Children of the Storm Read online

  "What did he threaten?"

  Peterson hesitated for a moment, then sighed wearily, as if it required too much energy to keep such awful things secret. "He was a damned ugly man. He promised to take a knife to them."

  "Stab them?"

  "Yes."

  She shuddered.

  He said, "And cut their throats."

  The chill had become a positively arctic line along her slender back, had frozen her to her place by the safety railing, sent cold fingers throughout her body.

  "There was worse than that," Peterson said. "But you wouldn't want to hear what he said he'd do, not in detail. Basically, he made it clear he wanted to mutilate them before he killed them."

  "My God!" Sonya said, quaking openly now, queasy inside. "The man sounds mad."

  "Very obviously, he was," Peterson agreed.

  "Mrs. Dougherty listened to all of this, put up with the filthy things he was saying?"

  "She says she was frozen by that voice, that she couldn't have hung up even if she'd wanted to. And believe me, she wanted to!" He concentrated on the instruments for a moment, seemed to make a course adjustment with the wheel, then said, "He called twelve times in one week, always with the same kind of patter, though it got even worse, even more brutal than what I've told you."

  "And they listened?"

  "Mr. Dougherty began taking all the calls, and he hung up. At first he did, anyway."

  "Why'd he change his tactics?"

  "Well, they began to wonder if they had a real psychotic on their hands-instead of just a crank. They went to the police and, finally, had a tap put on their phone. The guy called six more times while the cops were trying to trace him."

  "Trying to trace him?"

  "Well-"

  "Good God, you'd think they'd want to find out what kind of a depraved-"

  It was Peterson's turn to interrupt. "Oh, the police wanted to find him, sure enough. But tracing a telephone call, in these days of direct dial systems, isn't all that easy. You have to keep the man on the line for four or five minutes, until they get it pinned down. And this character was getting clever. He was making his calls shorter and shorter, packing more and more violent rhetoric into them. The police wanted him, because that's part of their job, but also because the pressure was on them. I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that Joe Dougherty wields influence and can force an issue when he wants to. In this case, he wanted to. But it took them six more calls from this crackpot to locate the phone."

  "And?"

  "It was just a payphone."

  "Still-"Sonya said.

  "After that, he didn't call again for a while, for more than two weeks, Joe said."

  "The police kept a tap going?"

  Peterson said, "No. After a week, they packed it up and convinced Joe that their man was only a hoaxer, perverted, to be sure, but not serious. They didn't explain how he got hold of the Doughertys' unlisted number, but they were ready to ignore that. So were the Doughertys. Things were much easier if they believed it, you see."

  "I see," she said.

  She wanted to sit down in one of the command chairs by the controls, but she was afraid she would lose her balance if she let go of the railing.

  "Then, after two weeks without any calls, they found a note in Tina's room, pinned to her pillow."

  "Note?"

  "It had been written, so far as they could tell, by the same man who had made the telephone calls."

  Sonya closed her eyes, tried to ride with the rocking vessel and with the story Peterson was telling her, but she did not think she was going to have much luck.

  "The note made the same threats as before, only elaborated on them-blood-curdling things, really obscene." He shook his head and looked as if he would spit out the taste of the memory. If it were this unpleasant to recall, for Peterson, what must it have been like for the Doughertys, who had experienced it all first hand?

  "Wait a minute," Sonya said, confused and not a little frightened by what he had told her. "Are you saying that they found the note in their own house-that this madman had been in the little girl's room?"

  "Yes."

  "But how?"

  Bill looked at his instruments, held the wheel steady in his powerful hands as he spoke. "No one saw or heard him-even though the butler, maid, cook and handyman must have all been around when he entered the house. Perhaps even Mrs. Dougherty was there, depending on the time the note was placed."

  "They called the police."

  "Yes," Peterson said. "And the house was watched by plainclothesmen in unmarked cars. Still, he managed to get into the house, three nights later, leaving notes on the doors of both the kids' rooms."

  "The police didn't see him?"

  "No. They started trying to convince the Doughertys that one of the servants was involved-"

  "Sounds reasonable to assume," Sonya said.

  "Except that Joe has had these people with him for years-some of them served his mother and father when they were alive and maintaining a big house. Joe just couldn't see what any of them would have against him or the kids. He treats his employees well, as you'll soon discover. Besides, none of that crew would be capable of such a thing: a gentler lot, you'll not find anywhere. When you meet them, you'll see what I mean." He looked at the sea, looked back at her and said, "Besides, neither Mrs. Dougherty nor Joe recognized the crackpot's voice."

  "You said, before, that he tried to disguise his voice."

  "Yes, but even disguised, they would have recognized the voice of someone they talk to every day and have known for years."

  "I suppose," Sonya said, reluctantly.

  For the first time, Peterson seemed to realize what the story had done to her composure, and he forced a smile for her, an imitation of his genuine grin. "Hey, don't let it upset you like that! No one got hurt. And, obviously, the kids are safe down here on Distingue. They've been here since the middle of June, going on three months, with no more incidents."

  "Still," Sonya said hollowly, "the man who made the threats is on the loose."

  "Oh, brother," Peterson said, slapping his forehead, "I must have come on like a real doomsayer first class! I really didn't mean to worry you, Sonya. I was just surprised that Joe hadn't explained the situation to you. Look, he and Mrs. Dougherty are sure the crisis is passed. They're so sure that they want to take a few weeks off for a trip to California. Once you're settled in, they'll pack and be off. Now, would they leave their kids if they thought there was still the slightest breath of danger?"

  "No," she said, "I guess they wouldn't." However, all of this sudden attempt to reassure her had actually done very little to erase the image of a deranged and murderous child molester which he had first painted for her.

  To distract her, he grinned even more broadly, and a bit more genuinely, and waved his arm dramatically ahead of them. "What do you think of our island, our lovely Distingue? Isn't she about the most marvelous piece of real estate you've ever seen?"

  Sonya looked up, surprised to see the island looming before them through the curve of the sun-tinted, plexiglass windscreen, like the opening scene in some motion picture, too beautiful for anything but fantasy. She had not noticed it growing on the horizon, but that might have been because, except for the central spine of low hills, the island was nearly as flat as the sea which lapped at all sides of it. A thick stand of lacy palm trees backed the startlingly white beaches and shaded, on the nearest of the hills, a mammoth house that must surely contain two dozen rooms or even more. It was of white board, with balconies and porches, several gables and many clean, square windows that reflected the golden-red brilliance of the sun and gave the place a look of warmth and welcome.

  If she had not just heard the story which Bill Peterson had told her on the way over from Pointe-a-Pitre, she would have thought that the Dougherty house was absolutely charming, a beautiful mass of angles, lines and shapes, the product of a good architect and of expert craftsmen spurred to do their best by a customer who c
ould afford any expense whatsoever, any luxury that struck his fancy. Now, however, with the real-life nightmare hovering always in the back of her mind, like a dark bird of prey, the house seemed curiously menacing, swathed in purple shadows, full of darkened niches, harsh, sharp, a mysterious monolith against the sweet Caribbean horizon, almost a sentient creature lying in wait on the brow of that tropic hill. She began to wonder, more seriously than before, if her old college roommate had been right about the dangers in coming to this place...

  "You'll like it," Peterson said.

  She said nothing.

  "This is God's country, in the true sense," Peterson said, still anxious to repair her mood, which he felt responsible for damaging. "Nothing bad can happen here."

  She wished she could be sure of that.

  * * *

  TWO

  Henry Dalton, the house butler, came down to the small boat dock to meet them, pushing an aluminum luggage cart over the uneven boards of the little pier. He was sixty-five, but looked ten years older, a slight man with snow white hair, a grizzled face, hard black eyes that looked far too young for the bushy white eyebrows that arched above them like senior citizen caterpillers. Though he must have been nearly six feet tall, he seemed smaller than Sonya's five-feet, four-inches, because he drew in on himself, shrank himself, like a dried fruit, as if he could protect himself from any further aging merely by rolling up and letting the world pass over him.

  When he spoke, his voice was tight and dry too, almost quarrelsome. "Henry Dalton," he said, not offering her his hand.

  She smiled and said, "Sonya Carter." And she did offer him her hand.

  He looked at it as if it were a snake, wrinkled his face even more, until he was in danger of losing his eyes and mouth altogether in some sharp crease of flesh. But at last he reached out and took her hand, held it briefly in his long, bony fingers, then merely dropped it as a man might drop a curious seashell he had lifted from the beach and studied and grown bored with.

  He said, "I came to get your luggage."

  Bill Peterson had already carried her bags from the Lady Jane, and now he carefully stacked them on the metal cart, his brown arms bunched with muscle, his thick hair falling slightly forward, into his eyes, as he bent to the task.

  "This way, then," Henry said when the cart was loaded. He turned, gripping the wheeled cart, and led them back toward the mansion, walking ramrod stiff. He was wearing dark slacks and a white, short-sleeved shirt made to be worn outside his trousers. Though a gentle breeze mussed Sonya's hair, it did not stir the hem of Henry's white shirt -almost as if Nature herself were wary about disturbing the old man's dignity.

  Sonya and Peterson fell back a few steps, out of the butler's hearing, and she said, "You didn't warn me about him!"

  Peterson smiled and shook his head. "Most of the time, Henry's as pleasant an old coot as you could meet. Occasionally, though, he seems to vent all his stored-up antagonisms, and he has a bad day. Everyone avoids him on a bad day, and it's like it never happened. Unfortunately, he's chosen your first day here as his first bad day in weeks."

  They reached the front porch steps, where Peterson and Henry worked together to maneuver the cart onto the porch floor, and then they went into the foyer of the Dougherty house, through a heavy screen door and a heavier mahogany door, into air conditioned coolness that was sweeter than the false relief of the passenger terminal at the docks of Pointe-a-Pitre.

  "How lovely!" Sonya said, without reservation.

  And the foyer did seem to promise a marvelous house beyond. It was paneled in the darkest teak wood imaginable, almost black, carpeted in a rich red shag that made her feel as if she were in the dark chamber of a furnace with hot coals beneath her feet and, paradoxically, cool air all around her. Original oil paintings, of many different schools, were tastefully arranged on the walls of the small room, the pieces of naturalism and surrealism somehow blending when they should not have, complementing one another when they should have clashed. The foyer ceiling, and the ceiling of the corridor which led from it, were high and open-beamed, also of that same very dark teak, quite in contrast with what one expected in a house in the tropics, but nonetheless effective for their striking anachronism.

  Henry lifted her luggage from the cart and placed it on the flat bed of an open escalator platform at the bottom of the steps. He punched a button in the wall, which Sonya had previously mistaken for a light switch, and sent the machine slowly along the steps. It was attached to the wall on an inset track, moved slowly, and would save Henry all the effort of lugging those bags to the second floor.

  The old man said, "I'll put them in your room, later. First, I imagine you'd like to meet the rest of the staff."

  "Of course," Sonya said.

  "This way, then."

  "I'll tag along," Bill Peterson whispered to her.

  "I'd appreciate it," she said, smiling thankfully at him. She hoped the rest of the staff was more like Bill than like Henry.

  They followed the red-carpeted corridor to the rear of the house, went through a white, swinging door and into the kitchen, which was fully twenty-five-feet on a side and equipped with all the latest gadgets and conveniences. All the appliances were new, white and chrome, the pots and pans all copper-plated. In the middle of the room, at a heavy, built-in table that contained a double sink, a woman Henry's age was grating a block of swiss cheese into a large porcelain bowl.

  She looked up, her chubby face slightly red, her dark eyes alive and young, put down the block of cheese and said, "Who have we here?"

  "Sonya Carter," Henry said. "The woman who'll be taking care of the children." He looked at Sonya and said, "This is Helga, the cook."

  "Glad to meet you," Sonya said.

  "Same here, same here," Helga said. She had stood up, from her tall stool, as if this were a formal meeting, and Sonya could see that the chubbiness extended beyond her face. She appeared to be the sort of cook who constantly sampled her own preparations.

  "There's not a cook in the islands compares to Helga," Bill Peterson said. "Thank God for the sea and the boat and all the other things to do around here. If there weren't a lot of ways to exercise, we'd all be as stout as Helga herself."

  The cook blushed proudly and sat down again, picked up the cheese and looked at Sonya under her eyebrows. "Nothing really that special," she said, shyly.

  "Helga's also too modest for her own good," Peterson said.

  She blushed even more and returned to grating her cheese.

  At that moment, the back door opened, and a small, tidy woman in her mid-fifties came in from outside, brushing her small hands together more as if to satisfy herself that some chore was completed than to actually clean them. She appeared to be the sort of woman who would never have to wash her hands, simply because she was also the type of woman who would never get them dirty in the first place. Her hair was nearly all white, drawn back from around her sharp face and tied in a bun at the back of her head. She wore no lipstick or makeup, but had a flawless complexion for a woman her age. She wore a simple, light blue dress that vaguely resembled a uniform, and she moved with a sprightliness that Sonya had often seen in career nurses who enjoyed their jobs and were like new girls in the hospital after even thirty years of service.

  "My wife," Henry explained to Sonya. And the girl thought that, for a moment, some of the old man's vinegar seeped away, as if this woman could sweeten him merely by her presence. To his wife, he said, "Bess, this is Sonya Carter, the kids' teacher."

  Bess crossed the kitchen and took Sonya's hands, looked up at her like some concerned mother assessing her son's fiance. She grinned, glanced past Sonya at Bill Peterson, then back at the girl, and she said, "Well, I'm sure Bill couldn't be more pleased." There was a tone of mischief in her voice. "After all, until now, he's had to take the boat to Guadeloupe and even farther to look at pretty girls. He'll be saving himself the trip, now."

  Sonya felt herself blushing, as Helga had blushed earlier, and she wi
shed she had a block of cheese to grate, something to hide herself in.

  But if Bess were mischievous, she was also considerate, and she relieved Sonya's embarrassment as easily as she had caused it, by asking questions about the trip down from the States. For several minutes, they stood there in the kitchen, talking, as if they had known each other for years and were only catching up on things after a short separation. Henry continued to soften noticeably around his wife, and Sonya felt certain that the center of the Dougherty household was probably not Mr. Dougherty or Mrs. Dougherty or either of their children-but was Bess.

  "Well," Henry said after a few minutes, "she ought to meet the others. And then I'd guess she wants to freshen up and rest after that trip."

  "Leroy's outside, patching the concrete at the pavilion," Bess said. "I was just talking to him."

  Henry lead Sonya and Peterson outside, onto the mat of tough tropical grass that covered the lawn like a flawless carpet, took them down a winding flagstone walkway toward an open-air pavilion down near the easterly beach. The building was perhaps forty feet long and twenty wide, with picnic tables and benches arranged around its waist-high rail walls. The roof was shingled tightly but laced over with palm fronds to give the illusion of primitive construction, and the final effect was exceedingly pleasant.

  "Mrs. Dougherty likes to sit here in the morning, when its cool and when the insects are not out. She reads a lot," Henry informed them.

  Leroy Mills, the handyman who was working on the pavilion floor, stood over his most recent piece of patchwork, watching their approach, smiling uncertainly. He appeared to be in his middle thirties, small and dark, with an olive complexion that indicated Italian or Puerto Rican blood. He was thin, but with a stringy toughness that made it clear he was not a weak man at all.

  Henry made the introductions in a clipped fashion and finished with, "Leroy lived in Boston for a time."

  "Really?" Sonya asked. "I went to school there."

  Leroy nodded. "Too cold in Boston, for me."