Children of the Storm Page 4

  Sonya was flushed bright red, and she did not make any comments.

  "Furthermore," Toomey said, "You've got a degree in nursing, an excellent spare talent for a governness and tutor who will be spending much time with active young children."

  She had seen the logic of that, but still she worried about meeting her employers. She needn't have worried, for they were quite personable people, the Doughertys.

  Now, on Distingue, the roast had been served, complete with six different vegetables, all rather exotic, and Joe Dougherty was questioning her about her trip from Boston, punctuating her remarks with amusing anecdotes about his own experiences with airlines-lost baggage, a martini that was accidentally made completely with vermouth and no gin.

  Helen Dougherty was more quiet than her husband, though she was in no way aloof or snobbish. She was an exceptionally lovely woman, with high, aristocratic cheekbones, a pert nose, thin but somehow friendly lips, a rich fall of auburn hair framing her delicate face. She was a slim woman, one clearly born to position; she moved with a fluid grace, whether walking to the table or merely salting her potatoes, that must have come, in part at least, from having been raised in the very best private schools where a third of the classroom hours were spent in the establishment of good manners and habits of gracious elegance.

  The children-nine-year-old Alex and seven-year-old Tina-sat side-by-side near their mother's end of the table, on cushion-raised chairs, both dark-haired, dark-eyed and beautiful. They were dressed pretty much alike in simple, serviceable jeans and lightweight tee-shirts, clean but certainly not formal. Occasionally giggling, offering their own observations, but mostly quiet, they complemented the air of casual formality-if there could be such a thing, a mixture of easiness and distance. Perhaps the distance, the lingering note of formality was all in Sonya's own mind; after all, she had never been this close to a millionaire and his family, and she could not bring herself to think of them as just average folks.

  "I hope Bill didn't scare you too badly on the way over from Pointe-a-Pitre," Joe Dougherty said. "Sometimes, he thinks the Lady Jane is a racing boat, and he puts her through her paces."

  "It keeps the engines in good condition to open her up now and again," Bill said. "You're just too land-bound to appreciate a good fast cabin cruiser."

  Joe Dougherty grinned, winked at Sonya. "I don't think it's my landlubber leanings that turn me against speed boating. No, instead, I think it's just a combination of good common sense and-"

  "Bad digestion?" Bill Peterson suggested, good-naturedly.

  "No," Dougherty chuckled. "Good common sense and-a good strong fear!"

  Helen laughed. "That sums it up for me, too."

  Catching the spirit of underlying humor that existed between the Doughertys and their help, Sonya said, "Well, he came out here at top speed from Guadeloupe, but I didn't mind at all."

  "You see!" Peterson cried, triumphant.

  "I just stood there by the wheel, at the safety railing, and I didn't faint once. If you don't believe me, you can go look at the railing-and you'll see where my fingers bent it."

  "Betrayed," Peterson said gloomily.

  "Did Bill take you on a tour around the island, before docking?" Helen asked.

  "No," Sonya said. "I was anxious to get here, get to work."

  "Tomorrow, then," Helen said.

  "My pleasure," Bill said.

  "I still can't get used to the fact you own a whole island," Sonya said, shaking her head.

  For the first time, Joe Dougherty's face clouded, and he looked less than perfectly happy. "We don't, exactly," he said.

  "But I thought-" she began.

  "We own most of it," Helen explained. "But the Blenwell family has the cove at the far end of Distingue, and they own the Hawk House which overlooks the cove."

  "I offered them an excellent price," Dougherty explained. "Far too excellent for people their age to turn down." He laid down his fork, wiped his mouth with a blue linen napkin. "Lydia and Walter Blenwell are in their seventies, far too old to live half an hour from the nearest ambulance service and an hour or more from the nearest hospital. Their children live in Jamaica, and up around Miami, but they steadfastly refuse to leave Hawk House."

  "And that's the fault of Ken Blenwell," Bill Peterson said. He sounded as if he did not much like Ken Blenwell.

  "You're right, of course," Dougherty said. He explained: "Lydia and Walter have raised one of their grandchildren since he was two years old. The boy's father was killed at the outbreak of the Korean war, and his mother, not a Blenwell girl, never was very stable. She had to be institutionalized when the child was two, and she died at her own hand while in the-the home."

  Madhouse, Sonya thought. She didn't know why Dougherty's euphemism, when speaking about a neighbor, was so frightening.

  "And her son, he's in his mid-twenties by now, Walter and Lydia's grandchild, has taken it in his head to own Hawk House when they're gone. He persuades them to hold out. Hell, he even persuaded old Walter to come to me and try to buy out our three-quarters of Distingue. Seems Kenneth wants to own the whole shebang some day."

  "We don't intend to sell, of course," Helen Dougherty said.

  "Of course," her husband agreed.

  She said, "We love this house-its old name was Seawatch, which is rather fitting when you consider it commands a view of the sea from three of its four sides-and we love the island too. It's such a quiet place, so beautiful and clean and fresh. It's like a monk's retreat, in a way, a place to escape from-from the everyday cares that plague the rest of the world."

  But Sonya saw, as the woman hesitated in the middle of her last sentence, that Helen Dougherty did not consider Seawatch an escape from ordinary day-to-day cares... No, more likely, this lovely, wealthy woman saw it as an escape from the madman who had threatened the lives of her children. Even as she spoke, she turned her head ever-so-slightly to look upon her two children, as if she wished to be certain that they were still beside her, still close at hand, still safe and not snatched up and carted away while her attention had been elsewhere.

  Sonya looked at Bill Peterson to see if he had noticed Helen's involuntary moment of fear.

  He had.

  He winked at Sonya, smiled, as if he were trying to restore the mood of good-humored ribbing which had dominated at the table until only a few moments ago.

  She did not wink back.

  She looked at Leroy Mills, his eyes on his plate, quiet and withdrawn, shy-or guiltily avoiding Helen Dougherty. Which was it?

  Sonya looked away from Leroy Mills, feeling chilled and much too helpless in the face of such brooding evil that she sensed all about her, and she looked across the table at the bodyguard, Rudolph Saine, whom she was startled to see staring back at her. She blinked in confusion, but he did not. He stared unwaveringly, unblinkingly, his broad forehead slightly furrowed as if he were concentrating on some puzzle or other, his intensely blue eyes, like chips of wet, bright glass floating in water, locked on her own eyes, held.

  She smiled at him, even though her smile did not come naturally or even easily.

  He did not smile back.

  She looked away from him, flustered, but found herself sneaking another glance in his direction to ascertain whether or not he was still so terribly interested in her.

  He was.

  He had not looked away.

  She turned quickly toward Helen Dougherty, then looked at the woman's husband, hoping someone would say something, anything, to break this sudden, inexplicable, malevolent spell which had descended on the entire company like the tension in the air just before a major summer thunderstorm.

  "Then," Joe Dougherty said, like a heaven-sent breath of fresh air, "tomorrow you'll relax, tour the island, get a little sun, refresh yourself. Wednesday's soon enough to begin the kids' lessons."

  Sonya looked at the children, and found them looking shyly at her, looking up under the eyebrows, heads tilted, tentative smiles on their small, cherubic fac
es. As all children did when faced with a new teacher, they would be wondering what she was like, whether she would be stern or friendly, whether she would like them or be indifferent.

  "Well," she said to Dougherty. "I really had wanted to get started as soon as possible, sir."

  "My name's Joe," he corrected her, amicably enough. "We go by first names around here. My father and mother were stuffy, position-conscious nouveau riche, and I won't run a house where everyone goes around in starched collars."

  "Joe, then," she said, smiling. "I've studied the requisites listed by the island government. I've seen the tests-or samples of them-the children will have to pass next spring in order to be officially raised in grade level. I'm really very anxious to begin."

  He waved her into silence, not imperiously, but good-humoredly. "These scamps have had an extended vacation, and it's time they were made to work."

  "Ahhh," both kids said, in unison.

  "Quiet in the peanut gallery," Dougherty said. To Sonya, he said, "However, one extra day of freedom will not set them back any further than they already are, and I'm absolutely insistent that you settle into the routine here on Distingue in a manner befitting the traditional leisurely ways of the tropics."

  Happily, Sonya said, "Whatever you say, Joe."

  The children cheered her.

  "Natural-born goldbrickers," Dougherty said, affectionately.

  Sonya looked up at Saine again, found that he was still scrutinizing her, watching her reactions to everything that went on at the dinner table, and, in some mysterious way, forming an opinion of her, making judgments, deciding just how far she could be trusted.

  She felt as if she were on trial, and she realized that, in Saine's mind, she was. She remembered what he'd said about not trusting anyone at all, and she returned his stare this time, evaluating him in the same way that he was summing her up. In a moment, he realized that the tables had turned and that she was judging him. He smiled at her and returned to his excellent food.

  * * *

  FOUR

  After supper, Alex and Tina, at their father's suggestion, took Sonya on a tour of Seawatch, beginning with the rest of the ground floor. She learned that, because the sea lay so near beneath the surface of the island, the house had no basement; such a subterranean chamber would have always been filled with brackish salt water. Unwillingly, Sonya thought of Lynda Spaulding's many warnings about the power of the sea during a hurricane...

  She had already seen the front dining room where they had just eaten, and the ultra-modern kitchen where, earlier, Helga had been so determinedly grating that block of cheese. But there was more, much more, still to see.

  Across from the front dining room was a combination lounge and drawing room, with heavy oak furniture in a Spanish motif, the ubiquitous red carpet, black velvet drapes, a cool and calming gloom that warm, indirect lighting only partially dispelled.

  "When we have guests," Alex said, taking his role as guide quite seriously, "they usually come in here."

  Tina, his sister, who was on the far side of Alex, peered around him and looked shyly at Sonya. "You're not just a guest, are you?"

  "No," Sonya said.

  "She's our new teacher," Alex explained, patiently.

  "Good," Tina said. She shook her head positively, her dark hair bouncing. "I think I'll like you."

  Sonya chuckled. "Well, Tina, I'll do my best to make you absolutely sure of that."

  They went from the drawing room into the hobby room, where there were workbenches littered with all manner of cameras, camera parts, projectors, tools, scraps of film and of white leader tape, editing equipment and stacks of film cans.

  "Dad's hobby is movies," Alex explained.

  Tina giggled. "He makes some funny ones."

  "And mom's a-still-photographer," he said, pronouncing each syllable of the last word with the utmost care, as if he were reading it from a prepared index card. He pointed to a door at the far end of the room and said, "That's the darkroom, where they develop the film. It really is awful dark-except for these purple lights they have."

  "We're not allowed in there," Tina said, solemnly.

  "You should know," her brother said.

  She sighed. To Sonya, she said, "I went in once. I got spanked."

  "Dad had a reel of film on the drying racks. It was spoiled," the boy explained. "That's the first and last spanking we ever got."

  "But we're allowed out here," Tina said, pointing to a table flanked by two high stools. "Alex makes his airplane models there, and I put my puzzles together."

  Next, they came into a small dining room, less than half the size of the one in which they had earlier taken their supper; here four or five people could dine comfortably, a very cozy nook not meant to hold large dinner parties. Most likely, this was the breakfast and lunch room, for meals that might be eaten by two or three members of the household, at all different hours.

  The ground floor also contained a game room, with a regulation size pool table, a ping pong table, color television set, shelves of games and a lot of comfortable, beaten up old black vinyl arm chairs. Connecting with the game room was a library fully as large as the drawing room or the front dining room, all four walls built up with shelves from floor to ceiling and at least ten or fifteen thousand volumes shelved neatly around scattered pieces of sculpture. The room also contained a large, dark pine desk and a matching captain's chair, several heavily-padded easy chairs arranged beside tall, heavy-looking ultra-modern steel floor lamps.

  On the second floor, the stairwell divided the living space into two distinct clusters of rooms, in two long hallways. The family's bedrooms were to the left, the staff's to the right (except for Saine's bedroom, which was in the family section).

  They went up to the third floor, which was only half-sized, directly above the family's portion of the second level.

  "This is father's study," Alex said.

  "We can come up here," Tina explained. "But only when it's absolutely necessary." As Alex had stumbled over the word "photographer," the little girl spoke her piece as if quoting her father.

  Joe Dougherty's study was certainly an impressive room: as large as the drawing room downstairs, airy and yet homey, well-furnished, containing yet another two thousand books of all types, with a beamed ceiling and two long windows toward the front of the house, which looked out on palm trees, white beach, and the sea that curled toward the land with countless, white-edged tongues of water. One had the feeling that great decisions had been made within the walls of this room, that enormous financial issues were considered and carefully dealt with. At the gadget-studded desk, Dougherty had added and subtracted figures that Sonya knew she would find meaningless because of their enormity. At these windows, perhaps, he had stared at Mother Ocean, gaining serenity and perspective with which to overcome his knottier problems.

  And now as she and the children stood by those same windows, watching the sea which glittered madly with reflected moonlight, Sonya felt more at peace than she had for quite a long time. Her parents had been dead for many years. And, already, it seemed that her grandmother had been dead for as long, for years instead of months. And what Bill Peterson and Rudolph Saine had told her about the madman who'd threatened the Dougherty children-all of that was like something she had once read in a story, not like something she had experienced, something that could be real. The solidity of Seawatch made her feel as if she were in a fortress, sealed away from harm, in a great bubble of safety passing through the riotous flow of time without suffering any damage.

  Alex destroyed that mood in a moment.

  "Are you worried?" he asked.

  Sonya did not look away from the sea.

  She said, "Why should I be worried?"

  "He won't hurt you."

  She looked at Alex.

  His eyes were very dark, almost too dark to see in the meager light of the desk lamp that was clear across the room.

  She said, "Who won't?"

  He scuffe
d his small feet on the carpet, and he looked away from her as if he were embarrassed. He looked back at the rolling sea, and he said, "The man."

  "Man?"

  "Yes."

  "What man?"

  Tina said, "You know. The man he says is going to kill us, me and Alex."

  "Who says that?"

  Tina said, "The man. He says it himself."

  "No one is going to kill you," Sonya said, firmly, softly. But she didn't really know how she could be so sure of that.

  The peacefulness of the night, the sea and the palms had swiftly disappeared, to be replaced by a brooding malevolence, like a large jungle cat waiting to spring on its prey.

  "He promised that he would," Alex said.

  "Well-"

  "He promised, several times, that he'd get the both of us, me and Tina." Curiously enough, the boy did not sound frightened so much as intrigued by the possibility of death. She knew that young children were not as frightened by such things as adults, and that they even enjoyed vicarious violence in a way adults had lost the taste for (witness their love of gory fairy tales, of Edgar Allan Poe and similar macabre literature). But this seemed cooly sinister, this casual acceptance of their own mortality.

  "Who told you about this?" Sonya asked. She had imagined that the worst of the situation had, very properly, been hidden from the children.

  "No one particular," Alex said.

  "We just listened around," Tina piped up.

  "We heard things," Alex said.

  "When no one knew we were listening," Tina added. She sounded quite pleased with their stealth,

  "You should both be private detectives-or spies," Sonya told them, trying to lighten the mood again.

  "Anyway," Alex said, "don't worry about him. He's not interested in you, just in us."