Children of the Storm Page 5

  "Well, you're just as safe as I am," Sonya said. "Mr. Saine sees to that."

  "He goes with us everywhere," Tina said.

  "Exactly."

  Alex shrugged. "Rudolph can't do much if the man is really after us. If he really wants us, bad, what can Rudolph do?"

  "I believe Mr. Saine could handle anyone," Sonya said. "Anyone at all." She smiled at them and hoped her smile did not appear as phony as it really was.

  * * *

  FIVE

  The man stood under the lacy palm trees, down near the thatch-roofed pavilion where Helen Dougherty liked to go every morning to sit and read while the sea murmured gently behind her. He was dressed in dark clothes, and he was all but invisible in the deep purple shadows of the trees, like a spirit, a specter. The moonlight touched the lawn, touched the top of the palm fronds above him, but did not touch him, as if it were afraid of him, as if it were purposefully avoiding contact with him.

  He watched the house.

  Especially the children's windows.

  Light shone there.

  He hoped to get a glimpse of them crossing the room, a quick flash of a small shadow... He felt powerful, good and deadly when he watched them without their knowledge. Such clandestine observation made him feel that he really was invisible, that he could move against them whenever he felt like it.

  Some night, not now but soon, when the room was dark and the kids were asleep, when Saine was especially lax, when everyone had all but forgotten about the threats...

  ... then he would strike!

  He would be quick.

  He would be calm.

  And silent.

  Quick, calm, silent, deadly.

  He would have to forget about torturing them, of course, though that had been such an important part of his original plan, before this, before the family had moved here to the island. Now, in such close quarters, the children would be able to summon help rather quickly. If he tortured them, they'd scream and scream and scream... And they'd be heard, and he'd be apprehended before he could escape.

  Saine was not that lax, ever.

  One swift, clean cut, from ear to ear, opening their tender young throats like ripe fruits.

  He would kill the boy first, without waking the little girl. Then he would creep, silently as wind, to her bed, where he would open her throat as he had her brother's, swiftly, calmly, quietly. Then, when there was absolutely no danger of their crying out for help, he would leisurely work on them with the knife...

  Now, watching their lighted room, standing by the palms near the pavilion, the man took the knife from his pocket and opened it.

  He held it in front of him, so that moonlight struck his hand and glinted wickedly on the seven-inch blade.

  It was quite sharp.

  He spent a good deal of time honing it.

  He ran a finger along the blade.

  Lovely.

  It would do the job.

  When the time came.

  Soon.

  * * *

  SIX

  "There it is-Hawk House!"

  Bill Peterson shouted over the roar of the Lady Jane's engines, pointing with one hand while, with the other, he brought them rapidly around the point of Distingue, out of the calmer waters in the lee of the land and into the choppy wavelets that pounded in toward the sheltered cove and were broken up on the hooking arms of beach.

  Sonya shielded her eyes from the glaring afternoon sun and stared at the old, dark house that loomed, almost menacingly, on the hill above the cove. Its windows were like black, blinded eyes, its porches and balconies like unhealthy growths sprouting from its weathered walls. It was much like Seawatch, really; but where Seawatch looked welcoming and warm, Hawk House seemed foreboding and cold.

  Peterson cut the engines back, bringing a comparative quietude to the open waters.

  He said, "Mr. Dougherty would like to own it. He'd remodel it and use it as a guest house-maybe as a retreat for friends and business associates."

  "Are we going in to shore?" Sonya asked.

  "What for?"

  He seemed surprised that she had asked.

  She said, "I thought we could meet the neighbors."

  His expression changed, in the instant, clouded, his eyes narrowing to slits, and he said, "You wouldn't want to meet them."

  "Are they really so bad as all that?"

  "They'd give you a reception about as cold and rude as you'd be able to survive. A conversation with the Blenwells always leaves me with icicles hanging from my earlobes and the end of my nose."

  Sonya laughed.

  "Really," he said, still somewhat serious. "The Doughertys and their people are not particularly welcome at Hawk House."

  As they reached the entrance to the narrow cove and moved across its mouth, Sonya spotted a tall, very deeply tanned, dark-haired young man, perhaps Peterson's age, standing on a small pier at the throat of the cove, wearing white slacks and a white tee-shirt. He appeared to be there for no other purpose than to watch them as they rounded the tip of the island.

  "Who's that?" she asked.

  "Where?"

  She pointed.

  She thought Peterson stiffened when he caught sight of the dark figure who stood so motionless, but she could not be sure.

  "It's Kenneth Blenwell," he said.

  "The grandson?"

  "Yes."

  At that moment, almost as if he had been listening to their conversation despite the two hundred yards of open water that separated them, and despite the persistent growl of Lady Jane's engines, Kenneth Blenwell casually raised a pair of dark, heavy binoculars, to get a better look at them.

  The sun glinted off the binocular lenses.

  Sonya, embarrassed, looked swiftly away.

  "Bastard," Peterson snapped, with feeling, as if he thought Blenwell could hear.

  "Actually," Sonya said, "we're the ones who're snooping. I suppose he has a perfectly legal right to come out on the pier and check us out."

  "He already knows who we are," Peterson said.

  "He doesn't know me."

  "Then he does now."

  Peterson accelerated, brought the small cabin cruiser up toward its top speed, arching slightly out toward the more open water, but hemmed in by sandbars, he was unable to pull completely away as he might have liked to.

  As they reached the far arm of white-white beach that formed half the little cove, as land rose up, and palm trees, to conceal them from Blenwell, Sonya stole one quick, last look backward at their mysterious neighbor.

  He appeared, from a distance, to have the glasses trained directly on Sonya's eyes. As a result, she felt as if they were only inches apart, as if they were on the pier together. Their eyes had locked in some inexplicable, hypnotic gaze, and they could not break free of each other.

  A rising hillock, and the thickening stand of pines, cut Sonya off from Kenneth Blenwell's steady gaze, and she snapped awake like a girl coming out of a nap, startled and ill-at-ease, wondering what had come over her.

  "Wasn't it his mother," she asked Peterson, "who was sent away to the-madhouse?"

  "Yes. And if you ask me, I think the madness was passed on from the mother to the son."

  "Why do you say that?"

  Peterson frowned, looking at the choppy blue sea on the windward side of Distingue, but it was not the slightly angry waters which had generated the frown. He said, "It's hard to pin down. But if you ever meet him, you'll understand why I said that. He's-cold, withdrawn, very sober. He gives you the feeling-I don't know how-that he's only the form of a man, that inside he's completely hollow."

  "I see."

  She turned to the lovely scenery and didn't ask any more questions. She didn't want to have to listen to any more answers.

  Later that afternoon, when they went swimming off the point from Seawatch, several hundred yards out in the Caribbean, using the Lady Jane as their base, Sonya experienced the extremes of reaction to her new circumstance: optimistic enjoyment-and
fearful anticipation of disaster.

  The joy came from the simple act of floating and frollicking on the brilliantly blue-green waters of the Caribbean, the sun beating down hot and steady, the sky high and wide and unbelievably blue, gulls circling high overhead like monitors of their pleasure. Peterson had brought the Lady Jane through the wide mouth of a submerged coral reef shaped like a semicircle with its open face towards shore. This natural crescent formed a breakwater that cut the roiling waves and left only a gentle in and out swell that Sonya gave herself over to. She lay on her back, gently moving her hands to keep herself afloat, sinking and rising, bobbing at the dictates of the gentle sea. Bill floated beside her, bronze already but growing even more tan, an extremely handsome man, very gay and very vital, the perfect sort of man to be with on a day like this in a place such as this.

  Then came the fear.

  Something brushed Sonya's feet, startling her into a sudden, loud yelp, so that she sank, thrashed, gained the surface again.

  "What's the matter?" Peterson asked.

  "A fish, I guess," she said. "It touched me, and I wasn't expecting anything like that." She laughed, but stopped laughing when she saw that the incident did not amuse him at all.

  He was staring intently at the water around them, as if he could see down through the glaring surface.

  "Sharks!" he snapped.

  "What?"

  But she had heard.

  She had heard too clearly.

  "Swim for the boat," he advised. "Make as much noise as you can. Forget about being a good swimmer; just thrash the water to a boil. Noise scares them off."

  In a minute or so, they were both standing on the deck of the Lady Jane, dripping saltwater on the polished boards, safe.

  "I always thought the reef formed a barrier against them," Peterson said; wiping his face with a towel. "But they must have come in from the landward side, through the open end."

  Sonya was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered together like clamshells. "Would they have hurt us?"

  "They might have."

  "Are they still there?"

  He pointed.

  "I don't see-"

  And then she did see: the hard, black fin, thrusting out of the water like a knife, circling, moving rapidly, now lost in the glare, now visible again.

  "How many?" she asked.

  "I saw two," he said.

  As she watched the shark circle and circle, as if waiting for them to come back into the water, her joy evaporated altogether. It seemed, to her, that the shark was a portent of things to come, a sign to beware-to be cautious.

  The sea no longer appeared to be as beautiful as it was only minutes ago...

  The sky was far too bright.

  The sun, instead of warming and tanning her, seemed fiercely, unmercifully hot and she realized, belatedly, that she might as easily burn as tan.

  "Let's go in," she said.

  He started the engines.

  Dinner was even better Wednesday evening than it had been the evening before: lobster tails with sweet butter, scalloped potatoes, pepper slaw, several vegetables, fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Conversation at the table remained lively-actually, now that everyone had grown accustomed to the new addition to the table, it was livelier than it had been the night before. Unfortunately none of it could erase Sonya's feeling of impending disaster.

  She retired to her room at nine-thirty, closed and locked her door, and made ready for bed. It was too early for sleep, and her nerves were too much on edge to permit her to turn out the lights just yet. She had brought several paperback novels with her, and she propped herself up on pillows, in the center of the Polynesian bed, and she began the best of the lot, trying to get caught up in the story.

  Two hours later, when she had read slightly more than half of the book, she felt sleep steal in behind her eyes and begin to tug insistently at her heavy lids much like a child might tug at his mother's skirts.

  She got out of bed and turned off the lights, stood for a moment in the cool darkness, listening for something but not knowing what.

  Before getting under the covers, she went to the window and looked out at the night sea and the swaying palms... As before, she was taken by the beauty of the scene, and she might have stood there admiring it for a long while, might have seen nothing at all out of the ordinary if the man standing beneath the palms, some distance from the house, had not chosen that moment to stretch his legs. He leaned away from the bole of one of the largest palms and stepped back and forth a few times, on a short path, before taking up his vigil again.

  Rudolph Saine?

  He did not seem big enough to be the bodyguard, though he was not a small man. Or she didn't think he was. In the deeps of the shadows, however, little about him was recognizable.

  She stood there, for long minutes, waiting for him to reveal himself once more. She was confident that he would not see her, for the room was dark behind her. Then, with a start, he stepped from the tree and seemed to gaze up at her, though his face was in shadows, and she could only suppose it was she who had attracted his sudden interest. She realized that, in the light of the large moon, her white pajamas must have shown up like a signal flag.

  The stranger-if he was a stranger-turned away from her and abruptly walked off into the sentinel pines.

  In an instant, he was lost to sight.

  She stepped back from her window, as if what she had seen was part of an illusion and that, if she turned away from the screen on which it had been played-her window-it would cease to be true and real. She wondered, briefly, if she should report this to Rudolph Saine, but she decided that she really had nothing to report, nothing that meant anything. She had seen a man standing in the shadows of the palms, near the house, watching the house at night. And he had gone away. What good would that information do anyone?

  Where had he gone?

  Who knew?

  Who was he?

  She couldn't say.

  What did she think he was doing there?

  She didn't want to think what he might have been doing there. She had come here to get away from ugly thoughts, old fears, tension, anxiety. She didn't want to have to face anything like that.

  And since she could not answer any of the questions Rudolph Saine was most likely to ask, she could see no sense in dredging up the mess. She would appear to be nothing more than a slightly hysterical young woman, still upset over her encounter with two sharks during the afternoon, sleepy, seeing things in the night, illusions, deceptions of shadows. She could do no good whatsoever by crying wolf at every little incident that disturbed her, for then, if the real trouble came, she would find them slow to react to her cries for help.

  That was logical, wise.

  Refusing to consider the import of her observation, refusing to dwell on the memory any longer at all, having convinced herself that she was right to keep her silence, she went to the large bed and got beneath the sheets, snuggled down and buried her bright, blonde head in the fluffy pillows. She would sleep... sleep... Then everything would be fine. In the morning, all of this sense of onrushing trouble, this fearful anticipation would be gone. In the morning. It would all be fine, then. Just fine. She slept...

  In the morning, of course, nothing had improved.

  At the university, a year earlier, a boy named Daryl Pattersen, whom she had dated for a while but about whom she had never been serious, told her that he liked her so much chiefly because of her ability to ignore all of the unpleasant things in life. "I mean," he told her, "you don't just grin and bear it when trouble strikes. You actually ignore it! You seem to forget about the disaster two minutes after it's happened. When you get a bad test grade, I've seen you toss the paper away and go about your business as if you'd just gotten an A."

  Naturally, Lynda Spaulding, Sonya's roommate, a pessimist from the word "go," did not look upon this personality quirk as an attribute, as Daryl did, but she saw it as a fault, a weakness, a dangerous inadequacy tha
t had to be watched carefully. "Life isn't all roses, Sonya, as you should know by now. You try too hard to be happy, and you work too hard to forget the things that've made you unhappy."

  "My own private psychiatrist," Sonya had said, slapping her forehead with an open palm.

  "See, you know I'm telling you the truth. You're trying to turn what I say into a joke, so you won't have to think about it." Later, she said, "You surround yourself with friends who're always jovial and in a good mood; sometimes, you make friends with the biggest phonies on campus, just because they're always smiling."

  "I like people that smile," Sonya had said.

  "But no one should be smiling all the time!"

  This morning, on Distingue, Sonya had forgotten all of those exchanges with Lynda Spaulding. If she remembered anything, it was Daryl's sweet and charming remarks.

  Still, the air was filled with expectancy, tense, waiting.

  In the next few days, there was no lessening of that tension. She began each workday at ten, with the children, going over their reading skills and seeing what she might do to improve them. Fortunately, both Alex and Tina were exceptionally bright students, and they needed no encouragement to do their work, for they were as curious as they were intelligent. By noon, when they took a lunch break, the kids were usually a good many pages ahead of the lesson which she had planned for them, like two intellectual sponges soaking up all that she could pour before them. After lunch, around two o'clock, they began work on arithmetic and spelling, some geography and history for Alex and some skill-games for Tina.

  Friday afternoon, when they were studying the map of the United States during the geography lesson, Alex pointed to the eastern seaboard, traced the outlines of one state in particular. "That's New Jersey," he said.

  "Yes, it is."

  "Where we used to live."

  Sonya frowned. "Yes. You see how far away you are from there?"

  "Real far," he said.

  She found Guadeloupe for him and, though Distingue was not on the map, indicated their general position in relationship to the larger island.