Children of the Storm (15 page)

    “There's a ship!” Alex cried.

    “Where?” Tina asked.

    He pointed.

    Sonya followed the direction of his outflung hand and saw, far out on that boiling cauldron of a sea, the dark shape of a long tanker which wallowed up and down like some living creature unaccustomed to savage waters and searching for a way out. Even at this distance, she was able to see the high sheets of white spray that exploded along the tanker's bow each time it slammed through another wall of moving water.

    It occurred to her that the savage ways of Nature could be far more dangerous than anything a human agent could do-even if the man in question were a certified lunatic. She fervently hoped that Greta would by-pass
Distingue..
.

    They walked near the water's edge, the children five paces ahead of them, and they did not say much of anything.

    “Chilly,” Sonya said.

    “A bad sign.”

    When, in a few more comments, they had exhausted the subject of the weather, they lapsed into complete silence.

    Ahead, Alex and Tina had found three-quarters of a crate washed to shore by the stormy seas, and they were clambering over it, playing with it as all kids play with boxes. Sonya and Rudolph walked past them a few feet, then stopped to watch over them. The game the two were playing was inexplicable, but they were both enjoying it; Tina was giggling so hard, as Alex popped in and out of the huge crate, that her small face was cherry-tinted at the cheeks and nose.

    Sonya looked for the freighter.

    It was gone.

    Farther along the beach, however, another show was in progress, one that appeared to be quite lively. About twenty paces away, half a hundred sand crabs, and perhaps twice that number, were thickly congregated around some object which, like the wooden crate, seemed to have been washed ashore. They scuttled over it in such numbers, with such devotion, that they reminded Sonya of flies on honey, and they obscured the general outline of their prize.

    “Isn't that strange?” she asked Saine.

    “The crabs?”

    “Yes.”

    “Probably a dead fish that washed ashore-and now they're having a real feast.”

    “They'd eat dead meat?”

    “That's about the only kind they eat. They're scavengers, not genuine predators.”

    “An unpleasant diet,” she said.

    “At least they keep the beaches clean,” Saine said.

    “It's an awfully large fish,” she said.

    “Could be a dead shark or porpoise.”

    The crabs scuttled back and forth, tossed around by the foaming waves that sluiced over half of their prize.

    “Will they devour it all?”

    “All but the bones.”

    She felt uneasy.

    She was not sure why.

    “Rudolph-?”

    “Hmmm?”

    Alex popped out of his box.

    Tina giggled and slapped at him.

    “Something's wrong,” Sonya said.

    The bodyguard was instantly alert.

    His hand had gone to his holster.

    “Nothing like that,” she said.

    “What, then?”

    She nodded toward the crabs.

    “What about them?”

    “I'm not sure, but-”

    “It's not pleasant, I'll agree,” he said, regaining his composure. “But it's a perfectly natural scene, an ecological cycle that takes place a million times each hour.”

    “No,” she said adamantly.

    “Sonya-”

    A heavy wave, taller than all of the rest that had been so regularly preceding it, swept in from the dark edges of the sea, rising twelve feet above the surface, curling down like a water hammer. It began to break, swept completely across the crabs and their meal, scattering the determined crustaceans before it.

    When the roiling waters poured back into the sea, baring the beach again, they left the crabs' meal free of pincered diners for one brief moment, and the outlines of the thing were, at last, painstakingly clear and recognizable.

    “My God,” Saine gasped.

    Sonya gagged.

    The crabs rushed in again.

    In a second, they had obscured the thing once more.

    The kids noticed the shift in their elders' attention, sensed that something special had just happened and, laughing, waving their arms, ran away from the broken crate toward the congregation of crabs.

    “Alex, stop!” Sonya screamed.

    Her damaged throat, which she would have thought incapable of that volume, produced a hoarse, terrified explosion of sound that stopped the children in their tracks.

    Alex turned and said, “Sand crabs won't hurt you.”

    “They run when you get close,” Tina said.

    “I don't care,” Sonya said, with all the authority she could muster. “You come back here right now, right away, this instant. Do you understand me?” She had never taken that tone with them before, had never needed to, and she saw that now they were cowed by it.

    They walked back, not sure why she had yelled.

    “What'd we do?” Tina asked, slightly frightened.

    “Nothing, angel,” Sonya said. “Just start back for the house. Walk slowly. I'll catch up in a minute.”

    They did exactly as they were told, holding hands again, not looking back, as if they now understood, however vaguely, that they had almost seen something they were never meant to see.

    Sonya and Rudolph, standing close together, as if sheltering each other from the wind-or from something more terrible than wind-looked at the crab-covered lump.

    “You saw it?” she asked.

    “Yes.”

    “I'm afraid,” she said.

    “It can't hurt you.”

    “It was a man,” she said.

    “A corpse.”

    “Same thing.”

    “No. He can't feel what the crabs are doing to him. He's playing a part in that ecological cycle, just as a dead shark would.”

    She nodded. “We better go see who-who he is.”

    “Probably a sailor who went overboard.”

    She nodded.

    Saine said, “You catch up with the kids, stop them and wait for me. You don't have to see this.” Before she could object, he walked briskly off toward the corpse, scattering the crabs before him.

    Sonya turned and, shaking uncontrollably, ran to catch the kids, stopped them, and kept their attention away from Rudolph and his grisly investigation.

    “Are you mad at us?” Tina asked.

    “No.”

    “We thought you were,” Alex said.

    She knelt in the wet sand and drew them both against her, hugged them tightly, felt how slight and defenseless they were. She almost started to cry-for them, for herself-but knew that tears would help nothing, and she fought back the urge to let go.

    An eternity later, Saine returned from his exploration, clearing his throat and spitting in the sand -as if he could expel the after-image of what he had seen in the same fashion that he might clear his mouth of a bad taste…

    

    In the kitchen, at Seawatch, Bess entertained Alex and Tina with a game of Old Maid, at a small card table which she had opened beside one of the big, multiple-paned windows. In the middle of the room, sitting side-by-side on stools at the built-in work table, Sonya and the bodyguard spoke in soft voices, trying to grow accustomed to their morbid discovery.

    “What could you tell about him?” she asked.

    “Not a lot. The crabs had done their work.”

    She shuddered.

    “It was a man,” he said. “Late twenties or early thirties, white, relatively well-dressed.”

    “Drowned?”

    “No.”

    She looked at him oddly.

    He said, “I think he was killed.”

    She picked up her coffee, took a long swallow.

    She said, “How?”

    “The crabs hadn't gotten to all of him, yet. His one arm was relatively untouched. I saw what I'm sure were knife wounds.”

    “If he was washed ashore, he might have been cut by coral.”

    “He wasn't washed ashore.”

    “What?”

    The children squealed with harsh laughter at one of Bess Dalton's bad jokes.

    Saine said, “He was lying in a depression in the sand.”

    “So.”

    He took a swallow of coffee.

    “So,” he said, “it looked disturbingly like a grave, an oblong hole a couple of feet deep… The sea had begun to smooth its edges and to fill it in around the body, but the lines were still noticeable.”

    “Someone buried him there? Why in such an unsafe spot?”

    “Perhaps the burial was a hasty affair. And, anyway, the tides are usually not fierce enough to reach that far up the beach and wash out the loose sand over the grave. The killer simply had a bit of nasty luck, what with the arrival of a storm in the area.”

    “Still,” she said, “if the waves hadn't washed him into sight, we'd have smelled him-when we walked by.”

    “The crabs would have tunneled to him and picked him clean,” Saine pointed out.

    “Even buried like that?”

    “Yes.”

    “I win, I win!” Tina shouted.

    An unserious argument began to take shape over at the Old Maid table, probably fomented by Bess to tease the kids.

    “But who could he have been?” Sonya asked.

    “John Hayes,” the bodyguard said.

    Startled, she said, “How do you know?”

    He produced a slip of pink paper, wrinkled and damp. He said, “This is a stub from a motorboat rental service on Guadeloupe. It has his name and home address, but it's been so soaked in seawater that it's nearly unreadable. Still, you can make out the name.”

    She looked but did not touch.

    “Where'd you get it?” she asked.

    He said, “In his trousers pocket.”

    “You touched-that thing?”

    “It was only a corpse.”

    “Still-”

    “I thought there might be identification on it, and there was.” He tucked the slip of paper into his pocket again.

    “Now, we have to face what to do with it.” she said.

    “The body?”

    “Of course, the body.”

    He said, “We leave it there.”

    “For the crabs?”

    “What would you have me do?” he asked. “I could move it off the beach, but the crabs would follow. The only other alternative is to wrap it in a blanket, bring it to the house and dump it into a freezer. Do you think that would make everyone feel better?”

    “Oh God, no!” she said.

    “Then we leave it where we found it.”

    “What if the sea takes it away?”

    He said, with feeling, “Good riddance!”

    “But,” Sonya protested, “isn't it evidence? Isn't it important to show the police what we saw-”

    “John Hayes will be reported missing, by someone-wife, mother, sister, girlfriend. And we'll have this slip of paper, and we'll be able to testify about what we saw out there. That'll be evidence enough.”

    She thought a while. “What was he doing here on
Distingue?”

    Saine said, “I would guess that, somehow, he was in cahoots with the man who wants to hurt the kids.”

    “Madmen don't work in pairs!” she said.

    “A point which John Hayes learned too late.”

    “He was killed by whoever's after Alex and Tina?”

    “I think so.”

    Earlier, on the way back to the house, he had asked her not to tell anyone what they'd found until they had a chance to talk about it. Now, she discovered why he felt a need for secrecy.

    He said, “I'm going to ask you to continue to be quiet about this. I don't want anyone to know we saw that body.”

    “Why?”

    “Because I have an ace up my sleeve that our knife-toting friend can't know about. I now have a slight advantage.”

    “How so?”

    She tried to take a sip of coffee but found that her mug was empty.

    “If we can hold everything together until this storm breaks and until someone on the mainland decides we're in some sort of trouble out here, if we can keep the kids safe, then I have a chance of nailing our crazy friend, whoever he is. I can take this slip of paper back to the boat rental place, learn the address that's been washed off, and find out just who John Hayes was-and who he knew. If I'm not getting senile, I believe I'll find that John Hayes was friends with someone on this island, either in Seawatch or Hawk House.”

    “And that someone is our man,” Sonya said.

    “Exactly.”

    “I'll keep it quiet.”

    “Thank you.”

    They sat for a long moment, watching the children playing cards with Bess Dalton.

    Sonya said, “They almost saw-”

    “But didn't.”

    “I scared them with my scream.”

    He said, “I was trying to call out to them too, but I couldn't get any words out. I just stood there moving my mouth, like a ventriloquist's dummy without his master.”

    Sonya looked at the bodyguard as he continued watching the children, and she thought again about the contradictions of his personality. The same man who could coldly search a decomposing corpse's pockets could not find his voice to warn the kids away from that same grisly object! He was in no way an ordinary man-a curious blend of brutality and sensitivity.

    Without knowing why, she asked, “Have you ever been married?”

    He nodded. “Once.”

    “Children?”

    “A son.”

    “How old is he?”

    “He would be eight now.”