Children of the Storm (17 page)

    “But I tell the truth,” she said.

    “I'm afraid you don't,” he said. “We really are going to find some books, because we've been enormously depressed by the company we've been forced to keep, and-”

    Bess smiled wearily. “Oh, go away, go away. Everyone knows it's you two who've brought this air of defeat in the first place.”

    No one paid them much attention when they left the kitchen.

    No one except Rudolph Saine.

    In the library, Bill closed the heavy teak door and leaned against it for a moment, a finger raised to his lips, listening intently, as if he thought they might have been followed.

    In a moment, satisfied, he stepped away from the door and led Sonya to two facing, black leather reading chairs, put her into one and sat down across from her.

    He said, “How can we convince Saine that, all this time, he's been looking in all the wrong places for his man?” He spoke in a low, calm but demanding tone of voice. His face was creased with lines of worry, his thin lips tight and in harmony with his squinted, concerned eyes.

    “Has he been?”

    “You know he has.”

    She fidgeted.

    She said, “I'm not sure what I know.”

    “You know who's the likeliest suspect.”

    “I do.”

    “Sonya, please.”

    She said nothing.

    “Once, just Sunday night, you didn't hesitate to say who you most suspected. You were very adamant about your conclusions, then.”

    “I guess I was.”

    “You haven't changed your mind, have you?”

    She thought a moment. “No.”

    “Good. Because if you have changed your mind, I think I can argue you back to your original suppositions.”

    She leaned away from her chair. “You know something?”

    “I've had a couple of-unsettling experiences,” he admitted, gripping the arms of his chair so hard his knuckles whitened.

    “When is this?”

    “Last night, Sunday night.”

    “And these unsettling experiences of yours-” she said, afraid of what he would answer “-they had something to do with-”

    “Kenneth Blenwell.”

    She got up and began to pace.

    He remained seated.

    “Rudolph swears it can't be Blenwell.”

    “I've heard,” he said, bitterly.

    “Why do you think he's wrong?”

    As if he had been afraid she would not ask that question, the one question he had been waiting for, and pleased that she had, he suddenly relaxed and let it all pour out, almost as if he had let it run through his mind a few hundred times, practicing the story until he had it to its most effective version.

    He said, “Last night, when I found the
Lady Jane
scuttled, I came and told Saine and suggested I go down to Hawk House and borrow a boat from the Blenwells. Though there's a hell of a lot of mutual animosity between the families, it seemed to me that they'd not be so stubborn, in a case like this, as to refuse us a boat. Saine told me to go ahead.”

    “I know.”

    “Yes, but you don't know what happened at Hawk House.”

    “Their boats were sunk.”

    “More than that.”

    She returned to her chair, sat down, waited.

    “Ken Blenwell answered the door when I knocked,” Peterson told her. His eyes were far away, as if he could even now see that meeting in perfect clarity, as if it were just now unrolling for the first time. “He was wearing a pair of filthy white jeans that were water-soaked almost to the knees, and a pair of white sneakers that squished with water when he walked. He looked as if he'd been doing a piece of pretty strenuous work, just before I'd arrived. He wanted to know what I was there for, and I got right to the point…”

    

    “Who the hell would want to scuttle your boat?” Blenwell asked when Bill finished his story.

    He seemed suspicious, as if he thought Peterson had some other motive for being there at that hour of the night.

    “Rudolph Saine thinks it might be the same character who made all the threats against the kids,” Bill explained.

    “Why would he do that?” Blenwell asked. “What percentage would there be in it, for him?”

    “He could isolate us,” Peterson said.

    “You're not isolated so long as
we
have boats,” Blenwell said.

    “But he might not know that.”

    “I suppose…”

    Blenwell stepped back, motioning for Peterson to enter Hawk House. The foyer was poorly lighted, and the house curiously still except for the overly loud blare of a television set tuned to a cops and robbers story.

    Blenwell, seeing Peterson's grimace at the rat-a-tat-tat of a phoney submachine gun, smiled and said, “My grandparents watch a lot of television these days.”

    Peterson nodded and said, “If I could use your radio, it might not be necessary to take one of your boats.”

    “Of course,” Blenwell said, then stopped as if jerked on puppet strings. “What's wrong with your own radio?”

    “Someone smashed it.”

    Blenwell looked worried. “Rudolph has no idea who might have-”

    “Perhaps an idea, but no proof,” Peterson said.

    Blenwell looked at him oddly, then said, “Of course. Well, you can use our radio-phone, sure enough.”

    They went the length of the hall, past the lounge where the television set vaguely illuminated two old, motionless people who stared intently at the gray images that danced before them. At the end of the hall, they went into a small, back room which was isolated from most of the house-and here they found the Blenwells' set, as damaged as Dougherty's set had been.

    “You don't seem surprised,” Peterson had said, when Ken Blenwell discovered the trouble.

    “I'm not.”

    “Oh?”

    “I'm sure this man who's after the Dougherty kids is mad,” Blenwell explained. “And madness, rather than breeding stupidity, usually generates abnormal cunning. He wouldn't have smashed your radio and overlooked ours.”

    “You make him sound like a damned formidable opponent,” Peterson said, not trying very hard to conceal his irritation with Blenwell's off-handed manner.

    In the orange light of the lamp that rested on a pedestal beside the ruined radio-telephone, Blenwell grimaced, wiped at his face as if he were suddenly weary, and said, “Well, my friend, to date, hasn't he proved himself to be just that?”

    “He won't succeed.”

    “We hope.”

    “I know.”

    “Then you know much more than most mortal men,” Blenwell had said, looking at him oddly again, as if probing for something, trying to guess how much-of what?-Peterson might know or suspect.

    Peterson had turned away from the other man and walked to the door. Over his shoulder, he said, “Where are your boats?”

    “I'll take you to them,” Blenwell said, shouldering past Bill, taking him across the kitchen and out the back door. He walked hurriedly over the rear lawn, to the beach steps and then down. In the center of the cove, in a boathouse alongside the pier where Sonya had first seen Blenwell, they found the sailboat and the cabin cruiser.

    Scuttled.

    Blenwell just stood there, smiling ruefully at the boats as they lay like rocks in the water of the boathouse, so heavy with water that they were not rocked at all by the tide that rolled through the open doors.

    Peterson, his mouth abruptly punk dry with fear, said, “We're really in a tight jam, now, aren't we?” He looked at Blenwell, puzzled by the other man's equanimity in the face of his personal losses, and he said, “You expected this, too, didn't you?”

    “It occurred to me,” Blenwell admitted, “that if he'd destroyed your boat and your radio, he might also have visited my boatshed. In fact, I thought it highly probable.”

    “You're taking it awfully well.”

    “It's done.”

    Blenwell turned, and he walked away from the two boats, out of the boathouse and back toward the mansion.

    Following him, Peterson noted his dirty trousers and the slowly drying water stains from cuffs to knees.

    “Surf fishing tonight?” Peterson had asked.

    Blenwell turned.

    He said, “What?”

    Peterson motioned at his wet slacks. “I wondered if you were surf fishing?”

    “Oh. Yes, I was, in fact.”

    “Catch anything?”

    “No.”

    Back at the house, Peterson said, “You don't have a gun, by chance, do you?”

    “Why do you ask?”

    Bill said, “I think tonight might get pretty rough up at Seawatch. Our man's obviously on the island, and he clearly intends to make his move, his big move, soon. All this other stuff is mickey mouse, just setting the scene for what he really wants to do. I'd feel a lot better if I had a gun. If anything happened to those kids, to Alex and Tina, I'd feel just awful…”

    “Doesn't Rudolph have a gun?” Blenwell asked.

    “Yes, he does. But it's the only gun in the whole house, hardly enough in the circumstances. We could do with a bit more protection.” He hoped Blenwell didn't see his real reasons behind these questions.

    But the other man looked at Peterson for a long, uncomfortable time, again as if he were probing Peterson's thoughts, were trying to find out exactly how much Peterson knew-about what?-or suspected-about whom?-and as if he had some personal stake in the outcome of this extrasensory investigation.

    At last, he said, “No, I have no gun.”

    “You're sure?”

    “Naturally.”

    “It wouldn't even have to be a handgun, a pistol or revolver. If you have a rifle-”

    “No guns at all. I don't believe in guns,” Blenwell said.

    “Your grandfather?”

    “There isn't a gun in Hawk House,” Blenwell had insisted.

    Peterson felt that it was time to drop that line of inquiry before Blenwell realized what he suspected. As pleasantly as he could, he said, “Well, thanks for your help.”

    “Good luck,” Blenwell had said.

    Peterson had come home, empty-handed.

    

    His story finished, Bill let go of the arms of the library chair and folded his long-fingered hands together, as if the telling of the tale had somehow relieved him of an inner agony and given him a semblance of peace. To Sonya, he said, “At least, now, I feel fairly certain that Blenwell doesn't have a gun. That would make him twice as dangerous as he is.” It was clear to Sonya that Bill no longer had the slightest doubt about who their man was.

    “Of course,” she pointed out, “he never has threatened, whoever he is, to kill anyone with a gun.”

    “Still, I feel better.”

    “Why are you so sure it's Kenneth Blenwell,” she asked.

    His arms returned to the arms of the chair, his fingers gripping the leather like talons.

    He said, “His entire attitude was suspicious. He wasn't in the least surprised about the ruined radio or boats. And there was the condition of his clothes, the wet trousers, as if he had been standing in water-as if he had been out sinking a couple of boats.”

    “He said he was surf fishing,” Sonya said.

    “No,” Bill said. “I asked him if he had been surf fishing, and he said that he had been-after a confused hesitation. You see, Sonya,
I
supplied him with his alibi for the wet trousers, and all he had to do was agree with me. And he did.”

    “Then he was lying?”

    “Definitely.”

    “How do you know?”

    “You don't go surf fishing in trousers,” Bill said. “You either wear a bathing suit or shorts. Or, if you do wear trousers, for some odd reason, you roll them up above your knees.”

    “That's pretty flimsy evidence-”

    But he was not finished, and he interrupted her before she could say more. “And even if you've got some weird reason for surf fishing in your streetclothes, you don't go home, when you're done, and walk around in the house wearing dripping pants and wet, muddy sneakers.”

    Sonya nodded, but she did not have anything to say this time.

    “And when I asked if he'd caught anything, he said he hadn't-a very convenient situation. If he'd caught a couple of snappers or almost anything of interest, I would have asked to see it-out of simple sportsmanlike curiosity. He realized that; I know he did.”

    “You've told Rudolph about this?”

    “First thing, when I came back from Hawk House Sunday night.”

    “And?”

    “He said it didn't mean anything.”

    “He's got a great deal of faith in Kenneth Blenwell,” Sonya agreed. “That's about the only person he seems to trust.”

    “That's just the problem,” Peterson said, “that illogical trust.” He got out of his chair and began to pace, swiftly, agitatedly, his hands clasped behind his back. “Saine goes blind, deaf and dumb every time that someone points a finger at Blenwell-and yet Blenwell is the one with the best reasons for wanting to hurt the Dougherty family.” He turned and faced her, repeated, “Blind, deaf and dumb. Well, blind and deaf, anyway. He's not dumb on the subject; he's quite vocal about Blenwell's innocence. Why in the devil's name is Saine so stubbornly unrealistic on this one, single point?”

    Miserably, she said, “I don't know.”

    “Nor do I.”

    She got up, too, but she did not pace with him. She felt that she didn't have the strength to pace, to do anything but hold herself erect as if she were waiting for a blow against the back of her head. If she started walking back and forth, her nerves would tighten up like springs and, in moments, also like springs, would go
boing
and snap into ruin. She just stood there in front of her chair, awkward, like a fawn learning to stand by itself, legs trembling, unsure, afraid.