Children of the Storm (24 page)

    He wandered through these mental images much like a man strolling leisurely through a museum, considering each of the many characters who was involved in this real-life drama, turning them around in his mind, but rather quickly rejecting them and choosing, for a longer consideration, Miss Sonya Carter…

    He was a young man, some said a handsome young man, and he was wealthy and educated- with a degree in literature-and he had seen a great deal of the world, from England to Japan, from Chile to Sweden. He had, according to popular modern mythology, all of the qualities for a great romantic, a ladies' man… Yet, until he had seen the Carter girl, he had never pictured himself as a romantic, and certainly not-as he had been continually imagining since-as a family man. He tended to be cynical, wary of people professing friendship, and felt it unlikely that he would ever experience a close, love-relationship with anyone but his grandparents, with whom he shared a special closeness originally born of mutual dependency but now gone far beyond that.

    Then he had seen Sonya Carter.

    When he first glimpsed the
Lady Jane
moving slowly across the mouth of the cove, he had been surveying the horizon for large cruise ships, an idle hobby that he sometimes spent hours at. He realized that Peterson was not alone and, still convinced that Peterson was the most likely suspect in the recent Dougherty family incidents, trained his glasses there to see who might be with him. Even at that distance, seen only through a pair of field glasses, she had mesmerized him. Not by her looks, so much (though she was quite lovely), but by her smile, her attitude…

    In prep school, when he was a teenager, the other kids had begun to call him “The Raven,” because they said that he matched the gloomy personality of that bird in Poe's famous narrative poem of the same name. He had endured his nickname without comment, though he had naturally not much appreciated it.

    He was not gloomy at all, he felt, but merely being realistic. The world was not, as most of his frivolous classmates seemed to think it was, the proverbial oyster. Certainly, many things in life were pleasurable, and he enjoyed himself whenever he could. But you had to be on the lookout for the bad, for the upsets and the disappointments. Most of these prep school kids had lived all their lives, to date, in wealthy homes where doting parents had supplied them everything they wanted and twice everything that they needed. Until they were on their own, until they risked emotional involvement with the world, they could not realize that it contained things you had to be wary of. He realized it, because he had his mother's history of madness haunting him, and he was plagued by the memory of that awful day when the news of her suicide had come and his grandparents, though they knew she was insane, had grieved so deeply, so terribly at her loss.

    In college, too, he had been known as a pessimist, an image he at first attempted to void himself of but later embraced because, if they all believed it, he could be let alone, friendless. He enjoyed his privacy more than the average student his age, and he convinced himself that he also enjoyed being without any companions at all.

    These days, he liked to think, he was in a much lighter mood, far less likely to become despondent over events. He had developed a sense of humor that pleased his grandfather immensely and, though it was based on a cynical outlook on life, a sarcastic approach to almost everything he encountered, it was still a genuine sense of humor, proof that instead of depressing him, these days, the inanities of life did little more than amuse him.

    When he had seen Sonya, laughing out loud, head thrown back, her yellow hair streaming in the sea breeze, her whole attitude one of carefree optimism, he had been struck, had been struck hard, as if someone had punched him in the center of his chest, directly over the heart, and he'd had trouble breathing. Then, of course, in that first moment, he had been attracted to her only as one magnet might be attracted to an unlike force, intrigued by the evident differences between them. She was, he had seen in that single, long-distance glance, quite his emotional opposite, and because of this, she was unique. He'd met other optimistic people, naturally, scads of them, but none so purely gay and open as this girl appeared in this brief and indirect contact.

    The first meeting, of course, had been a complete disaster. He had been nervous at meeting her, surprised to find her on the beach near Hawk House, and he had not reacted well.

    Neither had she.

    She seemed to rebel at the sight of him, and she misinterpreted his nervousness for-he later realized-malicious antagonism.

    Then there'd been their first meeting with his grandparents, a disaster to outdo all others. He loved them both, dearly, and he sometimes forgot that their age had made them different people, in other's eyes, than those he saw them as. They were no longer sparkling conversationalists, and their passion for television was almost unbreakable. When they had rambled on about the details of the threats against the Dougherty kids,
he
had known they were not really ghoulishly interested in the gore, but that they were merely going on as old people often did. When Walter snapped at the girl,
he
knew the snap was not intended to sound mean, but chiding. But, of course, Sonya could know none of this.

    What a botch that afternoon had been!

    He had learned, from Rudolph Saine, later, that she was far too optimistic, a very naive and innocent young lady who had been early attracted to Bill Peterson's surface glitter, his facade of carefree charm, and that she had not seen the thinly disguised restlessness that shifted rapidly just below his surface. He knew then that he had probably lost her and would most likely never be able to communicate properly with her, but he did not give up thinking about her.

    He worried for her.

    When he had first talked to Saine, months ago, had first heard all the details of the Doughertys' problems, he had pointed out that he was fairly sure Bill Peterson had been away from Seawatch for several weeks at the same time the threats were being delivered in New Jersey. He had supposedly been on a vacation. He and Saine had hit it off at once, recognizing, perhaps, their mutal distrust of most of the world, and he had gone to Guadeloupe, at Saine's request, to see if he could track down Peterson's whereabouts during the critical time period when things had been turned upside down in New Jersey. He was able to trace Peterson to a Miami-bound private plane, but lost him there, in the records of the commercial airlines, where he could easily have employed a false name. This was little for Saine to form an opinion on, but added to his own observations of Peterson, the big man had centered much of his attention, from then on, on the boat captain.

    And now Sonya was becoming friendly with Peterson, too friendly for a girl whose outlook on life left her intensely vulnerable to danger and hurt.

    Blenwell closed and bolted the last ground floor shutter and, his thoughts drifting to Seawatch again, began to wonder just what was going on now, at that fated house, as Hurricane Greta isolated them even further than ever…

    He had wanted to be there now, ever since the boats and radios had been destroyed, because he was sure the madman was about to make his move. But in the middle of the worst hurricane in thirty years, his place was at Hawk House, with his grandparents, who might need him. Even if the storm did not tear the house down, the excitement of the wind and noise might fatally weaken the heart in one of them. He could not leave them by themselves, even though he knew Saine could use his help.

    Inside, he closed the interior shutters on the upper floors, one by one, still an automaton with his thoughts elsewhere.

    Standing at the last window, with his hands on the shutters, staring out at the final piece of the rainy world which was still visible from Hawk House, he hesitated to close them, for his thoughts took a sudden and particularly nasty turn. He had great faith in Rudolph Saine, and he doubted very much that anyone, even a madman, could overpower that giant. But just suppose that Saine grew careless, or that the madman was more cunning than anyone could have suspected… Suppose he struck at Seawatch and, suspecting that Blenwell knew who Saine suspected, decided to come after the Blenwell family too.

    He shuddered.

    Such a possibility was predicated on the certainty that the killer would eliminate both the Dougherty children, Rudolph Saine, and anyone else in Seawatch who might be able to connect him with murder.

    He didn't want to think about such a bloodbath.

    Especially not with Sonya up there…

    He looked at the skies: black, low, moving fast, broken up by sheets of hard rain.

    He looked, too, at the sea: towering, fierce, crushing the island in its watery vice, narrowing
Distingue
to a tiny strip of land, a strip of wind-battered mud.

    Walk a mile in that, to kill those in Hawk House while the hurricane still raged? That seemed unlikely. Such a trek could be deadly. Only a madman…

    He pushed the shutters open.

    What in God's name was he thinking? Of course only a madman would walk the length of the island in a hurricane, but it was a madman that they were dealing with!

    He left the shutters open.

    He pulled a chair up to the window, and he went to load the rifle he had told Bill Peterson he did not have.

    

    In the fourth ravine, between the fourth and the fifth hills, not so terribly far from the sanctity of Hawk House-she hoped, she prayed-they came across the dead body of a shark. It was floating in the dirty water that had coursed in between the low hills, its belly up, its toothy mouth frozen in a hideous grin that Sonya felt she had seen somewhere before but which she could not place…

    … and then
could
place. It was the grin one saw, in horror films, on the face of a death's head, a skull smile both broad and utterly unhumorous, the sort of cheap theatrics that, in films, had made her chuckle but which now brought her no amusement at all.

    She turned the children away from the thing and led them quickly along the shore of the pool, so that they could cross without coming into contact with the shark's corpse. They had seen it already, of course, for she had not been quick enough to turn them before it had bobbled into sight, and she knew that they would have dreams about it for many nights to come.

    For the most part, she was not so much disturbed by the grisly scene because it was stomach-churning or because it was another encounter in what seemed an endless string of encounters with death-but she was most disturbed because she could not decide whether the shark, this time, was a good omen or a bad one. In one sense, because it was dead, it might represent a previous threat now dissolved. And in another way, because it was dead and grinning at them, it might mean…

    She shook her head and tried to get hold of herself.

    Weariness was closing in on her like a gloved fist, and it was causing her to go off on useless tangents (like thinking in terms of good luck and bad luck, good omens and bad omens), and this was a trend she could not permit to continue.

    The pool, this time, was not uniformly deep and permitted an easy crossing at one point, thirty or forty feet from the dead shark, where the land beneath the invading sea rose up almost like a series of stepping stones.

    She carried the children across, one at a time, her arms aching like sore teeth which she longed to pull from the sockets and gain a modicum of release.

    That done, the hill remained ahead.

    She didn't want to go up it.

    She had to.

    Cautiously, because the rise was slippery and studded with flat rocks which were no good to use as handholds but which would strike a good blow if she fell on one of them and hit her head, she moved crabwise up the slope, taking Tina with her, casting anxious glances backwards at Alex who, though doggedly following, was beginning to lose some of his all-important pep. Once, she lost her balance and, in trying to cradle Tina and keep the child from being injured, fell and struck her head on one of those rocks which she had intended so hard to avoid.

    Dizziness swept over her…

    She felt she would pass out.

    And sleep…

    She gritted her teeth, then bit at her lips, pushed up and, puffing, went on, drawing her breath in great, wracking sobs which, fortunately, the storm covered. She could not have borne to hear that sound of absolute desperation, not here when she needed every ounce of her supposedly bottomless optimism.

    At the top of the hill, she wanted to relax, to sleep.

    She knew she must not give in to the urge.

    She wanted just to lie down, stretch out on the soft earth and close her eyes for a couple of minutes.

    She wouldn't sleep.

    No, she'd not sleep because she dared not to sleep, but why couldn't she just stretch out for a rest…?

    No, not even that.

    The most she would permit herself, by way of a breather, was a brief stop, at the top of the hill, with the fourth gully and the fourth rise behind them.

    She put Tina down, watched the child stir, mumble and blink at the world for a moment before tumbling into sleep again.

    The example was tempting.

    She looked away.

    She rubbed the back of her neck, then her eyes, felt the place on her arm where Peterson had slid the sharp blade across her flesh: that had already stopped bleeding, though the edges of the wound were purled and purplish.

    She looked at the sky.

    Blackness but not night…

    Where the trees were forcefully parted to let it show through, it was like an open mouth, swiftly descending to devour the earth. She could still not believe that it could put down so much rain, so rapidly, even though she had been driven temporarily half-deaf by the fall of that rain, even though she had been soaked deep and long by it. Even as she looked up, the water stung her open face, made her close her eyes for fear of being blinded.