Children of the Storm (25 page)

    She lowered her head.

    She leaned against a palm bole and sucked air into her lungs, moist
alt
that made her feel almost as if she were on the verge of drowning, that made her puff in desperation.

    Although Hurricane Greta and the journey from Seawatch were very painfully real, she could barely bring herself to believe that any of this were happening. How had a girl like her, a girl who had set out to enjoy life, not terribly strong and not interested in heroics of any kind, end up in such a predicament? She turned to look back the way they had come, at what seemed an eternal confusion of twisting, looping palm boles, and she could find no answer there. It was almost easier to believe that this was entirely fantasy.

    With a crash that made her squeal and whirl away from the tree against which she was leaning, three large coconuts and a bundle of palm boughs crashed down about five yards away, waking Tina who, though her voice was inaudible, began to cry.

    She had slept through the storm because it was a continuing uproar, a familiar and almost hypnotic lullaby sung at top volume. But the sudden explosion of the coconuts had been like a sour note in that lullaby, a harshly jangling chord that ruined the building effect, and it had been disconcerting even to her drowsing ears.

    Although Sonya had hoped for another minute or so of rest before she had to take Tina into her aching arms again, she did not hesitate to bend and lift the child, cuddle her close and murmur sweetly to her, though murmurs were useless in the scream of the wind.

    Tina slowly recovered her nerve.

    She stopped crying.

    Sonya wiped rain from her face, only to see more rain pour across it, wondered whether all of them would survive this crazy journey, even if they did reach Hawk House safely. Once in a warm, dry house, they would have to take immediate steps to thwart pneumonia and have a doctor over from Guadeloupe the moment that the weather improved sufficiently to permit that trip.

    Through the film of water, Tina looked up at the young woman holding her, dark eyes locking with blue eyes, and even though she was a child and supposedly incapable of sophisticated communication with an adult, she passed a wealth of emotion in those short seconds, fears and hopes that Sonya was able to recognize at once and sympathize with.

    She hugged Tina closer.

    She said, “I'll get us through.”

    At about the same moment, she became aware that Alex was standing before her, trying to get her attention. She bent, as if to try to hear what he had to say, then saw that he was frantically pointing toward the flooded glen out of which they had just come.

    Knowing what she would see before she looked, she turned and stared into Peterson's eyes.

    

    Kenneth Blenwell sat before the unshuttered window, watching the rain-swept lawn, the dipping trees that looked a bit like frantic dancers in a new style discotheque. He winced each time that something-perhaps a leaf, a tiny branch, a bare palm frond, a piece of paper carried from who-knew-where, clouds of dust and small pebbles- slapped against the glass with the force of Greta's big, invisible hands behind them. He knew that something might very likely be blown against the window at just the proper angle and at just the right speed to smash the pane and shower him with dangerously sharp shards of flying glass, but he tried to be watchful for such a thing, and he remained, fairly faithfully, at his post.

    Once, he went for a cup of coffee, telling himself that he was being the perfect fool and that nothing could happen in the three minutes or so that he would be gone.

    But he'd come running back, breathless, slopping coffee on his hand, certain that he'd chosen the crucial moment to take a break and that he was missing what he had been watching all this time for.

    The lawn had been empty.

    He sat down.

    He finished his coffee.

    He watched.

    Time passed as slowly for him as it had for Sonya, earlier in the morning, when she had waited in the kitchen of Seawatch for Rudolph Saine and Bill Peterson to return from the second floor with the kids. He kept looking at his watch, frowning, holding it close to his ear to see if it were still working.

    It always was.

    He went and got another cup of coffee and took his time returning to the window, so that he would not feel like an utter fool when he looked out and saw that the lawn was unpeopled and that the storm was still the focal point of the scene.

    Fifteen minutes later, he went to see how Walter and Lydia were getting along in the storm cellar. The place was as comfortably furnished as their regular living room, though the concrete walls gave off an unmistakable chill. They counteracted this irritant by wearing coats and draping their legs with afghans which Lydia had made herself. They were sipping wine and reading, clearly upset that they must miss their television programs for a while, but functioning nonetheless, in their usual style.

    “You should be down here too,” Lydia warned him.

    “I will be, shortly.”

    “What's taking you so long, anyway?” his grandfather asked.

    “Tying things down.”

    “Never took this long before.”

    “I'm getting old,” he said, smiling.

    Hattie, the maid, was there too, reading, sipping cola instead of wine. She smiled at him, a rare thing these days. Though he had often been angry with his grandparents for keeping her on just because, after working a lifetime for them, she had nowhere else to go, he was now glad that they had ignored him. She was grumpy, aging faster than either Walter or Lydia, though they were senior to her, and she was no longer a particularly efficient housekeeper and cook. But her presence was a testament to his grandparents' generosity and their concern about people they touched. She reminded him of how Walter and Lydia had been, when they were more vital, recalled to him the thousands of other kindnesses he had seen them extend and which they had extended to him. For that reason, despite her grumpiness, Hattie was good to have around.

    “I'll give you just another fifteen minutes,” Lydia said, looking at her watch.

    “And you'll spank me if I take longer?”

    “No, but your grandfather might.”

    “She doesn't speak for me,” Walter said, chuckling.

    “Why not?” she asked him. “I always have in the past.”

    The old man threw Ken a meaningful glance. “This woman,” he said, “has been my lifelong bane.”

    “And you hers,” Ken said.

    The old people laughed.

    “I'll be back,” he told them, when he had ascertained that they were comfortable.

    “Fifteen minutes!” Lydia called after him.

    “I heard!”

    Behind him, as he walked away, he heard Walter say, “Don't nag the boy, my dear. To us, he's still a child, but to the rest of the world, he's a grown man, more than a grown man.”

    He did not hear her reply.

    Upstairs, he sat down in his chair once again, pulled it up to the window and stared toward the edge of the palm forest, resuming his vigil.

    He thought about Saine, the Doughertys, Sonya… But because there was no new data, no new experiences, since he'd early thought of these things, he was covering ground that he had been over before and, in the case of Sonya, thoughts he had given way to a thousand times in the last couple of weeks…

    Before the fifteen minutes had passed, he began to feel like the village idiot, sitting at his watch-tower, waiting for an event that, in all logic, would never transpire. He was worrying his grandparents for no good reason. Though he didn't think that Greta would manage to rip Hawk House apart, it was possible that he could receive a severely lacerated face from the flying glass if the window before him should be broken-and that would be enough to have the old people in hysterics.

    Perhaps he needed more coffee.

    But he didn't want it.

    He fidgeted.

    He thought of Sonya again.

    Laughing…

    Riding the boat, hands gripping the rail, her blonde hair streaming out behind her…

    She was whiteness, he blackness. Together, facing the world together, what would they make of it, in such contrasting colors, half in pure white and half in gloomy black. The cynic in him answered that question with a sneer: they'd make gray together, unrelieved, depressing gray. He laughed bitterly at his ability to always bring himself back to the reality at hand, back to the moment.

    Sonya was not yet and probably never would be his responsibility, while, on the other hand, those old people in the storm cellar downstairs were definitely his responsibility. As he had once trusted in them to protect him from harm and make him comfortable, they now, perhaps unconsciously, had switched roles and depended on him to do the same for them. He must forget “what ifs” and tend to the “what is,” to Walter and Lydia and, yes, to Hattie.

    He stood up, abruptly convinced that nothing would be gained by remaining here and watching for a madman in a hurricane. He was a bit angry with himself for even having seriously considered such a ludicrously melodramatic development. He was the realist, after all. He was the cynic. He did not believe, as so many people did, in a life that was like a motion picture, where drama arose at the exactly necessary point…

    He pushed his chair back and drew closed one of the shutters.

    He took one last look at the lawn.

    Wind, rain, glowering clouds, dancing trees, nothing more.

    He swung the second shutter around in order to bolt it tightly to the first half that was already in place.

    

    Jeremy came over the brow of the hill and, digging his heels into the mushy earth to keep from losing his balance and falling to the bottom, he started down toward the sea-flooded ravine, yet another of the watery obstacles which had become familiar and hated. He had gone a third of the way down the hill before, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something more than green vegetation and gray rain at the top of the next slope, beyond the pool. He looked up, gasped when he saw the woman, Sonya, standing with her back to him, holding one of the children.

    The other child was nowhere in sight.

    For a moment, he could not move.

    The sight of her made him realize he'd not really expected to catch them, no matter how hard he'd tried to convince himself that he would. And, coming upon her unexpectedly like this, his memory was jarred so that he could not instantly recall why he had been chasing her… He could not think of her name or what relation she was to him and, when he was honest, he could not exactly remember who he was, himself. He stood there in the pounding rain, sweating, his brow furrowed, desperately trying to recall what this was all about.

    Then the other child, the boy, came into sight, looking down into the ravine and, instantly, discovered his pursuer, turning to the woman to tell her that the gap had been closed.

    In the same moment, Jeremy remembered that he was a judge, that he had held a trial, that he had passed a sentence and must now see that it was carried out. The Doughertys must suffer, must understand what life was really like. That was fair.

    He took out his knife.

    The three people above turned away from him and disappeared into the trees, but he was not worried, for he knew he would have them shortly.

    He started across the pool, his knife held before him again, the blade gleaming in the rain.

    

    Sonya was not a violent woman; violence repelled her, for it was so closely associated with death and unhappiness. Yet, when she saw what must be done in order to save their lives, she did not hesitate, even briefly, to do it, though she knew that she might end up killing a man who had once been Bill Peterson.

    Perhaps it was just this thought, couched in just those terms, that made her able to perform a violent act against another living creature-the painful realization that he was no longer that man whom she had known and had felt affection for and, having gone so far over the edge of madness as he had, would never be that man again. Either Jeremy, the black side of his schizophrenic personality, would rule the mortal shell from now on, or he would become a catatonic case for the mental wards, a staring and helpless vegetable without any personality at all, far beyond the help of any branch of modern medicine. She would not, then, be killing a friend, but an absolute stranger. Indeed, if you wanted to be blunt about it, she would not even be attacking a man, but a
thing,
a living and moving being that was less than a wild animal.

    But she would have to act fast.

    She had maybe three minutes, or four.

    No longer.

    She put Tina down again, stood her on her feet and tried to make the little girl understand that she would no longer be carried.

    Tina blinked at her, on the verge of tears again.

    
No, please,
Sonya thought.
Don't cry.

    If Tina didn't fully grasp the import of their situation now that Peterson had nearly caught up to them, her brother, Alex, did, for he grabbed hold of his sister's hand and held it tightly.

    Relieved, Sonya stood and pointed through the palm forest, in the general direction of Hawk House, and indicated that she would be along behind them in a minute or two.

    Alex turned away from her and tottered off, pulling Tina with him, not moving quickly but at least moving, not with much of a chance of survival but at least with a small chance, a tiny one. If she could stop Peterson without getting hurt herself, they would make it yet. But if she was hurt and could not catch up to them, they'd die. They'd die even if she'd killed the madman and he could no longer reach them, for they were almost sure to lose themselves in the storm and die of exposure during the long night ahead…