Children of the Storm (14 page)

    Then she'd be free.

    After all, they'd realize that no one wanted to live around a place full of bad memories, full of the stink of death and the threat of death. It was always better to get out, go elsewhere, slough off the bad past. You couldn't be happy if you didn't slough off the bad things that happened, stick them away in a corner of your mind, forget them, let dust cover them. Anyone could see that.

    Her decision firmly made and justified, at least to herself, she let her mind wander over the people on
Distingue
who might fit a murderer's shoes. She found that she suspected almost everyone, from Mills to Henry Dalton, to Saine and Peterson. They all had the opportunity, she supposed, to commit such a crime, though she could see no motivation. Even a madman, it seemed to her, would need some motivation, no matter how inconsequential it was, some spark to set him off. And that made Kenneth Blenwell the chief suspect, of course; he wanted Seawatch and all of
Distingue.
She let her mind wander through the memory of her first meeting with Kenneth and his grandparents, and she became convinced she was right. She would have to speak with Rudolph about it, convince him to be more serious about the possibility of Blenwell's guilt.

    At last, her mind began to return to the same thoughts, as if in a circle, and she knew it was time to get up.

    She showered, dressed, brushed her yellow hair until it shone, then went downstairs for breakfast, shortly past ten o'clock.

    In the small dining room just off the kitchen,

    Rudolph Saine sat before a large plate of bacon and eggs, keeping a watch over Alex and Tina, who were working diligently at stacks of pancakes that were smothered under blueberry syrup. Both kids had bright purple stains around their mouths and purpled fingers, but they had somehow managed not to spot the white tablecloth.

    Sonya said, “They must be good. Either that, or you've just heard that food will be outlawed as of tomorrow.”

    Tina giggled and wiped at her mouth.

    Alex swallowed a mouthful of pancakes in a loud gulp, then said, “Hey, Sonya! Did you know someone wrecked
Lady Jane
?'

    His eyes were fever bright, his voice quick and excited.

    She frowned. “Wrecked it?”

    “Chopped a hole in her,” Tina explained.

    “Right in the bottom,” Alex said. “She sank.”

    “You can still see her,” Tina said. “But she's mostly sunk.”

    “Same thing happened to the neighbor's two boats,” Alex said, chattering like a magpie. “Someone chopped holes in 'em.”

    “Sunk 'em,” Tina said.

    “Whoa, there,” Sonya said. “You two are going too fast for me. I can't keep up with you.”

    She looked at Saine.

    He didn't look happy.

    “Is this true?” she asked.

    “Too true.”

    She went to the kitchen door, opened it, saw Helga working on a pie crust at the central table. “When you have time, Helga, would you get me some coffee and maybe a couple of sweet rolls?”

    “Sure, right away,” Helga said.

    “Take your time.”

    Sonya closed the door and went back to the table, sat down across from Saine. “Is it very bad?”

    “Last night,” the big man said, “I told you that Bill was going to boat over to Guadeloupe and get the police. Well, he didn't make it. Someone opened the sea cocks and scuttled the
Lady Jane.”

    “Scuttled?”

    “Sank her, flooded her hold.” He forked eggs into his mouth, chewed and swallowed them. “She was down with her keel on the ocean floor and her pilot's cabin barely above the waterline.”

    “A hole chopped in her too?”

    “No, that's Alex being melodramatic.”

    “Being what?” Alex asked.

    Saine smiled. “Eat your pancakes before you wither up from lack of nourishment.”

    Sonya said, “Couldn't the hold be pumped out?”

    “Bill was going to do just that-until he found out that the electric pump was smashed.”

    “A hand pump, then-”

    “He's working on that,” Saine said. “But it'll take two days of steady work to empty out those hundreds of gallons with a hand pump. Anything could happen in a couple of days, anything at all.”

    Bess brought Sonya's coffee and rolls. “You're looking better this morning,” she told Sonya.

    “Feeling better, too.”

    Bess gingerly touched Sonya's bruised neck. “Hurt bad?”

    “Not much. Not so long as I don't turn it too suddenly.”

    “The best thing for that is an onion salve.”

    “Oh?” Sonya said.

    “I make it myself,” Bess explained.

    “I've never heard of that.”

    “It's the best thing for strained muscles which is, after all, about what you have. Strained muscles. The only difference is, in your case, someone else strained them for you.”

    “Onion salve,” Sonya repeated. “I think I'll forgo the pleasure.”

    “I'll make some anyway,” Bess said. “You may change your mind. It really works. Draws the pain right out.”

    “How?” Rudolph asked, smiling at her. “Does the stink make the patient forget about the pain?”

    “Doubting Thomas,” Bess said. “You see if it doesn't work.” She turned to Sonya. “It'll take about an hour or so.”

    “Really-” Sonya said.

    Bess touched her shoulder to stop her. “You'll thank me afterwards,” she said. Then she returned to the kitchen.

    “Some woman,” Rudolph said.

    Alex said, “She used onion salve on Tina once.”

    “I smelled bad,” Tina said.

    “For days,” Alex said.

    “Like a liver dinner,” Tina said.

    Sonya laughed out loud, as delighted by the children's good spirits in the face of their predicament as she was by the little girl's sense of humor.

    The children returned to their pancakes.

    To Saine, Sonya said, “What's this about the Blenwells' boats?”

    “Both scuttled,” Saine said. “Their cabin cruiser was hit the same way as
Lady Jane.
And Ken's catamaran had a hole chopped in the bottom. Three holes, in fact. Bill went down to borrow one of their boats last night, and that's when the damage was found.”

    He had stopped eating, even though he had more than half his breakfast on his plate.

    Sonya wished she could look away from him and talk only with the kids, for they were, in their innocence, still fun to be with. Saine, on the other hand, was going to depress her even further.

    “So how did you get word to Joe and Helen about what's going on here?” she asked.

    She had not touched her food yet, and now she realized that she hadn't really wanted it.

    “We were going to use the Blenwells' radiotelephone,” Saine said. “But it was damaged, just like ours.”

    Sonya felt dizzy.

    Saine said, “They keep it on the ground floor, in the back of the house, in a rather isolated room. It was easy enough for someone to pry open a window, slip in and do the job.”

    “That wouldn't be necessary if the man who did the job already lived in Hawk House,” Sonya observed.

    “You believe Ken Blenwell would isolate himself along with us, chop up his own boat, scuttle the other?”

    “I forgot,” she said. “You and Ken are good friends, aren't you? And you're reluctant to finger a good friend.”

    Saine colored. “I wouldn't say we're good friends.”

    “Kenneth Blenwell said it.”

    “Oh?”

    “He respects you quite a bit. I don't remember his exact words, but he implied that he liked you, and that the feeling is mutual.”

    “It is,” Saine admitted. “He's a very levelheaded man, a good man.”

    “Who wants to kill the parrots.”

    Saine looked perplexed. He said, “What's that supposed to mean?”

    “Exactly what it says.”

    “Kill the parrots?” He frowned.

    She said, “And maybe kill the ch-kill something else, too.”

    “Us, huh?” Alex asked.

    “Not you,” Sonya said.

    She didn't want to frighten them. The longer they could face the situation as if it were one big game, the better. She knew what it was like to be young and helpless and terrified of death, and she didn't want them to experience the nightmares that she had known as a child.

    “Sure, us,” Alex said. “Who else?”

    “Eat your pancakes,” Saine said.

    “I'm almost done.”

    “Almost isn't good enough.”

    “Eat your pancakes, dummy,” Tina told her brother. “They're good for you.”

    “So we're isolated,” she said to the bodyguard.

    “Quite effectively.”

    She tried not to let a tremor show in her voice, but it was there anyway. “Joe will probably call, sooner or later, to see if everything's all right here.

    When he can't get through to us, he'll know something's happened. He'll call Guadeloupe-”

    “He'll think it's the storm,” Saine interrupted.

    “Storm?”

    He looked surprised. “You didn't see the sky?”

    “I didn't open my drapes this morning.”

    “Come here,” he said.

    He rose and went to the window, pulled aside the drapes and showed her the muddied sky. Brown-purple clouds, ugly and massive, so low they seemed within her grasp, scudded quickly northwestward, thick and heavy with water. The sea, in the glimpse she had of it far down the beach, looked high and angry, with a great deal of froth.

    “There's a hurricane moving this way, a center that formed up two days ago but only reached hurricane proportions last night. It's the seventh of the season-they're calling it Greta-but it's the only one that's formed up near
Distingue,
so far.”

    “You mean we're in its path?”

    “Probably not,” he said.

    “You don't know for sure?”

    “Not yet. It's headed directly this way, but it's a hundred and twenty miles out, and it'll probably veer considerably before it reaches us. We won't get the hurricane itself, just the unpleasant fringe effects-lots of wind and rain. How bad that gets depends on how soon Greta veers. The closer she gets before making a directional switch, the worse we'll get pounded.”

    “Should we go to Guadeloupe, to a larger island?” she asked.

    “Maybe. But we can't. The boats are useless, remember.”

    She said nothing. She could not think of anything
to
say.

    Saine let the drapes fall back into place, and he turned away from the window. Quietly, so that the children wouldn't hear him, he said, “Has a good night's sleep refreshed your memory any?”

    “How so?”

    “Have you recalled anything more about the man who tried to kill you in the garden?”

    “No,” she said.

    He sighed. “These next couple of days are going to seem like a whole lifetime.”

    “Or even longer,” she agreed.

    

    Sonya decided to carry on in their normal routine, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened or was about to happen-as if the sabotaged radio-telephones, the ruined boats, and the approaching storm were all parts of some monstrous fantasy that was, admittedly, unsettling but, nonetheless, only fantasy. She tutored Alex and Tina until two o'clock, with Rudolph Saine sitting by them like an overgrown child who'd wandered into the wrong classroom. They ate a light lunch at two, and Sonya asked the children what they'd like to do, for recreation.

    “Can we go to the beach?” Alex asked.

    “It's not the weather for swimming,” Sonya said.

    “Not to swim, just to watch,” the boy said.

    “Watch what?”

    “The waves. When the weather's bad, we get these monstro waves that're really keen.”

    “Isn't there an indoor game you'd like to play?” Sonya asked.

    “I want to see the monstro waves,” Tina said.

    Sonya looked to Saine for help.

    The big man rose. “If it's monstro waves they want to see, it's monstro waves we give them.”

    “Get your jackets,” Sonya told them.

    They stepped across the hall, with Saine watching, and got their windbreakers from the closet, were back in a moment.

    “Stay close,” Sonya warned.

    Alex took hold of his sister's hand, and the little girl did not object, as she normally might have. She stood close beside him, casting glances his way, as if he were capable of protecting her and were not merely a fragile, nine-year-old boy.

    This gesture did not escape Sonya's attention, and she wondered whether, despite their apparent good humor and playfulness, the children didn't understand the gravity of the situation more than they let on to the adults around them. Or perhaps, rather than a conscious understanding, their caution was on a primitive, physical level, an unconscious reaction to a broad spectrum of pressures that they did not even realize they sensed.

    Outside, a good breeze was blowing from the southeast, pushing northwestward, less forceful at ground level than it was up where the big clouds were herded along. It set up a soft, rustling sound in the palm forest, a sinister hissing, but was otherwise innocuous. It was somewhat difficult to imagine it growing in force until it could uproot palms and drive waves halfway across the island.

    They went across the edge of the formal gardens, almost directly over the spot where Sonya had lain, unconscious, the night before, took a set of steps down to the gray beach.

    “See!” Alex cried, pointing to the unruly waters.

    Just as he had said, the waves were huge, eight or nine feet high, curling in toward the beach with brutal force. That elemental savagery was as hypnotic a show as the boy had promised.