Children of the Storm (3 page)

    “You'll like it,” Peterson said.

    She said nothing.

    “This is God's country, in the true sense,” Peterson said, still anxious to repair her mood, which he felt responsible for damaging. “Nothing bad can happen here.”

    She wished she could be sure of that.

    

    Henry Dalton, the house butler, came down to the small boat dock to meet them, pushing an aluminum luggage cart over the uneven boards of the little pier. He was sixty-five, but looked ten years older, a slight man with snow white hair, a grizzled face, hard black eyes that looked far too young for the bushy white eyebrows that arched above them like senior citizen caterpillers. Though he must have been nearly six feet tall, he seemed smaller than Sonya's five-feet, four-inches, because he drew in on himself, shrank himself, like a dried fruit, as if he could protect himself from any further aging merely by rolling up and letting the world pass over him.

    When he spoke, his voice was tight and dry too, almost quarrelsome. “Henry Dalton,” he said, not offering her his hand.

    She smiled and said, “Sonya Carter.” And she did offer him her hand.

    He looked at it as if it were a snake, wrinkled his face even more, until he was in danger of losing his eyes and mouth altogether in some sharp crease of flesh. But at last he reached out and took her hand, held it briefly in his long, bony fingers, then merely dropped it as a man might drop a curious seashell he had lifted from the beach and studied and grown bored with.

    He said, “I came to get your luggage.”

    Bill Peterson had already carried her bags from the
Lady Jane,
and now he carefully stacked them on the metal cart, his brown arms bunched with muscle, his thick hair falling slightly forward, into his eyes, as he bent to the task.

    “This way, then,” Henry said when the cart was loaded. He turned, gripping the wheeled cart, and led them back toward the mansion, walking ramrod stiff. He was wearing dark slacks and a white, short-sleeved shirt made to be worn outside his trousers. Though a gentle breeze mussed Sonya's hair, it did not stir the hem of Henry's white shirt -almost as if Nature herself were wary about disturbing the old man's dignity.

    Sonya and Peterson fell back a few steps, out of the butler's hearing, and she said, “You didn't warn me about him!”

    Peterson smiled and shook his head. “Most of the time, Henry's as pleasant an old coot as you could meet. Occasionally, though, he seems to vent all his stored-up antagonisms, and he has a bad day. Everyone avoids him on a bad day, and it's like it never happened. Unfortunately, he's chosen your first day here as his first bad day in weeks.”

    They reached the front porch steps, where Peterson and Henry worked together to maneuver the cart onto the porch floor, and then they went into the foyer of the Dougherty house, through a heavy screen door and a heavier mahogany door, into air conditioned coolness that was sweeter than the false relief of the passenger terminal at the docks of
Pointe-a-Pitre.

    “How lovely!” Sonya said, without reservation.

    And the foyer
did
seem to promise a marvelous house beyond. It was paneled in the darkest teak wood imaginable, almost black, carpeted in a rich red shag that made her feel as if she were in the dark chamber of a furnace with hot coals beneath her feet and, paradoxically, cool air all around her. Original oil paintings, of many different schools, were tastefully arranged on the walls of the small room, the pieces of naturalism and surrealism somehow blending when they should not have, complementing one another when they should have clashed. The foyer ceiling, and the ceiling of the corridor which led from it, were high and open-beamed, also of that same very dark teak, quite in contrast with what one expected in a house in the tropics, but nonetheless effective for their striking anachronism.

    Henry lifted her luggage from the cart and placed it on the flat bed of an open escalator platform at the bottom of the steps. He punched a button in the wall, which Sonya had previously mistaken for a light switch, and sent the machine slowly along the steps. It was attached to the wall on an inset track, moved slowly, and would save Henry all the effort of lugging those bags to the second floor.

    The old man said, “I'll put them in your room, later. First, I imagine you'd like to meet the rest of the staff.”

    “Of course,” Sonya said.

    “This way, then.”

    “I'll tag along,” Bill Peterson whispered to her.

    “I'd appreciate it,” she said, smiling thankfully at him. She hoped the rest of the staff was more like Bill than like Henry.

    They followed the red-carpeted corridor to the rear of the house, went through a white, swinging door and into the kitchen, which was fully twenty-five-feet on a side and equipped with all the latest gadgets and conveniences. All the appliances were new, white and chrome, the pots and pans all copper-plated. In the middle of the room, at a heavy, built-in table that contained a double sink, a woman Henry's age was grating a block of swiss cheese into a large porcelain bowl.

    She looked up, her chubby face slightly red, her dark eyes alive and young, put down the block of cheese and said, “Who have we here?”

    “Sonya Carter,” Henry said. “The woman who'll be taking care of the children.” He looked at Sonya and said, “This is Helga, the cook.”

    “Glad to meet you,” Sonya said.

    “Same here, same here,” Helga said. She had stood up, from her tall stool, as if this were a formal meeting, and Sonya could see that the chubbiness extended beyond her face. She appeared to be the sort of cook who constantly sampled her own preparations.

    “There's not a cook in the islands compares to Helga,” Bill Peterson said. “Thank God for the sea and the boat and all the other things to do around here. If there weren't a lot of ways to exercise, we'd all be as stout as Helga herself.”

    The cook blushed proudly and sat down again, picked up the cheese and looked at Sonya under her eyebrows. “Nothing really that special,” she said, shyly.

    “Helga's also too modest for her own good,” Peterson said.

    She blushed even more and returned to grating her cheese.

    At that moment, the back door opened, and a small, tidy woman in her mid-fifties came in from outside, brushing her small hands together more as if to satisfy herself that some chore was completed than to actually clean them. She appeared to be the sort of woman who would never have to wash her hands, simply because she was also the type of woman who would never get them dirty in the first place. Her hair was nearly all white, drawn back from around her sharp face and tied in a bun at the back of her head. She wore no lipstick or makeup, but had a flawless complexion for a woman her age. She wore a simple, light blue dress that vaguely resembled a uniform, and she moved with a sprightliness that Sonya had often seen in career nurses who enjoyed their jobs and were like new girls in the hospital after even thirty years of service.

    “My wife,” Henry explained to Sonya. And the girl thought that, for a moment, some of the old man's vinegar seeped away, as if this woman could sweeten him merely by her presence. To his wife, he said, “Bess, this is Sonya Carter, the kids' teacher.”

    Bess crossed the kitchen and took Sonya's hands, looked up at her like some concerned mother assessing her son's fiance. She grinned, glanced past Sonya at Bill Peterson, then back at the girl, and she said, “Well, I'm sure Bill couldn't be more pleased.” There was a tone of mischief in her voice. “After all, until now, he's had to take the boat to Guadeloupe and even farther to look at pretty girls. He'll be saving himself the trip, now.”

    Sonya felt herself blushing, as Helga had blushed earlier, and she wished
she
had a block of cheese to grate, something to hide herself in.

    But if Bess were mischievous, she was also considerate, and she relieved Sonya's embarrassment as easily as she had caused it, by asking questions about the trip down from the States. For several minutes, they stood there in the kitchen, talking, as if they had known each other for years and were only catching up on things after a short separation. Henry continued to soften noticeably around his wife, and Sonya felt certain that the center of the Dougherty household was probably not Mr. Dougherty or Mrs. Dougherty or either of their children-but was Bess.

    “Well,” Henry said after a few minutes, “she ought to meet the others. And then I'd guess she wants to freshen up and rest after that trip.”

    “Leroy's outside, patching the concrete at the pavilion,” Bess said. “I was just talking to him.”

    Henry lead Sonya and Peterson outside, onto the mat of tough tropical grass that covered the lawn like a flawless carpet, took them down a winding flagstone walkway toward an open-air pavilion down near the easterly beach. The building was perhaps forty feet long and twenty wide, with picnic tables and benches arranged around its waist-high rail walls. The roof was shingled tightly but laced over with palm fronds to give the illusion of primitive construction, and the final effect was exceedingly pleasant.

    “Mrs. Dougherty likes to sit here in the morning, when its cool and when the insects are not out. She reads a lot,” Henry informed them.

    Leroy Mills, the handyman who was working on the pavilion floor, stood over his most recent piece of patchwork, watching their approach, smiling uncertainly. He appeared to be in his middle thirties, small and dark, with an olive complexion that indicated Italian or Puerto Rican blood. He was thin, but with a stringy toughness that made it clear he was not a weak man at all.

    Henry made the introductions in a clipped fashion and finished with, “Leroy lived in Boston for a time.”

    “Really?” Sonya asked. “I went to school there.”

    Leroy nodded. “Too cold in Boston, for me.”

    “Me, too,” she said. “What part of Boston are you from?”

    “A part I don't like to remember,” Leroy said, still smiling uneasily. “I haven't lived there for quite a while now. I was Mr. Dougherty's handyman in New Jersey, before we moved here.”

    “You were a handyman' in Boston, too?” she asked, trying to make some pleasant conversation. Though he seemed nice enough, Leroy Mills was not particularly easy to engage in conversation.

    “Yes, there too.”

    “I'm a fumble fingers myself,” she said. “I admire someone who can fix things.”

    “If you need something repaired, almost anything, just call for me,” he said. He looked at the wet concrete at his feet. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to work.”

    Their conversation had been a most mundane one, yet it stuck with Sonya all the way back to the house. Mills had been so uncommunicative, even though Henry, by mentioning Boston, had provided them with a simple take-off point for an exchange of greetings. Of course, Mills might only be shy, as Helga so obviously was. And, when all was said and done, did she really know anything more about the others than she did about the handyman? Helga was too shy to say much. Bill Peterson was talkative and open but had not said much about himself; likewise, Bess. And Henry, of course, had said little because, as Peterson had explained, he was having a bad day. Yet… Mills' uncommunicative nature seemed different-as if he were being purposefully secretive. She had asked where he lived in Boston; he had avoided saying. She had asked what he did there; he had skipped that subject too. She realized, now, that he had been completely circuitous in his responses, as if she had been questioning him rather than making polite conversation.

    At the house again, she shrugged off the incident. She was building proverbial mountains out of molehills-all because of the story Peterson had told her on the way over from
Pointe-a-Pitre.
Child mobsters, threatening telephone calls, poison pen letters, madmen-on-the-loose-none of these things made for peace of mind, and all of them served to set the imagination working overtime.

    In the front foyer again, Bill Peterson said, “Well, I'll leave you to your rest for now and see you at dinner. You'll meet the Doughertys then, too.”

    “They eat meals with us?” she asked, surprised.

    Peterson laughed. “It's a democratic household, all the way. Joe Dougherty is in no way a snob, and he runs a lively dinner table. Leroy, you and I will eat evening meals with the family; the kitchen staff, which has to be cooking and serving, will eat separately, of course.”

    “See you at dinner, then.”

    She followed Henry up the wide central staircase to the second floor, along that main corridor to the far end where her room lay at the southeast corner of the great house.

    The chamber was painted a restful shade of beige, with an inlaid teak ceiling. Dark blue carpet, the color of clean seawater, gave deliciously beneath her feet. The furniture was all hand-carved red cedar, as Henry explained. It was in a Polynesian mode, with god faces hewn into most of the open surfaces and with holy symbols-fish, suns, moons, stars, leaves-cut in between the faces. It was all heavy and rich, not in the least bit feminine but Sonya liked it. She had never really been one for frills, laces and satins, but preferred things that were
different,
unique. And this was certainly as different as she could have asked for. A full bath, in dark blues and greens, lay off her main room and included shower and sunken tub. Her closet was nearly as large as a whole bedroom itself.

    “May I help you unpack?” Henry asked, after bringing the last of her bags.

    “No thanks,” she said. “I'll feel more at home if I set things up myself.”

    “Dinner at eight o'clock, then,” Henry said. “You'll find the family in the front dining room.”

    “Fine,” she said. “Thank you, Henry.”