Children of the Storm

by Dean Koontz

  "But didn't."

  "I scared them with my scream."

  He said, "I was trying to call out to them too, but I couldn't get any words out. I just stood there moving my mouth, like a ventriloquist's dummy without his master."

  Sonya looked at the bodyguard as he continued watching the children, and she thought again about the contradictions of his personality. The same man who could coldly search a decomposing corpse's pockets could not find his voice to warn the kids away from that same grisly object! He was in no way an ordinary man-a curious blend of brutality and sensitivity.

  Without knowing why, she asked, "Have you ever been married?"

  He nodded. "Once."

  "Children?"

  "A son."

  "How old is he?"

  "He would be eight now."

  "Would be?"

  "He wasn't a healthy child. He died of heart trouble when he was three, congenital coronary disease."

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  "So am I," he said, watching the Dougherty kids. "So am I."

  * * *

  SEVENTEEN

  The man was angry with Fate.

  It just wasn't fair that some people had everything they could want in this world-while other people lacked everything and always would lack, no matter what they did. The world was out of kilter, spinning all wrong, and life was a mockery. Men were clowns, nothing but clowns, playing out a bunch of silly routines that lacked wit and made them seem like cement-headed fools. Men were clowns. And hopes were illusions. You could never hope for anything and receive it. Except for a favored few, those who had everything.

  Like the Doughertys.

  He hated the Doughertys.

  Fate had been absolutely philanthropic when it came to the Doughertys. They had money, so very much money, more money than anyone could expect to spend, reasonably spend on reasonable things, in ten lifetimes. They were healthy, well-educated, admired and respected by the people who counted, other people like them. They had such a lovely family, such a happy family, two beautiful children for whom they could buy or do anything.

  It wasn't right.

  What did he have? In comparison, he had nothing. The Doughertys had everything, and he had nothing.

  Jeremy, of course, would even things up.

  That was fair.

  Balance the inequities Fate created.

  And before long.

  He already knew the perfect moment. He had it all set up, and no one would be able to do a thing to stop him.

  He had been improvising so furiously, that he had been afraid of slipping up somewhere, but now he saw it, in crystal visions, how it would work, and he knew he'd not made a single mistake. In a little while, Jeremy would use his knife again.

  * * *

  EIGHTEEN

  When the rain began to fall, hard as hail and in sheets so dense that it cut their view from the kitchen windows to a mere ten or twelve yards, Bess switched on the portable radio that sat atop the refrigerator and tuned in to a weather report.

  "Hurricane Greta, seventh of this season," the announcer told them, "is now predicted to maintain its northwestwardly movement toward the island of Guadeloupe where twelve-foot tides are already being recorded. Government officials at the marine watch station at Pointe-a-Pitre have issued warnings to all ships at sea and are presently completing calls to outlying islands to learn whether anyone there requires assistance in leaving their homes to weather Greta on the mainland. The Pointe-a-Pitre docks are closed, and all the ships in that area have been ordered to stand anchor in the Bay and ride the storm out at a safe distance from the piers and berthing slots.

  "The United States Weather Bureau, operating out of San Juan, reports that Hurricane Greta is now packing winds slightly stronger than one hundred miles an hour, with a storm front some twenty-six miles wide. It is picking up speed and moving in a northwestwardly direction at approximately eighteen miles an hour and is expected to reached the Guadeloupe area sometime before midnight tonight.

  "Anyone requiring the assistance of the island government in reaching a port of safety should either telephone one of the three following numbers-"

  Bess switched the radio off.

  "If it doesn't roll right over us, it'll come damn close," Henry Dalton said. "Better bolt the shutters in place."

  "You sound like you've been through this before," Sonya said. They had congregated in the kitchen, as if seeking mutual comfort from the screaming winds and the thunder-both the Daltons, Mills, Helga, Saine, the children. Only Bill Peterson was missing, for he was still aboard the Lady Jane, trying to clear her of seawater with the use of the hand pump which, ingeniously, he had hooked up to a bicycle frame for greater efficiency.

  "Oh, my, yes," Bess said. "We're old hands. We've weathered out two or three other storms over the years."

  Dalton and Mills went to tend to the shutters, which were all external for the ground floors, internal on the second and third levels.

  "Be some broken glass to clean up when this is over," Helga said. "Not all them upper windows are going to escape."

  Henry Dalton slammed the shutters together across the outside of the largest kitchen window, slid bolts into place, while Mills tended quickly to both the smaller windows.

  The room grew darker.

  Bess got up and turned on another light.

  "Will we go into the storm celler?" Alex said.

  "That's fun! "Tina said.

  "We'll see," Bess told them. "But we're not the types to run from any little blow, you know." She spoke in imitation of some salty old sea dog.

  "I thought there weren't any cellars in Sea-watch," Sonya said, slightly confused. She didn't much like the idea of hiding in the cellar like a rat in flight from its own fear. "I thought a cellar would flood with sea water."

  "It's not a genuine cellar," Bess explained. She pointed to a white door at the far end of the room, a door which was recessed into the wall beside the large refrigerator. "The storm cellar's attached to the house instead of lying under it. The ground slopes up at that side of Seawatch, and the storm cellar is built partly into the hillside. Concrete, all reinforced. It's not a perfect shelter, mind you, but it's a sight better than the house when the wind really gets bad and the rain comes as hard as a waterfall."

  "How long will we have to stay in there?" Sonya asked.

  Bess shrugged. "Depends. If the storm passes us at a decent distance, we might not have to use it at all. If it passes right over us, as it looks as if it might, then we'll be in there a day-maybe two."

  "I'll be glad when this is over," Sonya said.

  "That makes a bunch of us," Bess said.

  Sonya could not help but remember Lynda Spaulding's melodramatic warnings about hurricanes. Right now, as the rain pattered hard against the windows and they waited to find out how bad it was going to get, those warnings did not seem silly and melodramatic at all. They seemed frighteningly real and valid.

  Indeed, almost everything that Lynda Spaulding, in her moments of jealousy, had predicted was now coming true. Everything except for the stories about Voodoo, of course. Thus far in her Caribbean adventures, Sonya had not encountered anyone working a Voodoo spell on anyone else. No mumbo-jumbo, no chants or curses. She supposed that was something to be thankful for, at least.

  At that moment, Bill Peterson opened the door, had it ripped from his hand by the fierce wind. It banged back against the wall with a terrific crash that sent Sonya halfway out of her chair and brought every eye in the room immediately to the young man.

  Bill came in, followed by the wind and rain like a giant claw that was trying to snatch him back, and he struggled to shove the door shut against that claw's insistence.

  He turned, that chore completed, and smiled at them, drenched clear through, his clothes pasted to him by the rain, his hair hanging in thick, wet clumps, made darker by the water. "I think we're in for a spell of bad weather," he told them, grinning.

  "You'll catch your death
of cold," Bess said.

  Helga was on her feet. "I'll make coffee for you."

  "Be back in a jiffy, then," Bill said. He went upstairs to change his clothes.

  When he came back, a couple of minutes later, Helga proved true to her word and gave him a cup of steaming coffee, which he took at the work table, sitting on a stool. He folded his hands about the cup, warming himself, and he drank it like a man fresh from the desert and willing to swallow anything liquid.

  "How's the boat?" Saine asked.

  Bill glanced at him.

  "Bad," he said.

  "In what way?" Saine asked.

  "I'm getting nowhere with her."

  "Why?"

  "I was making a little progress, mostly because of the bicycle rig I'd hooked up to the hand pump. I'd gotten the water level in the lower decks down to, oh maybe two thirds of what it had been when I found her last night. It wasn't going smoothly or quickly, you understand. But steadily. Then this damn rain came up." He scowled into what was left of his coffee, like a gypsy into a teacup.

  "So?"

  "You could stand out in this stuff and drown," Bill said. "It's that damn heavy. Of course, when I was working the pump, I had to leave the deck door open in order to run the pump hose over the side. As a result, the rain was catching on the upper deck like water in a swimming pool. It followed the deck slant to the hatch door, poured through the door and down the steps and into the hold-almost as fast as I was pumping it out. And it was all falling on my head."

  "I see."

  "When the storm's finished," Peterson went on, "I can get things hooked up and started all over again."

  "By then," Saine said, "it won't matter."

  Everyone stiffened, unconsciously, when the bodyguard made that unpleasant pronouncement.

  Saine, realizing what he had said and how it had been interpreted, explained himself, "I mean, by the time this storm's really over, Mr. Dougherty will know something's wrong here, and he'll be trying to get through. He'll have alerted the police on Guadeloupe, and help will have arrived."

  Everyone eased back again, some of the tension draining out of them, though no one seemed to be as relaxed as he had been before Saine's faux pas. They had become especially intrigued with the approaching storm, engrossed in the violence of Nature, and this far greater spectacle had momentarily relieved them of their worry for the children. Now that worry was back, twofold, and there was no way to be distracted from it, fully, again.

  Henry Dalton and Leroy Mills returned from closing the shutters on the ground floor, stripped out of their water-beaded slickers and then, at Bess's insistence, from their shoes and socks.

  Helga made more coffee while the two men went to shut the second and third floor windows, and when they returned, she had also set out several plates of cookies and pastries which everyone, rather half-heartedly, was helping himself to.

  The next hour passed slowly, punctuated by three weather reports on the radio.

  The first:

  "Winds up to a hundred and ten miles an hour at the worst of the storm as Hurricane Greta moves closer to Guadeloupe on a steady northwest track. Inhabitants of the outlying island have, almost without exception, reported to Pointe-a-Pitre for shelter, where stores have been closed for some hours and shutters have been bolted against the fierce wind and rains that are moving in advance of the storm itself."

  The second:

  "Captain Richard Spiker of the Janse Pride, freshly into port on Guadeloupe, reports that Hurricane Greta is one of the worst storms he has seen in twenty years of seamanship in the Caribbean. He reports towering seas, and an almost unbearable wind that managed to put the Janse Pride in a heavy list to port during the last few hours of her frantic drive for Guadeloupe."

  The third:

  "The United States Weather Bureau operating out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, predicts that the hurricane will pass through the vicinity of Guadeloupe between ten-thirty and midnight tonight. U.S. reconnaissance planes, scouting the perimeter of the storm, report, from analysis of aerial photography, that the tides are running extraordinarily high. On this warning, the shopkeepers and homeowners living near the docks at Pointe-a-Pitre, have begun to move all furniture and goods off the ground floor, in the event the seas should breast the docks and pour into the lower streets of the city."

  They talked, nervously, between the extended silences when they were listening intently to the weather reports and stories of imminent disaster on the radio, and they made a lot of bad jokes that somehow seemed, to them, quite funny. Only the children were clearly unimpressed with the danger posed by Hurricane Greta, for they played together as they always did, relaxed, pleased with themselves, competing in age-old games and in other games of their own manufacture. And they never wanted for a genuine smile or laugh, which made the adults' forced humor seem all the more phoney.

  Bill Peterson came and sat next to Sonya, trying to cheer her up. He seemed to be aware, more than the others were, that this was her first experience in a major storm and that, piled atop all the other horrors of recent days, this was almost too much for her to cope with.

  He held her hand.

  She welcomed that.

  He surprised her, after a while, by leaning close to her and whispering, "I'd like to talk to you alone."

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "About Saine, about the things that have been going on," he said, in a voice so low that Saine could not have heard him.

  "When?"

  "Now."

  She said, "Where?"

  He thought for a long moment, then suddenly got to his feet, pulling her up after him.

  To the others in the kitchen, he said, "Sonya and I are going to the library to look for a couple of books to pass the time."

  Bess said, "That's the feeblest story of its type that I think I've ever heard."

  Sonya blushed, but could not protest.

  Bill said, "You're a gossip, Bess Dalton, unprincipled, a common scold like they used to put in the stocks."

  "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?"