by Dean Koontz
Children of the Storm
by
Dean Koontz
* * *
NO HAVEN...
As she and the children stood by the windows, watching the sea which glittered madly with reflected moonlight, Sonya felt more at peace than she had for a long time. The solidity of Seawatch made her feel as if she were in a fortress, sealed away from harm...
Alex destroyed that mood in a moment. "Are you worried?" he asked.
Sonya did not look away from the sea. "Why should I be worried?"
"He won't hurt you."
She looked at Alex. His eyes were very dark, almost too dark to see in the meager light. "Who won't?"
He scuffed his small feet on the carpet and looked back at the rolling sea. "The man."
"What man?"
"You know," said Tina. "The man who says he is going to kill me and Alex..."
BOOK ONE
* * *
ONE
Having lived nearly all of her twenty-three years in the brief summers and the bitter winters of Maine and Massachusetts, Sonya Carter was especially intrigued by the Caribbean-by the almost too-bright skies, the warm breezes that smelled of salty ocean air, the palm trees that could be seen nearly everywhere, the delicious mangoes, the spectacular sunsets and the sudden twilights that deepened rapidly into purple darkness... Too, the warmth of the Caribbean seemed to represent life, bustle, excitement, anticipation-while New England, in her mind, was associated with death and loneliness. She had lost her parents in Maine, thirteen years ago, when their car overturned on a stretch of icy highway. And this past winter, her grandmother, who had raised her ever since she was orphaned at the age of ten, had at last succumbed to the deep and awful coughing that had plagued her for years, the taint of the lungs that had long been her burden. In the last weeks of her life, lying in the crisp white sheets of the hospital bed, she had been thin and dark, her face drawn, too weak even to smile. Certainly, people died all the time in the Caribbean, just as they did in the rest of the world; this was no place of respite from tragedy, no sacred shelter from the ravages of time. But here, at least, Sonya had never lost anyone whom she desperately loved. This newness, this freshness of the place and its lack of associations, was what made it special, an unsullied haven where she could more easily be happy.
Lynda Spaulding, a girl with whom Sonya had roomed during her senior year at the university, thought this journey was a distinctly bad idea, and she went to great lengths to persuade Sonya to call it off. "Going way down there, among strange people, to work for someone you've never met face-to-face? That's going to be trouble, right from the start, you mark my words."
Sonya had known that Lynda was more jealous of her success in securing such a position than she was concerned about Sonya's well-being. "I think it'll be just fine," Sonya had said, repeatedly, refusing to be disillusioned. "Lots of sun, the ocean-"
"Hurricanes," her roommate said, determined to throw clouds over the situation.
"Only for part of the year, and then only rarely."
"I understand the sea can sweep right over one of those small islands when a real bad wind comes up, during a storm-"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Lynda!" Sonya snapped, "I'm in more danger on the freeways than I am in the middle of a hurricane!"
Later, Lynda had said, "They practice voodoo down there."
"In Haiti."
"That's the center of it, yes. But they practice it all over those islands."
Sonya had now been in the islands three days and had yet to see any sign of dark religious rites. She was glad that she had come, and she was looking forward to the job.
She had flown from Boston to Miami on a 747 Jumbo Jet, uncomfortable in such an enormous craft, certain that it could not be expected to keep its hundreds of tons aloft for very long, surely not long enough to cover the length of the East Coast. In Miami, she boarded a cruise ship of the French Line for her first sea journey and, less frightened of drowning than of falling twenty thousand feet in a steel aircraft, she immensely enjoyed the trip. The boat stopped at San Juan, Puerto Rico, then leisurely wended its way southward until it stopped at the exquisitely beautiful island of St. Thomas where the beaches were both white and black, the sand hot and the orchids wild. The next stop was St. John's port, then on to the French-owned island of Guadeloupe where they docked at the city of Pointe-a-Pitre late in the afternoon of a brilliantly clear first Tuesday in September. The ship would sail on to Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, Curacao and then, eventually, back to France. Sonya disembarked at Guadeloupe, missing those other exotic ports, but not particularly upset by this. She was eager to begin her new job, her new life, to form new hopes and dreams and set about making them reality.
Her four large suitcases and one metal-bound steamer trunk were unloaded onto the dock at Pointe-a-Pitre, where a fiercely dark terminal worker put them onto a four-wheeled cart and led her into the air conditioned passenger's lounge.
"It be an outrageous wahm day," he said, smiling with many bright teeth, his voice syrupy and yet a musical delight that she thought she would never tire of no matter how long her job kept her in these climes. When she tipped him, he said, "De lady be outrageous kind," half-bowed and walked away.
The lounge was busy-though most of the hustling and bustling was done by the tourists, chiefly Americans who appeared unable to adjust to the lazy ambience of this new land. The dark-skinned workers all seemed loose-jointed and half-dreaming, their pace adjusted to what the tropics required of a man if he were to live his allotted span and remain healthy.
"Miss Carter?" Someone said from behind her.
Startled, she turned, her heart thumping, and looked into the eyes of an extremely handsome man perhaps four years her senior.
He said, "My name's Bill Peterson. I'm the Dougherty's chauffeur, messenger and boat captain all rolled into one." He was tanned so deeply that he could have passed for a native at a quick glance, teeth white against his brown skin, only his blue eyes stood out startlingly from his dusky countenance. He made Sonya feel out of place, a foreigner with her pale skin and bright yellow hair. At least, they had the blue eyes in common.
"I'm glad to meet you," she said. "Can I call you Bill?"
He smiled. He had a very winning smile, almost boyish. He said, "You'd better."
"Sonya, then, for me." She had to look up in order to speak to him, for he towered over her five-feet, four-inches.
"Good!" he said, clearly pleased with her. "I can see that you're going to get along well with everyone. I was afraid you might be hard to get to know, a snob or a complainer-or something worse. On an island as small as Mr. Dougherty's Distingue, it would be intolerable to have a staff member who was anything less than fully amicable."
"How small an island is it?" she asked.
She was remembering Lynda Spaulding's warnings about high water and hurricanes.
"One and a half miles long, slightly less than three-quarters of a mile wide."
"That doesn't sound so tiny," she said.
"In a vast ocean, it is infinitesimal."
"I suppose."
He seemed to sense the source of her uneasiness, for he said, "I wouldn't worry about it sinking out of sight. Its been there for thousands of years and looks to last even longer."
She let the musical name roll around on her tongue for the thousandth time since she had first heard the word a month ago, found it as pleasant as she always had before. "Distingue," she said dreamily. "It almost sounds like paradise."
"The name is French," Bill Peterson said. "It means 'elegant of appearance', and the island is just what the name implies-palms, orchids, bougainvillea and white-white sand."
She smiled at him, at his obviou
s enthusiasm for the island. He was a big man, a couple of inches past six feet, slim and well-muscled. He was wearing white jeans and a maroon, short-sleeved, knitted shirt; his arms were brown as nuts and knotted with muscle, his hands broad and strong. Yet, talking about the island, he sounded like a child, a little boy who was breathlessly anxious for her to share his enthusiasm, his sense of wonder.
"I can't wait to see it," she said.
"Well," he said, looking at her luggage, "we'd best get your things along to the private docks where I have the Lady Jane tied up."
"That's Mr. Dougherty's boat?" Sonya asked.
She could still not get accustomed to the idea that she was working for a bona fide millionaire, someone who could own an island and the boat to get to and from it. It was all like a scene from some fairy tale, a dream from which she would wake sooner or later-or, if her old college roomie were to be believed, it was not a dream but a nightmare. In any case, it did not seem real.
"Yes," Bill Peterson said, "but it's not the most interesting of boats. I'm an experienced trimaran captain, and I always prefer sailing to the use of engines. For one thing, its ecologically more sound a method. But more important than that, sails give a man a sense of accomplishment, a real communion with the sea that the use of engines inhibits. But Mr. Dougherty is not really much of a sea lover. He believes that gasoline is far more reliable than the wind-though I've seen more small boats with engine trouble than those caught unexpectedly in the eye of a calm. The Lady Jane's not really a bad little cabin cruiser, though. You'll probably like her."
He whistled for and located another porter, supervised the loading of Sonya's baggage onto another wheeled cart and then led the way out of the chrome and glass structure into the suddenly oppressive-by comparison-heat of the late afternoon sun.
The tourists out on the promenade easily outnumbered the locals, dressed in the most awful bermudas and loud shirts, the women in slacks too tight for them, many almost comical in their floppy straw hats and exaggerated sunglasses. But Sonya had had enough of colorful costumes, native accents and mannerisms; now, all that she wanted was to settle down on Distingue as a governess for Mr. and Mrs. Dougherty's two small children, and begin a career that would make use of her education and training.
The private docks at the bay port of Pointe-a-Pitre were not shabby, by any means, more well-appointed than the public landing decks. They seemed newly built of sea-bleached stone, concrete and tightly-fitted, well-oiled dark wooden planks. The Lady Jane nestled in a berth barely large enough to accommodate her, floated lazily on the swell, beyond a sign that read: PRIVATE. JOSEPH L. DOUGHERTY. LADY JANE. She was perhaps twenty-five feet long, slim and dazzlingly white, trimmed quite subtly in a dark blue and contrasting gold stripe, spotlessly clean and with an air of welcome about her.
"How lovely!" Sonya said, meaning it.
"You've been on a boat before?" Bill asked.
"Never, except for the ship coming down, of course. But that was so terribly huge that I didn't feel as if I was on a boat at all."
"I know what you mean."
"It was more like a floating town."
"You'll know you're on a boat when you're on the Lady Jane!" he said. "The sea bounces her a bit, unless we put her up toward top speed-and then she bounces the sea"
The porter put the bags on the main deck, near the pilot's cabin, accepted a tip from Peterson, doffed a tiny porter's hat as he smiled, and wheeled away the luggage cart.
With a gentleness she would not have thought Peterson capable of-since he was such a big man -he took her arm and helped her down the steps and onto the deck. He escorted her on a complete tour of the pilot's cabin, the galley and the two staterooms below deck.
"It's utterly gorgeous," Sonya said, enchanted by the sparkling little machine.
"You'll have plenty of opportunity to go out in her," Peterson said. "The kids both like to be taken on trips into the smaller islands, the cays and the backwater places. And on your off time, you might want me to take you out as well."
"You mean I can use the boat for my own enjoyment," she asked.
"Of course! The Doughertys love the beach and shore fishing. But as I said, neither of them is really a sea lover, except at a proper distance. If you don't make use of the Lady Jane, she'll just sit there at the dock, rusting."
"I wouldn't let her rust!"
He laughed. "Spoken like a real sailor."
She stood in the pilot's cabin with him while he maneuvered the small craft out of its slot along the wharf, amazed that he did not slam it rudely against the sleek hulls of its neighbor ships and that when he had taken it into the harbor, he was able to guide it around the plentitude of other boats-perhaps a hundred of them-that bobbled on the bright water. He seemed to have been born on a ship, raised with his hands around a wheel and his eyes trained to nautical instruments.
She asked no questions, and he started no conversations until they were out of the busiest sea lanes and in the open water, the heavy ocean swell rolling rhythmically toward, under and beyond them. "How far to Distingue?
"Twenty-five minutes, half an hour," he said. "It's not actually very far from civilization, but the illusion of isolation is pretty good." He handled the wheel nonchalantly, setting course by some method which she could not divine.
"I'm sure the children like living in a place where there's no one to compel them to go to school," she said, holding fast to a chrome hand railing as the boat slapped through the crests of the foam-tipped waves.
"They've been pretty rambunctious since the family came down here from New Jersey," Peterson agreed. "But you're a school teacher as well as a nurse, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"So their days of freedom are limited." He grinned, very warmly, very reassuringly, a man almost any young woman would be attracted to.
"I hope they don't see me as an old dragon," Sonya said. "I don't intend to make their studies burdensome, if I can help it."
"No one could see you as an old dragon," he said. "Absolutely no one at all."
She was not accustomed to flattery, and she was unable to respond with more than a blush.
He said, "You seem to have picked up quite a bit of education for a girl so young." He looked sideways at her, then back at the sun-dappled sea.
She said, "One of the few things that bills and taxes couldn't touch in my father's small estate was a trust fund he had established for my education. It couldn't be used for anything else; and I took full advantage of it. After nurse's school, I wasn't really certain that I wanted to spend my life in hospitals watching people die little-by-little. So I enrolled in the elementary education curriculum at a small college near my grandmother's place. I don't know whether I would ever have enjoyed teaching in a normal grade school atmosphere. This job-governness and tutor, is just about perfect, though."
"The kids are bound to like you," he said, smiling at her.
"I hope so. I also hope I can teach them well enough to keep up with the island government's requirements."
"Whatever you teach them," he said, the tone of his voice having suddenly hardened a bit, "they'll be safer on Distingue than in a town somewhere, in any regular school. Safer than they'd be in private schools, too, for that matter."
Lady Jane rose, fell, groaned as the water slapped her hull, whined on through the choppy seas.
Sonya felt a shiver course the length of her spine, though she was not sure of the cause. The day was not chilly, nor the company-thus far- full of gloom. Yet there was something behind what Peterson had just said, something in the way he had said it that was distinctly unsettling...
She said, "Safe?"
"Yes. The island puts them out of the reach of anyone who might take it in mind to hurt them."
He was completely serious now, with no more white-toothed, bright-eyed smiles for her, his big hands gripped hard about the wheel as if he were taking his anger out on that hard, plastic circle.
"Why should anyone want to hurt
them?" she asked, genuinely perplexed but uncomfortably certain that he had an answer. Bill Peterson seemed a level-headed man, not the sort to generate wild stories or unbased fears.
"You don't know about what's happened?" he asked.
"No."
He turned away from the water and looked at her, obviously concerned. He said, "Nothing about the threats?"
"Threats?" she asked.
The chill along her spine had grown worse. Though she had by now gotten accustomed to the rollicking progress of the speeding craft, she still held tightly to the shining hand railing, her knuckles white.
"Back in New Jersey, someone threatened to kill both of the kids-Alex and Tina."
The Lady Jane rose.
The Lady Jane fell.
But the ship and the sea both seemed to have receded now as the thing that Bill Peterson was telling her swelled in importance until it filled her mind.
She said, "I suppose wealthy people are often the targets of cranks who-"
"This was no crank," he said. There was no doubt in his voice, not a shred of it.
"Oh?"
"I wasn't up in New Jersey with them, of course. This house on Distingue is their winter home for four months of the year, and I'm here the year-around, keeping it up. Mr. Dougherty, Joe, told me what happened up there, though. It scared him enough to finally move his family and servants down here ahead of schedule. What he told me happened up there would have frightened me too, no question."
She waited, knowing that he would tell her about it and angry with him for having brought it up. Yet, at the same time, she wanted to know, had to know, all about it. She remembered her roomie's warnings about coming to an unknown place, to work for unknown people...
"It was telephone calls at first. Mrs. Dougherty took the first one. Some man, obviously trying to disguise his voice, told her what he would do to both the children when he found an opportunity to corner one or both of them when they were alone."