Children of the Storm

Dougherty said, affectionately.
        Sonya looked up at Saine again, found that he was still scrutinizing her, watching her reactions to everything that went on at the dinner table, and, in some mysterious way, forming an opinion of her, making judgments, deciding just how far she could be trusted.
        She felt as if she were on trial, and she realized that, in Saine's mind, she was. She remembered what he'd said about not trusting anyone at all, and she returned his stare this time, evaluating him in the same way that he was summing her up. In a moment, he realized that the tables had turned and that she was judging him. He smiled at her and returned to his excellent food.

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    FOUR
        
        After supper, Alex and Tina, at their father's suggestion, took Sonya on a tour of Seawatch, beginning with the rest of the ground floor. She learned that, because the sea lay so near beneath the surface of the island, the house had no basement; such a subterranean chamber would have always been filled with brackish salt water. Unwillingly, Sonya thought of Lynda Spaulding's many warnings about the power of the sea during a hurricane…
        She had already seen the front dining room where they had just eaten, and the ultra-modern kitchen where, earlier, Helga had been so determinedly grating that block of cheese. But there was more, much more, still to see.
        Across from the front dining room was a combination lounge and drawing room, with heavy oak furniture in a Spanish motif, the ubiquitous red carpet, black velvet drapes, a cool and calming gloom that warm, indirect lighting only partially dispelled.
        “When we have guests,” Alex said, taking his role as guide quite seriously, “they usually come in here.”
        Tina, his sister, who was on the far side of Alex, peered around him and looked shyly at Sonya. “You're not just a guest, are you?”
        “No,” Sonya said.
        “She's our new teacher,” Alex explained, patiently.
        “Good,” Tina said. She shook her head positively, her dark hair bouncing. “I think I'll like you.”
        Sonya chuckled. “Well, Tina, I'll do my best to make you absolutely sure of that.”
        They went from the drawing room into the hobby room, where there were workbenches littered with all manner of cameras, camera parts, projectors, tools, scraps of film and of white leader tape, editing equipment and stacks of film cans.
        “Dad's hobby is movies,” Alex explained.
        Tina giggled. “He makes some funny ones.”
        “And mom's a-still-photographer,” he said, pronouncing each syllable of the last word with the utmost care, as if he were reading it from a prepared index card. He pointed to a door at the far end of the room and said, “That's the darkroom, where they develop the film. It really is awful dark-except for these purple lights they have.”
        “We're not allowed in there,” Tina said, solemnly.
        “You should know,” her brother said.
        She sighed. To Sonya, she said, “I went in once. I got spanked.”
        “Dad had a reel of film on the drying racks. It was spoiled,” the boy explained. “That's the first and last spanking we ever got.”
        “But we're allowed out here,” Tina said, pointing to a table flanked by two high stools. “Alex makes his airplane models there, and I put my puzzles together.”
        Next, they came into a small dining room, less than half the size of the one in which they had earlier taken their supper; here four or five people could dine comfortably, a very cozy nook not meant to hold large dinner parties. Most likely, this was the breakfast and lunch room, for meals that might be eaten by two or three members of the household, at all different hours.
        The ground floor also contained a game room, with a regulation size pool table, a ping pong table, color television set, shelves of games and a lot of comfortable, beaten up old black vinyl arm chairs. Connecting with the game room was a library fully as large as the drawing room or the front dining room, all four walls built up with shelves from floor to ceiling and at least ten or fifteen thousand volumes shelved neatly around scattered pieces of sculpture. The room also contained a large, dark pine desk and a matching captain's chair, several heavily-padded easy chairs arranged beside tall, heavy-looking ultra-modern steel floor lamps.
        On the second floor, the stairwell