Children of the Storm

divided the living space into two distinct clusters of rooms, in two long hallways. The family's bedrooms were to the left, the staff's to the right (except for Saine's bedroom, which was in the family section).
        They went up to the third floor, which was only half-sized, directly above the family's portion of the second level.
        “This is father's study,” Alex said.
        “We can come up here,” Tina explained. “But only when it's absolutely necessary.” As Alex had stumbled over the word “photographer,” the little girl spoke her piece as if quoting her father.
        Joe Dougherty's study was certainly an impressive room: as large as the drawing room downstairs, airy and yet homey, well-furnished, containing yet another two thousand books of all types, with a beamed ceiling and two long windows toward the front of the house, which looked out on palm trees, white beach, and the sea that curled toward the land with countless, white-edged tongues of water. One had the feeling that great decisions had been made within the walls of this room, that enormous financial issues were considered and carefully dealt with. At the gadget-studded desk, Dougherty had added and subtracted figures that Sonya knew she would find meaningless because of their enormity. At these windows, perhaps, he had stared at Mother Ocean, gaining serenity and perspective with which to overcome his knottier problems.
        And now as she and the children stood by those same windows, watching the sea which glittered madly with reflected moonlight, Sonya felt more at peace than she had for quite a long time. Her parents had been dead for many years. And, already, it seemed that her grandmother had been dead for as long, for years instead of months. And what Bill Peterson and Rudolph Saine had told her about the madman who'd threatened the Dougherty children-all of that was like something she had once read in a story, not like something she had experienced, something that could be real. The solidity of Seawatch made her feel as if she were in a fortress, sealed away from harm, in a great bubble of safety passing through the riotous flow of time without suffering any damage.
        Alex destroyed that mood in a moment.
        “Are you worried?” he asked.
        Sonya did not look away from the sea.
        She said, “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 of the desk lamp that was clear across the room.
        She said, “Who won't?”
        He scuffed his small feet on the carpet, and he looked away from her as if he were embarrassed. He looked back at the rolling sea, and he said, “The man.”
        “Man?”
        “Yes.”
        “What man?”
        Tina said, “You know. The man he says is going to kill us, me and Alex.”
        “Who says that?”
        Tina said, “The man. He says it himself.”
        “No one is going to kill you,” Sonya said, firmly, softly. But she didn't really know how she could be so sure of that.
        The peacefulness of the night, the sea and the palms had swiftly disappeared, to be replaced by a brooding malevolence, like a large jungle cat waiting to spring on its prey.
        “He promised that he would,” Alex said.
        “Well-”
        “He promised, several times, that he'd get the both of us, me and Tina.” Curiously enough, the boy did not sound frightened so much as intrigued by the possibility of death. She knew that young children were not as frightened by such things as adults, and that they even enjoyed vicarious violence in a way adults had lost the taste for (witness their love of gory fairy tales, of Edgar Allan Poe and similar macabre literature). But this seemed cooly sinister, this casual acceptance of their own mortality.
        “Who told you about this?” Sonya asked. She had imagined that the worst of the situation had, very properly, been hidden from the children.
        “No one particular,” Alex said.
        “We just listened around,” Tina piped up.
        “We heard things,” Alex said.
        “When no one knew we were listening,” Tina added. She sounded quite pleased with their stealth,
        “You should both be private detectives-or spies,” Sonya told them, trying to lighten the mood again.
        “Anyway,” Alex said, “don't worry about him. He's not interested in you, just