Children of the Storm

that?”
        “They'd give you a reception about as cold and rude as you'd be able to survive. A conversation with the Blenwells always leaves me with icicles hanging from my earlobes and the end of my nose.”
        Sonya laughed.
        “Really,” he said, still somewhat serious. “The Doughertys and their people are not particularly welcome at Hawk House.”
        As they reached the entrance to the narrow cove and moved across its mouth, Sonya spotted a tall, very deeply tanned, dark-haired young man, perhaps Peterson's age, standing on a small pier at the throat of the cove, wearing white slacks and a white tee-shirt. He appeared to be there for no other purpose than to watch them as they rounded the tip of the island.
        “Who's that?” she asked.
        “Where?”
        She pointed.
        She thought Peterson stiffened when he caught sight of the dark figure who stood so motionless, but she could not be sure.
        “It's Kenneth Blenwell,” he said.
        “The grandson?”
        “Yes.”
        At that moment, almost as if he had been listening to their conversation despite the two hundred yards of open water that separated them, and despite the persistent growl of Lady Jane's engines, Kenneth Blenwell casually raised a pair of dark, heavy binoculars, to get a better look at them.
        The sun glinted off the binocular lenses.
        Sonya, embarrassed, looked swiftly away.
        “Bastard,” Peterson snapped, with feeling, as if he thought Blenwell could hear.
        “Actually,” Sonya said, “we're the ones who're snooping. I suppose he has a perfectly legal right to come out on the pier and check us out.”
        “He already knows who we are,” Peterson said.
        “He doesn't know me.”
        “Then he does now.”
        Peterson accelerated, brought the small cabin cruiser up toward its top speed, arching slightly out toward the more open water, but hemmed in by sandbars, he was unable to pull completely away as he might have liked to.
        As they reached the far arm of white-white beach that formed half the little cove, as land rose up, and palm trees, to conceal them from Blenwell, Sonya stole one quick, last look backward at their mysterious neighbor.
        He appeared, from a distance, to have the glasses trained directly on Sonya's eyes. As a result, she felt as if they were only inches apart, as if they were on the pier together. Their eyes had locked in some inexplicable, hypnotic gaze, and they could not break free of each other.
        A rising hillock, and the thickening stand of pines, cut Sonya off from Kenneth Blenwell's steady gaze, and she snapped awake like a girl coming out of a nap, startled and ill-at-ease, wondering what had come over her.
        “Wasn't it his mother,” she asked Peterson, “who was sent away to the-madhouse?”
        “Yes. And if you ask me, I think the madness was passed on from the mother to the son.”
        “Why do you say that?”
        Peterson frowned, looking at the choppy blue sea on the windward side of Distingue, but it was not the slightly angry waters which had generated the frown. He said, “It's hard to pin down. But if you ever meet him, you'll understand why I said that. He's-cold, withdrawn, very sober. He gives you the feeling-I don't know how-that he's only the form of a man, that inside he's completely hollow.”
        “I see.”
        She turned to the lovely scenery and didn't ask any more questions. She didn't want to have to listen to any more answers.
        
        Later that afternoon, when they went swimming off the point from Seawatch, several hundred yards out in the Caribbean, using the Lady Jane as their base, Sonya experienced the extremes of reaction to her new circumstance: optimistic enjoyment-and fearful anticipation of disaster.
        The joy came from the simple act of floating and frollicking on the brilliantly blue-green waters of the Caribbean, the sun beating down hot and steady, the sky high and wide and unbelievably blue, gulls circling high overhead like monitors of their pleasure. Peterson had brought the Lady Jane through the wide mouth of a submerged coral reef shaped like a semicircle with its open face towards shore. This natural crescent formed a breakwater that cut the roiling waves and left only a gentle in and out swell that Sonya gave herself over to. She lay on her back, gently moving her hands to keep herself afloat,