Children of the Storm

sinking and rising, bobbing at the dictates of the gentle sea. Bill floated beside her, bronze already but growing even more tan, an extremely handsome man, very gay and very vital, the perfect sort of man to be with on a day like this in a place such as this.
        Then came the fear.
        Something brushed Sonya's feet, startling her into a sudden, loud yelp, so that she sank, thrashed, gained the surface again.
        “What's the matter?” Peterson asked.
        “A fish, I guess,” she said. “It touched me, and I wasn't expecting anything like that.” She laughed, but stopped laughing when she saw that the incident did not amuse him at all.
        He was staring intently at the water around them, as if he could see down through the glaring surface.
        “Sharks!” he snapped.
        “What?”
        But she had heard.
        She had heard too clearly.
        “Swim for the boat,” he advised. “Make as much noise as you can. Forget about being a good swimmer; just thrash the water to a boil. Noise scares them off.”
        In a minute or so, they were both standing on the deck of the Lady Jane, dripping saltwater on the polished boards, safe.
        “I always thought the reef formed a barrier against them,” Peterson said; wiping his face with a towel. “But they must have come in from the landward side, through the open end.”
        Sonya was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered together like clamshells. “Would they have hurt us?”
        “They might have.”
        “Are they still there?”
        He pointed.
        “I don't see-”
        And then she did see: the hard, black fin, thrusting out of the water like a knife, circling, moving rapidly, now lost in the glare, now visible again.
        “How many?” she asked.
        “I saw two,” he said.
        As she watched the shark circle and circle, as if waiting for them to come back into the water, her joy evaporated altogether. It seemed, to her, that the shark was a portent of things to come, a sign to beware-to be cautious.
        The sea no longer appeared to be as beautiful as it was only minutes ago…
        The sky was far too bright.
        The sun, instead of warming and tanning her, seemed fiercely, unmercifully hot and she realized, belatedly, that she might as easily burn as tan.
        “Let's go in,” she said.
        He started the engines.
        Dinner was even better Wednesday evening than it had been the evening before: lobster tails with sweet butter, scalloped potatoes, pepper slaw, several vegetables, fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. Conversation at the table remained lively-actually, now that everyone had grown accustomed to the new addition to the table, it was livelier than it had been the night before. Unfortunately none of it could erase Sonya's feeling of impending disaster.
        She retired to her room at nine-thirty, closed and locked her door, and made ready for bed. It was too early for sleep, and her nerves were too much on edge to permit her to turn out the lights just yet. She had brought several paperback novels with her, and she propped herself up on pillows, in the center of the Polynesian bed, and she began the best of the lot, trying to get caught up in the story.
        Two hours later, when she had read slightly more than half of the book, she felt sleep steal in behind her eyes and begin to tug insistently at her heavy lids much like a child might tug at his mother's skirts.
        She got out of bed and turned off the lights, stood for a moment in the cool darkness, listening for something but not knowing what.
        Before getting under the covers, she went to the window and looked out at the night sea and the swaying palms… As before, she was taken by the beauty of the scene, and she might have stood there admiring it for a long while, might have seen nothing at all out of the ordinary if the man standing beneath the palms, some distance from the house, had not chosen that moment to stretch his legs. He leaned away from the bole of one of the largest palms and stepped back and forth a few times, on a short path, before taking up his vigil again.
        Rudolph Saine?
        He did not seem big enough to be the bodyguard, though he was not a small man. Or she didn't think he was. In the deeps of the shadows, however, little about him was recognizable.
        She stood there, for long minutes, waiting for him to