Children of the Storm

Distingue months ahead of schedule-and it's keeping them here for a lot longer than they usually stay.”
        He did not seem to realize or care that his thoughtlessly antagonistic comments about the Doughertys put Sonya on the spot. She could hardly, after all, join in a conversation denouncing her employer.
        “Threatened to cut their throats, didn't he?”
        “I suppose,” Sonya said.
        “He did,” Walter said. “He threatened to cut their throats from ear to ear. But there was more than that.”
        “I'll say there was!” Lydia wheezed.
        She was leaning forward, as if the talk of blood had given her more energy than she'd known at one time in years.
        “Torture and mutilate,” Walter said, shaking his grisly old head, his white hair blued by the television. “Threatened to torture and mutilate them as well as kill them.”
        Sonya swallowed all of her brandy, trying to still her nerves, which were as jittery as a congregation of frogs.
        “What kind of a man, do you suppose, would even consider doing something as unspeakable as that?” Lydia asked Sonya. From the old woman's pursed lips and anxious expression, Sonya could only surmise that she was eager as a schoolgirl to meet this marvelously daring soul, whoever-or whatever-he was.
        “I don't know,” Sonya said. “A monster of some sort, a-madman.” She took a sip of her coffee.
        “More brandy, Sonya?” Kenneth inquired.
        “No. No, thank you.”
        “I believe the man also threatened to disembowel them,” Walter said. “Didn't he, Kenneth?” The old man held his coffee cup in both shaky hands.
        “He was not so civilized as to word it that nicely,” Kenneth said. “He promised, instead, 'to open the kids' guts,' quite a more forceful way of putting it.”
        The walls drew nearer.
        Despite the air-conditioning, Sonya was perspiring.
        She put her cup down.
        “Worse than that, though,” Walter said. “The man promised worse than that.”
        “The eyes,” Lydia added. “He promised to do something with their eyes. I don't remember just what.”
        Before any of them could tell her just what the man had threatened to do with the Dougherty children's eyes, Sonya said, “How did you learn all of this?”
        “Ken told us,” Lydia said.
        “And how did you hear all this?” Sonya asked the grandson.
        He smiled. “Rudolph told me.”
        “Mr. Saine?”
        “He's the only Rudolph I know around here.”
        Sonya was shocked, for Saine did not strike her as the sort of man who would go running to the neighbors, blabbing the latest gossip-especially to neighbors like the Blenwells, when he knew they did not like or associate with the Doughertys, his employers. And that meant that she had badly misjudged the burly bodyguard-or it meant that Kenneth Blenwell was lying, and that he knew about the nature of the threats through some other source…
        “You know Rudolph, then?” she asked.
        “We're friends.”
        “Friends?”
        “Why sound so incredulous?” Ken asked her. “Is there a law against it? I think he's a very capable, admirable man.”
        Lydia leaned far forward in her seat and said, “I know what it was now!”
        “What are you talking about?” Walter snapped.
        “What that terrible man promised to do with their children-he was going to cut out their eyes, he said. Take them right out of their heads. Wasn't that it, Kenneth?”
        “Yes, I think so,” he agreed.
        Sonya stood so abruptly that she caught the serving cart with her hip and jarred all the utensils on it, almost knocking over the cut glass brandy decanter which the youngest Blenwell barely managed to catch before it tipped to the floor.
        “I'm sorry,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. She wished that she could control the tone of her voice, for she knew that it contained a note of obvious panic. “But I really must go now. I've things to do back at Seawatch and-”
        “I'm sorry if we've frightened you,” Kenneth said.
        “No, no, you haven't-”
        She turned, aware that she was being rude, but really not caring much after having endured the past half hour with them, and she made for the open door and the hallway where there was at least a bit more light.
        When she opened the front door of Hawk House, Kenneth was right behind her.
        He said,