Children of the Storm

him.
        “To my family,” Mills explained. “I wrote to my sister, Rose, in Oregon, about her new baby. It's her first. And I wrote to my brother in New York. The third letter was to my mother. She lives with my brother, but I always like to make her letter separate, to let her know she's important to me.” He looked down at his hands again.
        “Your mother's still alive then?”
        “Yes, Mr. Saine. She's quite old, but she gets around pretty good.”
        “You're lucky to have her with you, yet,” Saine said, ignoring the two thousand miles that separated mother and son. “Most men our age are without much family, unless they've married and started one of their own. My own mother's been dead three years.”
        “I'm sorry,” Mills said, looking up. He appeared to be really hurt at Saine's loss.
        The bodyguard caught himself, shook himself from his reverie and began to pace again.
        Sonya was amazed by the little scene which had just transpired, for it revealed to her a side of Rudolph Saine's personality which she had not thought existed. He had always seemed hard, tough, brutal, formidable, reliable, capable-any of a hundred similar adjectives. But never before had he appeared to be at all emotional or sentimental, not until this brief exchange with Leroy Mills. She saw now that Saine was a man of contradictions, of many parts, with an outlook that was far larger in scope than she would have guessed.
        “No one to verify your letter-writing story, I suppose,” Saine said at last.
        “No one saw me,” Mills said.
        “Of course.”
        “But if you want, Mr. Saine, I can go upstairs and get the letters to show you.”
        Saine shook his head, wiped a hand over a face suddenly weary. “No. They prove nothing. You could have written them earlier in the day, or even yesterday.”
        “I didn't, Mr. Saine,” Mills said.
        Saine shrugged.
        He turned to Henry Dalton who stood rigid and apparently disinterested, by the kitchen door, almost as if he were a sentry. “And what about you?” Saine asked.
        “I was right here, in the kitchen, with Bess,” Henry said. If he had not been in a bad mood today, this entire affair had certainly helped to put him in one. His voice was sharp and waspish, his whole attitude indefinably antagonistic.
        “Doing what?” Saine asked.
        “Washing dishes.”
        “Isn't that part of Helga's job?”
        “Yes,” Henry said. “But she wasn't feeling so well tonight, and she went upstairs to lie down. She was probably asleep through all of this. She wasn't out in the gardens, that's for sure.” He cast a glance at Sonya that made the girl feel as if he held her responsible for the entire mess.
        “I didn't believe she was,” Saine said. “You've forgotten that, tonight at least, I'm only interested in the men here.”
        “What has that interest gotten you so far?” Henry snapped. “I see no clues.”
        “Nor do I,” Saine admitted.
        “It isn't anyone in this house,” Peterson said. “It's someone else, an outsider.”
        “How has he gotten to Distingue ?” Saine inquired.
        “The same way all of us did,” Bill said. “By boat, of course. He could have come in after dark, in any sort of sailboat, beached it in any of a hundred places along the shoreline.”
        “Perhaps,” Saine said.
        Though her throat hurt considerably whenever she spoke, and her headache flared up with each word as if words were marbles that rattled around inside her head, Sonya said, “Have you given careful consideration to the Blenwells, Rudolph?”
        Saine looked surprised. He said, “You told me this was a strong man. Both Walter and Lydia Blenwell are old-”
        “I'm referring to Kenneth Blenwell,” she said.
        Saine frowned.
        He said, “I doubt very much that he's our man.”
        “How can you be sure?” She was remembering, all too clearly, her first and thus far only encounter with that tall, dark, brooding young man. She remembered the way he smiled at her, his vehement dislike of the parrots and his threats to kill them one day-and she was also remembering how strong his hand had been on her arm when he was guiding her across the lawn and up the steps of Hawk House.
        “Why would Ken Blenwell travel all the way to New Jersey to harass Alex and Tina?” Saine asked.
        “We've already decided the man