Children of the Storm

Peterson agreed. “But you're a school teacher as well as a nurse, aren't you?”
        “Yes.”
        “So their days of freedom are limited.” He grinned, very warmly, very reassuringly, a man almost any young woman would be attracted to.
        “I hope they don't see me as an old dragon,” Sonya said. “I don't intend to make their studies burdensome, if I can help it.”
        “No one could see you as an old dragon,” he said. “Absolutely no one at all.”
        She was not accustomed to flattery, and she was unable to respond with more than a blush.
        He said, “You seem to have picked up quite a bit of education for a girl so young.” He looked sideways at her, then back at the sun-dappled sea.
        She said, “One of the few things that bills and taxes couldn't touch in my father's small estate was a trust fund he had established for my education. It couldn't be used for anything else; and I took full advantage of it. After nurse's school, I wasn't really certain that I wanted to spend my life in hospitals watching people die little-by-little. So I enrolled in the elementary education curriculum at a small college near my grandmother's place. I don't know whether I would ever have enjoyed teaching in a normal grade school atmosphere. This job-governness and tutor, is just about perfect, though.”
        “The kids are bound to like you,” he said, smiling at her.
        “I hope so. I also hope I can teach them well enough to keep up with the island government's requirements.”
        “Whatever you teach them,” he said, the tone of his voice having suddenly hardened a bit, “they'll be safer on Distingue than in a town somewhere, in any regular school. Safer than they'd be in private schools, too, for that matter.”
         Lady Jane rose, fell, groaned as the water slapped her hull, whined on through the choppy seas.
        Sonya felt a shiver course the length of her spine, though she was not sure of the cause. The day was not chilly, nor the company-thus far- full of gloom. Yet there was something behind what Peterson had just said, something in the way he had said it that was distinctly unsettling…
        She said, “Safe?”
        “Yes. The island puts them out of the reach of anyone who might take it in mind to hurt them.”
        He was completely serious now, with no more white-toothed, bright-eyed smiles for her, his big hands gripped hard about the wheel as if he were taking his anger out on that hard, plastic circle.
        “Why should anyone want to hurt them?” she asked, genuinely perplexed but uncomfortably certain that he had an answer. Bill Peterson seemed a level-headed man, not the sort to generate wild stories or unbased fears.
        “You don't know about what's happened?” he asked.
        “No.”
        He turned away from the water and looked at her, obviously concerned. He said, “Nothing about the threats?”
        “Threats?” she asked.
        The chill along her spine had grown worse. Though she had by now gotten accustomed to the rollicking progress of the speeding craft, she still held tightly to the shining hand railing, her knuckles white.
        “Back in New Jersey, someone threatened to kill both of the kids-Alex and Tina.”
        The Lady Jane rose.
        The Lady Jane fell.
        But the ship and the sea both seemed to have receded now as the thing that Bill Peterson was telling her swelled in importance until it filled her mind.
        She said, “I suppose wealthy people are often the targets of cranks who-”
        “This was no crank,” he said. There was no doubt in his voice, not a shred of it.
        “Oh?”
        “I wasn't up in New Jersey with them, of course. This house on Distingue is their winter home for four months of the year, and I'm here the year-around, keeping it up. Mr. Dougherty, Joe, told me what happened up there, though. It scared him enough to finally move his family and servants down here ahead of schedule. What he told me happened up there would have frightened me too, no question.”
        She waited, knowing that he would tell her about it and angry with him for having brought it up. Yet, at the same time, she wanted to know, had to know, all about it. She remembered her roomie's warnings about coming to an unknown place, to work for unknown people…
        “It was telephone calls at first. Mrs. Dougherty took the first one. Some man, obviously trying to