Children of the Storm

it doesn't work.” She turned to Sonya. “It'll take about an hour or so.”
        “Really-” Sonya said.
        Bess touched her shoulder to stop her. “You'll thank me afterwards,” she said. Then she returned to the kitchen.
        “Some woman,” Rudolph said.
        Alex said, “She used onion salve on Tina once.”
        “I smelled bad,” Tina said.
        “For days,” Alex said.
        “Like a liver dinner,” Tina said.
        Sonya laughed out loud, as delighted by the children's good spirits in the face of their predicament as she was by the little girl's sense of humor.
        The children returned to their pancakes.
        To Saine, Sonya said, “What's this about the Blenwells' boats?”
        “Both scuttled,” Saine said. “Their cabin cruiser was hit the same way as Lady Jane. And Ken's catamaran had a hole chopped in the bottom. Three holes, in fact. Bill went down to borrow one of their boats last night, and that's when the damage was found.”
        He had stopped eating, even though he had more than half his breakfast on his plate.
        Sonya wished she could look away from him and talk only with the kids, for they were, in their innocence, still fun to be with. Saine, on the other hand, was going to depress her even further.
        “So how did you get word to Joe and Helen about what's going on here?” she asked.
        She had not touched her food yet, and now she realized that she hadn't really wanted it.
        “We were going to use the Blenwells' radiotelephone,” Saine said. “But it was damaged, just like ours.”
        Sonya felt dizzy.
        Saine said, “They keep it on the ground floor, in the back of the house, in a rather isolated room. It was easy enough for someone to pry open a window, slip in and do the job.”
        “That wouldn't be necessary if the man who did the job already lived in Hawk House,” Sonya observed.
        “You believe Ken Blenwell would isolate himself along with us, chop up his own boat, scuttle the other?”
        “I forgot,” she said. “You and Ken are good friends, aren't you? And you're reluctant to finger a good friend.”
        Saine colored. “I wouldn't say we're good friends.”
        “Kenneth Blenwell said it.”
        “Oh?”
        “He respects you quite a bit. I don't remember his exact words, but he implied that he liked you, and that the feeling is mutual.”
        “It is,” Saine admitted. “He's a very levelheaded man, a good man.”
        “Who wants to kill the parrots.”
        Saine looked perplexed. He said, “What's that supposed to mean?”
        “Exactly what it says.”
        “Kill the parrots?” He frowned.
        She said, “And maybe kill the ch-kill something else, too.”
        “Us, huh?” Alex asked.
        “Not you,” Sonya said.
        She didn't want to frighten them. The longer they could face the situation as if it were one big game, the better. She knew what it was like to be young and helpless and terrified of death, and she didn't want them to experience the nightmares that she had known as a child.
        “Sure, us,” Alex said. “Who else?”
        “Eat your pancakes,” Saine said.
        “I'm almost done.”
        “Almost isn't good enough.”
        “Eat your pancakes, dummy,” Tina told her brother. “They're good for you.”
        “So we're isolated,” she said to the bodyguard.
        “Quite effectively.”
        She tried not to let a tremor show in her voice, but it was there anyway. “Joe will probably call, sooner or later, to see if everything's all right here.
        When he can't get through to us, he'll know something's happened. He'll call Guadeloupe-”
        “He'll think it's the storm,” Saine interrupted.
        “Storm?”
        He looked surprised. “You didn't see the sky?”
        “I didn't open my drapes this morning.”
        “Come here,” he said.
        He rose and went to the window, pulled aside the drapes and showed her the muddied sky. Brown-purple clouds, ugly and massive, so low they seemed within her grasp, scudded quickly northwestward, thick and heavy with water. The sea, in the glimpse she had of it far down the beach, looked high and angry, with a great deal of froth.
        “There's a hurricane moving this way, a center that formed up two days ago but only reached hurricane proportions last night. It's the seventh of the season-they're calling it Greta-but