Children of the Storm

this instant. Do you understand me?” She had never taken that tone with them before, had never needed to, and she saw that now they were cowed by it.
        They walked back, not sure why she had yelled.
        “What'd we do?” Tina asked, slightly frightened.
        “Nothing, angel,” Sonya said. “Just start back for the house. Walk slowly. I'll catch up in a minute.”
        They did exactly as they were told, holding hands again, not looking back, as if they now understood, however vaguely, that they had almost seen something they were never meant to see.
        Sonya and Rudolph, standing close together, as if sheltering each other from the wind-or from something more terrible than wind-looked at the crab-covered lump.
        “You saw it?” she asked.
        “Yes.”
        “I'm afraid,” she said.
        “It can't hurt you.”
        “It was a man,” she said.
        “A corpse.”
        “Same thing.”
        “No. He can't feel what the crabs are doing to him. He's playing a part in that ecological cycle, just as a dead shark would.”
        She nodded. “We better go see who-who he is.”
        “Probably a sailor who went overboard.”
        She nodded.
        Saine said, “You catch up with the kids, stop them and wait for me. You don't have to see this.” Before she could object, he walked briskly off toward the corpse, scattering the crabs before him.
        Sonya turned and, shaking uncontrollably, ran to catch the kids, stopped them, and kept their attention away from Rudolph and his grisly investigation.
        “Are you mad at us?” Tina asked.
        “No.”
        “We thought you were,” Alex said.
        She knelt in the wet sand and drew them both against her, hugged them tightly, felt how slight and defenseless they were. She almost started to cry-for them, for herself-but knew that tears would help nothing, and she fought back the urge to let go.
        An eternity later, Saine returned from his exploration, clearing his throat and spitting in the sand -as if he could expel the after-image of what he had seen in the same fashion that he might clear his mouth of a bad taste…

----

    SIXTEEN
        
        In the kitchen, at Seawatch, Bess entertained Alex and Tina with a game of Old Maid, at a small card table which she had opened beside one of the big, multiple-paned windows. In the middle of the room, sitting side-by-side on stools at the built-in work table, Sonya and the bodyguard spoke in soft voices, trying to grow accustomed to their morbid discovery.
        “What could you tell about him?” she asked.
        “Not a lot. The crabs had done their work.”
        She shuddered.
        “It was a man,” he said. “Late twenties or early thirties, white, relatively well-dressed.”
        “Drowned?”
        “No.”
        She looked at him oddly.
        He said, “I think he was killed.”
        She picked up her coffee, took a long swallow.
        She said, “How?”
        “The crabs hadn't gotten to all of him, yet. His one arm was relatively untouched. I saw what I'm sure were knife wounds.”
        “If he was washed ashore, he might have been cut by coral.”
        “He wasn't washed ashore.”
        “What?”
        The children squealed with harsh laughter at one of Bess Dalton's bad jokes.
        Saine said, “He was lying in a depression in the sand.”
        “So.”
        He took a swallow of coffee.
        “So,” he said, “it looked disturbingly like a grave, an oblong hole a couple of feet deep… The sea had begun to smooth its edges and to fill it in around the body, but the lines were still noticeable.”
        “Someone buried him there? Why in such an unsafe spot?”
        “Perhaps the burial was a hasty affair. And, anyway, the tides are usually not fierce enough to reach that far up the beach and wash out the loose sand over the grave. The killer simply had a bit of nasty luck, what with the arrival of a storm in the area.”
        “Still,” she said, “if the waves hadn't washed him into sight, we'd have smelled him-when we walked by.”
        “The crabs would have tunneled to him and picked him clean,” Saine pointed out.
        “Even buried like that?”
        “Yes.”
        “I win, I win!” Tina shouted.
        An unserious argument began to take shape over at the Old Maid table, probably fomented by Bess to tease the kids.
        “But who could