Children of the Storm

disguise his voice, told her what he would do to both the children when he found an opportunity to corner one or both of them when they were alone.”
        “What did he threaten?”
        Peterson hesitated for a moment, then sighed wearily, as if it required too much energy to keep such awful things secret. “He was a damned ugly man. He promised to take a knife to them.”
        “Stab them?”
        “Yes.”
        She shuddered.
        He said, “And cut their throats.”
        The chill had become a positively arctic line along her slender back, had frozen her to her place by the safety railing, sent cold fingers throughout her body.
        “There was worse than that,” Peterson said. “But you wouldn't want to hear what he said he'd do, not in detail. Basically, he made it clear he wanted to mutilate them before he killed them.”
        “My God!” Sonya said, quaking openly now, queasy inside. “The man sounds mad.”
        “Very obviously, he was,” Peterson agreed.
        “Mrs. Dougherty listened to all of this, put up with the filthy things he was saying?”
        “She says she was frozen by that voice, that she couldn't have hung up even if she'd wanted to. And believe me, she wanted to!” He concentrated on the instruments for a moment, seemed to make a course adjustment with the wheel, then said, “He called twelve times in one week, always with the same kind of patter, though it got even worse, even more brutal than what I've told you.”
        “And they listened?”
        “Mr. Dougherty began taking all the calls, and he hung up. At first he did, anyway.”
        “Why'd he change his tactics?”
        “Well, they began to wonder if they had a real psychotic on their hands-instead of just a crank. They went to the police and, finally, had a tap put on their phone. The guy called six more times while the cops were trying to trace him.”
        “ Trying to trace him?”
        “Well-”
        “Good God, you'd think they'd want to find out what kind of a depraved-”
        It was Peterson's turn to interrupt. “Oh, the police wanted to find him, sure enough. But tracing a telephone call, in these days of direct dial systems, isn't all that easy. You have to keep the man on the line for four or five minutes, until they get it pinned down. And this character was getting clever. He was making his calls shorter and shorter, packing more and more violent rhetoric into them. The police wanted him, because that's part of their job, but also because the pressure was on them. I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that Joe Dougherty wields influence and can force an issue when he wants to. In this case, he wanted to. But it took them six more calls from this crackpot to locate the phone.”
        “And?”
        “It was just a payphone.”
        “Still-"Sonya said.
        “After that, he didn't call again for a while, for more than two weeks, Joe said.”
        “The police kept a tap going?”
        Peterson said, “No. After a week, they packed it up and convinced Joe that their man was only a hoaxer, perverted, to be sure, but not serious. They didn't explain how he got hold of the Doughertys' unlisted number, but they were ready to ignore that. So were the Doughertys. Things were much easier if they believed it, you see.”
        “I see,” she said.
        She wanted to sit down in one of the command chairs by the controls, but she was afraid she would lose her balance if she let go of the railing.
        “Then, after two weeks without any calls, they found a note in Tina's room, pinned to her pillow.”
        “Note?”
        “It had been written, so far as they could tell, by the same man who had made the telephone calls.”
        Sonya closed her eyes, tried to ride with the rocking vessel and with the story Peterson was telling her, but she did not think she was going to have much luck.
        “The note made the same threats as before, only elaborated on them-blood-curdling things, really obscene.” He shook his head and looked as if he would spit out the taste of the memory. If it were this unpleasant to recall, for Peterson, what must it have been like for the Doughertys, who had experienced it all first hand?
        “Wait a minute,” Sonya said, confused and not a little frightened by what he had told her. “Are you saying that they found the note in their own house-that this madman had been in the little girl's