Children of the Storm

said, “Sonya and I are going to the library to look for a couple of books to pass the time.”
        Bess said, “That's the feeblest story of its type that I think I've ever heard.”
        Sonya blushed, but could not protest.
        Bill said, “You're a gossip, Bess Dalton, unprincipled, a common scold like they used to put in the stocks.”
        “But I tell the truth,” she said.
        “I'm afraid you don't,” he said. “We really are going to find some books, because we've been enormously depressed by the company we've been forced to keep, and-”
        Bess smiled wearily. “Oh, go away, go away. Everyone knows it's you two who've brought this air of defeat in the first place.”
        No one paid them much attention when they left the kitchen.
        No one except Rudolph Saine.
        In the library, Bill closed the heavy teak door and leaned against it for a moment, a finger raised to his lips, listening intently, as if he thought they might have been followed.
        In a moment, satisfied, he stepped away from the door and led Sonya to two facing, black leather reading chairs, put her into one and sat down across from her.
        He said, “How can we convince Saine that, all this time, he's been looking in all the wrong places for his man?” He spoke in a low, calm but demanding tone of voice. His face was creased with lines of worry, his thin lips tight and in harmony with his squinted, concerned eyes.
        “Has he been?”
        “You know he has.”
        She fidgeted.
        She said, “I'm not sure what I know.”
        “You know who's the likeliest suspect.”
        “I do.”
        “Sonya, please.”
        She said nothing.
        “Once, just Sunday night, you didn't hesitate to say who you most suspected. You were very adamant about your conclusions, then.”
        “I guess I was.”
        “You haven't changed your mind, have you?”
        She thought a moment. “No.”
        “Good. Because if you have changed your mind, I think I can argue you back to your original suppositions.”
        She leaned away from her chair. “You know something?”
        “I've had a couple of-unsettling experiences,” he admitted, gripping the arms of his chair so hard his knuckles whitened.
        “When is this?”
        “Last night, Sunday night.”
        “And these unsettling experiences of yours-” she said, afraid of what he would answer “-they had something to do with-”
        “Kenneth Blenwell.”
        She got up and began to pace.
        He remained seated.
        “Rudolph swears it can't be Blenwell.”
        “I've heard,” he said, bitterly.
        “Why do you think he's wrong?”
        As if he had been afraid she would not ask that question, the one question he had been waiting for, and pleased that she had, he suddenly relaxed and let it all pour out, almost as if he had let it run through his mind a few hundred times, practicing the story until he had it to its most effective version.
        He said, “Last night, when I found the Lady Jane scuttled, I came and told Saine and suggested I go down to Hawk House and borrow a boat from the Blenwells. Though there's a hell of a lot of mutual animosity between the families, it seemed to me that they'd not be so stubborn, in a case like this, as to refuse us a boat. Saine told me to go ahead.”
        “I know.”
        “Yes, but you don't know what happened at Hawk House.”
        “Their boats were sunk.”
        “More than that.”
        She returned to her chair, sat down, waited.
        “Ken Blenwell answered the door when I knocked,” Peterson told her. His eyes were far away, as if he could even now see that meeting in perfect clarity, as if it were just now unrolling for the first time. “He was wearing a pair of filthy white jeans that were water-soaked almost to the knees, and a pair of white sneakers that squished with water when he walked. He looked as if he'd been doing a piece of pretty strenuous work, just before I'd arrived. He wanted to know what I was there for, and I got right to the point…”
        
        “Who the hell would want to scuttle your boat?” Blenwell asked when Bill finished his story.
        He seemed suspicious, as if he thought Peterson had some other motive for being there at that hour of the night.
        “Rudolph Saine thinks it might be the same character who made all the threats against the