Children of the Storm

yes.”
        He waved the knife to indicate the kids.
        She was surprised at how calm she was. All the tension that had been building and building since that first day she had come to the island, all her nasty apprehensions and the long pressure of anticipation drained rapidly away from her, leaving her pure, unsullied, refreshed and feeling remarkably capable even in such a dangerous situation as this.
        Perhaps she was also partially buoyed by her training as a nurse, for she had been taught how to talk to mental cases, how to reason with them as much as they could be reasoned with, how to force them to do what she wanted them to do.
        Perhaps, too, her calmness was based on such an intense fear that, had she not gotten calm, she would have been utterly immobilized, terrified into a trancelike state that would not have done her or the children any good. But if that was the case, she didn't want to think about it.
        “Give me the knife,” she said, holding out her hand.
        He just stared at her.
        “You'll get hurt very badly, when they catch you, if you go through with this, Bill. Now you don't want hurt, do you?”
        “I'm not Bill.”
        “Yes, you are.”
        “My name's Jeremy.”
        She sighed. “Jeremy, then. Do you want to be hurt, badly hurt, when they catch you?”
        The sneer returned.
        He said, “They won't catch me.”
        “How can you run away?”
        “In a boat.”
        “You destroyed the boats.”
        “I've got my own.”
        “The Lady Jane ?”
        “Not the Lady Jane, another boat, my own special boat. I've got it hidden where no one will find
        it.”
        A particularly harsh gale struck Seawatch, moaned beneath the eaves like a creature out of a nightmare, throaty, seeking.
        He held the knife more tightly than ever.
        She said, “It's not really your boat, is it?”
        “Sure.”
        “It's really John Hayes' boat, isn't it?”
        He jerked as if she'd struck him.
        “Isn't it?”
        “No.”
        “That's a lie, Jeremy. It's Hayes' boat.”
        “How do you know about Hayes?”
        “You killed him, didn't you?”
        The point of the knife dropped and was correspondingly less wicked looking. She had impressed him, stunned him.
        “I killed him,” he admitted.
        “Why?”
        “He was a fool.”
        “Why was he a fool, Bill?”
        “My name is Jeremy.”
        She sighed. “Why was he a fool, Jeremy?”
        “He thought what I told him, at the start, was the truth. He thought we were doing all this just to blackmail Joe Dougherty.” He laughed bitterly. “You see, a complete fool.”
        “What was Hayes' part in it?” she asked. She was genuinely curious about this, but she asked the question chiefly to keep him talking, the longer he talked, the less likely he was to act; at least, that was what the psychology textbooks had said, if she remembered them right. Besides, if she could keep him talking long enough, someone from the storm cellar would come to see what was holding her and Saine and the kids up.
        “He made the telephone calls,” Peterson said.
        “In New Jersey?”
        “Yes.”
        “Was he also the one who broke into the house there and left the notes?” she asked.
        “No. I did that. I got keys to the New Jersey house from Bill.”
        “Bill Peterson?”
        “That's right,” Jeremy said.
        She thought she saw a weakness in his fantasy, here, and she tried to drive a wedge in that chink. “Then Bill is involved in whatever you do. Maybe they won't catch you, Jeremy, but they'll catch Bill. They'll make him pay.”
        “They can't do a thing to him,” he said. “Bill didn't know why I wanted the keys.”
        “He must have suspected, eventually.”
        “Not Bill. He's too level-headed a guy. He'd never be able to understand something like this- about the trial and being judge and jury, about the need for everyone to suffer.” He paused, licked his lips. “No, no, Sonya. Bill is too naive ever to understand.”
        She abandoned that track and went back to the subject of John Hayes, the dead man she and Saine had found on the beach. She said, “Why didn't you make all the telephone calls yourself? Why use Hayes?”
        “No one would recognize his voice,” he said.
        “But they wouldn't recognize your