Children of the Storm

rain slicker with a hood that closed tight around his face by means of a drawstring that tied beneath his chin, and he had still felt damp and chilled to the bone before the job was a quarter finished, his own body heat trapped under the slicker and turning cold the perspiration that filmed his skin.
        Standing outside, facing a window, swinging the heavy wooden, tin-backed shutter panels into place and working the rust-stuck bolts through their loops, he had felt as if a couple of hundred malicious children, with slingshots and a supply of ripe grapes, were using his back as a target. From previous, similar experiences, he knew that the quickest way to get this routine finished, the easiest way to endure the punishment of the wind and the rain, was to let his mind wander and forget what he was doing… He would move from window to window like some sort of robot, an automaton who need only fall into a familiar work pattern and did not need to think, letting his mind dwell on other matters; then before he realized it, he would have rounded the house and closed down all the windows. Therefore, he began to consider the mess over at Seawatch, Saine, the Dougherty family, everyone who was involved with the strange threats against the Dougherty children…
        He wandered through these mental images much like a man strolling leisurely through a museum, considering each of the many characters who was involved in this real-life drama, turning them around in his mind, but rather quickly rejecting them and choosing, for a longer consideration, Miss Sonya Carter…
        He was a young man, some said a handsome young man, and he was wealthy and educated- with a degree in literature-and he had seen a great deal of the world, from England to Japan, from Chile to Sweden. He had, according to popular modern mythology, all of the qualities for a great romantic, a ladies' man… Yet, until he had seen the Carter girl, he had never pictured himself as a romantic, and certainly not-as he had been continually imagining since-as a family man. He tended to be cynical, wary of people professing friendship, and felt it unlikely that he would ever experience a close, love-relationship with anyone but his grandparents, with whom he shared a special closeness originally born of mutual dependency but now gone far beyond that.
        Then he had seen Sonya Carter.
        When he first glimpsed the Lady Jane moving slowly across the mouth of the cove, he had been surveying the horizon for large cruise ships, an idle hobby that he sometimes spent hours at. He realized that Peterson was not alone and, still convinced that Peterson was the most likely suspect in the recent Dougherty family incidents, trained his glasses there to see who might be with him. Even at that distance, seen only through a pair of field glasses, she had mesmerized him. Not by her looks, so much (though she was quite lovely), but by her smile, her attitude…
        In prep school, when he was a teenager, the other kids had begun to call him “The Raven,” because they said that he matched the gloomy personality of that bird in Poe's famous narrative poem of the same name. He had endured his nickname without comment, though he had naturally not much appreciated it.
        He was not gloomy at all, he felt, but merely being realistic. The world was not, as most of his frivolous classmates seemed to think it was, the proverbial oyster. Certainly, many things in life were pleasurable, and he enjoyed himself whenever he could. But you had to be on the lookout for the bad, for the upsets and the disappointments. Most of these prep school kids had lived all their lives, to date, in wealthy homes where doting parents had supplied them everything they wanted and twice everything that they needed. Until they were on their own, until they risked emotional involvement with the world, they could not realize that it contained things you had to be wary of. He realized it, because he had his mother's history of madness haunting him, and he was plagued by the memory of that awful day when the news of her suicide had come and his grandparents, though they knew she was insane, had grieved so deeply, so terribly at her loss.
        In college, too, he had been known as a pessimist, an image he at first attempted to void himself of but later embraced because, if they all believed it, he could be let alone, friendless. He enjoyed his privacy more than the average student his