Children of the Storm

at Hawk House, with his grandparents, who might need him. Even if the storm did not tear the house down, the excitement of the wind and noise might fatally weaken the heart in one of them. He could not leave them by themselves, even though he knew Saine could use his help.
        Inside, he closed the interior shutters on the upper floors, one by one, still an automaton with his thoughts elsewhere.
        Standing at the last window, with his hands on the shutters, staring out at the final piece of the rainy world which was still visible from Hawk House, he hesitated to close them, for his thoughts took a sudden and particularly nasty turn. He had great faith in Rudolph Saine, and he doubted very much that anyone, even a madman, could overpower that giant. But just suppose that Saine grew careless, or that the madman was more cunning than anyone could have suspected… Suppose he struck at Seawatch and, suspecting that Blenwell knew who Saine suspected, decided to come after the Blenwell family too.
        He shuddered.
        Such a possibility was predicated on the certainty that the killer would eliminate both the Dougherty children, Rudolph Saine, and anyone else in Seawatch who might be able to connect him with murder.
        He didn't want to think about such a bloodbath.
        Especially not with Sonya up there…
        He looked at the skies: black, low, moving fast, broken up by sheets of hard rain.
        He looked, too, at the sea: towering, fierce, crushing the island in its watery vice, narrowing Distingue to a tiny strip of land, a strip of wind-battered mud.
        Walk a mile in that, to kill those in Hawk House while the hurricane still raged? That seemed unlikely. Such a trek could be deadly. Only a madman…
        He pushed the shutters open.
        What in God's name was he thinking? Of course only a madman would walk the length of the island in a hurricane, but it was a madman that they were dealing with!
        He left the shutters open.
        He pulled a chair up to the window, and he went to load the rifle he had told Bill Peterson he did not have.

----

    THIRTY
        
        In the fourth ravine, between the fourth and the fifth hills, not so terribly far from the sanctity of Hawk House-she hoped, she prayed-they came across the dead body of a shark. It was floating in the dirty water that had coursed in between the low hills, its belly up, its toothy mouth frozen in a hideous grin that Sonya felt she had seen somewhere before but which she could not place…
        … and then could place. It was the grin one saw, in horror films, on the face of a death's head, a skull smile both broad and utterly unhumorous, the sort of cheap theatrics that, in films, had made her chuckle but which now brought her no amusement at all.
        She turned the children away from the thing and led them quickly along the shore of the pool, so that they could cross without coming into contact with the shark's corpse. They had seen it already, of course, for she had not been quick enough to turn them before it had bobbled into sight, and she knew that they would have dreams about it for many nights to come.
        For the most part, she was not so much disturbed by the grisly scene because it was stomach-churning or because it was another encounter in what seemed an endless string of encounters with death-but she was most disturbed because she could not decide whether the shark, this time, was a good omen or a bad one. In one sense, because it was dead, it might represent a previous threat now dissolved. And in another way, because it was dead and grinning at them, it might mean…
        She shook her head and tried to get hold of herself.
        Weariness was closing in on her like a gloved fist, and it was causing her to go off on useless tangents (like thinking in terms of good luck and bad luck, good omens and bad omens), and this was a trend she could not permit to continue.
        The pool, this time, was not uniformly deep and permitted an easy crossing at one point, thirty or forty feet from the dead shark, where the land beneath the invading sea rose up almost like a series of stepping stones.
        She carried the children across, one at a time, her arms aching like sore teeth which she longed to pull from the sockets and gain a modicum of release.
        That done, the hill remained ahead.
        She didn't want to go up it.
        She had