Dean R. Koontz - Children Of The Storm

Dean Koontz (Deanna Dwyer) – Children of the storm

[Version 2.0 by BuddyDk – august 3 2003]

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[Completely new scan]

[Some spelling errors has been left as is (This is an old book)]

NO HAVEN . . .

As she and the children stood by the windows, watch-ing the sea which

glittered madly with reflected moon-light, Sonya felt more at peace than she

had for a long time. The solidity of Seawatch made her feel as if she were

in a fortress, sealed away from harm . . .

Alex destroyed that mood in a moment. “Are you wor-ried?” he asked.

Sonya did not look away from the sea. “Why should I be worried?”

“He won't hurt you.”

She looked at Alex. His eyes were very dark, almost too dark to see in

the meager light. “Who won't?”

He scuffed his small feet on the carpet and looked back at the rolling

sea. “The man.”

“What man?”

“You know,” said Tina. “The man who says he is going to kill me and

Alex . . .”

PUT PLEASURE IN YOUR READING

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CHILDREN OF THE STORM

Deanna Dwyer

A LANCER BOOK

CHILDREN OF THE STORM

Printed in Canada.

LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY

NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

BOOK ONE

ONE

Having lived nearly all of her twenty-three years in the brief summers and the bitter winters of Maine

and Massachusetts, Sonya Carter was especially intrigued by the Caribbean—by the al-most too-bright

skies, the warm breezes that smelled of salty ocean air, the palm trees that could be seen nearly

everywhere, the delicious mangoes, the spectacular sunsets and the sudden twilights that deepened

rapidly into purple dark-ness . . . Too, the warmth of the Caribbean seemed to represent life, bustle,

excitement, antici-pation—while New England, in her mind, was as-sociated with death and loneliness.

She had lost her parents in Maine, thirteen years ago, when their car overturned on a stretch of icy

highway. And this past winter, her grandmother, who had raised her ever since she was orphaned at the

age of ten, had at last succumbed to the deep and awful coughing that had plagued her for years, the taint

of the lungs that had long been her burden. In the last weeks of her life, lying in the crisp white sheets of

the hospital bed, she had been thin and dark, her face drawn, too weak even to smile. Certainly, people

died all the time in the Carib-bean, just as they did in the rest of the world; this was no place of respite

from tragedy, no sacred shelter from the ravages of time. But here, at least, Sonya had never lost anyone

whom she desper-ately loved. This newness, this freshness of the place and its lack of associations, was

what made it special, an unsullied haven where she could more easily be happy.

Lynda Spaulding, a girl with whom Sonya had roomed during her senior year at the university,

thought this journey was a distinctly bad idea, and she went to great lengths to persuade Sonya to call it

off. “Going way down there, among strange peo-ple, to work for someone you've never met

face-to-face? That's going to be trouble, right from the start, you mark my words.”

Sonya had known that Lynda was more jealous of her success in securing such a position than she

was concerned about Sonya's well-being. “I think it'll be just fine,” Sonya had said, repeatedly, refus-ing

to be disillusioned. “Lots of sun, the ocean—”

“Hurricanes,” her roommate said, determined to throw clouds over the situation.

“Only for part of the year, and then only rarely.”

“I understand the sea can sweep right over one of those small islands when a real bad wind comes

up, during a storm—”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Lynda!” Sonya snapped, “I'm in more danger on the freeways than I am in

the middle of a hurricane!”

Later, Lynda had said, “They practice voodoo down there.”

“In Haiti.”

“That's the center of it, yes. But they practice it all over those islands.”

Sonya had now been in the islands three days and had yet to see any sign of dark religious rites. She

was glad that she had come, and she was look-ing forward to the job.

She had flown from Boston to Miami on a 747 Jumbo Jet, uncomfortable in such an enormous craft,

certain that it could not be expected to keep its hundreds of tons aloft for very long, surely not long

enough to cover the length of the East Coast. In Miami, she boarded a cruise ship of the French Line for

her first sea journey and, less frightened of drowning than of falling twenty thousand feet in a steel aircraft,

she immensely enjoyed the trip. The boat stopped at San Juan, Puerto Rico, then leisurely wended its

way southward until it stopped at the exquisitely beautiful island of St. Thomas where the beaches were

both white and black, the sand hot and the orchids wild. The next stop was St. John's port, then on to the

French-owned island of Guadeloupe where they docked at the city of Pointe-a-Pitre late in the

afternoon of a brilliantly clear first Tuesday in September. The ship would sail on to Martinique,

Barbados, Trini-dad, Curacao and then, eventually, back to France. Sonya disembarked at Guadeloupe,

miss-ing those other exotic ports, but not particularly upset by this. She was eager to begin her new job,

her new life, to form new hopes and dreams and set about making them reality.

Her four large suitcases and one metal-bound steamer trunk were unloaded onto the dock at

Pointe-a-Pitre, where a fiercely dark terminal worker put them onto a four-wheeled cart and led her

into the air conditioned passenger's lounge.

“It be an outrageous wahm day,” he said, smiling with many bright teeth, his voice syrupy and yet a

musical delight that she thought she would never tire of no matter how long her job kept her in these

climes. When she tipped him, he said, “De lady be outrageous kind,” half-bowed and walked away.

The lounge was busy—though most of the hus-tling and bustling was done by the tourists, chiefly

Americans who appeared unable to adjust to the lazy ambience of this new land. The dark-skinned

workers all seemed loose-jointed and half-dreaming, their pace adjusted to what the tropics required of a

man if he were to live his allotted span and remain healthy.

“Miss Carter?” Someone said from behind her.

Startled, she turned, her heart thumping, and looked into the eyes of an extremely handsome man

perhaps four years her senior.

He said, “My name's Bill Peterson. I'm the Dougherty's chauffeur, messenger and boat cap-tain all

rolled into one.” He was tanned so deeply that he could have passed for a native at a quick glance, teeth

white against his brown skin, only his blue eyes stood out startlingly from his dusky countenance. He

made Sonya feel out of place, a foreigner with her pale skin and bright yellow hair. At least, they had the

blue eyes in common.

“I'm glad to meet you,” she said. “Can I call you Bill?”

He smiled. He had a very winning smile, almost boyish. He said, “You'd better.”

“Sonya, then, for me.” She had to look up in order to speak to him, for he towered over her

five-feet, four-inches.

“Good!” he said, clearly pleased with her. “I can see that you're going to get along well with

ev-eryone. I was afraid you might be hard to get to know, a snob or a complainer—or something worse.

On an island as small as Mr. Dougherty's Distingue, it would be intolerable to have a staff member who

was anything less than fully amicable.”

“How small an island is it?” she asked.

She was remembering Lynda Spaulding's warnings about high water and hurricanes.

“One and a half miles long, slightly less than three-quarters of a mile wide.”

“That doesn't sound so tiny,” she said.

“In a vast ocean, it is infinitesimal.”

“I suppose.”

He seemed to sense the source of her uneasi-ness, for he said, “I wouldn't worry about it sink-ing out

of sight. Its been there for thousands of years and looks to last even longer.”

She let the musical name roll around on her tongue for the thousandth time since she had first heard

the word a month ago, found it as pleasant as she always had before. “Distingue,” she said dreamily. “It

almost sounds like paradise.”

“The name is French,” Bill Peterson said. “It means 'elegant of appearance', and the island is just

what the name implies—palms, orchids, bou-gainvillea and white-white sand.”

She smiled at him, at his obvious enthusiasm for the island. He was a big man, a couple of inches past

six feet, slim and well-muscled. He was wear-ing white jeans and a maroon, short-sleeved, knit-ted shirt;

his arms were brown as nuts and knotted with muscle, his hands broad and strong. Yet, talking about the

island, he sounded like a child, a little boy who was breathlessly anxious for her to share his enthusiasm,

his sense of wonder.

“I can't wait to see it,” she said.

“Well,” he said, looking at her luggage, “we'd best get your things along to the private docks where I

have the Lady Jane tied up.”

“That's Mr. Dougherty's boat?” Sonya asked.

She could still not get accustomed to the idea that she was working for a bona fide millionaire,

someone who could own an island and the boat to get to and from it. It was all like a scene from some

fairy tale, a dream from which she would wake sooner or later—or, if her old college roomie were to be

believed, it was not a dream but a nightmare. In any case, it did not seem real.

“Yes,” Bill Peterson said, “but it's not the most interesting of boats. I'm an experienced trimaran

captain, and I always prefer sailing to the use of engines. For one thing, its ecologically more sound a

method. But more important than that, sails give a man a sense of accomplishment, a real communion

with the sea that the use of engines in-hibits. But Mr. Dougherty is not really much of a sea lover. He

believes that gasoline is far more re-liable than the wind—though I've seen more small boats with engine

trouble than those caught unex-pectedly in the eye of a calm. The Lady Jane's not really a bad little cabin

cruiser, though. You'll probably like her.”

He whistled for and located another porter, su-pervised the loading of Sonya's baggage onto

an-other wheeled cart and then led the way out of the chrome and glass structure into the suddenly

oppressive—by comparison—heat of the late aft-ernoon sun.

The tourists out on the promenade easily out-numbered the locals, dressed in the most awful

bermudas and loud shirts, the women in slacks too tight for them, many almost comical in their floppy

straw hats and exaggerated sunglasses. But Sonya had had enough of colorful costumes, na-tive accents

and mannerisms; now, all that she wanted was to settle down on Distingue as a gov-erness for Mr. and

Mrs. Dougherty's two small children, and begin a career that would make use of her education and

training.

The private docks at the bay port of Pointe-a-Pitre were not shabby, by any means, more

well-appointed than the public landing decks. They seemed newly built of sea-bleached stone, concrete

and tightly-fitted, well-oiled dark wooden planks. The Lady Jane nestled in a berth barely large enough

to accommodate her, floated lazily on the swell, beyond a sign that read: PRIVATE. JO-SEPH L.

DOUGHERTY. LADY JANE. She was perhaps twenty-five feet long, slim and dazzlingly white,

trimmed quite subtly in a dark blue and contrasting gold stripe, spotlessly clean and with an air of

welcome about her.

“How lovely!” Sonya said, meaning it.

“You've been on a boat before?” Bill asked.

“Never, except for the ship coming down, of course. But that was so terribly huge that I didn't feel as

if I was on a boat at all.”

“I know what you mean.”

“It was more like a floating town.”

“You'll know you're on a boat when you're on the Lady Jane!” he said. “The sea bounces her a bit,

unless we put her up toward top speed—and then she bounces the sea”

The porter put the bags on the main deck, near the pilot's cabin, accepted a tip from Peterson, doffed

a tiny porter's hat as he smiled, and wheeled away the luggage cart.

With a gentleness she would not have thought Peterson capable of—since he was such a big man

—he took her arm and helped her down the steps and onto the deck. He escorted her on a complete

tour of the pilot's cabin, the galley and the two staterooms below deck.

“It's utterly gorgeous,” Sonya said, enchanted by the sparkling little machine.

“You'll have plenty of opportunity to go out in her,” Peterson said. “The kids both like to be taken on

trips into the smaller islands, the cays and the backwater places. And on your off time, you might want

me to take you out as well.”

“You mean I can use the boat for my own en-joyment,” she asked.

“Of course! The Doughertys love the beach and shore fishing. But as I said, neither of them is really a

sea lover, except at a proper distance. If you don't make use of the Lady Jane, she'll just sit there at the

dock, rusting.”

“I wouldn't let her rust!”

He laughed. “Spoken like a real sailor.”

She stood in the pilot's cabin with him while he maneuvered the small craft out of its slot along the

wharf, amazed that he did not slam it rudely against the sleek hulls of its neighbor ships and that when he

had taken it into the harbor, he was able to guide it around the plentitude of other boats—perhaps a

hundred of them—that bobbled on the bright water. He seemed to have been born on a ship, raised with

his hands around a wheel and his eyes trained to nautical instruments.

She asked no questions, and he started no con-versations until they were out of the busiest sea lanes

and in the open water, the heavy ocean swell rolling rhythmically toward, under and beyond them. “How

far to Distingue?

“Twenty-five minutes, half an hour,” he said. “It's not actually very far from civilization, but the illusion

of isolation is pretty good.” He handled the wheel nonchalantly, setting course by some method which she

could not divine.

“I'm sure the children like living in a place where there's no one to compel them to go to school,” she

said, holding fast to a chrome hand railing as the boat slapped through the crests of the foam-tipped

waves.

“They've been pretty rambunctious since the family came down here from New Jersey,” Peterson

agreed. “But you're a school teacher as well as a nurse, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“So their days of freedom are limited.” He grinned, very warmly, very reassuringly, a man al-most

any young woman would be attracted to.

“I hope they don't see me as an old dragon,” Sonya said. “I don't intend to make their studies

burdensome, if I can help it.”

“No one could see you as an old dragon,” he said. “Absolutely no one at all.”

She was not accustomed to flattery, and she was unable to respond with more than a blush.

He said, “You seem to have picked up quite a bit of education for a girl so young.” He looked

sideways at her, then back at the sun-dappled sea.

She said, “One of the few things that bills and taxes couldn't touch in my father's small estate was a

trust fund he had established for my educa-tion. It couldn't be used for anything else; and I took full

advantage of it. After nurse's school, I wasn't really certain that I wanted to spend my life in hospitals

watching people die little-by-little. So I enrolled in the elementary education curriculum at a small college

near my grandmother's place. I don't know whether I would ever have enjoyed teaching in a normal

grade school atmosphere. This job—governness and tutor, is just about per-fect, though.”

“The kids are bound to like you,” he said, smil-ing at her.

“I hope so. I also hope I can teach them well enough to keep up with the island government's

requirements.”

“Whatever you teach them,” he said, the tone of his voice having suddenly hardened a bit, “they'll be

safer on Distingue than in a town somewhere, in any regular school. Safer than they'd be in pri-vate

schools, too, for that matter.”

Lady Jane rose, fell, groaned as the water slapped her hull, whined on through the choppy seas.

Sonya felt a shiver course the length of her spine, though she was not sure of the cause. The day was

not chilly, nor the company—thus far— full of gloom. Yet there was something behind what Peterson

had just said, something in the way he had said it that was distinctly unsettling . . .

She said, “Safe?”

“Yes. The island puts them out of the reach of anyone who might take it in mind to hurt them.”

He was completely serious now, with no more white-toothed, bright-eyed smiles for her, his big

hands gripped hard about the wheel as if he were taking his anger out on that hard, plastic circle.

“Why should anyone want to hurt them?” she asked, genuinely perplexed but uncomfortably certain

that he had an answer. Bill Peterson seemed a level-headed man, not the sort to gener-ate wild stories or

unbased fears.

“You don't know about what's happened?” he asked.

“No.”

He turned away from the water and looked at her, obviously concerned. He said, “Nothing about the

threats?”

“Threats?” she asked.

The chill along her spine had grown worse. Though she had by now gotten accustomed to the

rollicking progress of the speeding craft, she still held tightly to the shining hand railing, her knuck-les

white.

“Back in New Jersey, someone threatened to kill both of the kids—Alex and Tina.”

The Lady Jane rose.

The Lady Jane fell.

But the ship and the sea both seemed to have re-ceded now as the thing that Bill Peterson was telling

her swelled in importance until it filled her mind.

She said, “I suppose wealthy people are often the targets of cranks who—”

“This was no crank,” he said. There was no doubt in his voice, not a shred of it.

“Oh?”

“I wasn't up in New Jersey with them, of course. This house on Distingue is their winter home for

four months of the year, and I'm here the year-around, keeping it up. Mr. Dougherty, Joe, told me what

happened up there, though. It scared him enough to finally move his family and serv-ants down here

ahead of schedule. What he told me happened up there would have frightened me too, no question.”

She waited, knowing that he would tell her about it and angry with him for having brought it up. Yet,

at the same time, she wanted to know, had to know, all about it. She remembered her roomie's warnings

about coming to an unknown place, to work for unknown people . . .

“It was telephone calls at first. Mrs. Dougherty took the first one. Some man, obviously trying to

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 po-lice 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 Dough-ertys'

unlisted number, but they were ready to ig-nore 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 tell-ing

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 ex-perienced

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 room?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

Bill looked at his instruments, held the wheel steady in his powerful hands as he spoke. “No one saw

or heard him—even though the butler, maid, cook and handyman must have all been around when he

entered the house. Perhaps even Mrs. Dougherty was there, depending on the time the note was placed.”

“They called the police.”

“Yes,” Peterson said. “And the house was watched by plainclothesmen in unmarked cars. Still, he

managed to get into the house, three nights later, leaving notes on the doors of both the kids' rooms.”

“The police didn't see him?”

“No. They started trying to convince the Doug-hertys that one of the servants was involved—”

“Sounds reasonable to assume,” Sonya said.

“Except that Joe has had these people with him for years—some of them served his mother and

fa-ther when they were alive and maintaining a big house. Joe just couldn't see what any of them would

have against him or the kids. He treats his employees well, as you'll soon discover. Besides, none of that

crew would be capable of such a thing: a gentler lot, you'll not find anywhere. When you meet them,

you'll see what I mean.” He looked at the sea, looked back at her and said, “Besides, neither Mrs.

Dougherty nor Joe recog-nized the crackpot's voice.”

“You said, before, that he tried to disguise his voice.”

“Yes, but even disguised, they would have rec-ognized the voice of someone they talk to every day

and have known for years.”

“I suppose,” Sonya said, reluctantly.

For the first time, Peterson seemed to realize what the story had done to her composure, and he

forced a smile for her, an imitation of his genu-ine grin. “Hey, don't let it upset you like that! No one got

hurt. And, obviously, the kids are safe down here on Distingue. They've been here since the middle of

Dean R. Koontz - Children Of The Storm

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