Children of the Storm

    

by

    

 

NO HAVEN…

    

    As she and the children stood by the windows, watching the sea which glittered madly with reflected moonlight, 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 worried?” 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…”

BOOK 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 almost 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 darkness… Too, the warmth of the Caribbean seemed to represent life, bustle, excitement, anticipation-while New England, in her mind, was associated 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 Caribbean, 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 desperately 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 people, 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, refusing 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 looking 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, Trinidad, Curacao and then, eventually, back to France. Sonya disembarked at Guadeloupe, missing 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 hustling 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 captain 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 everyone. 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 uneasiness, for he said, “I wouldn't worry about it sinking 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, bougainvillea 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 wearing white jeans and a maroon, short-sleeved, knitted 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 inhibits. But Mr. Dougherty is not really much of a sea lover. He believes that gasoline is far more reliable than the wind-though I've seen more small boats with engine trouble than those caught unexpectedly 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, supervised the loading of Sonya's baggage onto another wheeled cart and then led the way out of the chrome and glass structure into the suddenly oppressive-by comparison-heat of the late afternoon sun.

    The tourists out on the promenade easily outnumbered 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, native accents and mannerisms; now, all that she wanted was to settle down on
Distingue
as a governess 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. JOSEPH 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 enjoyment,” 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.