We're not allowed in there, Tina said, solemnly.
You should know, her brother said.
She sighed. To Sonya, she said, I went in once. I got spanked.
Dad had a reel of film on the drying racks. It was spoiled, the boy explained. That's the first and last spanking we ever got.
But we're allowed out here, Tina said, pointing to a table flanked by two high stools. Alex makes his airplane models there, and I put my puzzles together.
Next, they came into a small dining room, less than half the size of the one in which they had earlier taken their supper; here four or five people could dine comfortably, a very cozy nook not meant to hold large dinner parties. Most likely, this was the breakfast and lunch room, for meals that might be eaten by two or three members of the household, at all different hours.
The ground floor also contained a game room, with a regulation size pool table, a ping pong table, color television set, shelves of games and a lot of comfortable, beaten up old black vinyl arm chairs. Connecting with the game room was a library fully as large as the drawing room or the front dining room, all four walls built up with shelves from floor to ceiling and at least ten or fifteen thousand volumes shelved neatly around scattered pieces of sculpture. The room also contained a large, dark pine desk and a matching captain's chair, several heavily-padded easy chairs arranged beside tall, heavy-looking ultra-modern steel floor lamps.
On the second floor, the stairwell divided the living space into two distinct clusters of rooms, in two long hallways. The family's bedrooms were to the left, the staff's to the right (except for Saine's bedroom, which was in the family section).
They went up to the third floor, which was only half-sized, directly above the family's portion of the second level.
This is father's study, Alex said.
We can come up here, Tina explained. But only when it's absolutely necessary. As Alex had stumbled over the word photographer, the little girl spoke her piece as if quoting her father.
Joe Dougherty's study was certainly an impressive room: as large as the drawing room downstairs, airy and yet homey, well-furnished, containing yet another two thousand books of all types, with a beamed ceiling and two long windows toward the front of the house, which looked out on palm trees, white beach, and the sea that curled toward the land with countless, white-edged tongues of water. One had the feeling that great decisions had been made within the walls of this room, that enormous financial issues were considered and carefully dealt with. At the gadget-studded desk, Dougherty had added and subtracted figures that Sonya knew she would find meaningless because of their enormity. At these windows, perhaps, he had stared at Mother Ocean, gaining serenity and perspective with which to overcome his knottier problems.
And now as she and the children stood by those same windows, watching the sea which glittered madly with reflected moonlight, Sonya felt more at peace than she had for quite a long time. Her parents had been dead for many years. And, already, it seemed that her grandmother had been dead for as long, for years instead of months. And what Bill Peterson and Rudolph Saine had told her about the madman who'd threatened the Dougherty children-all of that was like something she had once read in a story, not like something she had experienced, something that could be real. The solidity of Seawatch made her feel as if she were in a fortress, sealed away from harm, in a great bubble of safety passing through the riotous flow of time without suffering any damage.
Alex destroyed that mood in a moment.
Are you worried? he asked.
Sonya did not look away from the sea.
She said, 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 of the desk lamp that was clear across the room.
She said, Who won't?
He scuffed his small feet on the carpet, and he looked away from her as if he were embarrassed. He looked back at the rolling sea, and he said, The man.
Man?
Yes.
What man?
Tina said, You know. The man he says is going to kill us, me and Alex.
Who says that?
Tina said, The man. He says it himself.
No one is going to kill you, Sonya said, firmly, softly. But she didn't really know how she could be so sure of that.
The peacefulness of the night, the sea and the palms had swiftly disappeared, to be replaced by a brooding malevolence, like a large jungle cat waiting to spring on its prey.
He promised that he would, Alex said.
Well-
He promised, several times, that he'd get the both of us, me and Tina. Curiously enough, the boy did not sound frightened so much as intrigued by the possibility of death. She knew that young children were not as frightened by such things as adults, and that they even enjoyed vicarious violence in a way adults had lost the taste for (witness their love of gory fairy tales, of Edgar Allan Poe and similar macabre literature). But this seemed cooly sinister, this casual acceptance of their own mortality.
Who told you about this? Sonya asked. She had imagined that the worst of the situation had, very properly, been hidden from the children.
No one particular, Alex said.
We just listened around, Tina piped up.
We heard things, Alex said.
When no one knew we were listening, Tina added. She sounded quite pleased with their stealth,
You should both be private detectives-or spies, Sonya told them, trying to lighten the mood again.
Anyway, Alex said, don't worry about him. He's not interested in you, just in us.
Well, you're just as safe as I am, Sonya said. Mr. Saine sees to that.
He goes with us everywhere, Tina said.
Exactly.
Alex shrugged. Rudolph can't do much if the man is really after us. If he really wants us, bad, what can Rudolph do?
I believe Mr. Saine could handle anyone, Sonya said. Anyone at all. She smiled at them and hoped her smile did not appear as phony as it really was.
FIVE
The man stood under the lacy palm trees, down near the thatch-roofed pavilion where Helen Dougherty liked to go every morning to sit and read while the sea murmured gently behind her. He was dressed in dark clothes, and he was all but invisible in the deep purple shadows of the trees, like a spirit, a specter. The moonlight touched the lawn, touched the top of the palm fronds above him, but did not touch him, as if it were afraid of him, as if it were purposefully avoiding contact with him.
He watched the house.
Especially the children's windows.
Light shone there.
He hoped to get a glimpse of them crossing the room, a quick flash of a small shadow
He felt powerful, good and deadly when he watched them without their knowledge. Such clandestine observation made him feel that he really was invisible, that he could move against them whenever he felt like it.
Some night, not now but soon, when the room was dark and the kids were asleep, when Saine was especially lax, when everyone had all but forgotten about the threats
then he would strike!
He would be quick.
He would be calm.
And silent.
Quick, calm, silent, deadly.
He would have to forget about torturing them, of course, though that had been such an important part of his original plan, before this, before the family had moved here to the island. Now, in such close quarters, the children would be able to summon help rather quickly. If he tortured them, they'd scream and scream and scream
And they'd be heard, and he'd be apprehended before he could escape.
Saine was not
that
lax, ever.
One swift, clean cut, from ear to ear, opening their tender young throats like ripe fruits.
He would kill the boy first, without waking the little girl. Then he would creep, silently as wind, to her bed, where he would open her throat as he had her brother's, swiftly, calmly, quietly. Then, when there was absolutely no danger of their crying out for help, he would leisurely work on them with the knife
Now, watching their lighted room, standing by the palms near the pavilion, the man took the knife from his pocket and opened it.
He held it in front of him, so that moonlight struck his hand and glinted wickedly on the seven-inch blade.
It was quite sharp.
He spent a good deal of time honing it.
He ran a finger along the blade.
Lovely.
It would do the job.
When the time came.
Soon.
SIX
There it is-Hawk House!
Bill Peterson shouted over the roar of the
Lady Jane's
engines, pointing with one hand while, with the other, he brought them rapidly around the point of
Distingue,
out of the calmer waters in the lee of the land and into the choppy wavelets that pounded in toward the sheltered cove and were broken up on the hooking arms of beach.
Sonya shielded her eyes from the glaring afternoon sun and stared at the old, dark house that loomed, almost menacingly, on the hill above the cove. Its windows were like black, blinded eyes, its porches and balconies like unhealthy growths sprouting from its weathered walls. It was much like Seawatch, really; but where Seawatch looked welcoming and warm, Hawk House seemed foreboding and cold.
Peterson cut the engines back, bringing a comparative quietude to the open waters.
He said, Mr. Dougherty would like to own it. He'd remodel it and use it as a guest house-maybe as a retreat for friends and business associates.
Are we going in to shore? Sonya asked.
What for?
He seemed surprised that she had asked.
She said, I thought we could meet the neighbors.
His expression changed, in the instant, clouded, his eyes narrowing to slits, and he said, You wouldn't want to meet them.
Are they really so bad as all that?
They'd give you a reception about as cold and rude as you'd be able to survive. A conversation with the Blenwells always leaves me with icicles hanging from my earlobes and the end of my nose.
Sonya laughed.
Really, he said, still somewhat serious. The Doughertys and their people are not particularly welcome at Hawk House.
As they reached the entrance to the narrow cove and moved across its mouth, Sonya spotted a tall, very deeply tanned, dark-haired young man, perhaps Peterson's age, standing on a small pier at the throat of the cove, wearing white slacks and a white tee-shirt. He appeared to be there for no other purpose than to watch them as they rounded the tip of the island.
Who's that? she asked.
Where?
She pointed.
She thought Peterson stiffened when he caught sight of the dark figure who stood so motionless, but she could not be sure.
It's Kenneth Blenwell, he said.
The grandson?
Yes.
At that moment, almost as if he had been listening to their conversation despite the two hundred yards of open water that separated them, and despite the persistent growl of
Lady Jane's
engines, Kenneth Blenwell casually raised a pair of dark, heavy binoculars, to get a better look at them.
The sun glinted off the binocular lenses.
Sonya, embarrassed, looked swiftly away.
Bastard, Peterson snapped, with feeling, as if he thought Blenwell
could
hear.
Actually, Sonya said, we're the ones who're snooping. I suppose he has a perfectly legal right to come out on the pier and check us out.
He already knows who we are, Peterson said.
He doesn't know me.
Then he does now.
Peterson accelerated, brought the small cabin cruiser up toward its top speed, arching slightly out toward the more open water, but hemmed in by sandbars, he was unable to pull completely away as he might have liked to.
As they reached the far arm of white-white beach that formed half the little cove, as land rose up, and palm trees, to conceal them from Blenwell, Sonya stole one quick, last look backward at their mysterious neighbor.
He appeared, from a distance, to have the glasses trained directly on Sonya's eyes. As a result, she felt as if they were only inches apart, as if they were on the pier together. Their eyes had locked in some inexplicable, hypnotic gaze, and they could not break free of each other.
A rising hillock, and the thickening stand of pines, cut Sonya off from Kenneth Blenwell's steady gaze, and she snapped awake like a girl coming out of a nap, startled and ill-at-ease, wondering what had come over her.
Wasn't it his mother, she asked Peterson, who was sent away to the-madhouse?
Yes. And if you ask me, I think the madness was passed on from the mother to the son.
Why do you say that?
Peterson frowned, looking at the choppy blue sea on the windward side of
Distingue,
but it was not the slightly angry waters which had generated the frown. He said, It's hard to pin down. But if you ever meet him, you'll understand why I said that. He's-cold, withdrawn, very sober. He gives you the feeling-I don't know how-that he's only the form of a man, that inside he's completely hollow.