Children of the Storm Read Free

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 generate 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 knuckles 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 receded 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 servants 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,