Children of the Storm by Dean Koontz Page A

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