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“I don't think it's my landlubber leanings that turn me against speed boating. No, instead, I think it's just a combination of good common sense and-”
        “Bad digestion?” Bill Peterson suggested, good-naturedly.
        “No,” Dougherty chuckled. “Good common sense and-a good strong fear!”
        Helen laughed. “That sums it up for me, too.”
        Catching the spirit of underlying humor that existed between the Doughertys and their help, Sonya said, “Well, he came out here at top speed from Guadeloupe, but I didn't mind at all.”
        “You see!” Peterson cried, triumphant.
        “I just stood there by the wheel, at the safety railing, and I didn't faint once. If you don't believe me, you can go look at the railing-and you'll see where my fingers bent it.”
        “Betrayed,” Peterson said gloomily.
        “Did Bill take you on a tour around the island, before docking?” Helen asked.
        “No,” Sonya said. “I was anxious to get here, get to work.”
        “Tomorrow, then,” Helen said.
        “My pleasure,” Bill said.
        “I still can't get used to the fact you own a whole island,” Sonya said, shaking her head.
        For the first time, Joe Dougherty's face clouded, and he looked less than perfectly happy. “We don't, exactly,” he said.
        “But I thought-” she began.
        “We own most of it,” Helen explained. “But the Blenwell family has the cove at the far end of Distingue, and they own the Hawk House which overlooks the cove.”
        “I offered them an excellent price,” Dougherty explained. “Far too excellent for people their age to turn down.” He laid down his fork, wiped his mouth with a blue linen napkin. “Lydia and Walter Blenwell are in their seventies, far too old to live half an hour from the nearest ambulance service and an hour or more from the nearest hospital. Their children live in Jamaica, and up around Miami, but they steadfastly refuse to leave Hawk House.”
        “And that's the fault of Ken Blenwell,” Bill Peterson said. He sounded as if he did not much like Ken Blenwell.
        “You're right, of course,” Dougherty said. He explained: “Lydia and Walter have raised one of their grandchildren since he was two years old. The boy's father was killed at the outbreak of the Korean war, and his mother, not a Blenwell girl, never was very stable. She had to be institutionalized when the child was two, and she died at her own hand while in the-the home.”
         Madhouse, Sonya thought. She didn't know why Dougherty's euphemism, when speaking about a neighbor, was so frightening.
        “And her son, he's in his mid-twenties by now, Walter and Lydia's grandchild, has taken it in his head to own Hawk House when they're gone. He persuades them to hold out. Hell, he even persuaded old Walter to come to me and try to buy out our three-quarters of Distingue. Seems Kenneth wants to own the whole shebang some day.”
        “We don't intend to sell, of course,” Helen Dougherty said.
        “Of course,” her husband agreed.
        She said, “We love this house-its old name was Seawatch, which is rather fitting when you consider it commands a view of the sea from three of its four sides-and we love the island too. It's such a quiet place, so beautiful and clean and fresh. It's like a monk's retreat, in a way, a place to escape from-from the everyday cares that plague the rest of the world.”
        But Sonya saw, as the woman hesitated in the middle of her last sentence, that Helen Dougherty did not consider Seawatch an escape from ordinary day-to-day cares… No, more likely, this lovely, wealthy woman saw it as an escape from the madman who had threatened the lives of her children. Even as she spoke, she turned her head ever-so-slightly to look upon her two children, as if she wished to be certain that they were still beside her, still close at hand, still safe and not snatched up and carted away while her