“Well, they’re not exactly a family, are they?” Tyson asked with a low, humorless laugh, running a hand across his face wearily. “They’re just these random guys who all sleep there and drink all the time.”
“Like a frat house?” Tessa asked, her brow furrowed together in confusion.
“I mean, I guess so,” Alice said, though her face was scrunched up as if this didn’t sound quite right to her. “They’re older, though. And I wouldn’t say they really party. They just lounge around and drink a lot.”
“Do you ever see them doing drugs, anything harder?” I asked, thinking of my last case in the Keys, where there was a similar situation with a property’s new owners turning a house into a literal drug den.
“Oh no, nothing like that,” Alice said, her eyes widening in panic at the thought. “You don’t think they are, are they? I wouldn’t want the kids anywhere near that.”
She looked at her husband desperately, and he reached out and rested a comforting hand on her knee.
“I don’t think so,” I said, only half honestly since I didn’t need these people even more on edge than they already were. “It’s just something that I have to ask. You understand.”
“Right, of course,” Tyson said with a nod of understanding, and Alice looked at least a little less concerned now.
“I have to ask, how is it that you see all of this?” Tessa asked them. “When we walked over here, we could barely see anything with all the fog. Is it not usually this bad?”
“There’s always fog,” Tyson said with a shrug. “But it does ebb sometimes. And we like to take walks along the beach like you did to get here, I assume. The kids love it down there. That’s when we’d see most of this stuff.”
“We stopped taking them, though,” Alice said in a forced tone. “We didn’t want them around those guys.”
“We just got a bad feeling, you know?” Tyson asked, waving a hand in the air. “A hunch. It’s probably nothing, but we didn’t feel right ignoring it since we both felt it.”
“Believe me, I understand,” I assured him. “In my line of work, you learn to trust your gut. It’s usually on to something your conscious mind doesn’t quite get yet.”
Both Tyson and Alice looked more than a little vindicated by this, some muscles in their shoulders relaxing, though not completely.
“That’s what we thought,” Alice said. “The kids complain all the time about it, but we just felt uneasy.”
“How long since you stopped going down by the water?” Tessa asked, taking a small bite out of one of the cookies and glancing over at me as if reminding me that I hadn’t touched my plate.
I quickly picked up one of the cookies and bit out of it so as not to be rude to our hosts. It was pretty good and tasted homemade, so I finished it up in short order and took a second one.
“About three months?” Tyson mused, looking to his wife for confirmation, and she nodded. “The last time we went down there, we ran into one of those guys. We didn’t go back after that.”
“Did you talk to him?” I asked, dropping my second cookie as I looked at the couple with interest. “What was he like?”
“I tried talking to him,” Tyson sighed. “But he wasn’t really in the mood. I asked him about the house, why they bought it, and when they thought the construction might be done. I was just trying to get some information out of him. I tried to make it seem like I was just friendly, though.”
“I thought you were friendly,” Alice told him reassuringly.
“Anyway, he just kind of stared at me and grunted,” Tyson said with a shrug. “He was smoking a cigar on the beach and watching the water. And then he started glaring at Alice and the kids, and that made me uncomfortable, so I stopped trying, and we left. That night, we agreed not to go down there anymore. The whole thing freaked us out too much.”
“I know he didn’t really threaten us,” Alice admitted with a weak smile. “He didn’t do anything at all. We were just uncomfortable. Call us overprotective—my mother does, all the time—but we decided to go with our guts, as you said.”
“You don’t have to explain yourselves to me,” I assured them. “And I get the sense that mothers will always find something to complain about.”
I gave them a wry smile, and they both chuckled.
“You said something about construction?” Tessa asked. “Has that been bothering you?”
“Oh yeah, it’s been going on forever,” Tyson said, an annoyed edge in his voice now. “We expected it when they bought the house, but damn, this is just nuts.”
“It’s been going on for months on end,” Alice added, putting her plate down and folding her hands in her lap. Every muscle in her body looked tense. “Hammers and drills and just horrible noise all the time. We thought we might not hear much of it because of the water—it gets loud a lot in this area, which is why we almost never let the kids swim in it, even before. It’s rough out there. But the sound just carries somehow.”
“Interesting,” I murmured, remembering how the police officers had dismissed the idea of the construction noise bothering neighbors because of the distance between the houses and because of the roar of the waves down below. “And this has impacted your ability to live here in peace?”
“Oh, yes,” Alice breathed, straightening out her skirt and looking like she wanted to throw up.
“It’s bothered the kids and Alice the most,” Tyson said, wrapping an arm around his wife protectively. “I’m at work most of the day. And when the kids are at school, it doesn’t bother them. But the sounds even come at night sometimes, and then I hear it, too.”
“Construction in the middle of the night?” I repeated, remembering that Paulina had mentioned something about this, too. “That
