“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Tyson asked with a small, almost helpless smile. “That’s part of why I wanted to talk to them so badly. It’s just all so strange. But the guy didn’t offer any explanation, obviously.”
The couple’s demeanor and anxiety were starting to make more sense to me. If I was inundated with noise and surrounded by strangers who didn’t make me feel safe in my own home, I would look and act like I never slept, too.
“Have you thought about moving to get away from it all?” Tessa asked, echoing some of my own thoughts.
The couple exchanged a pained look.
“We’ve talked about it, yes,” Alice admitted with a small, high-pitched sigh.
“I’m hesitant to give up just yet,” Tyson explained, giving his wife another small squeeze around the shoulders. “This is our home, and we worked hard to be able to afford to raise our family in a place like this. If this keeps going on much longer, maybe we’ll seriously consider it. But this is our dream home. I doubt we’d ever be able to find somewhere else more perfect for the kids and us.”
“It’s not perfect anymore,” Alice said softly, and I got the sense that Tessa had unwittingly hit on a sore spot for these two.
“Have you ever had any contact with these men other than that time you ran into one of them on the beach?” I asked, skipping right over this testy exchange and changing the subject.
“I brought them cookies when they first got here,” Alice said, wincing at the memory. “I just thought I’d welcome the new owners to the neighborhood.”
“That’s when we first started feeling uneasy,” Tyson explained.
“They took the cookies, but I felt weird the whole time I was there,” Alice explained. “There was this guy there who was ordering all the others around, and he was kind of weird—talking in hushed tones with the others. And I saw that he was carrying a gun. That made me really uncomfortable. Then I saw a few of the others with guns, too, and I just didn’t like that at all. This is a quiet neighborhood! Why are people walking around their own home with deadly weapons like that? It just seemed kind of like a gang or something.”
I exchanged a glance with Tessa. It sounded more and more like the Hawthorne house had something to do with our case.
“Did you ever report this to the authorities?” I asked the couple.
“I work for the city, so I talked to a couple of guys at the office,” Tyson shrugged. “They agreed it was weird but said it probably wasn’t illegal, and I didn’t want to make a fuss about it. News travels fast around here, and I didn’t want these guys mad at us for reporting them if nothing came of it.”
“I understand,” I said, thinking of how quickly gossip spread with someone like Paulina around. “Was that the only other time that you guys interacted with any of them?”
Tyson and Alice exchanged another even more worried look this time.
“Yes,” Alice said, staring down at her hands. “For us, anyway.”
“What does that mean?” Tessa asked, leaning forward with a confused look on her face again. “Has someone else spoken with them?”
“Well, what spooked us the most was when the kids saw a couple of them,” Tyson said softly, and Alice looked like she was just about to burst into tears at the mention of it.
I couldn’t blame her, and a chill of anger bubbled up in the pit of my stomach. I hated it when kids got involved. Everyone did. Even Tessa tensed beside me on the couch.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said softly. “Is this what happened in the backyard?”
Tyson gave his wife a questioning look.
“I mentioned something when you were upstairs,” she explained to him before turning back to me. “And yes, that’s what happened in the backyard.”
“The kids used to love playing out there,” Tyson added. “It’s part of why we bought the house in the first place. It’s so great back there. The kids can run and play as much as they want, and there are trees to climb and stuff. There’s not enough of that in the modern world. Most kids are always on their smartphones or tablets. The idea of raising them somewhere like this appealed to us.”
“I understand,” I chuckled, agreeing with him completely. “I was telling Alice before that I would’ve killed to grow up in a place like this. A forest and the ocean? You can’t beat that.”
“So you get it,” Tyson said, seeming pleased with this response. “But yeah, we don’t even let them go out there anymore, even supervised. It’s not safe. Not now.”
“What happened?” Tessa asked gently, leaning forward and placing a hand softly on Alice’s wrist across the table.
“We don’t know, exactly,” the woman sighed, looking up at us again. “The kids are young, and we asked them questions, but we’re still not sure we’re getting the full story.”
“What they told us doesn’t exactly make sense,” Tyson explained apologetically. “You know kids. They make fanciful stories out of everything. And our kids have even bigger imaginations than most.”
Okay, now I really had to hear this story. But I waited patiently for the couple to continue, not wanting to put too much pressure on them and letting them set their own pace.
“I went outside one afternoon to call them in for lunch,” Alice continued after taking a deep breath. “This was a Saturday over the winter break for the holidays, so they didn’t have any homework to worry about. They’d been out there all day, and I didn’t think much of it. It was a good day, too. We hadn’t heard any construction from the Hawthorne house all morning, which is rare.”
“You’d never been concerned about these people coming onto your property before?” Tessa asked, and both of the Carltons shook their heads.
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Tyson said quickly. “We have a state-of-the-art security system all around the
