The three kids looked at each other, and Violet suggested, “Lily, as the oldest, do you want to start?”
Her daughter held her gaze and nodded slowly before gaining an encouraging nod from Ben. Turning toward Carter, she said, “We were just playing in the back. We’d walked over to Ben’s yard ‘cause it’s bigger and the dog is there. Plus it doesn’t have any holes.”
“Holes?” Carter’s gaze darted to Violet.
“I’ll fill you in on that,” Ben said softly, and Carter nodded, turning his attention back to Lily.
“I can’t run with my sprained ankle, so I was sitting on the deck. A noisy motorcycle went down the road next to our house, and I looked over. That’s when I saw the man across the street at the park. I didn’t think anything about it first. I thought maybe he was waiting on somebody.”
“Was he doing anything specific… sitting, standing, talking to someone…” Carter asked.
Lily shook her head. “No, he was just leaning against a tree. Colleen and Charlie were in the yard tossing a ball to Bounder, and sometimes he’d bring it to me and I’d toss it, too. Bounder was excited and raced toward the fence near the sidewalk, and that’s what made me look again. The man was still standing there, only this time he had a phone in his hand, and I think he was taking pictures of us.”
Violet gasped, and Ben jerked. She was horrified at the thought that someone was taking a picture of her children, but her attention slid to Ben as she felt the tension rolling off of him. As angry as she was, she wanted to make sure he was holding on to his emotions so he wouldn’t frighten the kids. She glanced to the side, but other than the tick in his jaw, he looked perfectly calm as he rubbed his hand over Charlie’s back.
Focusing on Lily, she forced a smile onto her face and nodded. “You’re doing really well, sweetheart.”
“Did the man seem to notice you looking at him?” Carter asked.
“If he did, he didn’t change what he was doing. He just leaned against the tree and looked down at his phone and then brought it back up again. Maybe he wasn’t taking our picture, but I started getting a weird feeling in my stomach.”
Charlie piped up, “Lily called us over and we all came up on the deck with Bounder. She whispered to us that she thought someone was across the street but didn’t want us to all look at the same time. So we were real sneaky and peeked. She was right. He just kept standing there and stared at us with his phone. I thought he might have been the bad man who dug the holes.”
Carter had taken out a pad of paper and was scribbling notes. At Charlie’s comment, he looked up but said nothing as Violet offered a slight shake of her head. “Can you describe him for me?”
“I saw him,” Violet answered in place of the children. She felt Ben’s fingers dig into her shoulder as he startled. She turned and looked at him, seeing his calm façade crack. “The kids came running in and said there was the man across the street, possibly the bad man, and I just raced outside. I saw him leaning against the tree looking down at his phone. I started to run across the street toward him—”
Ben’s fingers flexed again as he muttered, “What the hell, Violet?”
“I didn’t think, Ben. I just reacted. If there was somebody out there who’d been staring at my children, I wanted to know. I was going to find out what he was doing!”
Ben’s jaw ticked again, and she had a feeling they’d have more words about her actions, but she had no plans on apologizing for giving in to her mama bear’s instinct to protect her cubs. Turning back to Carter, she said, “He was dressed in brown. Brown pants, a brown jacket. Even a brown fedora on his head, which seemed out of place. He didn’t see me at first because he was looking down at his phone, but as soon as I started across the street, he looked up and then took off running. Because there were cars on the street, I couldn’t dart across, and he got away before I was able to safely get to the other side. I realized I ran out of the house without my phone, so I couldn’t call for help or even take a picture of him.”
“Did you get a close look at his face?” Carter asked.
“Not very well. He was Caucasian, I’d say late forties, early fifties. Slight build. Shorter than the two of you,” she described, inclining her head toward both Ben and Carter. Sighing heavily, she added, “I realize that’s not much to go on.”
Carter looked toward Tara and smiled. “Sweetheart, can you take the kids for a little bit, and I’ll chat with Ben and Violet?”
Standing, Tara held her hands out, and upon receiving nods from Violet, Charlie and Lily stood, also.
“We were just getting ready for snacks,” Violet said. “Tara, if you’d like to take them into the kitchen, Lily can show you where everything else is.” By now, the adrenaline rush had left her, and she slumped against Ben, grateful for his embrace as he easily took her weight.
Once Tara and the kids had headed into the kitchen, Carter shifted his chair closer to Ben and Violet. “Okay, you want to explain the bad man and holes comments from Charlie?”
21
Ben felt as though he were hanging on by a thread. Flashes of missions with his SEAL team flew through his mind.
The time they were racing toward their helicopter hovering just off the ground in the mountainous region of Afghanistan. He was the next to last one on and turned to see Heartbreaker hit the ground as the sound of gunfire erupted. Leaning out, he grabbed Brian by the arm as the bird took flight, pulling his teammate up.
When a hostage rescue on the west coast of Africa took a nosedive after a poisonous snake bit Mars and they had to ditch the original plan, quickly changing roles, managing to get the hostage and Mars out in one piece.
The time he almost didn’t make it out of a Mexican drug cartel’s mansion because a child stumbled into the area where Ben was setting explosives. Ben had to get the child to safety at the risk of his own as well as his team’s.
There were a hundred other memories… but nothing was like the feeling he had when Charlie’s voice on the other end of his phone said, “Ben, can you come home? There’s a scary man staring at us, taking pictures.”
When the call came in, he was almost home, having spent the afternoon at Anderson Construction with Daniel. On a high, having accepted a job while working on becoming a licensed contractor, he was in a hurry to get home so that he could celebrate with his grandmother, Violet, Lily, and Charlie. But as soon as he heard Charlie’s words, he stepped on the accelerator, his heart pounding until he rushed into Violet’s house and saw for himself that the kids were safe. Knowing the kids would take their panic cues from him, he called upon his SEAL training and locked down his emotions.
Now, sitting with his arm around Violet and facing Carter, he explained what Charlie saw out his window and how they all initially thought it was nightmares. “To be honest, even Charlie seemed confused as to whether or not he was awake or asleep at first. Then he admitted that he had looked out the window to see a man in the yard.”
Carter’s brows drew down, but he remained silent, still scribbling in his notebook. As Ben described how Lily’s twisted ankle led him to canvas the yard, he explained the lifted sod and soft dirt that had been disturbed.