“More movies,” Melody added. She, more than her sisters, loved the happily ever after nature of the films they’d watched. She was the little romantic of the bunch.
“What about you, Haley?” William asked, the last and most reticent of the girls.
“Swinging,” Haley said in a small voice.
William shot Cora a glance. They’d gotten good at communicating without words as they co-parented the kids. They’d had a couple of miscues but nothing serious since they understood each other so well.
She gave her head a slight shake in response to his glance, which she interpreted as considering a trip to the park. They were coming up on outside playtime according to the schedule. On the recent rainy days, they’d made adjustments. Since the sun was shining, outside was an option again. Going to the park, though, would mean a ton of extra prep and care for Paige. Maybe the tree house would be better if William checked it first and made sure it was safe.
His response was almost imperceptible, but she caught the negative. He was disagreeing with her and before she could open her mouth, he said, “Let’s take a trip to the park today.”
The girls’ cheers drowned out Cora’s quiet no. She relented quickly when she saw how delighted the girls were at the prospect of getting out of the house. She supposed they deserved that after being cooped up so long.
“You’ll need to get dressed,” Cora said after the noise settled. During the rainy days, they’d let the girls stay in their pajamas until after morning snack. At William’s suggestion she had started putting clothes out for each girl and letting them dress themselves. Other than a few backwards items, it had gone well and saved her time. It also fostered independence. “Everything’s ready for you upstairs. I’ll be there in a minute to help.”
She listened as they made their way to the second floor and entered the nursery before turning her gaze on William.
“Sorry,” William apologized. “They need the fresh air. So do we.”
He wasn’t wrong when he spoke for them as “we.” But Cora wasn’t sure how to define what was between her and William. Were they lovers? Friends with benefits? Something else entirely? She didn’t know, and she’d wondered several times in the past weeks what it would be like to simply date him without the complications of caring for children and living together under forced circumstances. But maybe he wasn’t interested in her in that way—maybe that was why he felt the need to hide their relationship.
“You’re right,” she relented, “but I’m worried about taking Paige too far. I don’t want her to hurt her leg when it’s almost healed.”
“I’ll take care of her. I’ll get her ready and stick with her like glue,” he offered.
Cora’s phone buzzed on the counter signaling a text. She reached for it and read the message. “It’s Francis. He wants to come over.”
William frowned at the mention of the girls’ relative. “Tell him no one’s home—that we’ve already gone to the park.”
Cora texted the message back, glad not to have to see Francis. She supposed her prejudice stemmed from the Lawrences. They’d tolerated Francis but never welcomed him into their home.
Upstairs, she facilitated getting dressed while William packed a bag of supplies for the trip to the park. He grabbed snacks and drinks before they loaded the girls into the strollers.
When they reached Woodside Park, the unanimous choice of the triplets, William kept them on the edge of the park while he studied the other people for a moment. Cora handed out juice boxes to keep the kids happy and hydrated. The park was crowded with families enjoying the first nice day in weeks.
“I’m going to take a walk around, but I don’t see anything to be concerned about,” William said and set off to circle the park’s perimeter, checking carefully around the building where the strange man had been on a previous visit. After a few minutes, he came back to them and lifted Paige from the single stroller. “It’s all clear.”
“No sandbox or slides for her,” Cora warned, tickling Paige’s chin to take the sting out of her words. Paige was adventurous, intrepid even, and loved to run free in the park. Soon, she’d be able to do that again. Until then, she’d have to be contained.
“Got it. We’ll swing instead.” He headed for the swings while Cora got the other two out of the double stroller.
“What do we do first?” she asked, hoping Melody and Haley could agree on something.
“There,” both girls pointed toward the big play structure that contained cargo nets, tunnels to crawl through, and multiple slides.
“Okay,” Cora said warily. A good run in the park was what the girls needed, but William was going to owe her a shoulder massage later. She could feel her body tense up at the thought of keeping track of both girls while they climbed, slid, and played.
She released Melody and Haley, and they bolted off, each taking a different route into the structure. With other parents, she circled the area, dashing to the foot of slides when she saw one of the girls coming down, catching them and sending them back inside the structure. The girls must have saved up all their energy over all those days inside because it was all she could do to keep up.
Cora was soon damp with sweat. Even without rain, the day was humid. She paused for a moment under a shade tree to pull her hair back into a ponytail.
She glanced to check on William, who was still swinging Paige. Over the squeals of other children, she could hear Paige demanding to go higher and faster, but William was keeping her to a more controlled pace. Cora turned her eyes back to the play structure in time to see Haley pop out of a tube slide and land on her butt. The girl jumped to her feet and ran off toward the ladder to do it again.
Cora scanned for Melody. She’d been jumping between lily pad-type platforms across an opening, but she was no longer there. Cora circled the structure. Kids ran in every direction, but she focused on searching for Melody’s yellow shirt.
The first wave of panic struck her thirty seconds later. Haley re-appeared, crossing a platform on her way to a twisty slide. Cora couldn’t keep track of Haley and look for Melody, so she caught Haley and held her while continuing to search.
“Can you see Melody?” Cora asked the girl she held.
Haley’s eyes went huge, but she shook her head in answer. The panicked feeling inside Cora ramped up. How long had it been since she’d laid eyes on Melody? Two minutes? Five? Longer? She didn’t know.
She made one more scan before dashing over to William at the swings. “I can’t find Melody.”
His expression shifted from carefree to concern to in control in less than a second.
“Where did you see her last?” he asked, stopping Paige’s swing and pulling her out even as he studied the play structure.
“On the slide, the green one on the end. Oh, god. I took my eyes off her for a minute.” Cora felt her throat close off, and she fought for breath.
“We’ll find her.” William beelined for a shady bench and placed Paige on it. “Stay with the kids. I’ll search.”
Cora sat Haley next to her sister and tried to keep calm. She got the girls playing a game of I-spy while she watched William circle the play structure, his eyes focused on every little girl. There were so many. He couldn’t do this alone. She had to help him. With a glance at the two girls on the bench, she moved off ten feet, then twenty. Looking back every few seconds to check on them.
William had crossed to a play structure for older kids with a climbing wall and ropes course. Would Melody have wandered that far? Had someone enticed her away? How had Cora missed it if they had?
She retreated a few steps back toward her other charges, but when she caught a flicker of bright yellow material under a slide on the big kids’ structure, she jogged toward it.
“William,” she screamed, waving him toward the burst of yellow.
He sprinted in the direction she indicated and dove under the slide. A second later, he came out with Melody, her cheeks stained with tears.
“Oh
, thank goodness.” Cora dropped to her knees and gathered Melody to her. “Are you okay?”
“I got scared,” Melody whimpered.
“What scared you?” William asked.
“I wanted to go down the big slide, but they pushed me out of the way.” Melody sniffled between the words.
“Who pushed you?”
“I don’t know. Some boys.”
“It’s okay now. We have you, and Haley and Paige are waiting just over…” Cora trailed off when she heard her name screamed over the noise in the park. She dashed toward the bench. Haley sat there alone, sobbing. “Paige,” she cried, but William was already running.
She looked in the direction he’d taken. He was chasing a man who had Paige clutched to him. She was kicking and screaming for all she was worth despite the cast, but she couldn’t break free.
William, roaring like a lion, bore down on them. Just before William made contact, the man dropped Paige into a flower bed and took off, running as fast as a sprinter. As if she were inside William’s head, Cora felt his dilemma: chase the bad guy or get the child? He decided quickly, scooping up Paige from a bed of lavender and hugging her to him.
After a moment, William strode toward Cora. “We need to get home. Now.”
Nineteen
William rose when his supervisor, Adam Boswell, entered the office at Alert Security. The door closed with a definite click, ramping up the tension that roared through William’s veins. He knew he’d screwed up at the park. And now Boswell was going to break it down for him again.
“You can sit,” Boswell said, not bothering with a greeting. He let another few beats of silence pass while he re-organized the files on his desk into neat stacks.
William knew the trick. He’d used it himself with his subordinates in the Navy. It was an effective method of intimidating, of making people ill at ease, and what William deserved considering the circumstances.
Boswell turned cool gray eyes on William. “Explain your actions at the park.”
William had called Alert Security as he’d jogged home with Cora and the girls. His first concern had been getting them safely in the house. His second was filing the report on the incident. He’d talked to the local police, Ben Albright, and three other guys from Alert, and done the paperwork. Boswell had called him in to re-hash it all. So, he would.
“I was with Paige, the one with the broken leg, at the swings when Cora ran over to tell me that she couldn’t find Melody. She’s the one who smiles the most.” He paused. That was an irrelevant detail, which Boswell wouldn’t appreciate. “Anyway, we located Melody under a slide, as I’ve reported. There doesn’t seem to have been any foul play there. Just mean kids.” He’d liked to have had a word with the kids who made the happy toddler run and hide, but he’d had to focus his attention elsewhere.
He continued his report, visualizing the scene in his head as he spoke. The kidnapper had been non-descript as a person. White male, thirties, medium build, shaggy brown hair, light blue t-shirt, and jeans. He’d have blended in with the dads who’d taken their kids to the park. If he’d been there when William made his security sweep, he might have passed over him.
William tried to recall every person he saw at the park from the point of arrival to the moment Cora alerted him to the problem. Nowhere in his mind could he see the assailant until the man had Paige.
“Where’d the perp go when he fled the park?” It was a question William expected to get pegged with.
“I don’t know,” William had to admit. He’d been more concerned with Paige than chasing the guy down. She’d looked so helpless, sitting there with her leg in the cast among the purple flowers.
“Did you check the parking lot or the surrounding streets?” Boswell kept at it.
“No, I wanted to get Cora and the girls to where they’d be safe,” William explained.
“Did you think there was another credible threat coming at them?”
“I couldn’t be sure. And anyway, they were upset.” Cora had been shaking, physically shaking, and the girls had all been crying. He’d loaded them into the strollers as fast as possible and run behind Cora, encouraging her. She was tougher than she looked, he’d decided, when she’d set a blistering pace and still managed to talk soothingly to the girls.
Boswell leaned back in his chair, using silence as a weapon once again.
“I know I screwed up,” William admitted, getting it out in the open. He’d spent the night reviewing the mistakes he’d made. His actions weren’t going to reflect well on his future with Alert Security.
“Damn straight you did.” Boswell came forward again, resting his beefy hands on the desk. “You should have left the girl to Miss Caspian and stuck to the attacker. She could have called us and the police while you handled the pursuit. No one was going to come at the four of them if they all stuck together, out in the open in a crowded park. A toddler left on a bench was easy pickings.”
He’d let Cora, Paige, and Haley out of his sight for too long while he’d focused on finding Melody. So much of the incident he should have handled differently. He knew why he’d failed. He’d been afraid for them, afraid something would happen that he couldn’t prevent, afraid to lose the closest thing to a family he’d had in twenty years.
“You got caught up in daddy detail,” Boswell said, matter-of-factly, stating exactly what William was thinking. “That’s not your job on this assignment, Royce. Protect the kids and eliminate the threat. You’re not their caregiver. You don’t have the luxury of getting emotionally attached. And it complicates the hell out of an assignment if you do.”
William knew that, had kept it in the forefront of his thoughts during his initial time in the household, but his professional distance had decayed steadily. At this point, he cared about the girls, probably too much. And Cora…how he felt about her was far more complicated.
“Can you remember anything else about the attack at the park?” Boswell circled back to the problem. “Any detail that might be useful to the investigation?”
“Everything’s in the report,” William admitted and listened to Boswell’s irritated huff.
“Leaving us nothing new to go on.” Boswell tossed the original dossier for the assignment across the desk at William. “Go through it again, every word. Whoever’s behind this has to appear in there, but he’s a slippery SOB. Your actions yesterday netted us no new data for the investigation.”
“Yes, sir,” William said, rising. It was time to take the fight to the bad guy. Protecting and waiting only worked for so long. If William knew who his opponent was, he could be proactive and go after the bastard.
“And change up your schedule,” Boswell advised. “It’s obvious you’re being watched. Don’t make it easier for someone to get to the kids.”
Williams should have realized that, too. Anyone familiar with their pattern would know they frequented that particular park on nice days. He’d made more than one rookie mistake on this one. Time for that to end.
At home, William relieved Ben, who’d come to stay with Cora and the girls. William found his co-worker in the home office, going through surveillance footage.
“How was your trip to the principal’s office?” Ben’s tone was teasing, but William couldn’t find much humor in the situation.
“Not good. All quiet here?” William had resisted the urge to call Cora on his drive home. Professional distance, he’d reminded himself.
“Nothing doing. Cora’s kept the kids inside and nothing’s triggered on any of the cameras. Going through that again?” Ben gestured to the dossier that William tossed on the desk.
“Boswell thinks I might’ve missed something.”
“Always a good idea to look at it with fresh eyes. Do you want any help?”
“No, my task. Appreciate you coming in,” William said. It had been Ben’s day off, but he was the only other protector Cora knew and trusted.
“Call if you need me. I’ll re-arm the alarm when I get outside.”
He studied the photographs of Bob and Jeanie Lawrence: a wedding picture, a snapshot from a beach vacation, and a formal portrait when the triplets were born. He could see traces of their parents in each of the girls. He moved onto the images from the restaurant fire that took their lives, then moved on to the fire marshal’s report. The blaze had started in the kitchen on the ground level, filling the two-story restaurant with smoke. The couple had been at a table on the second floor near an emergency exit, that had been blocked by tables and chairs. Could have been accidental or a controlled method of assassination. William grimaced. Smoke and fire were terrible ways to die.
Financials for their company came next. William was no expert at this kind of data, but a forensic accountant had already combed through it all. William re-read his report. Someone was skimming money from the company—someone with the wherewithal to know how to get it and to almost succeed in hiding the theft. Little amounts at first and a substantial chunk right before the couple’s deaths. The accountant had been unable to trace the perpetrator or track the money since it went to a Cayman Islands account.
Another possible lead that dead-ended.
William dove into family bios. Neither Bob nor Jeanie had living parents or siblings, which might strike another investigator as odd. Not William. He’d had only his elderly great uncle since he was nine. Not even a cousin—unlike the Lawrences. William studied the information on Francis Kelp. Private high school, Ivy League university, bachelor’s in engineering and master’s in computer science. No employment records other than with the corporation owned by the Lawrences. They’d parted ways several years ago based on what William was seeing. Francis had designed the software that made the company famous and the triplets’ family rich, but he’d had no head for business. He’d been duly compensated for his idea and that’s where the record of his association with the business ended.
The SEAL’s Unexpected Triplets Page 13
