They were nearly finished with their meal when the doorbell rang. Welcoming the opportunity to escape the silence, Ellen said that she'd see who it was and quickly left the table. A few seconds later, all of them could hear it as she answered the door.

Instead of the conversation they expected, the rest of the family was surprised to see Ellen come back into the dining room-closely followed by a man wearing some kind of mask. Even more surprising was that there were two more men behind the first, all of them with their faces covered.

Demanding "Hey, what's going on here?!", Vic started to get up, only to have the man behind Ellen club him with a pistol that Vic hadn't seen. Knocked to the floor, Vic could only lay there, stunned, as the man behind Ellen told all of them "This is gonna go easy as long as all you folks just stay still and don't make any fuss. Once we get what we're after, we'll be gone, and you can all go back to doing whatever. Got it?"

Terrified, Ellen and the kids said that they did; Vic could only nod weakly.

Still watching the four of them, the man behind Ellen told his companions "Okay, go to it."

From where she stood, Ellen could see as the other two men headed for the stairs to the second floor before the man behind her told her "Okay, lady, go ahead and have a seat. This might take a while, and I don't need anybody getting frisky and trying to get away." When she was seated, the man backed up a little bit, then pointed his pistol at Vic and told him "You, too, buddy-off the floor and on a chair, where I can keep a good eye on you. No more trouble, right?"

Again, Vic could only nod as he slowly got himself back onto the chair he'd been in.

Each minute that passed seemed more like an hour to the family as they waited under the watchful eyes of the masked man. It was roughly twenty minutes after they first saw him that one of the others came in and whispered something to him. He became visibly agitated, and they heard him say "Then one of you look again, only don't be too neat or picky. I want the other one to start hauling out anything else valuable; the TV, stereo, computers, that kind of shit. Go on, get moving!"