The Year We Disappeared (23 page)

Dad would work with Max out in the yard some afternoons when it wasn’t too cold for his hip. One afternoon, I watched Dad give Max the “hit” signal, punching his fist into his open palm. Then he pointed at the fence. Max growled, and in about a second had crossed the yard and hit the fence at full speed, jumping up. He almost cleared the eight-foot fence—I couldn’t believe it. Then Dad clapped his hands twice, and Max ran back over to his side like a happy puppy, his tail wagging. Dad gave the
“sit” signal, and Max sat right in front of him, watching Dad’s face the whole time. Dad then circled his hand and touched his hip and Max came around to sit next to Dad’s left hip. He petted Max on top of the head to let him know he did a good job and waved his arm out, which signaled the drill was over and he was free to go. I knew then that one signal could change this easygoing dog into a vicious attack dog. He loved Dad and would do anything for him, even if that meant killing someone at his command.

I didn’t really like Max; in fact, I was terrified of him. So was my little dog, Tigger. She knew that Max could eat her in one bite, and she refused to go outside, even to pee. It was really sad to watch her shake and hide every time Max barked in the yard, which was often. So, just a few days after Max moved in, Mom told us that Tig would have to move out. “She is going to be so much happier with Aunt Bee and Uncle Dale up in Maine,” Mom explained. ‘And you want her to be happy, right?” My brothers didn’t seem to care that much, but I cried. Kelly was also leaving, going home, and she took Tigger with her when she went.

When they left, the house felt dead and empty inside. Kelly had been sharing my room since the summer, and now I would have to sleep in there alone. I missed her, even though she got on my nerves sometimes, always asking me how I was feeling and wanting me to talk to her about stuff. And now we didn’t have Tigger either. I woke up at night sometimes and thought I heard
her paws on the kitchen tiles, the way I used to when she would get up in the middle of the night for a drink. I would fall back asleep feeling so happy that Tigger was there again. But in the morning, I would remember that she was gone.

Once the fence was put up, it was so close to my window that it blocked out the sun, and my room stayed dark all day. The wood was new and white and reflected into the windows, making me think, for the first few mornings when I woke up, that it had snowed overnight—all that whiteness outside everywhere. From the inside, we were cut off. We couldn’t see the church next door or our other neighbors, and they couldn’t see us, the fence was so high. It looked strange from the outside, too, unrecognizable as our house, our yard.

When the construction was done, a security company came and installed an alarm system and an intercom, which Eric and Shawn and I loved. When someone came over, they had to push a button on the outside of the fence, and it would ring inside, like a phone. You could push a button in the house and talk to whoever was outside and decide if you wanted to “buzz” him or her in. This meant pressing a button to undo the lock on the gate outside. We never did buzz anyone in because of Max—if he wasn’t chained, Dad would have to hold him before we could let anyone in.

The large gate across the driveway always had to be opened manually, and this was a huge pain, especially in the winter months when it was cold and snow piled against it, making it
hard to move. Now anytime we went outside, or anyone else came in, we had a series of steps to go through: turning off the alarm, securing the dog, swinging open the big driveway fence, then closing it and resecuring everything. Even to take the trash out, Dad had to be there, holding the dog, and the alarm system had to be disarmed.

The fence also had a motion detector that would go off if someone tried to climb over it. “If you hear that alarm at night,” Mom told me, “you go up into the attic with your brothers and stay there until we tell you that you can come out, okay?” After we were woken up one windy night, terrified that someone was trying to scale the fence, we realized that the motion detector was so sensitive that almost anything—even Max walking near it—could set it off, sending the shrill alarm cutting through the house and notifying the police department immediately. Dad decided to turn off the motion detector and just leave the gates armed.

Our bus driver and the school principal had to be notified right away if we weren’t going to school, because if we weren’t on the bus or in class, our teachers and the bus driver had been instructed to contact the police immediately. Mom sat us down with Dad and Don Price the night before school started back up after Christmas break. “You cannot be late for class, you cannot miss the bus,” Mom explained. “You understand that the police will be looking for you if you are late, even by a few minutes?”

Don told us that when we got home from school, we were to
use a special code to be let into the fence. “You guys might be targets for someone trying to get to your dad,” he told us. “If someone comes over to you while you’re trying to get into the fence and puts a gun to your head, you’re going to have a special code to let us know that.”

I had been so happy to lose my police escort that I forgot about the real reason a cop had been following me to school. Suddenly, I wanted Arthur the Bear to walk me to the bus again and stand outside my classroom. The embarrassment of dealing with the other kids at school was better than someone putting a gun to my head.

“This code needs to be easy for you guys to remember,” Mom said. “If everything is safe and you want to be let in, you ring the buzzer, then say over the intercom, ‘I don’t have any homework tonight,’ like that. If someone is with you, or something bad is happening, you say, ‘I have
a lot
of homework tonight.’ Okay? Can you remember that?” She was looking right at me. It made me mad. Just because I was the youngest, she thought I didn’t get it.

“I can remember it,” I told her. I just didn’t want to ever have to use it.

“So the cops won’t be at school anymore?” Shawn asked.

“They will sometimes, just not every day, and not right outside your classroom. They’ll still swing by to check on you guys a lot,” Mom said.

“You’ll never know we’re there, sweetheart,” Don told me. I
think he was trying to make us feel better, like our lives would be more normal, but I was terrified. Having the fence up, the alarm system, this vicious dog, the code words—it just made everything more surreal. Things weren’t getting any better. They seemed to be getting worse.

A couple of nights after the security guys put in the alarm system, Eric and Shawn and I were sitting in the living room watching TV after dinner. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen with a couple of Dad’s friends from the force, John Ayoub and Craig Clarkson. I was lying on the rug in front of the TV doing my homework when suddenly the TV cut out and the whole house went black.

“Oh Jesus, Johnny,” Mom said in a high-pitched voice. She sounded scared.

“What’s happening?” I jumped up and screamed. Was someone in the kitchen hurting my mom?

I heard chairs being pushed back from the table and everyone scrambling around and talking at once. “Kids, kids, get in here now,” Mom called to us. As we moved through the dark into the kitchen, the control panel for the alarm system starting flashing and letting out a high-pitched warning sound. “That’s okay, just means that the system isn’t working,” Craig said.

Someone grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the attic doorway and shoved me up the stairs. I didn’t want to be first to go up into the dark, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I climbed the steep ladder without complaint, Eric and Shawn
behind me, then Mom. I could hear Dad and the guys talking quietly downstairs. “They’re going to get Dad’s rifle, don’t worry,” Mom whispered to us as we sat on the carpet in Eric and Shawn’s room. “Each one of these guys has at least one gun on him, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Mom, do you have your gun?” Shawn asked her.

“Oh damn it, I don’t,” Mom said. “I took it off.” In the dim light I could just see her as she felt along her side where she usually carried her gun. “Wouldn’t you just know it?” She sounded like she was trying to make a joke.

I couldn’t hear anyone downstairs anymore. Eric moved over to the window. “I see someone,” he whispered. I looked out the window too and saw a figure moving along the fence. It was a man holding a long gun that looked like it had a flashlight on top of it. “Who do you think that is?” Eric whispered.

“That’s your dad, that’s his gun,” Mom said. She sounded pretty confident, but what if she was wrong? What if that was someone else?

We watched the person with the gun walk the perimeter of the fence until he rounded the corner and we couldn’t see him anymore. I was waiting, tensed up. Somehow, I just knew I was about to hear that gun go off. I was ready for the sound of it, just like when we went shooting. I tried to remember the advice that Rick and Don gave my brothers that day, how to hold the gun, how to shoot it. If I had to get Mom’s gun from downstairs, I was pretty sure I could use it. Turn off the safety, I remembered. Aim
for the body, not the head. I was nervous that the trigger would be too hard to pull, but maybe Mom’s gun was easier than the one I had used that day and I could do it. I just had to pull harder—

We heard a door open, then footsteps downstairs, and we all held our breath. Then John Ayoub called up to us, “It’s okay, power’s out all over the street.”

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Mom said as she hurried down the stairs. When we got to the kitchen, Mom started lighting some candles. I watched Dad slide the small black flashlight off the top of his rifle and put the gun back into a big black suitcase that was open on the kitchen table. The inside of the case was made of black foam that had an imprint of the gun, so it fit perfectly inside. The flashlight had its own little spot too, right above the rifle. As Mom lit more candles, Dad snapped the case shut and took it out of the kitchen. “Bedtime,” Mom said to us.

Even though it was still early, my brothers and I went to our rooms without a word. When I lay down to go to sleep, I started thinking about what had happened. I realized that if someone had come for us tonight, I didn’t have a weapon anywhere that I could use. I didn’t have a gun, and I hardly knew how to use my mom’s. My dad’s rifle was too big, and his revolver was almost too hard for my brothers. What could I use?

I waited in the dark until I heard the other cops leave, until Mom and Dad went into their room for the night, then I waited until the house was quiet. I crept into the kitchen and opened
the silverware drawer. I knew exactly what I wanted: one of Mom’s good steak knives, with a wooden handle and serrated edge. Perfect. Back in my room, I hid the knife underneath my mattress, where I could reach it easily but no one else could see it.

The next morning on the bus, Amelia asked me if our power had gone out the night before. “It was so funny, my mom was right in the middle of making us a milkshake and the blender just died,” she told me. “She tried to mash it up with a fork, but it didn’t work. The bananas weren’t even cut up; there were big chunks of ice in it. It was so gross we just had to throw it out!”

I smiled at her story, and opened my mouth to say something. For some reason, Dad’s rifle with the mini flashlight came into my mind and I almost told Amelia about it. But then I caught myself.

“Yeah, our power went out too,” I told her, and left it at that.

WE were living in a fortress, hiding in plain sight. With the eight-foot fence around the house, the guard dog, and the alarm system, it felt more and more like prison every day. I was nearing the end of my rope and wanted this all just to go away.

Some days, the anger overwhelmed me. Why should my family have to live like this when they had done nothing wrong? The police department needed to move their asses and get something done. After the shooting, the focus of my hatred had been Meyer, but now that was morphing into something larger—I was mad at the cops who weren’t doing their jobs, the selectmen in town, the detectives, the principal at the boys’ school. The list was getting long. It was enough that Meyer had wanted me dead, that was personal. But I worked for these guys, for the town of Falmouth, for ten years, protecting residents and keeping the general population law abiding. And now that I was in need,
where were they? Who was protecting me and my family? The investigation into my shooting had gone from a good-natured bumbling attempt to pushing it away like it was something that smelled bad to a flat-out fiasco.

There was one aspect of my shooting that continued to haunt me that I just couldn’t shake: the fact that someone on the force—a fellow officer—must have given Meyer my work schedule. There’s no other way he could have set up the ambush the way he did—knowing right where to wait for me and at what time. So when I wasn’t thinking about ways I was going to off Meyer, I spent my time thinking about which one of my brothers-in-arms had turned rat. There was only one guy who kept coming to mind, and that was Larry Mitchell. He seemed like a pretty decent officer, but I’d heard he was friends with Meyer—though I didn’t know how close. That didn’t bother me as much as a couple of stories I’d heard about him from other cops, guys I trusted. First, Mitchell was the guy Rick and some other officers had seen the morning after my shooting talking to Meyer in the parking lot of the police station. According to the reports I heard, they were laughing and having a nice little chat, while inside the station everyone else was busy looking into what had happened to me the night before.

On the night I was shot, Mitchell had been assigned to ride in the “party car” with a friend of mine, Rufino “Chuck” Gonsalves. Chuck was a small-built Portuguese guy, with a full black mustache and a great smile with a little space between his front
teeth. If things were slow during his shift, Chuck had a habit of swinging by his home, about two miles down from our house on Sandwich Road, to see his wife and take a short coffee break. Whoever was riding with him would usually come along for some fresh coffee and pie. Then they’d go back to work.