The Year We Disappeared (25 page)

“What are you doing bringing a vicious dog like that down here?” the woman in the red ski coat yelled at my mom. “There are children here!”

“He’s our guard dog,” Mom started to explain. “We have to have him with us . . .”

“How dare you! That dog is violent and should be put to sleep! I should call the cops on you!” the woman shouted.

“We are the cops!” Mom yelled back, getting in her face. “My husband is a cop, and someone tried to kill him. That’s why we have this violent dog, for your information.”

Dad motioned to us to come in off the ice. I moved toward the shore, but my brothers both stood like statues. We had never seen Mom talk to someone like that.

We sat on the log by the pond and quickly pulled our skates off as the woman went over to console her kids. As we hurried back up the trail to our van, I heard her say, “Go on and take your horrible dog with you!”

“Bitch,” Mom said under her breath. We all got into the van without a word. Dad held Max, who was now happy as a puppy, his tongue out and tail wagging. He was content to be by my dad; his job was to protect us, and that’s what he had done. I was glad the woman hadn’t noticed that both of my parents were carrying guns. I wonder what she would have thought of us then.

When we got home, Mom took out the typewriter and put it on the kitchen table, got out some nice paper, and started typing. I came into the kitchen and stood behind her. “What are you writing?” I asked her.

“My résumé,” she said without looking up. “I’m going to find a nursing job somewhere far away from here, and we are going to move.”

I pulled out a chair and sat next to her, watching her fingers move quickly over the keys. “I don’t want to move.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. She stopped typing for a moment and looked at me. “You
do
, sweetie. We can’t stay here and live like this. It’s dangerous for your dad, and for us, and we can’t do it anymore. We have to leave.”

“What about my friends at school?” I asked her.

“Oh Cee, you hardly have any friends left. Haven’t you noticed that no one is allowed to play with you? No one can have you over at their house? You don’t get invited to anyone’s birthday parties anymore. The other kids are scared to even ride the bus with you.” Mom laughed a little, then stopped herself and looked at me. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Just Meg can’t ride the bus, nobody else ever said that,” I pointed out. Suddenly I was sorry I had ever shared that story with her. “Besides, now that the cops aren’t at school all the time, I think my old friends are going to like me again.”

Mom let out a sad sigh and stopped typing for a second. “Cee, go watch TV with your brothers, okay? I have a lot of work to do.”

The next week, I tried to act like everything was great so Mom would change her mind. I was even nice to Erin at school, hoping that maybe she would be the one person who would finally invite me over to her house to play. One afternoon when we got home from school, I rang the buzzer and said the code: “I don’t have any homework tonight.” When Dad came out to hold Max, I asked if we could play with him in the yard a little bit. You could throw him a ball, and no matter how high or far you tried to throw it, Max would catch it before it hit the ground. He moved so fast, he was like a blur of brown and black. Eric and Shawn came home and we all started playing with Max, while Dad and his friend Craig Clarkson stood by and watched us.

“I’ll get it,” Eric said, racing over to retrieve the ball that Max had dropped. Max saw Eric reach for the ball and turned to snap at him, lunging so fast it caught us all off guard. Dad moved to restrain him, and Eric tripped over himself running to get away. Dad got Max secured and pulled back on his collar until the dog’s front legs came up off the ground. He was almost choking Max. “My ankle hurts,” Eric said, standing up and limping.
Dad motioned for us to go into the house; playtime was over. I watched from the kitchen window as Dad dragged Max back over to his doghouse and chained him roughly. Then he turned and came in the house, leaving Max whining and heartbroken. The dog knew he had disappointed Dad, and he was visibly crushed.

That night when Mom came home, Eric’s ankle had ballooned to three times its normal size. She moved it around while Eric winced in pain. “It’s sprained, not broken,” she sighed. She got out an ice pack and an Ace bandage and wrapped it tightly. Dad brought up an old pair of crutches from the basement and adjusted them to Eric’s height.

“No more playing with that dog,” I overheard Mom say to Dad as they were making supper. “We’re very lucky it was just a sprain. That dog is trained to kill—don’t ever forget that.”

I felt horrible. My brother was hurt. Dad was angry at Max. Mom was mad at Dad. And Max was crushed. He lay in his doghouse whining for attention until Dad finally went out that night and petted him and told him he was still a good dog. I had wanted to show everyone that we could be happy, that things were returning to normal, but my plan backfired horribly, only making it more obvious that this could never work.

That night the sounds of the house kept spooking me and I couldn’t sleep. Every time the furnace kicked on, I felt under my mattress for the steak knife that I had hidden there and wrapped my hand around the wooden handle. I was tired of always being
afraid. Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones who had given up; now I had too. If we did move, I was never going to tell anyone about what had happened here in Falmouth. I would make up a whole new story, about a whole new girl, leaving in only the good stuff and pretending that was still me. I fell asleep thinking up new names for myself and stories that I would tell.

ON July 4, roughly two months before my shooting, there was a fatal accident on Route 28. The victim was an assistant district attorney. I’d pronounced him dead on the scene and called the sergeant. Because it was a fatality, it had to be investigated before traffic could pass. A tow truck arrived to deal with the wreck, and I diverted traffic east of the area. The first vehicle I stopped was a tractor-trailer. It was taking a while for the tow truck to pick up the car, and the guy in the semi was getting impatient, revving his engine and looking generally pissed off. I looked into the cab at the driver and recognized him as Ray Meyer’s brother, James, but didn’t think anything of it. I wasn’t doing anything to him that I wouldn’t do to the general public: there was an accident on the road ahead and no way around it. I couldn’t have given anyone preferential treatment, even if I had wanted to make an exception.

Since traffic wasn’t going anywhere for a while, I got out my clipboard and starting filling out the shift log. James Meyer was revving his engine, letting me know he wasn’t happy, and it was loud and hot as hell standing right next to it. I yelled up through his passenger side window that if he was in a rush he could turn around and take a side street down to the ocean and up Maravista. As I walked back in front of the rig, he dropped it into first and hit the gas—and me. He didn’t stop at all. He caught just enough of me to spin me around and knock me down but not actually run me over. I got up, dusted myself off and picked up my clipboard, but before I could approach him, he drove directly through the accident scene and trucked on down the road. Except for some minor abrasions to my hands and arms from the pavement, there was no physical harm done, but I was angry as hell.

As soon as the accident was cleared up, I went straight to James Meyer’s home and arrested him. I took him down to the station and charged him with assault and battery on a police officer with a deadly weapon. Our original trial date was set for mid-September. After my shooting, the case against James Meyer was in limbo, under a postponement.

That winter, a couple of weeks after I got home from my second surgery, I read in the paper that James Meyer had been arraigned that Monday in Superior Court. The judge had decided there was not sufficient evidence to hold a trial. I had not been notified of the new date for the arraignment. To say I was
irate would be an understatement. This was the case that was set to go to trial two weeks after my shooting. And if I was right about who had shot me, then this case had a lot to do with why someone wanted me dead.

At that time, Sergeant Robert Peres was our brand-new court officer, the guy on the force who was in charge of letting cops know when their court dates were, and he didn’t tell me about the Meyer case date. When I asked about it, he was all apologies; he had no idea that I’d want to follow up on any of my old cases. Wasn’t I officially retired from police duty? “I wasn’t even sure you were out from your surgery yet.” The excuses went on.

By this time, Chief Ferreira had officially retired and Captain Martin became the chief of police. Captain Robichaud went from court officer to line captain, and that moved Bob—as we called Peres—up to a captain and into the position of court officer. Once he became court officer, I wasn’t informed of any court cases again. Bob knew Meyer and his family; they had been neighbors for years. Back in the late 1960s, before we even lived in Falmouth, there had been a dangerous fire at Bob’s junkyard (his second business, the one he ran in addition to being a cop). Meyer for some reason was the first person on the scene. He rushed Bob to the Hyannis hospital and probably saved his life. I wouldn’t say they were friends, but Meyer always had that over Bob. So he didn’t let me know that I was supposed to turn up to testify against Ray’s brother James. Just an oversight, a slipup? Who can say. All I know is that I wasn’t informed, the trial
happened without me, and the case was dismissed. Just like Meyer wanted it to be.

I’d charged James with assault and battery on a police officer with a deadly weapon—a serious charge, and about the same one I’d given Ray’s son, Paul Cena. It was getting to be a habit with this family. Ray was more pissed about the charges against James, though, seeing as how they were partners in their trucking business. A charge like that could mean not only jail time and fines but also a loss of his Class A license, which would be most unfortunate for business. And that was exactly what I had had in mind. Considering that this case against the Meyer clan was probably the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, maybe I should have just counted myself lucky that I didn’t know to show up. Who can say what would have happened if I had testified against James Meyer. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been good. But then again, if I look at everything my family and I had to go through because of my shooting, it would have been nice to face this guy in court, even if just to show them I was still around, still unafraid, still ready to make the charges stick and cause them a bit of unhappiness for a change.

I pointed the news item about James Meyer’s arraignment to Polly in the paper, and at first she was as pissed as I was. She was horrified at how I was being treated, how our family was being treated. And it was looking more and more like there was nothing we could do about it.

Later on that night, after the kids were in bed, we were sitting
on the couch and Polly looked like she was going to cry. I knew something was up. “Remember that kid you guys told me about last year, the one who went missing?”

At first I didn’t know what she was talking about. “The kid who was going to testify against Meyer,” Polly said, and this jogged my memory. The kid she was talking about was Paul Alwardt, a seventeen-year-old who was in the care of the department of youth services. He was a troubled kid, estranged from his family for some reason, and he’d found his way to Meyer, who had hired him to work at the trucking company.

In 1977, Meyer was charged in another arson case. There had been two mysterious fires on Paola Drive, close to where Meyer lived. After one blaze, a fireman followed footprints from the scene all the way back to Meyer’s mother’s house on the Meyer compound. Most unusual. The fire chief came into the police department and pulled Meyer’s file. And surprise, surprise, somehow Meyer found out about this. He actually had the balls to call the fire department and ask them why they were pulling his file, telling them they had no right, they would be sorry, this and that. But they filed the paperwork for an arson investigation anyhow. This time there was going to be a grand jury looking into the charges because Meyer had already served time for a previous offense. The problem was finding witnesses who would be willing to testify against him to make the charges stick. That’s where Paul came in. He had information about
Meyer, had seen and heard things that would most certainly put the guy away. He agreed to tell the grand jury what he knew but asked the police to protect him until trial time. He was terrified of Meyer, and with good reason. So one of our guys, Officer Carreiro—a good guy and excellent cop—escorted the kid to the Martha’s Vineyard ferry one evening. Paul wanted to go out to the island to stay with relatives where he’d be safe and no one could find him until the trial date. But he never arrived on the island, and his body was never found. It was like he had vanished into thin air, just days before he was going to testify.

“The detectives, they didn’t do anything about it, they never even looked for him,” Polly pointed out. “No one cared, because he didn’t have any close family. He was a human being, probably murdered, and no one cared.” She started to cry. “He was seventeen years old!”

I didn’t know what to tell her. The poor kid had joined the others who had crossed Meyer and “disappeared.” And now I was a part of that club. The only difference being that I was still alive. “If you’re right about who shot you, and I think you are,” Polly confided, “this guy is so crazy, I wouldn’t put anything past him. And no one seems to be willing or able to stop him.”

I nodded. She was right.

“We don’t know for sure who he’s connected to, and how far those connections reach. I know you’re angry, but I don’t want you to do anything stupid.” She eyed me knowingly. I wasn’t out
with my guns taking target practice every week because I was bored, and she knew it. “I don’t want you to end up like that kid, for any of us to end up like that,” Polly said. She sat quietly on the couch, probably thinking the same thing that I was: it was up to us to decide how to play this now. So what were we going to do?