Instead, she and Dad would wear their guns and we would bring Max for protection. “It’s time we started acting like a family again,” she said. By this point, my brothers and I had overheard enough conversations to know what was going on. Mom was tired of the constant fear and anger, living in seclusion and under protection. She wanted to move away if there wasn’t a break in Dad’s case soon. “This is no way to live,” she had told Dad. “It’s not fair to any of us.” The town of Falmouth also wanted us to move; the selectmen had offered to pay to help us relocate, which really got Dad steaming mad. “They’ll spend money to send us somewhere else but they won’t spend money on the case,” he wrote in his notebook. “They want to make us disappear.” If we did want to move, the town had collected over fifteen thousand dollars—most of it donations from the townspeople—that would be ours for a down payment on a new house. The police department would sell our house for us after we left, and all tracks would be covered.
