Hayley’s friends, of course, all wanted to meet the boy and took turns talking to him. This made Otis feel very much like “the boy,” which was fine with him. Mairi and Michaela giggled about this all afternoon.
SUNDAY
July 22, 2007
THE CHESHIRE United Methodist Church is on Academy Road, down the street from Cheshire Academy. It’s a hulking white building, built in 1970 and redolent of the often unfortunate architecture of the era—an overlapping series of featureless, cutout facades with white peaks. One Sunday morning, Bill, Jennifer, and Michaela attended the nine-thirty service—Hayley was away at a friend’s house for the weekend or she would have been there, too. The Reverend Stephen Volpe, a buoyant, moon-faced man whom everyone calls Pastor Steve, led the worship, standing as he always did in front of the austere dark cross, backlit on a gleaming white slab behind the altar.
The three Petits stood for the opening prayer, a call-and-answer between Pastor Steve and the congregation, taken from The Africana Worship Book:
Invisible God, be visible through our faith today.
Praise God who empowers us with faith to see what others miss.
Will we stop our building a better future because of evil?
No! Our God will deliver us from evil.
Will we concede our dreams for our world, your Creation, because of evil?
No, God will judge all evildoers.
Pastor Steve didn’t give a sermon that morning. Instead, some of the younger church members who had participated in the United Methodist Action Reach-Out Mission by Youth, or U.M. ARMY, stood and spoke about their experiences on that year’s weeklong mission. Bill and Jen felt a certain pride listening to this. A few years earlier, one of the very first members of Cheshire United Methodist to participate in U.M. ARMY was Hayley Petit.
This morning Hayley was in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a beach town north of Boston, where a bunch of her gang had gone up to hang out one more time before the summer wore thin and everybody scattered off to college. By the time Bill, Jen, and Michaela walked out of church around eleven-fifteen, Hayley was already on her way home, driving the old Mercedes clunker that her parents had bought used and felt was as safe as any car for a seventeen-year-old girl. Hayley called it the Tank.
Some Sundays, Bill and Michaela snuck up the road to the Notch Store for the homemade doughnuts they served only on Sundays. It was supposed to be their secret—Jen had been trying to encourage Bill to eat healthy, especially since his heart trouble—but somehow Michaela always let it slip. On that day, though, they returned straight to Sorghum Mill Drive for lunch. It was a July Sunday, with mercifully little to do. Bill’s dad called and asked if he wanted to play golf. The sky over central Connecticut was as blue as it gets, and the temperature was already up over 80. Jen and Michaela told him to go ahead—they were thinking of heading to the beach anyway, and that wasn’t Bill’s thing. This was something of a routine during the summer months at home, or on vacation—girls in the sun (Jen shaded by an umbrella), Bill on the golf course. It worked for everybody.
On his way to the club, Bill called Ron to see if he wanted to join him and his dad for golf. Ron lived about halfway between Bill’s house in Cheshire and the club in Farmington. But Ron hadn’t shaved all weekend and was working in the yard and figured that by the time he showered and drove the fifteen minutes to the club…He told Bill to go ahead, he’d catch him next weekend.
Shortly after Bill left, Hayley showed up from her trip on schedule and the three Petit girls jumped in the family minivan and drove to Silver Sands State Park, on the shore of Long Island Sound, about a half hour away. It would be crowded, but it was a beautiful stretch of beach near a breeding ground for herons and egrets, and the girls would bring their books, maybe take a walk on the old boardwalk, and just sit. Jennifer would be careful not to get too much sun.
Bill finished up his golf game a little after six and checked in with Jen on his cell. She told him that she and Michaela bought some groceries at Stop & Shop for dinner, and that KK wanted to cook dinner for the family. Jen asked Bill to stop by a farm stand on his way home for some fresh corn or whatever looked good. He pulled in to a couple of places, but it was a Sunday evening and everyone had closed up for the weekend, so he drove home. By seven-fifteen, he had hugged Hayley and was hearing about her trip as he dug into the tomato bruschetta that Jennifer and Michaela had made. The sky was clouding up a little, but the air was still bright and warm, and Sorghum Mill Drive was quiet. Bill’s daughter was home safe. There was food on the stove. He had played pretty decent golf with his dad. Life was good.
They decided to eat in the sunroom. Jen helped Michaela serve the pasta and sauce they had made with local tomatoes, which Bill made a fuss over, and after supper the girls sat around the table talking. Eventually Bill picked up the Sunday paper and sank into the living-room couch. After a while, he glanced up and noticed that it was going on ten. Ten o’clock Sunday night was when Army Wives, a new show the girls liked, came on TV. They switched places—the girls took over the living-room couch, and Bill went back out to the sunroom with the paper.
He was exhausted. He had gotten some sun out on the golf course, and he had just eaten a big plate of pasta. Not long after the girls’ show started, he was out cold on the couch, a section of the newspaper on his chest. When Army Wives ended, at eleven, the girls locked up the house and went upstairs to bed, leaving a light on in the kitchen for the cats, as usual. With her dad asleep on the couch downstairs, Michaela curled up in her parents’ bed, where she and Jennifer read the latest Harry Potter book together, and fell asleep.
This wasn’t the first time Bill had zonked out on the couch for the night. He had never needed much sleep, but especially since Jennifer’s MS diagnosis, she got tired early. He didn’t like to wake her by climbing into bed, and anyway, he could function fine after a night on the couch, even on five or six hours of sleep.
He awoke from a dream to find himself in the darkened house, the lamp by the couch glowing just above his head. He reached up to turn it off, closed his eyes, and fell back asleep.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil
walks about like a roaring lion,
seeking whom he may devour.
—1 Peter 5:8, tweeted by Bill Petit, 2013
MONDAY
July 23, 2007
THE PAIN comes slowly, like a thought.
Ow. What the…?
It is a shock, being awakened this way. You’re pretty sure you are in your home, on your couch, but you can’t see, and someone is hitting you, hard.
Aaaow!
By the time Bill feels the blows, they stop.
The pain racks every part of his head. There is blood in his eyes. He had been sleeping, a deep, thick sleep after a hot day, but now suddenly he isn’t sure whether he is sleeping or dreaming, whether the pain is real, whether he is in the sunroom or some place that only looks like it. Everything is black. He feels his house around him, and yet what’s happening is so incongruous and nonsensical as to seem impossible. Where are the girls?
Seconds pass before he determines that the pain is actual. That this is happening.
Two people—two men, black shapes in the blackness of the glass room—look down at him. His eyes throb feverishly, but he can see their figures floating in the gauzy darkness, and at the end of an arm he sees a handgun. Nine millimeter. Bill has treated plenty of cops over the years who come in wearing guns in their holsters, and he always asks what they’re carrying. Plus, he watches NCIS sometimes. He knows a little about guns, and this one looks like a 9mm. But whose gun is it? Not his. He doesn’t own weapons, unless you count the baseball bat the other guy is holding, the one the guy just used to beat Bill’s head with. The bat was a giveaway from Ronrico Rum. Bill picked it up once at the liquor store his dad used to own.
The men bind his wrists with plastic zip ties, then they tie rope over the zip ties, tight, his palms pressed together as if in
prayer. Then they tie his ankles together the same way, so tight that the medial malleolus on each ankle—the bony ball that sticks out at the base of the tibia—is pressed hard against the other and he can’t even rub them together. Warmth spreads across his face, into his eyes—his blood. He has been taking a prescription blood thinner called Coumadin since he had the heart trouble a few years ago, so as he lies on the couch, he is bleeding out faster than most people would. His right eye throbs.
Only one of the men speaks. While Bill lies there stunned, a few feet from the table where only hours before he had sat with his wife and daughters eating dinner, the talker tells him they’re just there for the money, and to stay calm. They ask him where the safe is, and Bill tells him there’s no safe in the house. Now the talker seems to be leaving the room—Bill can’t tell for sure, because his eyes are full of blood and the men have thrown some kind of cloth over his head, maybe a shirt. But that’s what it sounds like from his voice and his footsteps—that he is leaving Bill here with the other guy. As the talker leaves, Bills hears him say, “If he moves, put two bullets in him.”
What to do? This is bad. So what to do? What’s the strategy? Yell? Be quiet? He decides to stay quiet. Try to attack this guy? Ridiculous. There’s the gun, obviously. Bill can barely move. The pain is horrible. The plastic ties slice into the skin on his wrists and ankles. He feels like he is going blind. He goes over his options again and again, but right now, at this very moment, he does not seem to have any. There are two men in his home, one of them on the big side. The other one, who’s probably off looking for a safe, might have a gun, too. Bill is a pretty big guy, but in this state he can’t even stand up, let alone take on two men with guns and a bat and whatever else they want to use on him. At least Bill doesn’t hear any sounds from the rest of the house—no sounds of violence, no screams from upstairs, where he assumes the girls are. The men said they only want money. It makes sense that they would incapacitate the man of the house, the only one who could hurt them. But that didn’t mean they would hurt the girls, too. Why would they? Maybe they haven’t even woken the girls.
He doesn’t know how long he is left lying there, barely able to move, unable to see much of anything. He slides in and out of consciousness, his brain a slushy mess of fear, feverish pain, and the cloudiness of being awake when it should be sleeping.
But the men have woken the girls upstairs.
Michaela had fallen asleep in Bill and Jen’s bed next to her mother. The talker yanks pillowcases over their heads and tells them not to worry, that he is only there for money. He brings Michaela to her bed across the hall. He covers Hayley’s head, too, in her bed, in her room at the top of the stairs, and all three Petit females are tied by their wrists and ankles to the posts of their beds, their own panicked breaths amplified under the pillowcases, afraid to close their eyes but unable to see, listening to the unsettling quiet.
—
Bill’s head is so thick with pain it feels as if something is inside trying to beat its way out. Eventually—suddenly—both men are once again standing over him as he lies on the couch. They rip him from his delirium. He feels them cut the zip ties and clothesline from around his ankles and his relief at being able to move his legs again is immense. They grab him by both arms and jerk him to his feet. When he is standing, he wobbles—he has lost so much blood already, and his legs are weak from being bound together so uncomfortably for…How long have they been tied together? He doesn’t know. He tries to figure it out, his mind working to compute. He definitely fell asleep sometime between ten and eleven—that’s when Army Wives was on, and he knew he hadn’t lasted long after the girls migrated to the living-room couch. He woke up once to turn off the light but doesn’t know when that was. There isn’t a hint of brightness that he can see now—even through the shirt covering his face, he probably would be able to see the dimmest membrane of sunlight to the east, because the sunroom has east-facing windows. But there is no light. His best guess is that the men broke in between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., and that he has been incapacitated on the couch for two hours or so.
The men walk him up the step from the sunroom into the living room, up the other little step into the kitchen, and toward the basement door, which is off the kitchen. They’re bringing me downstairs, he thinks. He listens for any sound that might suggest the girls’ presence, but hears nothing. He again considers making a move, but what’s he going to do, kick them? Start swinging his tied-together hands, only to have the guy with the gun shoot him in the leg? Then where would he be? But it’s confounding, the silence. The not knowing. He hasn’t heard anything from the girls. He doesn’t know where they are. Even in his demolished state, the impulse to protect is elemental. He is a man who always believes he can do anything. But right now, there is nothing he can do but shuffle his aching feet across the kitchen floor he has walked across a million times before.
His hands are still bound palm to palm, and he can’t see, but he reaches for the railing on the basement stairs, and the tips of his fingers read it like braille, guiding him down the steps he knows by heart but that now feel uneven under his bare feet. It is an indescribable feeling, being a prisoner in your own home, being beaten to the point where you can barely manage to walk from here to there in a house you’ve lived in for twenty-two years. For Bill right now, everything is familiar and grotesque at the same time, a fever dream of his own life.
The Petits had never bothered to convert the basement to living space. It’s just a basement—concrete floors, a tangle of electrical wiring running out of the breaker box and along the ceiling joists, plastic storage boxes full of old stuff, a refrigerator. The men walk him to the steel support pole in the middle of the room and slide him down it so he’s sitting on the floor with his back against the pole. He is a few feet from the two cats’ litter boxes and an open bag of Fresh Step. Blurry scraps of memory and life whir in and out of his sight line—tiny rocking chairs, a miniature puppet theater, tiki torches leaning against the wall, a table of paint cans. One of the men jams a couple of cushions, taken from upstairs, under him. They retie his hands together tight, behind his back and around the pole. Once again they tie his ankles together with a plastic zip tie and then a few wraps of clothesline over that. He doesn’t keep those zip tie things in the house, which means the men must have brought them. Same with the clothesline, which they tie around his waist and chest, bracing him hard against the metal pole.
Bill can barely move.
The shirt is no longer on his head, but now they throw a quilt over him. One of Hayley’s elementary-school teachers, Mrs. Watkinson, made it for Hayley and gave it to her when she graduated from high school a few weeks ago.
—
Upstairs, the men search for money. They pull out drawers, empty cupboards, turn over boxes—they want a score, and they don’t seem to understand that most suburban families, affluent though their clapboarded, landscaped homes may give them away to be, don’t store cash in their credenzas. Eventually they figure out that there are no piles of money in the house. They find a few jars, one emblazoned with a Boston Red Sox logo, full of loose change, and one of them empties the coins into a bag, a pathetic little grab. They find wallets. Bill’s is worn, the leather used up like an old football, the plastic window for photos held in place with Scotch tape. There’s no cash inside, but there are four wallet-size photographs of Jennifer, two each of Hayley and Michaela, and three photo-booth snapshots of Bill and his daughters.
Inside Hayley’s neat leather wallet with the pink trim: $103 cash and a bunch of gift cards, probably given to her on her graduation, to Bob’s, a chain of clothing stores; Starbucks; Banana Republic; and the Dartmouth Co-op. And a new Bank of America ATM card that her parents had gotten for her to take to college.
The men have ripped the phone cord next to the bed in the master bedroom out of its jack. They continue to search the house and eventually find a bankbook showing a Bank of America account flush with nearly $30,000. Their plan
changes. They’ll wait until the bank opens, and then one of the men will drive the wife to the bank and wait in the car while she withdraws $15,000—that’s the number they choose. The other one will keep watch at the house.
Bill knows none of this. He sits on the concrete basement floor in dark silence, trying to make his brain work for him, the way it always does. It feels swollen and bruised—he can feel his pulse in his skull. But he tries. His body feels unbearably heavy, and his mind is careening between half-sleep, desperation, fear, calculation, pain, and unconsciousness. His blood is soaking the couch cushions, Mrs. Watkinson’s quilt, the basement floor. But there are a few things he knows, because he can still hear: He realizes that he heard the birds outside start singing when he was still upstairs—that would have been around 4:45. Then, down in the basement, he heard an electrical box click. That was the timer activating the sprinkler system: 5:30. He has lived here for two decades. The house’s familiar noises become his clock.
—
One of the men rummages around in Bill’s two-car garage and finds several empty windshield-washer-fluid containers in the recycling bin. Bill is no mechanic, so for him car maintenance consists primarily of making sure the Petits’ three cars—Jennifer’s Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Bill’s used Mercedes, and Hayley’s car, the Tank—always had washer fluid. The man throws the plastic jugs into the minivan.
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