'There's water coming in the car. Come and get me!'
Just before Christmas, Alice Nunes, a Peabody grandmother, left home alone and never returned. Her desperate phone call to her husband was the last anyone has heard of her.
PEABODY - John Nunes was watching television in his bedroom on the night of Dec. 15 when his granddaughter yelled at him to pick up the phone.
When he did, he heard his wife's panicked voice.
"There's water coming in the car," Alice Nunes screamed. "Come and get me, John. I'm in Lynn. Hurry!"
Then the phone went dead.
John Nunes has not heard from his wife since then.
It has been 5 1/2 months since the 57-year-old Peabody grandmother went missing, on an unseasonably mild Monday night 10 days before Christmas. Police have searched ponds, harbors, and rivers in Peabody and Lynn, but they have found no sign of Nunes or her two-year-old black Lexus.
The case has confounded investigators, who believe that Nunes drowned, probably within a few miles of her home, but cannot explain why their searches have not found her.
"How does a person just disappear like that?" Peabody police Detective Robert Church said. "It's baffling guys who have been on the job 30 years."
For the Nunes family, part of a large local clan with Portuguese roots, the lack of answers is excruciating. In their hearts, say the woman's husband and daughter, they believe that Alice Nunes must be dead. But with her fate still as uncertain as what happened the night she vanished, they have found it hard to take the steps that would mark acceptance.
John Nunes, 59, continues to pay the excise tax and car insurance bills for his wife's missing Lexus. He has not canceled her Fast Lane transponder or shut off her cellphone, because, he said, "I don't want anybody else to have that number yet."
A Portuguese immigrant who came to Peabody at age 13 from a home in the Azores islands with dirt floors and no running water, Nunes proposed when they were still teenagers. He said the couple had spent four nights apart in their 39 years of marriage.
"I wake up at night, and I think she's right there," said Nunes, a small, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite man who paused several times to collect himself during an interview. "I wake up in the morning and I think it's a nightmare, that it's not real. . . . But it is, and it keeps going on and on and on."
Almost four decades after they married, Alice and John were still inseparable, said their daughter. They traveled frequently, to Aruba, Las Vegas, the Bahamas, enjoying a financial stability that was hard won, often by working two jobs. He was employed most recently as manager at a packaging plant. They ate out on Friday nights, favoring a Portuguese society hall that donated proceeds to charity. On weekends, they roamed the North Shore, sometimes settling in with coffee and newspapers at the lighthouse in Marblehead.
"No matter how many people were in the room, it was like they were the only ones," said their daughter, Gina Provencher. "To me, my mother is my father. They're just one."
With her blond hair, year-round tan, and perfectly manicured nails, Alice was always put together, her family said. She wore high heels even on the assembly line at Peabody's
Alice hosted the family open house on Christmas Eve; Alice was the one who always organized parties at work.
"There was always a cake in the fridge," her daughter said. "She would say, 'Don't touch that; that's for so-and-so.' "
Her disappearance is not the only thing that baffles the Nunes family and police. Even before her final phone call, they say, her actions on the night of Dec. 15 - leaving home without a word to her husband, driving to Lynn, at night, and apparently drinking alone at a bar - were sharply out of character.
Earlier that day, John and Alice drove back to Peabody after an overnight trip to Mohegan Sun. Alice seemed quiet, but otherwise fine, said John Nunes. She broiled salmon for dinner - it was always salmon on Mondays - and the family ate together, as they always did. After dinner, Alice watched a Portuguese soap opera.
But at about 8 p.m., she did something they cannot explain: she said goodbye to her granddaughter and walked out the door, past the decorative reindeer covered with holiday lights, got into her car, and drove away.
According to a witness who came forward later, a woman who fit the description of Alice Nunes had two drinks at the bar at the Four Winds Pub in neighboring Lynn, on Sluice Pond just outside Wyoma Square, roughly between 8:15 and 8:35 p.m. The bar was about 3 miles from the Nunes home. The woman did not speak to anyone and seemed upset, police said the witness told them.
To the people who knew Alice best, that is almost as bizarre and troubling as what happened next. "That she didn't talk to anyone; that's not like her," her husband said. "She would never go out alone. I don't know what possessed her."
About 10 minutes after Alice left the bar, the phone rang at the Nunes home. After her daughter ran to tell her father, Gina Provencher picked up the receiver and heard her mother plead with her father for help.
Again and again, Provencher replays those desperate seconds in her head.
"I go over it every day," she said. "I hear her talking to my father, and I'm like, 'Concentrate - did you hear anything in the background?' "
John Nunes used almost a full tank of gas that night, driving the streets of Lynn for hours looking for his wife.
In the days that followed, Lynn and Peabody police traced the perimeter of ponds in the area, looking for tire tracks, broken branches, or other signs that a car had gone in. They found none.
They determined that her last phone call bounced off a cell tower in Wyoma Square, putting her within 15 miles, and they widened their search, to parts of Lynn Harbor and the Saugus River near the Western Avenue bridge, where a construction detour confused other drivers that night.
Police also considered that she could be alive. They watched her bank accounts for activity and saw none. They checked hotels and broadcast her description nationwide. They interviewed her hairdresser to try to find out where she might have gone that night and why.
With nothing to suggest that Nunes had left the area, police began looking underwater. Divers searched Sluice Pond in Lynn on Dec. 23 and probed a small section of the Saugus River for two days in February. Last week, they looked in Lynn's Flax Pond and part of Lynn Harbor, where a Coast Guard boat has also searched with sonar. Police plan a farther-reaching dive in the river, where strong tidal currents could have pushed the car some distance.
John Nunes believes that local police may have exhausted their resources and says that State Police should take over the investigation.
The underwater search has turned up two cars so far, neither of them the Nunes vehicle.
"Mother Nature has a tendency to hide people," said Richard Bowie, director of the Down East Emergency Medical Institute, a rescue team from Maine that has analyzed aerial photographs of the area. "Forces conspire to make her invisible - the black car; the depth of the water."
At the spotless Nunes home on Lowell Street, Alice is anything but invisible. She smiles out from countless photographs around the house; her husband still beams with pride at the sight of her.
Mondays are the worst, he says, "because that's when she left."
He still drives around Lynn every day. And even at home, he cannot stop looking for Alice. The first place his eyes go when he steps into their bedroom is the chair where she always sat to pray the rosary. He can still see her there. 