Piece of My Heart

by Mary Higgins Clark

  That was more than two years ago. She had made him promise never to wander off again without telling them, but had she reminded him enough in the interim? Did he think the rules were different when he was with a babysitter on vacation?

  She flinched when she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder. It was Andrew.

  “He’s going to be okay,” he said. “Remember that Fourth of July?”

  She wanted to scream. That was only 411 seconds. They had now been looking for him for almost twenty minutes, and that was after the fifteen-minute drive from the golf course. They had checked all the obvious places: the hotel lobby, swimming pool, gift shop, surf store—everywhere. So far, they had found a few people who remembered seeing Johnny with Kara and his sisters, as well as in the water with his skim board, but that would have been before he went to get ice cream at the beach shack.

  “I can’t believe Johnny was with some girl none of us had ever met before. What was she so busy doing that she couldn’t keep an eye on our son?”

  “Kara and Ashley both feel terrible.”

  “Good!”

  Her tone was bitter, but in truth, the person she was angry at was herself. She never should have left the hotel.

  “An employee at the beach shack says he saw Johnny collecting seashells behind the shack a little while after they ordered their ice cream cones. He may have walked farther down the beach to collect more.”

  “For over half an hour?”

  “It’s a long beach. You know how focused he can be.”

  “I also know he would never wander off alone this long.” Marcy had felt an immediate connection to Johnny when the nun at the hospital had placed him in her arms, like energy radiating directly from his tiny body into hers. She may not have had the experience of nine months of carrying him, but in that single moment, the two of them became bonded forever.

  A woman was heading toward them from the hotel. Her maxi dress blew like a sail with the wind. She was carrying a camera and a cigarette, just as she had been when Marcy spotted her earlier that day.

  “Excuse me. Ma’am, pardon me,” Marcy shouted. Andrew followed her as she charged through the sand toward the stranger.

  Up close, Marcy could see that the woman was older than she had assumed—probably approaching sixty, with long gray-and-blond hair and skin etched by sun and smoking. She had a warm, welcoming smile.

  “Well, hello.” She bent down and put her cigarette out in the sand. “Not like most people here to introduce themselves to strangers, especially in the summer.”

  “I’m sorry. We’re staying at the hotel, and we can’t find our son.” Marcy held up the screen of her phone. Her voice caught at the sight of the image—a photograph of Johnny, all cheeks and a toothy grin as he held up his certificate for winning second place in the first-grade puzzling contest last April. “I saw you taking photographs earlier on the beach. Did you see him playing?”

  The woman’s smile immediately fell. “I’m so sorry. I don’t recognize him. When I’m behind the camera, I focus on the natural beauty of the topography. Human beings don’t even exist in my mind when I’m looking through a lens.”

  “Is it possible you have pictures that might show where he went?” Andrew asked.

  “I can certainly check.” She switched her camera into display mode. Marcy and Andrew looked over her shoulder as she flipped through the digital images.

  “There!” Marcy exclaimed. She pointed to the far-right edge of the screen. “That’s Johnny on his skim board.”

  “Oh sure, I remember seeing a boy out there earlier today. I actually shifted my position to make sure I was getting a pure landscape.” She checked the time stamp of the photograph. It was not long after they had left for the golf course, so it didn’t provide any information beyond what they had gathered from Kara and Ashley.

  The photographer waited patiently while they scrolled through the rest of her pictures, desperately searching for some clue of Johnny’s whereabouts. Andrew was writing down her name and number just in case they needed to reach her again, when Marcy saw the photographer’s facial expression shift again, this time to fear.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing toward the water. An object had washed up to shore with the waves.

  Marcy felt her stomach tighten as she recognized the turquoise and white stripes from one of the photographs Kara had texted to Laurie while they were on the golf course. It was the skim board Johnny had been using. Her son was gone and he could be anywhere, even in the water.

  The waves seemed to grow louder as she broke into sobs.

  Chapter 6

  Laurie plugged one ear with a finger as she struggled to hear her father on the other end of her cell phone over the sounds of the roaring waves.

  “I reached out to the chief of the East Hampton Police Department,” Leo said. “They’re sending out a detective and a patrol car.”

  It had been almost a half hour since Andrew called 911 to report Johnny missing. He had said at the time that the dispatcher treated him like a worrywart parent who’d simply lost sight of a typically adventurous child for a moment or two. The lack of a police response in the time that had passed seemed to confirm his impression. Alex was inside trying to pull some strings, but even a federal judge could not beat Leo Farley’s influence with law enforcement.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “They’re also going to send the marine patrol unit to your area,” he added.

  “Is that police?”

  He hesitated before answering. “For the most part, but their beat is to patrol the water from boats.”

  The implication of the decision was clear and sent a chill up Laurie’s spine even though it was eighty degrees outside.

  As she hung up her phone, she noticed a stocky young boy with dark, wind-tossed hair walking in her direction. His swim shorts were decorated with Star Wars characters, and his tan belly popped out slightly over the waistband. He was probably nine years old or so and seemed to be looking directly, but reluctantly, at her.

  “Hey there,” she said, giving him a friendly wave. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  He squinted against the sunlight behind her.

  “Sure.”

  She pulled up a photograph she had taken of Timmy and Johnny together two months earlier when Andrew had brought Johnny up for the Yankees-Nationals game. Before she could even ask the boy if he recognized them, he pointed at the screen. “That’s Timothy and Jonathan. Are you their mom?”

  “Well, I’m Timothy’s mom, yes, and that’s his cousin, Jonathan. You know them?”

  “Just from today, but we were sharing the skim board. That’s what I was going to ask you. I saw you with the lady who found the board in the water and carried it away. I was going to ask her if I could play with it, but she looked really sad.”

  “She is sad. She’s Johnny’s mom, and we can’t find him. When was the last time you saw him?”

  He looked down at the sand, struggling to remember. “I think it was when he came out of the water and was talking to that girl and the lifeguard. They walked off that way.” He pointed in the direction of the beach shack.

  “Have you seen him since then?”

  More sand staring. “I saw him on the board in the water and he fell off.”

  “Okay, was that before or after he went off with the lady and the lifeguard?”

  “Um… I think it was before?”

  He was anything but certain.

  “But you were using the board, too?”

  He nodded.

  “So you know my friend found it in the water. Did you put it in there?”

  He shook his head. She pictured Johnny slipping off the board and getting pulled beneath the current. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  “But the waves keep coming up really far. Daddy had to move our umbrellas back and everything. I think the water just washed away the board when no one was looking.”

  At least she had one potentially
positive piece of news to report back to Marcy and Andrew. It was possible that one of the kids had simply abandoned the board in the sand, and then the tide pulled it into the ocean before returning it for Marcy to find.

  “Do you know where the beach shack is?” Laurie asked.

  He shook his head.

  She told him that if he kept walking past the lifeguard stand, there was a shack on the other side of the restrooms where the hotel stored the skim boards. “There’s ice cream there, too.”

  His eyes lit up at the thought of it.

  “But make sure you bring a grown-up with you, okay? You have to promise.”

  “Promise,” he said, marking an X over his heart with his index finger.

  “Thank you for talking to me. My name’s Laurie, by the way.”

  “I’m Wyatt.”

  She was about to turn away when he stopped her. “You’re really nice.”

  “Thank you, Wyatt. So are you.”

  “Was that you yelling at Timothy earlier? Was he in trouble?”

  “Someone yelled at Timmy?”

  Her tone was sharp, and the boy’s face fell.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I didn’t yell at him, and I hate the thought that someone else did.” They had decided not to call Ramon or Timmy yet, because they had left the hotel before Johnny went missing, and they didn’t want to upset Timmy unnecessarily if Johnny suddenly turned up. “What happened?”

  “Well, I was building a sand castle with my sister and I heard some lady yelling ‘Tim! Tim!’ Like maybe he was in trouble or not paying attention or something. But then when we looked around, we didn’t see where the yelling was coming from, and we didn’t see Timothy or Jonathan either. So maybe it was someone else named Tim.”

  “When was this that you heard someone yelling for Tim?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I don’t think I’ve seen Timothy or Jonathan since then.”

  And neither had Laurie.

  * * *

  One ring. Two. Three.

  Pick up, Ramon. Pick up the phone.

  “Were your ears burning?” Ramon answered midway through the fourth ring.

  “Um, what do you mean?”

  “Timothy and I were just saying he has never been to Italy before, so now you and Alex will have to go back again after the honeymoon. There are worse burdens, right?”

  “So Timmy’s with you?”

  “Yes, of course. The top-secret mission, remember?”

  “Oh, thank god.” There were plenty of people named some variant of Tim, she reminded herself. Some other beachgoer must have been calling out after one of them.

  “Laurie, is everything all right? You sound upset.”

  She tried to remain calm as she gave him an abbreviated version of what they knew so far. “Please don’t say anything to Timmy yet, okay? I’m still praying Johnny wandered off and will be back at any moment.”

  “Of course,” Ramon said, his voice even.

  Timmy had witnessed his father’s murder at the age of three and then lived under the killer’s threat to return for him and Laurie for another five years after that. He seemed drawn to Leo’s police work and her research on cold cases, but she nevertheless tried to do what she could to protect him from unnecessary fear. He had seen enough darkness for six lifetimes already.

  As she hung up, she registered a pang of guilt for feeling so grateful that her own son was safe. Her fear was increasing that Johnny was not.

  Chapter 7

  Seven-year-old Johnny Buckley felt like something was pressing down on him. No, more like someone. He imagined giant arms wrapped around him, but it wasn’t the way his mother or father would hold him. It wasn’t gentle or loving. This felt mean and scary. In his mind, Johnny imagined that the arms didn’t even belong to a person. They belonged to a monster.

  The monster was holding him so tight that Johnny could feel the monster’s tummy rumble.

  Johnny tried to sit up, but couldn’t move. He was certain his eyes were open, but he couldn’t see anything. He opened his mouth and tried to scream, but couldn’t hear his own voice.

  But he could hear… something. A growl. The sound of the monster filled his head. He imagined the monster squeezing him even tighter, and Johnny wondered if he might simply disappear, never to be seen again.

  I want Mommy and Daddy.

  A loud honking sound broke through the monster’s snarls and pulled Johnny further out of his dreamlike state. The noise felt like it belonged to the world Johnny used to know. When he heard it again, his mind moved away from the monster. He pictured his mother behind the wheel of the minivan, saying, Where does he think I can go? Johnny, someday you’ll learn to drive. Honking your horn in traffic doesn’t do any good.

  The sound was the beep-beep of a car horn.

  Johnny’s eyes darted side to side as the fog he was in began lifting more quickly. He was finally awake.

  He reached for what had been the monster’s arms in his dream and determined that he was wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. The rumble beneath him wasn’t a monster’s stomach, but the rumble of a car on the road.

  Two tiny circles of light were visible from the holes for the taillights, but otherwise he was in pitch blackness. He was locked in the trunk of a car.

  He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d heard the voice call out to him on the beach. Were his parents looking for him? He wondered where Chloe and Emily thought he went.

  Exploring the area within his reach, he found two objects. The first felt soft, like a small pillow. He managed to hold it up against the slivers of light from the back of the car, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  He was able to make out two big round eyes and a pair of moon-shaped ears. It was a stuffed animal. Why is this here? he thought. Why am I here? He set it aside, telling himself he didn’t need a baby’s toy right now.

  The second item he found was made of a thin fabric. As he traced his fingers along the edges, trying to make out the shape, grains of sand fell onto his face. It was a hat—not like the baseball caps he liked to collect, but the kind with a rim that goes all the way around, like his Nana used to wear when she went on her and Pop Pop’s boat. In the darkness, there was no way for him to know that it was the same light blue cotton hat that a stranger had worn while he had watched their family earlier in the day.

  This wasn’t a dream, but there was a monster, and he was taking Johnny away.

  I want to go home.

  He clutched the teddy bear to his chest as he started to cry.

  Chapter 8

  With ever-increasing terror, for the past two hours, Marcy had been in constant action mode—walking the beach, questioning other hotel guests, calling every business within walking distance. Now she was back in their suite, forcing herself to remain still and to focus on the information they had managed to gather so far.

  She jumped at the sound of a knock on the door. Andrew opened it. It was Alex, and he was followed in by a woman about her age with long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. “The police are here,” Alex announced.

  “I’m Detective Langland,” the woman said. The business card she handed to Marcy gave her full name as Jennifer Langland. She was a detective with the East Hampton Police Department.

  Marcy resisted the urge to say something about the police failure to respond until Laurie’s father had called in a favor, but the detective appeared to sense her resentment. “I can’t imagine how worried you must be right now. I’m so sorry that the dispatcher didn’t prioritize the call earlier. It’s no excuse, but we have a critical mass of units called out to a mess of an accident on Main Street.”

  The detective’s tone was compassionate. She looked Marcy squarely in the eye when she apologized for the delay. Please be good at this, Marcy found herself pleading silently. Please be the woman who can bring back my son.

  For the next ten minutes, Marcy listened. She willed herself to slow her
thoughts as Detective Langland outlined the department’s current efforts to locate Johnny.

  “I already met with the hotel’s general manager. He’s pulling all the available surveillance tape for us. Unfortunately, they don’t have much in the way of cameras on the beach itself, and only one camera in the beach shack, and it’s focused on the register.”

  Marcy felt all hope fading away as the detective continued.

  “But they’ll have footage from the hotel lobby, plus the entrances and exits. Unfortunately, the only cameras in the parking lot are close to the property, but we’re going to start with those. If your son left by car, hopefully we’ll get a plate number and move from there.”

  “Left by car?” Andrew was clenching and unclenching his fists at his side. “We’ve been careful to warn Johnny. He never willingly would have gotten into—” Andrew cut himself off, considering the implication of what he was saying.

  Langland nodded. “I know,” she said softly.

  Marcy was grateful that the detective wasn’t minimizing the situation by lecturing her about the curiosity of seven-year-old boys who want to explore the beach on their own, but her heart dropped at the thought of her son in some stranger’s car. She also knew that a kidnapper had probably considered the possibility of cameras at a resort. She thought about all of the paths between the sand dunes farther down the beach, paths that led to public roads where someone could park anonymously and away from the reach of surveillance.

  “What about an Amber Alert?” Andrew asked. Marcy had heard the blast of her cell phone a few times over the years when police used an area alert system to notify the public about a local child’s abduction.

  “My supervisor is weighing the request. To restrict the notifications to the most urgent cases, the broadcast system won’t allow us to trigger an alert unless we are confident there has been an abduction. I know it’s frustrating, but the fact that we haven’t sent out an alarm yet is actually good news in the big scheme of things. It means we have other possibilities to explore.”