Piece of My Heart

by Mary Higgins Clark

  She immediately hugged him and then listened attentively as he brought her up to speed. “It’s not your fault, Dad. Gunther and Summer intentionally misled us.”

  “This whole time, I was wrong, Laurie. But you were right. This was never a case of mistaken identity. Whoever took Johnny wanted him specifically. They came to New York from Washington, D.C. We need to call Marcy and Andrew.”

  Chapter 48

  Marcy Buckley pulled a casserole dish filled with baked macaroni and cheese from the oven. The heat that rose to her face helped hide the tears she had been fighting to control since she received the devastating phone call from Detective Langland: After all that work for a search warrant, the police didn’t find Johnny.

  Chloe and Emily were blissfully enjoying their dinners when the phone on the kitchen counter rang again. Marcy recognized Laurie’s number. She carried the handset into the den, out of earshot of the twins.

  Marcy knew there was urgent news when Laurie asked her to bring Andrew into the room on speakerphone. Once Andrew was nestled next to Marcy on the sofa, Laurie began her report. “Summer Carver admitted she was at our hotel the day Johnny vanished. She saw a light-colored sedan drive away from the ice cream shack. The plate was from Washington, D.C.”

  It only took Marcy a few seconds to process the information. “From the very beginning, you said most crimes aren’t random.”

  “It’s no guarantee that the car Summer saw was the kidnapper’s,” Laurie said, “but the road to the ice cream shack is separate from the main hotel. Plus, you don’t see many cars with D.C. plates on Long Island. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

  Marcy could see from Andrew’s face that she and Laurie weren’t the only ones who thought they had found a new lead.

  “What exactly does this mean?” Andrew asked. “We already racked our brains trying to figure out who might want to take Johnny. You think someone from D.C. followed us to the Hamptons?”

  Marcy felt her vision begin to blur. D.C. The Hamptons. The road to the ice cream shack. She imagined hands grabbing Johnny as he bent over to pick up a seashell from the sand. Her son, trembling with fear, in the backseat. No, more likely, the trunk. All alone in the dark, terrified. When she tried to picture the car pulling out of the hotel parking lot, she had a sudden image of a gray sedan—the same one that had been parked at the curb in front of their house only two days earlier.

  “Sandra Carpenter came to see us on Monday.”

  Andrew literally gasped as he processed the possibility.

  “I don’t know who that is,” Laurie said at the other end of the line.

  “She’s the woman Father Horrigan called about the adoption,” Marcy explained. “She’s Johnny’s biological grandmother.”

  “And she went to your house?”

  “Unannounced,” Marcy said. “It was all very strange. She said she couldn’t stop worrying about Johnny—that his disappearance had triggered all these feelings she had about her daughter. She wanted to know how she could help us. At the time, I assumed her intentions were good, but now I’m wondering whether she was trying to throw us off track.”

  “Do you remember her car?” Andrew asked. “I didn’t pay it any mind.”

  “I remember it was a gray sedan,” Marcy said. “A Buick. I don’t know the different models, but it was a bigger one.”

  “What shade of gray?” Laurie asked. “Summer said the car was either white or very light-colored.”

  Marcy searched her visual cortex, trying to pull up the image. “It was a silvery gray, close to white.”

  Next to her, Andrew had a suggestion. “Leo could pull up the car registration, right, Laurie? It would list the color? Maybe Summer will recognize it if she sees a picture.”

  “I’ll give him a call now.”

  “Laurie—” Marcy still felt they were all missing the larger point. “We don’t actually know what happened to her daughter. When I called Father Horrigan to check on Johnny’s birth mother, he had no idea until he called her mother. So everything we thought we knew about that family came directly from Sandra. The drug addiction. The move to Philadelphia. It could all be lies.”

  Andrew placed a hand over his mouth. “We never even confirmed that Michelle Carpenter is dead.”

  Marcy suddenly felt light-headed. From the moment when Sister Margaret first placed Johnny in her arms, Marcy had shared an immediate connection to her “miracle baby.” But there’s no such thing as a miracle.

  Her hands shook as she reached for Andrew. “They took him, didn’t they? They took our Johnny.”

  Chapter 49

  The open, empty pizza box stared up at Laurie from the living room coffee table, the last remnants of mozzarella stuck on the paper lining. She felt her father watching her as he reclined in his favorite chair.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “What’s fine?”

  “The pizza.”

  “Pizza’s better than fine,” she said. “Pizza’s basically the perfect food.”

  “Exactly. And did you see how happy Timmy was? It was like you took him to Disney World or something. So stop feeling guilty.”

  Just as her parents had raised her, Laurie was committed to having meals with Timmy at the dining room table. Granted, Laurie was rarely able to cook the kinds of meals her mother had prepared, but even when it was just the two of them and a bag of carryout, she thought of dinner as the time when she and Timmy put their screens away, turned off all the outside noise, and focused on each other.

  But tonight, dinner had been a box of pizza eaten in front of the TV. And because the delivery guy had brought paper plates with the order, they had gone ahead and used them.

  The reality was that Laurie was exhausted, physically and emotionally. They all were. For a week, they had been giving themselves and one another pep talks while they continued to put one foot in front of the other, doing all that they could to bring Johnny home.

  And today, all those efforts had failed.

  While writing off Johnny’s adoption as a dead end from the start, they realized now they actually knew nothing about Johnny’s biological mother or the grandmother who had shown up uninvited to Marcy and Andrew’s home. Leo had put a call in to a friend with the Philadelphia Police Department to inquire about Michelle Carpenter’s supposed drug overdose, but he was still waiting for details. Laurie wanted a time machine to go back and start all over again. Or better yet, to stay at the beach with the kids so none of this would have ever happened.

  Instead of risking a display of her emotional exhaustion at the dinner table, she had given Timmy his first choice of takeout, along with a proposal that they jump back into their Bosch binge. She knew he was still having nightmares, but he was also doing his best to put on a brave face. Now that Timmy had gone to his room to play a video game, she and Leo were free to speak openly again.

  “It was sort of nice to just sit and stare at the TV for two hours, huh?”

  Her father chuckled. “We should do it more often.”

  She held up a quick finger, pretending to scold him. “We have rules in this house, mister, and they started with you.”

  “No, they started with your mother. And trust me, even she would have given us dispensation after this miserable day.”

  Laurie carried the pizza box and paper plates to the kitchen, grateful for the easy cleanup, and returned to the living room. “Hey, at least there was a silver lining to today. We exposed Summer Carver and her brother as liars.”

  The D.A.’s Office had agreed to charge both of the Carver siblings with felonies. The argument was that even though they did not actually commit kidnapping, they used a threat against Johnny’s freedom and safety to coerce Leo into giving them a false admission—the equivalent of blackmail.

  Leo didn’t seem ready to celebrate. “But we still don’t have anything new on Darren Gunther.” According to Summer, pretending they had taken Johnny was her brother’s idea, and Toby invoked his right to counsel as
soon as he was arrested. If Gunther was involved in the plan, they had no way of proving it.

  “But their arrests were a top story on the local news tonight,” she said, “including their connection to Gunther. Trust me, Dad, I know how media works. The average person hearing the news will think Gunther’s a killer who tried to get these two bozos to tamper with the system.”

  “But the judge hearing Gunther’s case isn’t your average person hearing the news.”

  Laurie could tell that she wasn’t going to get her father to see the silver lining. Eighteen years ago, he had helped convince a jury that Darren Gunther had murdered Lou Finney. He was determined to prove it all over again.

  She was about to offer him a cup of coffee when his cell phone rang on the end table beside him.

  “This is Farley.”

  “Philadelphia PD,” he whispered.

  She was listening to her father’s lengthy series of uh-huhs, eagerly awaiting any actual information, when her own phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, so she hit the decline button. A minute later, it rang again. This time, she answered, taking the phone to the kitchen so as not to interfere with Leo’s call.

  “Laurie, oh good, you’re there. It’s Samantha Finney, Lou Finney’s daughter.”

  “Hi, Samantha. I hope you got my message earlier.” Laurie had left a detailed voicemail for Samantha about the Carvers’ arrests. Even though it was only indirectly related to her father’s murder, she didn’t want Samantha to learn about the development from the news.

  “I did, but here’s the thing. I saw their pictures on the TV, and I know that guy.”

  “Which guy?”

  “The brother. I think his name was Toby Carver? I know him, Laurie. And so did Clarissa.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Laurie hung up the phone and rushed to the living room to find her father.

  Before she could get a word out, he told her that he had just spoken to his contact at the Philadelphia Police Department. “Sandra Carpenter was telling the truth. Her daughter Michelle did in fact die of an overdose at her home six months ago. Her neighbor was the one who found the body and called it in.”

  “So what does that really tell us?” Laurie asked. “That might give Sandra all the more motive to try to take Johnny. She’s traumatized by the loss of her daughter, and she told Marcy that she thought of Johnny as the last living piece of her little girl. Maybe she wanted another shot at raising him herself.”

  “There was one thing in the police report for Michelle’s overdose that was interesting,” Leo said. “When the police asked Michelle’s neighbor about the next of kin, she said they shouldn’t even bother calling Sandra because if anyone was to blame for Michelle’s drug addiction, it was her mother.”

  “Sounds like there might be more to the story than Sandra’s letting on,” Laurie said.

  Leo handed her a yellow Post-it with a name and number on it. Lindsay Hart. “That’s the neighbor. Depending on her own connection to drugs, she might be more comfortable talking to you than some crusty old cop.”

  “Leo Farley? Crusty? I think all those widows who line up to see their favorite silver fox after Mass on Sunday would take issue with that description. But, yes, it makes sense for me to call Lindsay.”

  “Who were you talking to earlier, by the way? From what I overheard, it sounded important.”

  “Samantha Finney. She recognized Toby Carver’s picture on the news. Did you know that Samantha remained friends with Clarissa DeSanto after Finn’s murder?”

  Leo nodded. “They were extremely close. At the time of the case, I remember thinking they seemed like a couple of girls who could be part of your friend group. I still can’t believe Clarissa died in a car accident.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Dad. The last time Samantha saw Clarissa was the end of March. They were at an eighties-night dance party organized as a fundraiser for one of the big animal shelters. Samantha’s married, but Clarissa tagged along solo. Some guy asked her to dance and they were having a nice enough time—casual and friendly. Toward the end of the night, though, the guy seemed to assume that Clarissa was going to leave with him. Leave, as in—” Laurie rotated her hand in lieu of words to complete the sentence.

  “I may be your father, but I know what leave from a party means.”

  “Samantha says the guy was really persistent, enough so that they thought about calling over Security. But Samantha’s husband exchanged words with him and made it clear that Clarissa wasn’t going to wander home with a random stranger. Well, Samantha saw Toby Carver’s picture tonight on the news, and she’s sure he’s the guy who tried getting Clarissa to leave with him. Her husband is certain it’s the same man, too. Three days after the eighties party, Clarissa somehow lost control of her car on the Cross County Parkway.”

  Leo placed his head in his hands. “I said this entire time that Darren Gunther wouldn’t fight fair. That’s why I immediately thought of him when Johnny went missing.”

  “But if Toby Carver was in the picture months ago?” Laurie asked. “Dad, what if he killed Clarissa DeSanto because of something she knew?”

  * * *

  That night, after hanging up with Alex, Laurie was docking her phone into its charger when it rang again. She recognized the Philadelphia area code she had used to call Michelle Carpenter’s former neighbor earlier that evening.

  When she answered, the din of loud voices and music in the background made it difficult to hear.

  “Ms. Moran, this is Lindsay Hart, returning your call. I’m sorry to call so late, and it’s really loud here, but I want to talk to you about Michelle. Can we meet in person tomorrow?”

  “Sure, I can take a train in the morning—”

  “No, I’m actually in New York right now.”

  They agreed to meet at Laurie’s office at 9 A.M.

  “See you then,” Lindsay said. “I don’t know how you got interested in Michelle’s case, but I never believed that her death was an overdose. She was murdered. I’m certain of it.”

  Chapter 50

  The following morning, Johnny had helped clear the breakfast dishes again and was back to work on his Historic Buildings of America coloring book.

  “Keep on with your coloring,” the man said, inspecting his handiwork. “You show great promise as an artist, Danny.”

  “What building is this one?” Johnny asked, even though he knew it was the Empire State Building. Uncle Alex had taken him to the top of it when he was in kindergarten. They had taken a picture for Johnny to share with the rest of his class.

  Johnny pretended to be wowed as the man explained that the building was considered Art Greco, or something like that, designed by people Johnny had never heard of. Meanwhile, what Johnny really wanted to do was point out that he was only using his blue, green, tan, and gray colored pencils. This was the worst coloring book in the world.

  “You sure do know a lot,” Johnny gushed. A play. I am an actor in a play.

  The man appeared to space out for a few seconds before speaking. “I used to be an architect, in fact. That table you’re using?”

  Johnny thanked him once again for it. “It sure is cool. I like this ledge at the bottom so nothing falls off and you can tilt the book on it.”

  “Exactly,” the man said, apparently pleased by the observation. “That was my drafting table for years. I never made something as grand as the Empire State Building, mind you, but I created some spectacular homes—and a fairly large shopping mall and one office tower of some significance. If I’d kept working, I might have been the next I. M. Pei.”

  Johnny smiled.

  “That’s okay. Of course you don’t know who that is. He designed the glass pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre. Oh—and part of the National Gallery of Art.”

  “That one I’ve been to!” Johnny announced gleefully. Mommy had taken him there last year while Daddy took the twins to the doctor when they both ran temperatures. He had complained about bei
ng bored. I’m sorry, Mama. I wasn’t being a good boy that day. I’ll never act like that again. Seeing that the man was pleased with his response, Johnny decided to ask a question. “So you don’t make buildings anymore?”

  “No. A lot has changed in my life since then.” The man gazed into the distance again, and Johnny could tell he was sad.

  Johnny flipped to the next page of his coloring book, even though he still needed to pencil in the blue sky over Manhattan. “Which building is this one?”

  As the man talked about an architect named Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnny nodded along with interest. Trust is a two-way street, mister? Johnny’s plan was to earn enough trust to give him a chance to leave this creepy house.

  “Can I ask you one more question, sir?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You call me Danny, but what should I call you? Other than sir, I mean.”

  “What would you like to call me?”

  Johnny shrugged. “Your name, I guess.”

  The man’s smile sent a chill up Johnny’s spine. “Well, let’s see: What did you call the man who gave you meals and put a roof over your head at the place where you used to live?”

  Johnny felt like he’d been given a riddle without an answer. Looking down at his coloring book, he muttered. “I called him Daddy.”

  “Fine then. Why don’t we try that then?”

  Johnny pressed his eyes shut to stop tears from coming out. The man’s hand on his shoulder was surprisingly gentle.

  “They didn’t tell you, did they?” he asked.

  Johnny could not see how wide and innocent his own eyes were when he looked up at the man.

  “Andrew and Marcy Buckley aren’t your parents. Not really. You were adopted.” The man removed a folded sheet of paper from the back of his pocket and handed it to Johnny.

  The name of the website was New York Crime Beat. The man had highlighted one paragraph in yellow marker. Johnny wasn’t the fastest reader in his class, but he managed to read all the words, silently to himself, without moving his lips, the way they practiced in school.