MARY CLARK - Piece of My Heart

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-huh s, 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.”