MARY CLARK: Piece of My Heart

“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.