Piece of My Heart (Under Suspicion #7) - Mary Higgins Clark Page 0,13

next to hers. She looked at him expectantly, hoping to hear good news. He shook his head.

She followed him into his room, and he pulled her into an embrace and gave her a quick kiss.

“Are you holding up okay?”

“Me? Of course. I’m sick for Marcy and Andrew, though.”

“Obviously. But I know this can’t be easy for you either.”

Nearly three years ago, the man who had murdered Greg had made good on his lingering threat to return to kill the rest of Greg’s family. In the process, he had abducted Timmy and tried to shoot Laurie before being killed by police.

“This isn’t about me. I just want to help.” She told him what she’d learned from Wyatt, the boy on the beach. “At least it’s a possible explanation for the skim board being in the water. It sounds like the kids were all sharing it, and may have left it where the tide pulled it out.”

“Better than bad news at least. Honestly, I think Marcy could use anything to give her hope right now. Can you go tell her? She’s in their room. Andrew’s pulling the car around for me. We’re going to the copy shop to print out some fliers with Johnny’s picture. The police already put us in contact with a pilot who can fly over the east end with a missing child banner.”

“That’s a good idea. How are the twins?”

“Ramon took them down to the lobby to get a soda.”

“They don’t know yet?”

He shook his head. “What are you going to tell Timmy?”

“I’m about to talk to him now. I’ll make sure he knows not to say anything to the twins, but I have to tell him. You know Timmy.”

“Of course. He’s got your and your dad’s ability to sense when something’s wrong. If you don’t shoot straight with him, his imagination might come up with something even worse.”

Laurie was beginning to wonder if fiction could be any worse than their reality.

* * *

Marcy pulled Laurie into a quick hug when she walked into their suite.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Marcy said tonelessly. “I hate to say this, but I feel like you’re the only one who really understands what I’m going through right now. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even said that.”

Laurie pulled Marcy toward the sofa so they could take a seat. Laurie understood the point she was making. In one sense, Laurie had experienced a worse tragedy, losing her husband to a violent crime and living for five years under a threat of more harm to come to her and Timmy. On the other hand, Laurie’s loss was in the past, while Marcy still didn’t know the extent of hers.

“How are the girls?” Laurie asked.

“Too smart for what I can handle right now,” Marcy said. “Ramon’s watching them, but I’m not sure how long I can keep them at bay.”

“I told Timmy.”

“Is he all right?”

“I can’t tell. But he at least knows. He’s in our room and was planning to say a prayer for Johnny.”

“I know this sounds crazy,” Marcy said, “but I think at some level I was always expecting something like this to happen. Like he was never completely mine. We always thought of Johnny as our miracle child.”

Laurie had never pried about the details surrounding Andrew and Marcy’s decision to adopt their first child, but she empathized with the situation. She and Greg had tried for more than two years after they married to become pregnant with Timmy. In the back of her mind, she had been wondering if she and Alex might face similar hurdles once they began trying to add to their family.

“By the time Andrew proposed to me,” Marcy said, “I had already accepted what I had been told by my doctors—that I would never be able to conceive. We simply assumed it would be just the two of us. Plenty of couples opt not to have children.”

“And yet now you have three.”

“Funny how that works,” Marcy said. “We adopted Johnny as a newborn, and two and a half years later, he started saying he wanted a sibling. And not just any sibling. He was very specific: two baby sisters. Obviously, he was too young to understand why that was impossible, but nine weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. Then a few weeks after that, we learned we were having two twin girls. It’s as if Johnny predicted the family’s future.”

Laurie had not only been raised by a police detective, but also had been investigating true crime