up.
“Please,” Jerry said. “Put Brent and his ridiculous deadlines out of your mind. You have enough on your plate. Okay… done! It’s on Facebook and Twitter now. Our fans are pretty fierce. They’ll get it viral in no time, and I’ll monitor the accounts for any comments that show potential for follow-up. Hang in there. Hopefully Johnny just got lost on the beach and will find his way back any second.”
“Thank you so much, Jerry. You’re the best.”
When she hung up the phone, she opened Facebook to share the show’s posts on her personal account. She noticed that the last entry on her own timeline was a post from Marcy three days earlier, in which she had tagged Andrew and Laurie. Two pictures were side by side. The first was a photograph from the South Shore Resort’s home page of the hotel beneath a pink-and-purple sunset. The other was a picture of Marcy, Andrew, Alex, Laurie, and all four kids standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, taken last fall. Countdown: Three more days ’til a glorious family vacation in the Hamptons, followed by Judge Birthday Boy’s wedding with the best sister-in-law I could ask for! #Foundfamily #blessed
Laurie composed a post to share the Find Johnny information with her own friends and then hit enter. Her eyes drifted back to Marcy’s photographs. She felt a pang in her stomach at the sight of Johnny, his arms wrapped tightly around his mother’s waist. He really did look like Timmy.
She looked up from her phone with a sudden awakening.
“What’s wrong?” Alex immediately asked. He could always read her emotions.
“Timmy. The twins were calling their brother Timmy. Plus there was the room mix-up. The hotel had the honeymoon suite booked under my name, not theirs.”
“What about it?”
“What if this wasn’t random? What if someone thought Johnny was my son?”
Chapter 16
Alex took a seat beside Laurie on the sofa and wrapped an arm around her shoulder.
“Laurie, you’re literally shaking right now. It’s been a long day, and I think the stress has gotten to all of us.”
“Think about it. Earlier, I kept reminding myself of what we all know to be true—random crimes are the exception. Usually, a crime victim is targeted by someone they know. Or at the very least, they’re targeted for a reason. That’s what led me to ask about Johnny’s birth mother. But what if the target was actually Timmy?”
“Or it might actually just be random,” Alex said. “There was that horrible case last year where the defendant happened to see the little boy getting off the school bus—”
She couldn’t stand the thought of Johnny suffering a similar fate as the child he mentioned. “Maybe, but we can’t ignore the possibility. Your nephew looks so much like Timmy. Particularly if someone had been working from a picture of Timmy from a year ago; he’s grown since then, so they’d be expecting a kid who was closer to Johnny’s size. Plus his sisters were calling him Timmy, and they’re all staying in a hotel room booked under my name. And Timmy and I are the ones who live two hours away from here, and I’ve certainly managed to make some enemies given my work on the show. Do you have any idea how many letters I get from accused murderers begging me to clear their names?”
“Of course I do,” he said quietly. “I worked on the show with you, remember?”
“The numbers have tripled since then, and I don’t even tell you about some of the angry follow-ups I get when we don’t respond, because I don’t want you to worry about me. It would only take one person to get a crazy idea in his head—”
Leo held up a tentative hand, looking for permission to interrupt the conversation. “Laurie, I hear what you’re saying, but can I offer an opinion?”
“Of course, Dad.”
“I watched you raise Timmy for those first five years after Greg was killed. You always put on a brave face, but that monster told your little boy in no uncertain language that he would be coming back someday to kill both him and his mother. And you lived like that for half a decade—never knowing whether this might be the day that Blue Eyes made good on his promise.”
At the mention of Blue Eyes, Laurie had a sudden image of a younger Timmy, only eight years old. He had been even smaller than Johnny then, in his pajamas and robe, being dragged by one hand from a pool