Piece of My Heart (Under Suspicion #7) - Mary Higgins Clark Page 0,41

lighthouse,” Emily squealed. “Grandpa Leo says we’ll be able to go to the very tip top and look out over the entire ocean.”

They had started referring to Laurie’s father as Grandpa Leo the previous evening after dinner, and Leo seemed happy enough to accept the honorary role.

She was on the sofa in their hotel suite. In a chair across from her, Andrew used his laptop to check the Find Johnny website for any tips that might have come in overnight. She placed her hand over her heart, letting him know how relieved she was that the girls were safe and sound after all of the redialing she had been doing in her search for them.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll let Leo hang up the phone before you two give him an earache with all that yelling.”

In addition to wanting to hear their voices, Marcy had called to make sure that Leo knew they were about to go live with the press conference, not to mention the various search groups that the police department had already organized around the area. On Marcy’s drive back from the print shop, she had noticed a group of upper-middle-aged women slowly walking through a nature preserve at the edge of the village. Wondering if they might be some of the volunteers Detective Langland had mentioned, she pulled over. It turned out they were a group that usually did a morning water aerobics class together at the YMCA pool, but had decided to spend their time helping with the search for that “cute little boy” instead.

As Marcy had driven away from the scene, all she could think about was the fact that the women had been looking down on the ground and behind the bushes as they walked. They weren’t looking for a boy who was playing or running or looking for his way back to the hotel. They were looking for a body.

She didn’t want the girls to overhear their brother’s name out in public, and couldn’t exactly warn Leo while his phone was on speaker with the girls in the car. She told the girls she loved them and thanked Leo again for entertaining them. Once she’d hung up, she sent a quick follow-up text to Leo that he would see once he was out from behind the wheel.

As she set her phone down, she saw her husband through fresh eyes. They’d known each other ten years, but in her mind, it had whizzed by in a flash, and he hadn’t changed one bit. Same wavy head of dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. He had a fuller face than his more famous older brother, but to her, he was even more handsome. She suspected that if she and Andrew were lucky enough to turn one hundred together, she’d still see him as a young man.

But in this single moment, she saw the strands of gray peering out from his temples, and the lines that had formed around his eyes and lips. And, more than anything, he looked exhausted. Of course he did. So did she.

And in ten minutes, they were expected to step in front of the camera crews assembling in the parking lot outside the hotel. They would lay their pain bare for public consumption—for strangers to suspect them of harming their own son, to judge them for losing sight of him, to feel grateful they weren’t the ones begging to see their child again—all in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, one person would recognize Johnny from a picture and help bring him home.

Her phone buzzed with a new text from Detective Langland. We’re all set up outside. Let me know when you’re ready. I’ll walk you from your room. There’s quite a crowd gathered.

She thought again about the booklet’s mention of the number of parents who divorced after a child went missing. Those irreparable fractures had to start somewhere, maybe with the tiny little crack of one parent speaking to the police without the other.

“I have to tell you something before the press conference,” she said.

Andrew immediately closed his laptop and looked up at her with his full attention.

“This morning, I didn’t only go to the print shop. I met Detective Langland at the coffee shop.”

“Okay,” he said tentatively.

She explained to him that she had wanted Langland’s unvarnished views of the case, including Leo and Laurie’s theory about Darren Gunther. “And maybe because she was a woman, I thought it would somehow help if I met with her, one-on-one—to make sure