Piece of My Heart Read online

  She nodded her assent. “Not too close to the water, though.”

  She noticed Laurie smile as the girls kicked off their sandals at the edge of the deck and ran toward the boys.

  “The twins are over the moon about being flower girls on Sunday,” Marcy said. “They’ve been practicing their steps, but be warned: for all I know, Chloe will go running down the aisle screaming like a maniac with Emily not far behind.”

  “And all of that would be just fine,” Laurie said. “You know, it’s funny, I can’t believe I ever got them confused. They look completely different to me now that I know them.”

  “That’s a sign you’re officially family now.” And Marcy meant it. She could see that Alex was serious about Laurie when he made a point of inviting them to New York to meet her. She was the first woman Alex had ever introduced to them who seemed to have other priorities besides landing one of the most eligible bachelors in the city. Over the past two years, it had become clear how much Laurie and Alex cared about each other.

  “Laurie!”

  Marcy turned to see a young woman—she looked like a teenager—behind them, heading to Laurie with her arms outstretched. Her long blond hair was pulled into a ponytail and she lugged a black backpack over her white sundress. Laurie gave the girl a warm hug.

  “You must be Mrs. Buckley.” The girl held out her hand for a quick shake.

  “Marcy,” she urged. “And you must be the famous Kara. Your chocolate-chip pancakes are legendary.”

  Marcy knew that Kara was Timmy’s favorite babysitter and a mainstay at the Moran household until she had left for college last fall at SUNY Buffalo. Their introductions were interrupted by a sand-covered ten-year-old rushing to greet Kara. Before Marcy’s kids made it to the deck, Timmy was already telling Kara all about the new video game he wanted to play with her.

  “Mom,” Emily whined, “Jonathan isn’t throwing the ball to us.”

  “Jonathan?” Laurie inquired. “Since when?”

  Marcy chuckled. “A new student in his school is named Bartholomew, and he insists on being called by his full name. Now all the kids think it’s cool to use proper names.”

  “Small world,” Laurie replied. “Just last week Timmy told me he thought ‘Timmy’ is a little kid’s name. At his request I sometimes call him ‘Timothy.’ ”

  “I’m sure for both it’s a passing fad,” Marcy said.

  They were interrupted by the sound of male voices emerging from the breezeway. It was Alex, Andrew, and Ramon. Andrew dangled a set of hotel key cards over his head.

  “We have the honeymoon suite,” he boasted. “Courtesy of my big brother.”

  “Crossed signals with the reservations desk,” Alex explained. “My betrothed and I will be keeping everything on the up and up this week. The honeymoon suite was the only one big enough for your whole brood.”

  “Lucky us,” Marcy said, accepting one of the keys.

  “So…” Marcy could tell that her husband was eager to say whatever would come next. “How do you ladies feel about an afternoon of golf?”

  “Seriously?” She gave a playful swat in his direction. “I thought you were going to announce a spa day.”

  “These are Alex’s last few hours of being in his thirties, and a little bird named Ramon told me golf was on the wish list.”

  Ramon placed a guilty palm over his heart. “It’s my fault indeed. Leo won’t be here until close to dinner, so this would be the best time for the four of you to hit the links.”

  “And what about you, Ramon?” Marcy asked. “We don’t want to leave you out.”

  “I have a hidden agenda of my own.”

  “Top secret,” Timmy added with a sly smile.

  Marcy already knew that Ramon had promised to find a way to take Timmy shopping alone so he could select a special present for Alex, separate from the gift Laurie had chosen for both of them.

  Laurie looked to Marcy, assessing her opinion. “I’m a terrible golfer, but Alex keeps telling me that we should play together like you and Andrew do.”

  “Lunch at the clubhouse and then just nine holes,” Andrew promised.

  Marcy would be leaving her three kids with a nineteen-year-old she had met only moments earlier. On the other hand, Laurie was understandably the most protective mother she knew, and Laurie trusted Kara implicitly. What could possibly go wrong in this ocean paradise? she asked herself.

  “Fore!” she said, acting out a full swing of the club.

  The two couples entered the breezeway toward their rooms. As they walked—beneath the rim of a blue cotton hat, behind the darkened lenses of a pair of sunglasses—a stranger continued to watch the beach.

  Chapter 3

  Kara Sumner was having so much fun on the beach that she nearly forgot she was getting paid for the so-called work of helping to watch Timmy and his future cousins for a few days. She already knew that spending time with Timmy would be a piece of cake. She’d been babysitting him since she was in the ninth grade. But this trip involved three other, younger children she’d never met before, and Laurie had warned her that the twin girls could be “spirited.” Now that she was here, she couldn’t believe she had ever worried. The kids were super-sweet and managed to keep one another entertained with little effort on her part.

  The biggest challenge so far had been telling the girls apart. Kara was grateful that the parents hadn’t dressed them in matching swimming suits. Emily in yellow, Chloe in blue, she reminded herself. No problem.

  To top it off, one of Kara’s high school friends, Ashley Carter, was at the beach with her family and had joined the fun.

  At the twins’ request, they had just finished playing a practice round of “Alex and Laurie’s Wedding.” All of the children were included in the ceremony. While Alex’s brother Andrew would serve as the traditional best man to the groom, Timmy would serve as “best man” to the bride. Johnny would be the ring bearer, and Chloe and Emily were flower girls.

  In the twins’ pretend rendition on the beach, Kara was the bride, Ashley the groom, and Ramon stood in for best man, while the kids all practiced their ceremony responsibilities. Emily had even retrieved plastic rings from the family’s hotel room for Johnny to practice carrying down the aisle and for Timmy and Ramon to hand to the “bride” and “groom.”

  “Let’s try it again,” Emily pleaded. “Chloe walked too fast, and Johnny almost dropped the rings.”

  Her brother and sister protesting, Emily marched through the sand, back to the starting point of the imaginary “aisle” they had lined off with seashells for the procession.

  “I’m sorry to break up the fun,” Ramon said, “but Timothy and I need to make a trip into town to get your uncle Alex a birthday present.”

  “We got him a fancy briefcase,” Johnny announced. His sisters shushed him. “What?! Ramon and Timothy can keep a secret better than you two.”

  Ramon looked to the babysitters with sympathy. “Do you two have this, Miss Kara?”

  “I don’t know, guys. Do you mind hanging out with Ashley and me for a little while longer?”

  The three Buckley children all clapped and cheered. “Can we play wedding again?” Emily asked. “Pleeeeaaase!”

  “If they’re leaving, then I want to be one of the best men this time!” Johnny exclaimed.

  “You always want to do everything Timmy does,” Chloe said. “We’re going to call you Timmy all day long now.”

  “His name is Timothy,” Johnny insisted.

  Kara smiled at Ramon. “I’d say we’ve got it all under control here.”

  Johnny, now pretending to be Timmy the best man, indulged his sisters in three additional dry runs of the wedding procession before declaring himself finished. “I want to ride the skim board again. I’m getting good at it.”

  “I’m hot.” Emily’s complaint was quiet but plaintive. Kara placed a hand on the top of her dark hair. The little girl’s head was roasting. Chloe tilted forward, and Kara confirmed she was warm, too.


  “Dark hair absorbs all the heat. Let me go see if you have hats in your room.”

  “Can we go inside, too?” Chloe asked.

  Now that the thrill of the pretend wedding was over, the girls looked tired and overheated. “I think it’s time for all of us to go catch our breath inside with the air-conditioning.”

  Johnny clutched the turquoise-striped skim board against his body, eagerly studying the wave patterns. It was one of the many beach toys the hotel had available for guests. He was obviously disappointed by having to go inside.

  “I can stay with Johnny for a little while if you want to take them back to the room,” Ashley offered.

  Kara had no concerns about Ashley’s dependability. Ashley was a year older than Kara and had been trusted to watch her considerably younger siblings since middle school. But this was Kara’s job, and neither Marcy nor Laurie had ever met Ashley.

  “I’ll give him three runs on the board,” Ashley vowed. “It’ll be ten minutes—max. Besides, I even know the lifeguard on duty. Jack!” she cried out.

  A good-looking guy perched on top of the lifeguard stand turned his head and then waved.

  “It’s really hot out here,” Emily added.

  “Okay, let’s go in. You get three tries,” Kara said to Johnny, “but that’s it.”

  From a sand dune to the east, a stranger continued to watch—just a little boy and a teenage girl now, all alone. It’s almost time.

  * * *

  Once Emily and Chloe were back in their hotel suite, they ran to the terrace adjacent to their parents’ bedroom, marveling that they could wash the sand off of their legs with a private outdoor shower. Kara had to keep them from running around in circles when they came inside, so their wet feet didn’t slip on the tile floors. Instead, they tried jumping on the sofa, to which she also put a halt. So this was what Laurie meant by “spirited,” she thought.

  The suite had two bedrooms. The kids would be sharing the room with two queen beds. Kara watched as the girls pulled the blankets back from both of them and began rolling around, trying them out.

  In unison, they both pronounced that the bed closest to the window was where they’d sleep.

  “I don’t know,” Kara said hopefully. “You might want to lie there for a few seconds and pretend to sleep… just to be sure.”

  After a few minutes their slow, calm breaths fell into sync. Kara wondered if all twins were so connected, as she walked out of the room, leaving the bedroom door ajar behind her.

  She checked the time on her cell phone. It had been thirteen minutes since she’d left the beach. She pulled up Ashley’s number and hit call.

  “Hey girl.”

  “Did Johnny master his skim board?” Kara asked.

  “Nope. He tumbled his very first try. He made it out of the waves unscathed, but I figured it was safest to keep him out of the water. We’re with Jack getting ice cream at the beach shack.”

  Kara detected an unusual bubbliness in Ashley’s voice. She suspected it was related to Jack the handsome lifeguard.

  “The twins fell asleep, so would you mind bringing him back to the room as soon as he’s done with his ice cream?”

  “No problem. Johnny, it’s about time to head— Johnny? Where’d he go?”

  Kara heard shuffling sounds on the phone as if Ashley were walking.

  “You are with him, right?” The other end of the phone was silent. “Ashley, are you there? Say something. Is Johnny with you or not?”

  “He was literally just here. I don’t know where he went.”

  Chapter 4

  Laurie could not believe her eyes as her golf ball flew in a perfect arc off the head of her seven-iron, dropping only two feet from the pin.

  Andrew let out a whistle. “Alex, you didn’t tell me you were marrying a ringer!”

  As Laurie hopped into the passenger seat of the golf cart, Alex gave her a satisfied smile. “You’re a natural. We should play more often.”

  She had made some lucky shots around the green, but for her long game, she had taken to placing her errant fairway shots next to Alex’s lest she back up the entire course trying to move her ball along.

  As they were hopping out of the cart to putt, her cell phone rang. It was Leo.

  “Hey Dad.” She did her best to keep her voice down.

  “Am I missing all the fun?” Leo asked.

  “You’re missing all the golf.”

  “Sorry, I thought I was calling my daughter. Laurie Moran, about five-six, light brown hair, hazel eyes?”

  Laurie smiled. “How was your meeting?”

  In addition to being Laurie’s father, Leo Farley was also a former first deputy commissioner of the NYPD. Though he had accepted an invitation last year to return to the department’s anti-terrorism task force on a part-time basis, his meeting in the city today was not part of a current investigation.

  It was about an old murder conviction against Darren Gunther, a then twenty-one-year-old Vassar College student who stabbed a beloved bar owner who tried to break up a fight between Gunther and another bar patron. Gunther confessed the crime to Leo, but then claimed at trial that Leo fabricated the entire conversation. According to Gunther’s new version, a third party had intervened in the bar fight and ended up stabbing the owner. The jury didn’t buy it, and the judge handed Gunther a life sentence.

  “Let’s just say that the traffic on the LIE is heaven in comparison.”

  “Was it that bad?” Laurie asked.

  His meeting had been with the District Attorney’s Office, whose Conviction Integrity Unit was taking a second look at Gunther’s conviction. Her father was used to defendants claiming to be innocent years after the fact, but this case had gotten under his skin. Gunther had always been charismatic, but now at forty years old, he had gone on to publish a collection of essays about prison life, earning him a group of loyal—and in Leo’s opinion, naive—supporters. In Leo’s mind, Gunther was using his newfound celebrity to ride a recent wave of exoneration cases and get another bite at the apple.

  “They’re saying another guy’s DNA is on the knife handle. An ex-con with a long history of violence. It doesn’t change a thing, though. The confession’s the confession. I was in that room. But these young DAs don’t know me from Adam.”

  And that was the real reason this case had struck a nerve with Leo: Gunther was calling Leo Farley a liar, and Leo wasn’t going to let the accusation stand.

  “My faith in you is one hundred percent, Dad.”

  “I appreciate that. I need someone to take my side. I mean it: maybe you can take a look at this one for your show.”

  Alex was waving a putter in Laurie’s direction.

  To “investigate” a matter involving her father would be an obvious conflict of interest. But after Greg was murdered, Leo had retired early to help her care for Timmy. He had put himself on the line over and over again for her and her son, and never asked anything in return. And she did need to find a new case in a hurry.

  “Anyway, get back to your game before the marshal kicks you off the course for gabbing on the phone.”

  Her mind elsewhere, she missed her easy putt.

  * * *

  Three holes later, they were on the green when Laurie’s phone buzzed again. “Hi Kara,” she said, barely whispering.

  “It’s Kara?” Marcy asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Laurie could see the alarm cross Marcy’s face. “I’m sure it’s fine. She knows I appreciate regular updates.”

  Laurie could barely hear Kara over the sound of the ocean wind around her. “I’m so sorry, but you need to come back here.”

  “Okay, calm down. What happened?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t find Johnny. He’s missing, Laurie. Johnny’s missing.”

  Marcy must have seen something in Laurie’s face, because she reached for her husband, her eyes wide with dread.

  How am I going to tell her? Laurie asked herself.

  Chapter 5
/>
  In seven years, Johnny Buckley had only been lost one other time, and Marcy could remember every millisecond of the resulting fear. He was five years old then, and Andrew wanted to take the children to see the fireworks show now that the twins were old enough not to be afraid. They knew better than to take three kids into the crowds at the National Mall, so they opted for a picnic blanket and chairs at Meridian Hill Park instead.

  Unfortunately, taking in the show wasn’t the only thing the girls were old enough to do as toddlers. In an early demonstration of their curious tendencies, the twins kept marching away from their picnic blanket toward every nearby gathering that seemed remotely interesting. The young couple with the two dogs. The big family with all the cousins. The teenagers playing Frisbee. It seemed Chloe and Emily wanted to be everywhere except where they were supposed to be.

  Andrew and Marcy were focused so closely on Chloe and Emily that they scarcely noticed the fireworks blasting into the sky—or that Johnny was no longer perched in his little folding Nationals chair. It wasn’t like Johnny to wander off. If anything, he could be a bit clingy. Andrew hurried off to look for him while Marcy stayed put with the girls. Marcy counted the seconds, holding the twins on either side of her to keep them still. Not wanting to alarm the girls, she forced herself to breathe normally. Even beneath the booming sounds above her, she could feel her blood rushing through her veins.

  She had reached a count of 411 when she spotted Johnny moving toward her, his gaze bouncing between the colors on the horizon and the groups of park-goers he carefully navigated his way around. She grabbed him into the tightest hug possible. “Where were you?!”

  He had found his way to the restrooms and back all by himself, he declared proudly. “I had to go, and you and Daddy were chasing the twins.”