Piece of My Heart by Clark Mary Higgins & Burke Alafair

Author:Clark, Mary Higgins & Burke, Alafair [Clark, Mary Higgins & Burke, Alafair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, thriller, Suspense, Romance, Crime, Adult
ISBN: 9781982132545
Amazon: 198213254X
Goodreads: 50892230
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-11-17T08:00:00+00:00

Monday, July 20

Day Six

Chapter 32

Six days.

There was a time when six days rushed past in a minute, filled with PTA meetings, playdates, music lessons, and the general rhythm of keeping up with a busy family’s daily life.

But now Marcy had lived six days without speaking to her son. Every second felt like an hour. Every hour felt like a year. Every night felt like another eternity. She pressed her hands against her face, trying to remain calm.

It had been too many days since she had seen Johnny, and now she was also obsessed with the physical distance between her and the beach where she had last seen him.

“Maybe we should have stayed in New York.” She had uttered the same sentence at least a hundred times in the last twenty-four hours, after she and Andrew had driven the girls back to D.C. from the Hamptons.

They had consulted with both a crime victims advocate and two child psychologists before making the decision to go home. Detective Langland was keeping them up-to-date on the state of the investigation, but there was no quick ending in sight. Meanwhile, they had Chloe and Emily to think about. According to the experts, children were remarkably resilient. The absence of a routine, however, was a constant reminder that something was wrong with the world. In a hotel in the Hamptons, waiting each day for news about Johnny, they were suspended in limbo. And every time they left their room, they had to worry about a stranger offering awkward condolences or, worse, someone sneaking a clandestine photograph of the grieving family to post on the internet.

At home, they supposedly would feel more secure about their own safety. They’d be able to rely upon the familiar setting and old patterns of behavior to move through the days—or weeks or months—lying ahead.

And so back to D.C. they had gone.

At least it was summer. A few months from now, the girls would begin half days at school for pre-K. Marcy couldn’t imagine sending them out of her sight right now.

She was sitting at the outdoor table on their back deck, reading through the comments on the Find Johnny website, hoping that whoever had him might try to make contact online. Whatever you want, she thought. I will give you everything we own. I’ll trade my life for his. Please, just send him home.

But instead, she found the usual posts from well-intentioned strangers expressing their thoughts and prayers for Johnny and their family. She tried to ignore the negative ones. A small group of true-crime buffs had developed a conspiracy theory that Johnny must have been taken as revenge for some kind of criminal activity his parents were involved in. Then there were the cranks who believed the entire case was a “hoax” to drum up publicity for some unknown reason. But the comments that really stung were the ones blaming Andrew and Marcy for placing their son in danger: What kind of parents leave their kids with a sitter on a family vacation? Sometimes she thought she might die from the guilt.

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