“An employee at the beach shack says he saw Johnny collecting seashells behind the shack a little while after they ordered their ice cream cones. He may have walked farther down the beach to collect more.”
“For over half an hour?”
“It’s a long beach. You know how focused he can be.”
“I also know he would never wander off alone this long.” Marcy had felt an immediate connection to Johnny when the nun at the hospital had placed him in her arms, like energy radiating directly from his tiny body into hers. She may not have had the experience of nine months of carrying him, but in that single moment, the two of them became bonded forever.
A woman was heading toward them from the hotel. Her maxi dress blew like a sail with the wind. She was carrying a camera and a cigarette, just as she had been when Marcy spotted her earlier that day.
“Excuse me. Ma’am, pardon me,” Marcy shouted. Andrew followed her as she charged through the sand toward the stranger.
Up close, Marcy could see that the woman was older than she had assumed—probably approaching sixty, with long gray-and-blond hair and skin etched by sun and smoking. She had a warm, welcoming smile.
“Well, hello.” She bent down and put her cigarette out in the sand. “Not like most people here to introduce themselves to strangers, especially in the summer.”
“I’m sorry. We’re staying at the hotel, and we can’t find our son.” Marcy held up the screen of her phone. Her voice caught at the sight of the image—a photograph of Johnny, all cheeks and a toothy grin as he held up his certificate for winning second place in the first-grade puzzling contest last April. “I saw you taking photographs earlier on the beach. Did you see him playing?”
The woman’s smile immediately fell. “I’m so sorry. I don’t recognize him. When I’m behind the camera, I focus on the natural beauty of the topography. Human beings don’t even exist in my mind when I’m looking through a lens.”
“Is it possible you have pictures that might show where he went?” Andrew asked.
“I can certainly check.” She switched her camera into display mode. Marcy and Andrew looked over her shoulder as she flipped through the digital images.
“There!” Marcy exclaimed. She pointed to the far-right edge of the screen. “That’s Johnny on his skim board.”
“Oh sure, I remember seeing a boy out there earlier today. I actually shifted my position to make sure I was getting a pure landscape.” She checked the time stamp of the photograph. It was not long after they had left for the golf course, so it didn’t provide any information beyond what they had gathered from Kara and Ashley.
The photographer waited patiently while they scrolled through the rest of her pictures, desperately searching for some clue of Johnny’s whereabouts. Andrew was writing down her name and number just in case they needed to reach her again, when Marcy saw the photographer’s facial expression shift again, this time to fear.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing toward the water. An object had washed up to shore with the waves.
Marcy felt her stomach tighten as she recognized the turquoise and white stripes from one of the photographs Kara had texted to Laurie while they were on the golf course. It was the skim board Johnny had been using. Her son was gone and he could be anywhere, even in the water.
The waves seemed to grow louder as she broke into sobs.
Chapter 6
Laurie plugged one ear with a finger as she struggled to hear her father on the other end of her cell phone over the sounds of the roaring waves.
“I reached out to the chief of the East Hampton Police Department,” Leo said. “They’re sending out a detective and a patrol car.”
It had been almost a half hour since Andrew called 911 to report Johnny missing. He had said at the time that the dispatcher treated him like a worrywart parent who’d simply lost sight of a typically adventurous child for a moment or two. The lack of a police response in the time that had passed seemed to confirm his impression. Alex was inside trying to pull some strings, but even a federal judge could not beat Leo Farley’s influence with law enforcement.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“They’re also going to send the marine patrol unit to your area,” he added.
“Is that police?”
He hesitated before answering. “For the most part, but their beat is to patrol the water from boats.”
The implication of the decision was clear and sent a chill up Laurie’s spine even though it was eighty degrees outside.
As she hung up her phone, she noticed a stocky young boy with dark, wind-tossed hair walking in her direction. His swim shorts were decorated with Star Wars characters, and his tan belly popped out slightly over the waistband. He was probably nine years old or so and seemed to be looking directly, but reluctantly, at her.
“Hey there,” she said, giving him a friendly wave. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
He squinted against the sunlight behind her.
“Sure.”
She pulled up a photograph she had taken of Timmy and Johnny together two months earlier when Andrew had brought Johnny up for the Yankees-Nationals game. Before she could even ask the boy if he recognized them, he pointed at the screen. “That’s Timothy and Jonathan. Are you their mom?”
“Well, I’m Timothy’s mom, yes, and that’s his cousin, Jonathan. You know them?”
“Just from today, but we were sharing the skim board. That’s what I was going to ask you. I saw you with the lady who found the board in the water and carried it away. I was going to ask her if I could play with it, but she looked really sad.”
“She is sad. She’s Johnny’s mom, and we can’t find him. When was the last time you saw him?”
He looked down at the sand, struggling to remember. “I think it was when he came out of the water and was talking to that girl and the lifeguard. They walked off that way.” He pointed in the direction of the beach shack.
“Have you seen him since then?”
More sand staring. “I saw him on the board in the water and he fell off.”
“Okay, was that before or after he went off with the lady and the lifeguard?”
“Um… I think it was before?”
He was anything but certain.
“But you were using the board, too?”
He nodded.
“So you know my friend found it in the water. Did you put it in there?”
He shook his head. She pictured Johnny slipping off the board and getting pulled beneath the current. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.
“But the waves keep coming up really far. Daddy had to move our umbrellas back and everything. I think the water just washed away the board when no one was looking.”
At least she had one potentially positive piece of news to report back to Marcy and Andrew. It was possible that one of the kids had simply abandoned the board in the sand, and then the tide pulled it into the ocean before returning it for Marcy to find.
“Do you know where the beach shack is?” Laurie asked.
He shook his head.
She told him that if he kept walking past the lifeguard stand, there was a shack on the other side of the restrooms where the hotel stored the skim boards. “There’s ice cream there, too.”