Shannon studied my face while I spoke, then shook her head slowly. “I wish I had a magic wand to make that whole thing go away,” she said. “Mom should be, like, in intensive therapy or something.”

“She was in therapy when she was a kid,” I said. “And she’s okay,” I assured her. “You don’t need to worry about her.You just need to know that the next few weeks might be hard on her and your grandmother.”

“And you,” Shannon said.

“You know,” I said, and shrugged, “I remember so little of that time that it doesn’t have a big impact on me. I don’t even remember Isabel very well.”

Shannon drew her feet onto the sofa and turned to face me. “Okay,” she began. “Now, I’m honestly not saying this to be self-serving or anything, but doesn’t it seem like a really bad time for me to tell Mom I’m pregnant?”

I nodded. “Yes, it does. But I think you’ll have to do it sooner rather than later.” I took her wrist in my hand. “Come on, sweetie. Don’t let her find out by seeing you in maternity clothes, okay?”

She sighed. She had to know I was right.

“Shannon.” I tightened my hand on her wrist. “I’ve never said anything like this to you before, honey, but if you don’t tell your mother, I’m going to have to.”

She looked at me in disbelief. “All right, I’ll tell her,” she said. “Just not, like, tonight.”

“You have a week,” I said.

“All right.”

We turned back to the TV and Shannon clicked the remote until she found a station with old black-and-white reruns. I didn’t know what show we were watching, but it didn’t matter. My niece moved closer to me on the sofa and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and felt my spirit fill to overflowing with love for her.

“Would you be my labor coach?” she asked.

I was touched, but I knew my answer. “No,” I said. “I’m not labor coach material.You know who to ask.”

She let out a long breath. “I’m scared, Lucy,” she said.

I tightened my arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Of giving birth or of telling your mother?” I asked.

“Of the rest of my life,” she said.

CHAPTER 24

Julie

1962

Once upon a time, I was a hero.

On a stifling hot day during the last week of July, Lucy and I were lying on our stomachs at the Baby Beach, reading while our mother swam in the bay and Isabel hung out near the lifeguard stand with her friends. Suddenly, Lucy scrambled into a sitting position.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. Lucy had an uncanny way of knowing when anything out of the ordinary was occurring.

“You’re imagining things,” I said, but then I realized she was right. There’d been a shift in the activity on the beach. I could still hear the music from the transistor radios, but the laughter and talking had changed to whispers and shouts. Something was definitely going on.

I sat up, too, and noticed a few women standing at the water’s edge, shading their eyes as they looked out at the bay, and it was a moment before I realized that my mother was one of them. I heard a woman’s voice from somewhere behind me calling “Donnie! Donnie!” I glanced toward the lifeguard stand and saw Ned standing on top of it, looking toward the deep water through his binoculars.

My mother started walking toward us.

“What’s going on, Mom?” I asked, getting to my feet.

“Oh, not much,” she said, “but I think we should go home now. It’s so hot today.”

I could see right through her. Something bad had happened and she was trying to protect Lucy from knowing about it. I had no intention of leaving. I took off for the lifeguard stand at a run.

“Julie!” Mom called after me. “Where are you going? We have to go home.”

“In a minute,” I called over my shoulder.

Ned was still on top of the stand, but now he was crouched down on his haunches talking to a woman. It looked like a private conversation, so I walked behind the stand to where the teenagers stood huddled in a mass. I tugged on Isabel’s arm.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“A little boy is missing,” she said.

“What do you mean, he’s missing?” I asked. “In the water?”

“If I knew where he was, he wouldn’t be missing,” Isabel said, and some of her friends laughed.

“A three-year-old boy disappeared from his parents’ beach blanket,” Mitzi Caruso explained to me. “He’s got light blond hair and is wearing blue trunks.”

I looked around me at the beach. Nearly everyone was standing now, talking with one another, holding fast to their children. Women had their hands to their mouths, frown lines across their foreheads as they stared at the water. From where I stood, I searched the beach for a towheaded little boy and spotted several of them, but they all appeared to have at least one parent close by. I felt sad and I prayed that the little boy had not drowned. I had to do something to ease my feeling of helplessness.

“I’m going to check the playground,” I said, even though the teenagers were not paying much attention to me. I ran toward the swings, my mother’s request to return to her and Lucy forgotten.

I began my search for clues in a methodical fashion, using my foot to mark off areas in the sand to examine. I found a man’s watch almost immediately. It lay in the sand near one of the swings and had probably come off when a father had been pushing his child. I found a playing card—the two of clubs—along with numerous Popsicle sticks. And then I found a clue that sent a chill up my spine: a small piece of blue cloth!

I ran back to the lifeguard stand just as Ned was climbing down the ladder.

“Ned!” I called as I neared him. “Look what I found near the swings.” I held the piece of cloth out to him and he took it from my hand but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. His face looked grim, his mouth a straight, tight line.

“It might be from the boy’s trunks,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “No. His trunks are plaid, not solid.”He looked distracted as he handed the cloth back to me. “But thanks for trying and for keeping your eyes open.” He started toward the parking lot at a run, and Isabel walked up to me, frowning.

“Don’t bug him, Jules,” she said. Lifting her hair off her neck, she slipped a rubber band around it to form a sloppy ponytail. “This is an emergency. There’s no time to fool around.”

“I know it’s an emergency,” I said, and I walked away from her, annoyed.

“Come on, Julie,” my mother called again. She was folding the blanket and I walked over to help her.

“I want to stay, Mom,” I said, taking the hem of the blanket in my hands.

“You’ll only get in the way.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

My mother took the folded blanket into her arms and looked around us. People were still huddled together in small groups, talking. Some of the adults were racing this way and that, searching for the boy, I guessed, although the beach was so small you could nearly see all of it from where we were standing. The only areas hidden from view were the patches of tall beach grass at either end of the sandy crescent, and I watched a couple of women disappear into them, calling, “Donnnnneeeee! Donnnnneeeee!”

I heard sirens in the distance and looked toward the road. Ned and Isabel and a few other people stood in the parking lot, and Ned waved at the ambulance and the police car as they came into view.

“Please, Mommy.” Lucy grabbed our mother’s arm. “I want to go home.”

Lucy hated the sound of sirens. They must have reminded her of riding in the ambulance after the long-ago accident she’d been in with our mother.

“All right,” Mom said. “Pick up the thermos and we’ll leave. Julie, you can stay, but be sure you let the police do their job.”

“I will.”

“And be home by three. Not a second later, all right?”

A couple of men walked past us, one of them saying to the other that the bay might need to be dragged.

“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.

“Never mind,” my mother said. She picked up her beach bag and I saw tears in her eyes. She probably thought the boy was dead.

My mother and Lucy headed for the parking lot and I looked around me, trying to figure out what to do. My gaze lit on the pier. No one was out there, and I wondered if I could get a better look at the water from the end of it. I started running in that direction as a second police car pulled into the parking lot.

By the time I reached the end of the pier, there were no children at all in the water. Adults waded in the shallow section, eyes downcast as they looked for the little boy’s body. I studied the water below the pier, thinking that if the boy had made it onto the pier and then fallen in, I might see him under the water’s surface. But the water was too dark and, after a while, my eyes hurt from trying to pierce it.

I walked back down the pier toward the beach, and when I reached the area where the wood of the pier met the sand, I saw small footprints. They headed away from the beach toward the parking lot and they were the only set of footprints going in that direction. I followed them to where they disappeared into the crushed shells of the parking lot. Even when I got down on my knees and looked very closely, I could see how the bleached white bits of shell had been disturbed by tiny feet. I followed the footprints across the entire width of the parking lot, heading toward the clubhouse which was a nice, woody-smelling building where the kids in the area could play bingo and other games on rainy days. I picked the footprints up again in the sand at the other end of the parking lot. It was almost too easy. The footprints led directly to the rear of the clubhouse and stopped short at the lattice that enclosed the building’s crawl space. I tugged at one of the seams in the lattice and it pulled away easily. Kneeling down, I crawled inside, and there I found little Donnie Jakes, sound asleep on the cool, shaded sand.

I got a ride home a little after three from a policeman named Officer Davis, to whom I’d turned over the boy after I found him. Officer Davis walked me to my front door and told my mother that I had found Donnie Jakes, alive and well. Mom burst into tears, and it took me a while to realize it was not my role in finding him that made her cry, but rather that the child, even though he was a stranger to her, was safe.

“We’d have found him eventually,” Officer Davis said to her, once she’d mopped the tears from her face with a tissue, “but Julie here saved us a lot of work.” He told her I was an excellent sleuth. He told her I was a hero.

The next day, the Ocean County Leader ran the following headline on its front page: Boy Found Unharmed. The first sentence of the article was something like, Twelve-year-old Julie Bauer, aka the Nancy Drew of Bay Head Shores, helped police locate three-year old Donald P. Jakes, who had wandered off from his parents’ blanket on the BHS beach.

Within twenty-four hours, everyone knew my name. The mayor called to thank me, telling me once again that I was a hero, and Daddy came to the bungalow a day early to take us all out to dinner to celebrate. I was full of pride and self-importance, and I started thinking of myself as charmed, as though I could do no wrong. If only that had been the case.

CHAPTER 25

Julie

“I told him.” Ethan’s voice was a soft monotone on my speaker phone.

I was sitting at my desk, once again attempting to work on Chapter Four, and I quickly picked up the receiver.

“What did he say?” I asked. “And how are you?” I’d been waiting for his call, knowing he planned to talk to his father this morning. I had not yet gotten up the courage to call my mother.

“I’m fine,” he said, “but I won’t pretend it was easy.”

“Did you go to his house?” I knew that had been his plan.

“Uh-huh. I told him I’d bring over some pastries for breakfast and I think he knew something was up. So, we sat in his kitchen, and first I told him about Ned’s letter. He looked…God, he looked awful, Julie. Shocked. His face was all…it just crumpled in on itself. I told him I didn’t think it meant that Ned had done it, and he started yelling…well not yelling, exactly, but he said how he knew Ned didn’t do it better than anyone, because he’d been with Ned that night, just like he told the police. And then he said, ‘I hope you didn’t do anything with that letter. We should burn it.’”

I winced. “Oh, Ethan,” I said.

“I told him that I took it to the police and that they spoke with you and me and that they’ve reopened the case and will probably want to talk with him.” The words came out in that monotone again. He sounded tired.