Not everybody looks like their mom.

Ellen zoomed out to the original photo, outlined the man's face with the mouse, then clicked. Her heart beat a little faster. The man did look a little familiar, and his smile was like Will's, with that downturn on the right. She sipped some coffee and clicked Zoom again, enlarging his face to fill the screen. She'd hoped the blur would let her sense the general configuration of his face, but it didn't. She set down her coffee, almost spilling it on her notes, so she moved the notebook out of the way. Sticking out from underneath was the white card with the photo of Timothy Braverman.

Hmmm.

She slid out the white card and looked at the age-progressed version of Timothy, then set the card down, went back into My Pictures, and found Will's last school picture. She enlarged it and set it up on the screen next to the photo of the man on the beach. Then she compared the two photos, the most recent of Will with the man on the beach, taking a mental inventory:

Will, eyes blue and wide-set; Beach Man, eyes close together and blue Will, nose, little and turned up; Beach Man, long and skinny Will, blond hair; Beach Man, light brown hair Will, round face; Beach Man, long, oval face Will, normal chin; Beach Man, pointed chin Similarities, blue eyes, lopsided smile

Ellen reviewed the list, then leaned back and eyeballed the photos from a distance. She wasn't able to reach a conclusion, as much as she wanted to. Beach Man could be Will's father, or maybe he was someone Amy was dating around the same time, or a random guy with a beer. Or maybe Will didn't look that much like either of his parents. He looked like Cheryl, and that counted for something.

Ellen went back online. She clicked through to the Braverman family's website, then captured the age-progressed photo of Timothy and saved a copy to My Pictures. She was going to put it on the screen next to Will's and Beach Man's, then compare all three of them when something else on the Braverman family website caught her eye.

The composite drawing of the carjacker.

On impulse, Ellen captured the composite and saved a copy to My Pictures, then uploaded it and placed it next to recent Will, age-progressed Timothy, and Beach Man, all four images in a line. She blinked, and her heart beat a little faster. She captured the composite drawing and the photo of Beach Man, then placed them side by side on their own page. The photos were different sizes, so she outlined the composite drawing and clicked Zoom to enlarge it to the approximate size of Beach Man, and clicked.

She froze. The composite drawing of the carjacker looked like Beach Man. She double-checked, and there was no doubt that they looked alike.

"Oh my God," she said aloud, and Oreo Figaro raised his chin, his eyes angled slits disappearing into the blackness of his fur.

Ellen looked back at the screen, getting a grip. It was impossible to compare a black-and-white pencil drawing with a color photo of a flesh-and-blood man. She flashed on Will's tracing of a horse from the other day, and it gave her an idea. She clicked Print, and her cheap plastic printer chugged to life. Then she got up and hurried downstairs, rummaged through the toy box, and ran back up with a roll of tracing paper.

The printer had spit out a copy of the composite drawing, and she took a black Sharpie and went over the lines of the carjacker's features, blackening them so they'd be darker and thicker. Then she took the piece of tracing paper and placed it on top of the composite drawing, tracing the image onto the crinkly transparent paper, ignoring the thumping in her chest. She set the traced composite aside, slid the copy of the Beach Man photo from the printer tray, then moved her computer keyboard to the side and set the printed photo on the desk.

Then she stopped.

She wanted to know and she didn't want to know, both at once.

"Get over it," she said under her breath, and she took the traced composite of the carjacker and placed it over Beach Man's face.

It was an exact match.

Ellen felt her gorge rising, and she jumped up and bolted for the bathroom.

Chapter Thirty-three

Ellen lingered on the threshold to Will's room, lost in her thoughts. She couldn't work any longer, not after what she'd learned, or what she thought she'd learned. She could barely give it voice inside her own head, but she couldn't ignore it, either.

Is Will really Timothy?

She tasted bile and Colgate on her teeth and sagged against the doorjamb, willing her brain to function. Tried to reason it out and spot any failures of logic.

Begin at the beginning. Remain calm.

Ellen thought a minute, trying to articulate the scenario she feared. If the composite matched the photo of the man on the beach, then Beach Man was the carjacker. He had shot Carol Braverman's nanny. Kidnapped W. Taken the ransom money but kept the child. He had a girlfriend who pretended to be the baby's mother. Amy Martin.

Why not kill the baby right after the kidnapping?

Ellen shuddered, but she could guess at some answers. Amy wanted a baby and couldn't have one. Or they thought they could sell the baby on the black market. She folded her arms against her chest, hugging herself, and picked up the narrative in her mind, detecting another fallacy.

Why give him up for adoption?

That answer, Ellen knew for sure. Because he got sick. Will had a heart problem no one knew about. At least she assumed as much, because the Braverman site didn't mention that Timothy had any heart problems. The doctors at Dupont Hospital had told her that his murmur had gone undetected, which wasn't unusual. Will would have failed to thrive. He wouldn't eat well and he'd have been sickly. That would have overwhelmed Amy, even her mother said so, and it would have made it too risky to keep him. Too many blood tests, forms, and questions that could show Amy wasn't the mother and the boyfriend the father.

So what do they do next?

Ellen composed it like a nightmare news story. They'd take the baby to a hospital far from Miami, back to where Amy had grown up. They'd essentially abandon the baby in the hospital, and then a solution would come, in the form of a nice lady reporter, who falls in love with the baby. She adopts the baby and takes him home, where he sleeps under a sky of ersatz stars.

My God.

Ellen let her gaze wander around Will's bedroom, over the shadows of Tonka trucks and Legos, over shelves of skinny books and Candy Land and plush bears and bunnies, their soft pastels reduced to shades of gray. The window shade was up, and outside the sky was oddly bright, the world aglow with a new snowfall that insulated the house like a sheet of practical cotton, keeping her and Will safe inside.

"Mommy?" he asked sleepily, from the bed.

Ellen wiped her eyes, padded over to the bed, and leaned over Will, brushing his bangs from his forehead in the light from the doorway. "Sorry I woke you."

"Are you home?"

"Yes, it's night and I'm home."

"Connie says you have to work hard."

"I do, but I'm home now." Ellen swallowed the knot in her throat, but she had a feeling it would only travel down to her chest and cause a heart attack, or maybe she'd just spontaneously combust. She eased onto the guardrail and tried to regain her composure. "Sorry I forgot your crazy shirt."

"It's okay, Mommy."

Ellen's eyes welled up. She reached down and stroked his cheek. "You're the best kid in the world, do you know that?"

"You brushed your teeth."

"I did." Ellen was uncomfortable, sitting on the guardrail. "I hate this guardrail. I'm taking it off." She stood up and began to slide the wooden rail from the bed, jiggling the frame.

"I won't fall out, Mommy."