Whatever Happened to Janie? Read online

  “I’m sorry,” Janie said. “I’m trying. I really am. But it’s—it’s hard. I’ve been taken away from my real family twice.” She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want them to see how scared she was.

  “Except the Johnsons weren’t your real family,” said Mr. Spring carefully. “They were wonderful people, and we will always be in debt to them, because they took care of our daughter for us. But you’re back with your real family, sweetie.”

  She didn’t want strangers calling her sweetie.

  “Anyway,” said Jodie, getting mad, “we didn’t take you from the Johnsons. You called us. You’re the one who recognized yourself on the milk carton. You wanted to come here.”

  “I didn’t want to come,” Janie mumbled. “I just wanted you to know that I was all right. I wanted you to stop worrying.” Now it was her parents in Connecticut doing the worrying. They too had lost a daughter twice. Oh, Mommy! she thought, her lungs flaring up like bonfires. I can’t even breathe here, Mommy. I want to go home!

  “We love you, Jennie,” said Mrs. Spring. She ran her fingers through Janie’s hair as if she owned Janie. As if she were Janie’s mother. “And we’re very, very glad to have you home.”

  ALSO BY CAROLINE B. COONEY

  The Janie Books

  The Face on the Milk Carton

  Whatever Happened to Janie?

  The Voice on the Radio

  What Janie Found

  The Time Travel Quartet

  Both Sides of Time

  Out of Time

  Prisoner of Time

  For All Time

  The Time Travelers: Volumes I and II

  OTHER NOVELS

  Diamonds in the Shadow

  A Friend at Midnight

  Hit the Road

  Code Orange

  The Girl Who Invented Romance

  Family Reunion

  Goddess of Yesterday

  The Ransom of Mercy Carter

  Tune In Anytime

  Burning Up

  What Child Is This?

  Driver’s Ed

  Twenty Pageants Later

  Among Friends

  For Sayre, who knew what happened to Janie

  CHAPTER

  1

  After their sister’s kidnapping, Dad not only took Stephen and Jodie to school every morning, he held their hands.

  Not once—not once in a hundred and eighty days a year, kindergarten through sixth grade—were the remaining Spring children allowed to take a school bus. Not once had Jodie been allowed to walk in or out of the elementary school without her father there.

  The children would get out of the car. Dad would take Jodie’s hand in his right hand and Stephen’s hand in his left. Then they would walk across the parking lot, into the building and down to Jodie’s classroom where he would transfer Jodie’s hand to the teacher’s. His eyes would scan the halls, as if kidnappers were lurking beside the winning poster from the science contest. When Jodie was safely in her teacher’s care, Dad would continue on with Stephen.

  For years, Jodie thought this pattern was normal.

  But when Stephen was in fourth grade, he said if anybody ever held his hand again, he would bite it. He said if anybody had planned to kidnap another Spring child, they had given up by now. Stephen said he would carry a knife, he would carry a submachine gun, he would carry a nuclear bomb, and he would blow away all would-be kidnappers, but never again would he let anybody hold his hand.

  From his fourth-grade heart had come the hidden rage they all felt and never dared say out loud.

  “I hate Jennie!” Stephen had screamed. “I hate my sister for ruining our lives! The least Jennie could have done was leave her body there for us to find. Then we could bury her and be done with her. I hate it that we have to worry every single day. I hate her!”

  Stephen was seventeen now. Jodie could remember that meal as if it were yesterday. Mom and Dad had sat as tight and silent as wind-up dolls. More vividly than anything else, Jodie remembered that nobody yelled at Stephen for saying such terrible things.

  Years of worry had torn the family’s guts apart, like a tornado peeling the house walls away. Worry had separated them from each other, so they were not six people knit close in tight, warm threads of family, but travelers accidentally in the same motel.

  There had been a long, long silence after Stephen’s outburst. Even the twins, who had been thick and annoying all their paired lives, knew better than to speak.

  At last Dad had extended his hands from his sides, straight out, like a Roman slave being crucified.

  The whole family held hands every evening to say grace before supper. That was what Dad intended, and yet the stiffness of his arms, the awful lines around his mouth, did not look like grace.

  Jodie had been scared, because she was between Dad and Stephen, and she would have to take Stephen’s hand, and she was pretty sure Stephen really would bite her.

  But he didn’t.

  He cried instead. Stephen had cried easily when he was little and the humiliation of that had left its mark; nothing would have made Stephen Spring cry now that he was seventeen. Where a ten-year-old had exhibited tears, the young man used fists.

  So they had held hands, and Dad had prayed. Not grace. He didn’t mention food. He didn’t mention shelter. He said, “Dear Lord, tonight we are going to bury Jennie. We love her, but she’s gone and now we’re going to say good-bye. Thank you for the time we had Jennie. The rest of us have to go on living. Thank you for making Stephen tell us.”

  Jodie was only nine. Only a third-grader. Jodie had needed to take her hands back from Stephen and Daddy so she could wipe away her tears, and Jodie never admitted to anybody that they were not tears of grief for her missing sister, but tears of relief that they were going to put Jennie on the shelf and be done with her.

  “Give Jennie a guardian angel,” said Dad softly to the Lord.

  Usually during grace, Jodie felt that Dad was talking to his children, ordering them to behave and be thankful. Not this prayer. Dad was talking to the Lord; Jodie thought if she looked up she would see God, and that was even scarier than having to hold Stephen’s hand, so she didn’t look up.

  “Take care of Jennie, Lord, wherever she is. Help us not mention Jennie again. Help us be a family of six and forget that we were ever a family of seven.” Dad squeezed Jodie’s hand.

  Jodie squeezed Stephen’s.

  The squeeze went around the circle, and the Lord must have been there, because the lump in Jodie’s throat dissolved, and the twins began to talk about sports—even when they were babies they talked about sports, they had been playing with basketballs and footballs and tennis balls from birth—and Stephen showed his B-plus geography paper; he had gotten forty-two of the fifty state capitals right.

  The family sealed up, like a perfect package. Things fit again. Everything from the number of chairs around the table to the toppling stacks of presents under the Christmas tree. The Spring family had six people in it now. The seventh was gone.

  Mom and Dad didn’t even telephone Mr. Mollison again. Mr. Mollison was the FBI agent who had been in charge of the case. For a while he had been as much a part of the family as Uncle Paul and Aunt Luellen.

  The next year, nobody talked about Jennie on her birthday. Nobody sobbed on the anniversary of the day Jennie went missing.

  Mr. and Mrs. Spring were still more careful than any other parents in the state of New Jersey, but the children were more careful, too. It was not because Jodie and her brothers were worried that they might be kidnapped, too. They were worried that their parents would be worried. The Spring children were always lined up at telephones to let Mom or Dad know where they were. They were never late.
They were children who knew, too well, one of the horrors of the world.

  The thing Jodie could not get over, now that her sister Jennie turned out to be alive and coming home, was that there had never been a horror.

  They had imagined all of it.

  Jennie had not died.

  She had not been tortured.

  She had not been cold or lost or drowned or raped or even frightened!

  Jennie had been just fine all along.

  It was incredible, when Jodie thought of the lancing fear the rest of them had endured for eleven and a half years. In most ways, of course, worry and fear vanished. When she was small, it vanished because Jodie believed in Daddy’s deal with God. If Daddy and the Lord both said Stop Worrying, well then, who was Jodie to worry? But as Jodie moved into her teens, the reality of her sister’s kidnapping often surfaced. When she brought a library book home … and the heroine was a redhead named Jennie. When Stephen had his first date … and her name was Jennie. When the late movie on television was about a kidnapping. When Jodie went in the post office and saw those black-and-white photos—HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

  She’d feel it again. The panic like burning acid, making it impossible to think of anything else. And the rage: the terrible, terrible anger that their lives had been so brutally interfered with.

  Brian and Brendan were babies when it happened, still sitting in the double stroller, getting everything sticky. (Jodie’s relationship with her twin brothers began by steering around them lest they smear her with melting lollipop or contaminate her with Oreo-cookie crumbs. Somehow it had continued that way. Keeping clear was Jodie’s major activity with her little brothers.) But Jodie had been in kindergarten and Stephen in first grade, old enough to have memories, old enough to understand what had happened.

  Well, no.

  Not quite. Nobody had ever known what happened that day at the shopping mall. Nobody had ever known where Jennie was taken, or who took her, or for what purpose.

  But all too well Jodie understood what happened to her family because of it.

  It was so confusing and astonishing to find that all along, Jennie had been happy and healthy and warm and everything else that was good. The Springs had never needed to worry.

  Mom and Dad were weak with relief and joy.

  Jodie mentally laid her history of nightmares out on the bed, like laundry to be put away, and studied them, understanding less than ever.

  Stephen, of course, was angry. Stephen didn’t even have a fuse; he just continually exploded. Stephen yelled that Jennie ought to have suffered, since the rest of them had.

  “Don’t talk like that once she comes,” warned their father. Dad was wildly excited. He and Mom kept bursting into shouts of laughter and hugging each other and hyperventilating. That was Jodie’s new word—hyperventilate. Jodie did not want her family getting overly emotional, or too noisy. She felt it was time to drop the hand-holding at dinner and the saying of grace. Jennie would think they were weird. “Don’t hyperventilate,” Jodie begged constantly. But her family was the hyperventilating kind.

  When Mom thought nobody was watching, she would rearrange the dining table, seeing where the seventh chair fit best. The chair her missing daughter would sit in when she came home. Then Mom would do a little tap dance around the chair, fingertips on the wood. She looked so comic, a forty-three-year-old, getting heavy, going gray, wearing sneakers that squeaked on the linoleum instead of tapping.

  “We’ll all have to work hard,” Mom warned every night. “Jennie’s grown up with another family. Different values, I suppose. This won’t be easy.” Mom burst into laughter, not believing a word of it. This was her baby girl. It would be easy and joyful. “We may have a hard time adjusting,” she added.

  This was for Stephen’s benefit. Stephen was not a great adjuster.

  Jodie planned to be the buffer between Jennie and Stephen. Jodie knew that she would not have problems. This was the sister with the matching J name. They would be like twins.

  Brian and Brendan never noticed much of anything except each other and their own lives. Jodie thought it was such a neat way to live, wrapped up and enclosed with this secret best friend who went with you everywhere and was part of you.

  That was how she would be with Jennie.

  At night, when they were each in their own beds, with only a thin little table and a narrow white telephone to separate them, they would tell each other sister things. Jennie would tell Jodie details about the kidnapping that she had never told anybody. And Jodie would share the secrets of her life: aches and hurts and loves and delights she had never managed to confess to Nicole or Caitlin.

  Jodie was cleaning her bedroom as it had never been cleaned before. Nicole and Caitlin said it was impossible to share a room this small. Two beds had been squeezed in, one tall bureau and one medium desk. Another person could never fit in her share of sweaters, earrings, cassettes, and shoes. Jodie was seized with a frenzy of energy, folding and refolding her clothing until it took up only half the space it used to; discarding left and right; putting paper grocery bags stuffed with little-used items in the attic.

  She had spent her allowance on scented drawer-liner paper from Laura Ashley. It was a lovely, delicate English-looking pattern. Its soft perfume filled the room like a stranger. Jennie would be pleased.

  Mom loved matching names. Jodie and Jennie went together. Of course the twins, Brian and Brendan, went together. Stephen was the oldest, and Mom and Dad had always meant to have a sixth child, who would be named Stacey whether it was a boy or a girl. So there’d have been Jodie and Jennie, Stephen and Stacey, Brian and Brendan.

  Of course, after Jennie went missing, nobody could consider another baby. How could any of them ever have left the room again? Nobody could have focused their eyes anywhere else again. They’d all have had heart attacks and died from fear that somebody would take that baby, too.

  Jennie was only twenty months younger than Jodie. As toddlers they had fought, Jodie pairing up with Stephen. Over the years, Jodie had thought of this a lot. If she, Jodie, had been holding Jennie’s hand at the shopping mall the way she was supposed to, nobody could have kidnapped Jennie.

  When she got to know this new sister, should she say she was sorry? Admit that it was her fault? If the new sister said, don’t worry, everything’s fine now, I’m home and happy, Jodie would be safe telling about her guilt. But if the new sister said, I hate you for it, and I’ve always hated you for it—what then?

  Jodie put the hand mirror that said JENNIE down on the piece of lace she had chosen to decorate the top of the bureau.

  Jodie’s mother loved things with names on them. The four kids had mugs, sweatshirts, bracelets, book bags, writing paper—everything—with their names printed or embroidered or engraved. Mom wanted to have a house full of JENNIE items for the homecoming. It was a popular name. They had had no trouble at the mall finding tons of stuff that said Jennie. They bought so much they were embarrassed. “We’ll have to bring it out one piece at a time,” said Jodie, giggling.

  “She’ll know we love her,” said Jodie’s mother.

  But behind the hyperventilating and the laughter lay the years of worry.

  Mom was trembling. She had been trembling for days. She was actually losing weight from shivering. You could see her hands shake. Nobody had commented on it because everybody else had shivers, too. Everybody was worried about everything. What to serve for dinner on the first night? What to say to the neighbors? How to take Jennie to school. How to hug.

  Would she be afraid? Would she be funny? Would she be shy? What would she be like—this sister who had grown up somewhere else?

  Jodie opened her bureau drawers and looked at the empty halves. She was so proud of herself, opening up her life, just like a drawer, to take Jennie in.

  I have a sister again, thought Jodie Spring. She isn’t buried. She isn’t gone. She wasn’t hurt. Her guardian angel did take care of her. And now he’s bringing her back to us.
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br />   Tomorrow.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The bedroom in Connecticut was a beautiful, sunny room, from which Janie Johnson had led a beautiful and sunny life. The leftovers of her childhood enthusiasms filled every shelf: the horseback-riding ribbons from fourth grade; the silver flute and the wooden music stand from sixth; the pompons and trophy from seventh-grade cheerleading.

  Janie’s mother stared at the room as if she were touring a castle in Europe; as if impossibly distant people had once lived bizarre and unimaginable lives in this room.

  But it was their own world that had turned out to be bizarre and unimaginable.

  Janie tried to hug her mother, but Mrs. Johnson, the huggingest of people, stepped back. She actually brushed Janie away. “I can’t go through any more,” whispered her mother. Mrs. Johnson did not look at her daughter, but at the room. The room was all she would have left.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Mommy,” pleaded Janie. How could she go on living if her mother hated her? Janie felt like a very little girl who needed to sit on her mother’s lap.

  “I’m not your mother,” said Mrs. Johnson in a suspended voice, as if she were being hanged.

  Since the truth had come out, Miranda Johnson’s elegance had frayed away; she was literally coming apart at the seams. She picked at the pockets and hems of her clothing, unraveling herself.

  For Miranda Johnson, motherhood was twice destroyed. Hannah, lost in the remote past, had ruined the present as well.

  “You are so my mother!” Janie felt as if her body were going to turn inside out, the way their lives had been turned inside out. Why on earth had she agreed to live with the Springs? Why had she not fought and screamed and refused?

  Lawyers had carefully explained that since Janie was not quite fifteen years old—the Johnsons had guessed the baby’s age wrong; she was a whole year younger than everybody had thought—she was a minor, and must obey her parents. And her parents were not Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Her parents were Mr. and Mrs. Spring, who wanted her home. In their house. In their state.