Whatever Happened to Janie? Page 9

  “I’m her father,” said Mr. Spring, “and I’m not leaving.”

  Janie stared at that big, tired red-bearded man. He seemed alternately and both family and stranger. Her Connecticut father would not have left the room either. He is a father, thought Janie. And I guess he’s mine. “They can stay.” She felt behind her, finding the arm and lowering herself into the corner of the sofa. One of those awkward pillows that serve no purpose made a lump behind her back. She picked it up. It was soft and velvety in her arms, and she held it against her chest like a teddy bear or a shield.

  “I’m Mr. Mollison,” said the policeman. She had a feeling he had told her that several times. This time she could hear him. “I’m the FBI officer who was assigned to your case twelve years ago, Jennie. And this is Mr. Fabrioli, who is with the state police, and Mr. Saychek, from the local police. Each of us is doing different things now, but we’ve come back to help on the Jennie Spring case since we’re the most familiar with it.”

  I’m not her. I stopped being her twelve years ago.

  Jodie could hardly bear to look at her sister.

  Jennie’s fingers scrabbled around the pillow like little separate animals trying to hide under leaves. Her eyes darted around the room looking for a safety zone. Her speech pattern changed radically. With every sentence she sounded younger and younger, as if she were falling backward in time, to when she was three years old, and by the end of the interview they would actually hear the three-year-old’s version.

  Jodie’s mother tried to stifle tears. The weeping had nothing to do with the kidnapping. Mom was weeping because she could not hold this daughter in her arms to comfort or protect her. Jennie would crawl under the sofa first.

  It took Mr. Mollison several more minutes of talking, and then he was the one who sat down next to Jennie. He was able to put his arm around her shoulder and get her to talk. Jennie talked only to him. The Spring family might as well not have been there at all.

  “Jennie,” said Mr. Mollison. He had a big, slow voice, as if they had all day; would always have all day. “We don’t want to talk about what we think happened, but only the things you really remember.”

  “I don’t remember,” said Jennie quickly.

  Mr. Mollison nodded for a while. Then he said, “Must have been pretty scary to pick up that milk carton in the school cafeteria and recognize your own picture on it.”

  Jennie clutched the pillow even harder.

  “Did you say anything to the kids you were eating with?” asked Mr. Mollison.

  “I said I was the face,” said Jennie. “Out loud. Right away.”

  “And what did your friends say to that?” asked Mr. Mollison.

  “They said I must really want to get out of the math test,” said Jennie.

  Jodie had to laugh.

  Jennie let go of the pillow a little. “No, wait,” she said. “I wasn’t the one with the math test. Pete and Adair had the math test. I was going to have to read my English essay out loud. See? I’ve already gotten the facts wrong. You can’t use me for facts. I get them mixed up. See?”

  “It’s easy to mix things up,” agreed Mr. Mollison, smiling. His big torso nodded along with his head, and he and Jennie almost rocked together. “You must have figured whoever put that photograph on the milk carton was pretty mixed up, too.”

  Jennie nodded. “Because my parents were my parents. And they’re good. See, I had my whole childhood. I was there. I lived it. And kidnapping is wrong. It’s evil. Only terrible people would do that.” Her chin was dimpling in and out as she fought sobbing. “And my parents are good. So 1 knew that it wasn’t really my picture on there.”

  “And yet …” said Mr. Mollison. “You took the milk carton home that day, didn’t you?”

  Jennie clung to the pillow again. “Just in case,” she said.

  Jodie remembered the day Mom and Dad had decided to put Jennie’s picture on the milk cartons. Talk about arguments!

  Uncle Paul said absolutely categorically not to; it would just put everybody through it all over again. The baby had been killed and they had accepted that fact years ago. Why drag up something so hopeless and futile yet again?

  Aunt Luellen said, “This is ridiculous. Nobody could recognize a teenage girl from a picture of her when she was three!” Aunt Luellen whipped out pictures of Stephen and Jodie when they were three, and sure enough, they were generic, assembly-line tots, not a single thing about them that carried into their teenage photographs.

  Neighbors who had lived there when Jennie vanished said not to do it; the Springs would get phony calls from crazies and go through yet more hell. Neighbors who had moved in long after the kidnapping said not to do it, because who knew what unimaginable horrors might turn up.

  Mom and Dad prevailed. They wanted one last try and they got it.

  And they had been right.

  Because there was one person who would recognize the picture, if she saw it.

  Jennie herself.

  As vividly as if she had fallen into the very cafeteria where it happened, Jodie imagined that moment of unwrapping a sandwich and picking up a milk carton. That moment in which Janie Johnson ceased to be a happy well-adjusted kid who wanted nothing more than a boyfriend and a driver’s license. That moment in which she became a terrified wreck who eventually uncovered the truth.

  Not that anybody, including Jennie, knew the truth.

  Mrs. Spring had taken her five children shopping at the mall. It is not easy to shop with five children. An adult has but two hands, one if she carries packages. So the twins, staggering insecurely on bow legs, had had little red harnesses around their baby chests. Mrs. Spring kept their leashes wound around her right wrist, along with her purse handle. Stephen, six, and Jodie, five, were to hold each other’s hands. Jennie, three and a half, clung to her mother’s free left hand.

  In the shoe store, Jennie had been a nuisance. Jennie was jealous of the attention the others got. The others came in pairs and she did not. She was in the middle and it was not her favorite place. Jennie wanted not just the pretty new shoes, but also the matching patent-leather handbag. Jennie pranced around the shoe store, the handbag over her shoulder, demanding that her mother buy it and whining unmercifully when Mom said no.

  The twins were difficult to fit. Their little toes curled under when the salesman tried to feel where their feet ended inside the shoes. He and Mom were kneeling on the floor, trying to coax the twins to stand up straight. The twins loved this game and kept falling over onto their diaper paddings and laughing themselves sick.

  Stephen and Jodie were hugging their new shoes to their chests. There is just nothing like a new pair of shoes when you’re little. Jodie loved the box as much as the shoes. She kept peeping inside the box to check on her lovely new-scented leather shoes, planning what she would do with the empty box when they got home. Stephen kept shifting his weight from one foot to another, saying, “Mom? Mom? Mom? I wanna wear my new ones. Mom? Mom? Mom? I wanna wear my new ones.”

  “Hush!” their mother kept saying, pressing down on a twin’s toe.

  It was not until they lined up at the cashier’s desk that they noticed Jennie was not there.

  Mom was furious. She yelled at Stephen and Jodie for not watching Jennie. Yanking the twins by their cords and the older ones by their linked hands, she marched out into the mall expecting to find Jennie window-shopping at the stuffed-toy shop, or watching the man who silk-screened your name on T-shirts while you waited.

  But they did not find Jennie.

  They never found Jennie.

  Jennie was never seen again.

  Twelve years later came the story none of them could have thought up.

  It seemed that a Mr. and Mrs. Frank Javensen, of Connecticut, had had a daughter, Hannah. Many years earlier, teenage Hannah had joined a cult. This was a sort of religious group, which brainwashed its new, confused members—young, lonely, idealistic kids like Hannah. Cult members obeyed their leaders in every way, includ
ing where they sat, what they ate, whom they married. Cult members earned money for their leaders by selling anything from flowers to their own bodies. Once you joined, you never left. You were never given permission. You did not visit home, and you scorned your parents and everything that home and upbringing had once meant to you. Any word uttered by your leader was Truth. Any word uttered by your country, school, or family was Corruption.

  Hannah, eighteen, was sucked in. She was so completely brainwashed she could speak only when spoken to and lost the ability to initiate anything. When the cult moved her to California she went. The Javensens hired private detectives to find her.

  When they could not coax Hannah to come home, Mr. and Mrs. Javensen actually stole her back. Then they paid an expert to un-brainwash Hannah.

  The plan failed. Hannah preferred the cult and back she went.

  The years passed.

  Hannah acquired a “mate” chosen by the leader and was married in a mass ceremony with hundreds of other couples. The Javensens knew there was no hope. They still wrote, but the letters were never answered, and they still phoned, but Hannah never came on the line.

  And then one day, one ordinary suburban day, with no warning and no notice, Hannah came home. She just walked in, after all that time. She was not alone. She was with her daughter, a sweet little red-haired girl.

  My daughter Janie, said Hannah. I want her brought up in your world, not mine. I can’t change my life, but I can save Janie from it

  And back Hannah went, address unknown, needing whatever strange and sad things the cult had to offer her.

  The Javensens, knowing the cult would claim and then whisk away this innocent grandchild as well, fled. Not only did they find another town, they even changed their unusual last name to a dull and unmemorable one. Frank and Miranda Javensen, whose daughter Hannah disappeared in the clutches of a cult, became Frank and Miranda Johnson, whose daughter Janie soon entered nursery school.

  They didn’t want little Janie to remember Hannah, nor pine for her, and certainly never to look for her, because a search would lead to the cult. So they taught Janie to call them Mommy and Daddy.

  But Hannah had never had a child. It was a lie, one that Mr. and Mrs. Javensen had completely swallowed.

  What had happened in that shopping center in New Jersey?

  Hannah must have decided to leave the cult, fleeing California, stealing money to make the trip, and eventually stealing cars as well. Hannah would have been nearly at the end of her journey. Only a half day’s drive from her home. Had she panicked? Had she been so desperate for company that even a three-year-old seemed attractive? Had she planned to ask for ransom money and then gotten scared? Had the cult told her to kidnap a baby? Had it been her idea, or could she actually have been assigned such an evil task?

  What had motivated Hannah to pretend Jennie was hers? Had she given Jennie to the Javensens from fear of jail or of the cult? Or had Hannah become so demented from years without love that she was too confused to know herself? Had Hannah, kidnapped herself from her cult by her own parents, thought what she was doing was normal?

  Unless Hannah was found, nobody would know those answers.

  They had one answer to one question, at least: why hadn’t the Javensens heard about the kidnapped Jennie Spring and realized it was this child?

  They’d been running from the cult they were sure would snatch the baby back. That week there was no time for television, radio, or newspapers. And like any sensation, coverage of a missing child two states away ended, replaced by other sensations. By the time their lives reached normal (if name-changing and child-acquiring could ever be called normal), publicity on the Jennie Spring case had ended.

  Why “Janie” instead of Jennie?

  They could only suppose that when Jennie said her name, Hannah misunderstood.

  Memories of her first three years faded. The little girl ceased to be Jennie Spring and became completely and wholly Janie Johnson, daughter of Frank and Miranda.

  Then one day, the little girl looked down at a carton of milk, and all their intertwined lives were once more irrevocably changed.

  Jodie took her mother’s hand. She might have pressed a Scream button, the way Mom reacted.

  Mom cried out, unable to bear Mr. Mollison asking all the questions. Asking, in her opinion, the wrong questions. “Did Hannah force you?” Mom sobbed.

  Jodie began to cry in spite of her vows not to.

  “No,” said Jennie. Her voice broke. “I think I wanted to go. I think I was having fun.”

  Jodie’s mother—and Jennie’s—said softly, full of love, “I’m so glad. I saw you torn from limb to limb. I saw you beaten and bruised and left to die in some swamp. I saw you assaulted by horrible evil people. But you were okay. I’m so glad.”

  It was a cue, in Jodie’s opinion. Jennie should have gotten up to embrace this real mother. The Springs should have hugged all around. That would be the door to let them forgive and accept.

  But Jennie held a pillow instead of a mother and looked away.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Mr. Mollison relaxed into the sofa cushions, as if he were the one who lived here. He slouched down till his feet stuck out into the room and began chatting comfortably and easily. He’s trying to soften me up, thought Janie. She tried to resist him, though why she was resisting and whom she was protecting, she did not really know.

  “Practically nobody,” said Mr. Mollison, “is ever kidnapped by a stranger. In spite of the hype you see on television, there are probably no more than fifty children a year taken by strangers. Those victims are usually abducted for sexual purposes, and let go by their captors very quickly. In fact,” said Mr. Mollison, rearranging the crystal candlesticks and the stacks of magazines on the coffee table, “these kids are usually home within a few hours. Most of the time the police aren’t called until after the child is home and has told the parents what happened. Furthermore, most of those children are not babies and not toddlers. The children taken by strangers are young teens.”

  Janie was not in the mood for background material. She wanted Mr. Mollison to get to the point, get out of the house, and get out of her life.

  It was her brothers and sister who listened. Stephen was astonished. “But then—who are all these missing children?”

  “You have to define missing,” said Mr. Mollison. “Missing includes late. Children who are late getting home. They misunderstood what time their parents told them to be home or they went somewhere else. Missing includes lost. A family can’t find the kid and they live near a river, and maybe missing means drowned. Missing includes runaways. Children who purposely leave home, who don’t want to be home. Missing includes children of divorce where one parent keeps them longer than he’s allowed to by visitation rights. The other parent knows exactly where the child is and has probably talked to the kid on the phone. Missing is an inclusive word. Missing hardly ever means kidnapping.”

  “So you didn’t know I was kidnapped,” said Janie.

  “Nobody knew anything. You were a three-year-old redhead in a polka-dotted dress who couldn’t be found. Your family searched the mall. Security searched the mall. They made loudspeaker announcements. People didn’t panic for a while,” said Mr. Mollison. “Even when panic really set in, everybody figured you’d just wandered off. State troopers brought dogs to find your scent. Volunteer search teams held hands and inched through fields and woods for a half mile behind the mall. People waded through ditches and opened the trunks of abandoned cars.”

  Opened the trunks of abandoned cars? Janie’s hair prickled. What if they had found her like that? A body thrown carelessly inside a rusting wreck, lying dead on mouse-chewed upholstery.

  “Altogether,” said her father in a queer collapsing voice, “there were six abandoned cars.” He gave a funny strangled laugh. “Six,” he repeated, and Janie knew that he was seeing each one of them. Mrs. Spring crushed herself against her husband’s chest, protecting herself from
the memories.

  Six times, Janie thought, among the rats and the garbage, they poked and prodded to find a corpse. Mine.

  For the first time she knew what they had been through.

  Get up, Janie told herself. Go hug them both. These are your mother and father. You’re the kid they thought would be found dead in the trunks of those six cars. Go to them!

  But she did not. She looked down at her small sturdy hands and the shape of her fingernails. Her parents in Connecticut had completely different hands. Naturally.

  “When the police began questioning people in the mall,” said Mr. Mollison, “a waitress remembered a young woman with long blond hair and her little girl with bright red hair. She remembered them laughing together and leaving together. Holding hands.”

  “So you did know!” cried Janie. “You knew Hannah took me. What were you looking in cars for? Why did you make my parents go through that?”

  “How could we know why the woman took you?” said Mr. Mollison. “Maybe to kill you. Maybe she knew it was stupid and pushed you out of her car as she was driving away. At any rate, once the waitress identified your photograph, it ceased to be a missing-child case and became Abduction by a Stranger. Not one of the police involved in the case had ever before—or ever since, for that matter—handled that crime. Statistically, ninety-five percent of all police stations will not encounter child-abduction by strangers. Forget what you see on TV. It doesn’t happen.”

  “Except to us,” said Jodie.

  There was a long period of quiet.

  Janie could distinguish separate breathing, her mother taking air in little shudders, her father breathing hard through his nose, Stephen regulating his lungs like a machine, Jodie holding her breath, waiting.

  “Except to you,” agreed Mr. Mollison.

  One of the policeman passed around two large boxes of Dunkin Donuts. Of course the good doughnuts ran out right away and the twins complained that there should be more chocolate-covered and fewer cream-filled. Mrs. Spring brought out perked coffee, a pitcher of milk, and plenty of mugs and glasses.