Janie Face to Face Read online

In a moment, Janie was holding out her driver’s license to be matched to her plane ticket. The license read Jane Johnson, which was not in fact her name. Had never been her name. It was just the name she used.

  Who, exactly, will race down the aisle and say yes? Janie wondered. Somebody named Janie Johnson, who doesn’t exist? Or somebody named Jennie Spring, who was kidnapped, vanished, and has only partly emerged?

  Now I never have to decide! I will be Mrs. Reeve Shields instead.

  “Congratulations,” said another agent. “Take your shoes off, please.”

  Janie was out of sight.

  Reeve shook hands with total strangers and got hugs from women crying “That made my day!” and posed with tourists who wanted the picture for their scrapbooks.

  He opened his iPhone. His witnesses vanished along with Janie, past the X-rays and into the airport, but their photos and videos were already his. Reeve opened the pictures of himself and Janie and watched the video.

  It was good that he had these.

  Without proof, Reeve would never believe that he had actually asked Janie Johnson to marry him, let alone that she had said yes.

  He emailed the photographs and video to Janie. She was at the gate, she texted back, surrounded by well-wishers.

  Reeve sat on a metal bench and emailed practically everybody whose number was stored on his phone. He didn’t write any messages. He attached the pictures and let them speak for themselves.

  Then he uploaded everything to Facebook.

  Then he watched his video again.

  Janie was still saying yes.

  THE SIXTH PIECE OF THE KIDNAPPER’S PUZZLE

  In the trailer where she was living at the time, Hannah followed the milk carton story, glued to the news and talk shows on her little television. She even bought newspapers, especially ones with tall fat headlines, and scoured each article. They all referred to the Jennie/Janie as a “victim.” It was so annoying. The little girl had never protested! She had been perfectly happy to eat the ice cream Hannah had bought for her. Hannah was the victim! One afternoon taking a kid for a ride had led to a ruined life!

  But the talk shows were stymied. Even though every professional and amateur psychologist out there had opinions, nobody in either family would give interviews. The New Jersey mother and father said things like “We’re confident everything will work out.” Hannah’s own mother and father were cowards; they turned their faces from the cameras and wore sunglasses.

  Hannah could not get over that Frank and Miranda had believed her so completely. They knew she was a liar. They knew she never bothered with the truth. And yet when it came to this huge thing—an actual living kid—they went and believed her. What was up with pretending to be the Jennie/Janie’s mother and father instead of her grandmother and grandfather? Maybe they wanted another shot at raising a daughter. Maybe they just wanted to fit in at the PTA meetings.

  But one thing was for sure: two families were fighting to the finish to keep the Jennie/Janie. Nobody but the police wanted Hannah. In fact, in all the coverage of this case and the custody of the Jennie/Janie, the most important person was hardly ever mentioned.

  Just about the only people who mentioned Hannah were the Spring parents. “Stop focusing on us,” they would tell the media. “Find Hannah Javensen.”

  It was not healthy to want revenge like that. It was better to understand and forgive than to nurse anger. The whole thing had happened years ago. Hannah had hardly thought about it when it did happen and hardly thought about it after it happened, and anyway, that Jennie/Janie girl was fine.

  Hannah came close to calling up some of those reporters. She yearned to tell everything. She would put an end to that “victim” nonsense. She would laugh in her parents’ faces and smirk at those Springs. But satisfying as that might be, it would end in jail. Hannah had done short stretches. She didn’t want a long one.

  At the library, she tortured herself by gathering more details. You had to be careful at libraries. Librarians were always leaning over your shoulder. Other patrons liked to gab about their projects, and the librarians followed everybody’s passion and scurried over with some new angle or book. You had to be especially careful when printing something out. They were bound to hover. Hannah had a fat folder with every photograph she had cut from a library newspaper and all the printouts from online sites. She didn’t want any snoopy librarian seeing it.

  She liked to study those Spring people. There were so many of them, and they all had red hair. They looked like Easter rabbits dyed for the occasion. Some of them had curly red hair and some of them flat red hair and some of them redder red hair, but they were all healthy and freckled and proud of themselves.

  Hannah had been too busy following the news to go to the post office. It had been fun, but now she had to get her money. She was not many blocks away from the branch when it occurred to her that her father would give her up. Now that the FBI knew that the Jennie/Janie wasn’t Frank and Miranda’s daughter and that their actual daughter had driven the Jennie/Janie up from New Jersey, Frank would tell! Frank would save himself, because he had always put himself first, and never Hannah.

  Close to the post office, right this very minute, cops were probably hiding in parked cars, slumped behind steering wheels, sipping cold coffee, looking for a slim golden-haired young woman.

  But she was smart and they were stupid. She swung away from the post office branch. She would have to go to Denver for a while. But wait! Denver was very close. The police would think of looking in Denver!

  She had no choice. She left the state. She was forced to travel a long way. She was forced to steal. The one good thing about all the publicity was that Hannah did not need a library or a television. She could just read the headlines in tabloids.

  Nothing happened to her parents. No arrests. No trials.

  The weeks became months. She was desperate for money. Shortly before the annual rent on the box was due, Hannah made her way back to Boulder, walked quietly into the post office lobby, and put her key in the lock of the little box—and there lay her checks.

  Her father had not turned her in. He was still sending money. It wasn’t because he loved her. It was to buy her off.

  She cashed her checks at her old bank and at last managed a nice long visit to a library. She had missed an important episode in the life of the Jennie/Janie. Through the courts, the Spring family had finally gotten their kid—but the Jennie/Janie left them and went back to Hannah’s parents.

  Frank and Miranda still wanted these other people’s little girl more than they wanted their own little girl.

  If only Hannah could make them suffer the way she had to suffer.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Brendan Spring’s first interview had been fun. He knew that Janie—always the star in her own personal soap opera—would hate it that he was talking to the media about her. Brendan rather enjoyed sticking it to her.

  The second interview was difficult, seeing as Brendan had already told everything he knew. He wanted another free dinner, though, so he pretended he had more to say and was holding back.

  The night before the third interview, Brendan had trouble sleeping. The long year of anger was over. He was just confused. He could not think of anything to do all day. He wasn’t interested in going to class. It hardly mattered now anyway. Classes were mainly over.

  He wanted to pretend that he had never wanted success.

  He wanted to pretend that success would come in the morning.

  He wanted to have a better life handed to him.

  A few hours before dawn, Brendan Spring realized that he was not the strong one in his family. He was the weak one.

  When it was finally time to meet the interviewer at the restaurant, he remembered that Mom always said a good hot meal solved many problems.

  Maybe she was right, but Brendan couldn’t eat. He didn’t know what he was doing here. He didn’t even know what he was doing on Earth.

  For a while the researcher d
id the talking. Perhaps he couldn’t stand the silence. Perhaps he was hoping to jump-start Brendan. He told Brendan about the support checks Frank had been sending Hannah all these years.

  Somebody in his family had done some serious talking. Brendan only knew about Frank’s checks because he knew there was some secret about that trip to Colorado that Janie and Reeve and Brian had taken. Brendan had pounded his twin until Brian gave it up. “How come we’re not telling the FBI?” Brendan had asked him.

  “Because the one who’d be in trouble is Janie’s father, and she loves her father, and in fact, I like him too,” said Brian. “Frank is a good guy.”

  “Good guys send money every month to kidnappers?” Brendan demanded.

  His twin had been uncomfortable. They were always uncomfortable with Janie’s reality. But here in the restaurant, Brendan was really uncomfortable. This researcher knew more about the checks than Brendan did. Who had told him this stuff? Janie herself?

  But Janie had practically hidden under the couch that day the FBI came and Dad kicked them out. Okay, sure, years had passed—she was older—but still. Brendan could not believe Janie had talked.

  Stephen?

  Stephen regarded the kidnapping and its effect on them as poison. Stephen wanted the kidnapper caught and imprisoned, but Stephen would not share intimate details with anybody about anything.

  Jodie?

  Brendan didn’t understand this sister. He could see taking a year off to hitchhike in Europe, although he personally didn’t care whether Europe even existed. But Jodie had gone to a third world island with no economy, fresh from earthquakes, waist-deep in rubble, where she was teaching English and tooth brushing. Yes, her cell phone worked and yes, she communicated all the time. You couldn’t tell she was living in another world. She could have dealt with this guy by texting or whatever. But Brendan doubted it. Jodie had been hurt more than any of them by Janie’s dislike of her real family. Jodie had made peace with their younger sister, but Brendan believed she was in Haiti partly to put serious distance between herself and the family. He did not think Jodie would tell a researcher anything.

  Brian?

  His twin was very bookish. Maybe he was in love with the idea of being part of a book. And for sure, Brian loved talking.

  And yet, as the researcher moved into other topics and Brendan played with his food, he had a weird sense that the researcher was quoting a woman. It just didn’t sound like a guy.

  There was only one other female in the family.

  Mom.

  He tried to imagine her in a restaurant pouring out her heart to this man. What would be the point? Mom could talk forever about the kidnap and it wouldn’t change the fact that her kidnapped daughter preferred her kidnap family.

  And Brendan himself could talk forever—although he’d never talked once—about being a failure, and that wouldn’t make him a success.

  Brendan poured A1 sauce on his steak. Like everything else, it reminded him that he had not turned out to be A-one.

  “How do you picture Hannah now?” asked the interviewer.

  Brendan never thought of stuff like that, although the rest of his family was obsessed with the kidnapper. Hannah Javensen had been his age, and also in her second semester of freshman year, when she’d joined that cult.

  Brendan felt a stab of sympathy for Hannah. She too had probably expected to be special. But no—she was just another invisible mediocrity. They probably offered her steak too, he thought. She probably dipped a bite in A1 sauce and knew she was actually C minus. And they probably said to her, “Come to us. We’re your new friends. In our group, you’ll be A-one. Which you deserve! Your parents were bad. They placed unfair demands on you. We will never do that.”

  “Lemme read some of the book,” Brendan said roughly.

  “I have a few chapters because Calvin Vinesett thinks it’ll help me do the interviews. But they’re first drafts. He hasn’t polished them yet.”

  “Listen,” said Brendan Spring, “I read a book about every third year. Tops. I’m not gonna know if it’s polished. Give it over. I wanna read some.”

  Jodie Spring had brought her sewing machine to Haiti, along with a suitcase of bright cotton cloth and dozens of yards of trim. The children who flocked to the church for food had old, torn clothes. Jodie could whip up an adorable smock-type dress and edge it with lace or a row of hearts. She set her sewing machine on a table next to the bottled water, the only safe water around, and sometimes the only water at all. The next little girl in line would choose her cloth from Jodie’s stack. Jodie would cut it into two rectangles and string these on a collar made from the same fabric. She’d stitch up the sides and run the hem. The little girls were so happy in their new dresses.

  Jodie ran out of cloth. Her church back home shipped more, but somebody stole the sewing machine. Jodie wept and the little girls who were not going to get dresses comforted her. She managed to hand-sew one dress, but each seam took a long time.

  She used the rest of the trim for hair bows and bracelets. Her church shipped another sewing machine, but it never arrived. Somebody probably opened the crate and decided to keep it. She just hoped they were using it, instead of letting it rust.

  She was utterly exhausted by Haiti.

  Earthquakes had damaged so many buildings that her eye never rested on anything whole or painted or safe. Pieces of ruined structures stuck up in the air or lay in piles over yet more rubble. It seemed impossible that anybody could even walk down a street—that they could even locate the street! And yet people laughed and danced and wore bright clothing and thanked Jodie for coming.

  The first few months had been so exciting. The next few months had been so busy. By the end of spring, she was drained. The nuns said Jodie had done great things.

  But Jodie could not think of any.

  Sometimes she played kickball with the kids. They did not have a ball. It was kick the can, which she had heard of but hadn’t known people did literally. The church sent whatever Jodie requested, and sometimes it arrived, but people were so hungry for stuff that it never stayed at the mission. Soccer balls vanished in a knot of little boys joyful to have a real one, and books left the school shelves never to return.

  “It’s useless,” Jodie said sadly.

  “You were not useless,” said the nuns. “You gave a year of your life to God and to the people of Haiti. You were a blessing, and you are blessed.”

  But she did not feel that way. On her life list, she could not write: Save the world. Check. She could only write: Struggled in Haiti. Check.

  Thank God (literally; she thanked Him daily) for her cell phone. Every time she charged it (not always possible, in a place with occasional electricity), she went first to the calendar and stared at the date on which she would fly out.

  I’m so proud of you, her girlfriend Nicole texted. Nicole was studying fashion design in New York City, which meant Nicole’s life was the polar opposite of Jodie’s. I ran into your mother, Nicole added. All excited because Janie stopped in.

  That was EVER SO generous of Janie—to stop in, Jodie wrote back.

  You’re still mad at her, aren’t you?

  I’ll ALWAYS be a little mad at her.

  I haven’t forgiven her for not loving us more than she loved the Johnsons, thought Jodie.

  Jodie was standing within the convent walls. Well, not really, since most of the walls had fallen. She was standing within the rubble. But there was still a sense of enclosure. She could hear the noises of the town—different noises from at home: less traffic, more shouting; less machinery, more laughter—but she was wrapped inside the mission wall and had the faint sense of knowing what a real convent might be like for a real nun. You served God and the world, but you were enclosed in a wonderful way, with walls around and God above and sisters near.

  Not that being enclosed with her real sister had been wonderful.

  Maybe because it was a convent, Jodie could kneel easily. On her knees, she said silently
to God, I want to forgive. Help me love Janie all the way through, all the time.

  Nicole texted:

  Would you still want to find the kidnapper, if you could?

  In a heartbeat.

  My cousin Vic is on the local police force now. They’d love to resurrect that cold case. They need some new thing to justify it.

  And so, in Haiti, where wrong was so huge and pain so present, where Jodie could not solve a thing, where all she had to offer was a smile and a bowl of soup and a day of pointlessly shifting rubble, Jodie Spring decided there was one thing she could do: she could give the police a boost.

  Frank Johnson always knew where Hannah was, and always sent her money.

  Jodie texted: Stephen knows which bank branch.

  Reeve Shields left the airport terminal and stood for a minute in the intense sunshine, letting it bake his body.

  Janie phoned. “They delayed boarding. We can talk again.”

  Reeve entered the stuffy shade of the parking garage, sat in his car, and turned on the air-conditioning. They spent ten minutes getting mushy.

  The Fourth of July turned out to be a weekday, so they settled on Saturday, July 8. “Today is May twenty-first,” said Janie. “Seven weeks.”

  “Tons of time,” said Reeve. “What do we do first?” He figured that whatever they did first would involve shopping. Reeve was not fond of shopping, but Janie loved it. Once they were married, she’d probably do all of it. Division of labor was good.

  Of course, it’s easier to shop when you have money.

  Reeve knew to the dime how much he had in his checking and savings accounts. A week ago, he’d been rich, since his sixty-hour workweeks and required television left no time to spend money. No problem buying Janie a round-trip ticket for the weekend. But if he hoped to furnish a life, it looked tricky.

  Janie moved on. “The big problem is,” she said, “what is my name?”

  “Don’t let airport security hear you. They hate when people fly under false names.”