Janie Face to Face

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 did 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.”

“It isn’t false. I do have two names.”

Reeve put the phone on speaker, drove out of the parking garage, paid, and headed for the highway.

“I want to get married under my legal name,” Janie was saying. “Because marriage has to be true all the way through. So here’s the plan.”

Reeve loved that Janie would make the plans. She’d make a list, he’d follow it, that would be that. None of the boring discussion that had absorbed his sister Lizzie month after month. Like flowers. How much could you actually worry about flowers? You called the florist and they delivered, right?

“When we get to that part of the ceremony where you say ‘I, Reeve, take you, Janie, for my wedded wife,’ ” Janie told him, “you will say ‘I, Reeve, take you, Jennie, for my wedded wife.’ ”

Reeve didn’t drive off the road, but it was close.

Wife?

Wife?

He, Reeve, was going to have a wife?

That meant he would be a thing called a husband.

A hideous drumming infected the wheels. He had drifted off the road onto the warning cuts in the pavement. He found his way back into the lane. “I don’t call you Jennie,” he said. “You’re Janie.”

“It’s not that big of a change. Two letters.”

“Is this just for the wedding vows or is this for good?” Reeve asked. “Am I marrying some stranger named Jennie?”

“She is a stranger,” agreed Janie. “We both have to get to know her.”

“I know how I’ll handle it,” said Reeve. “My brother, Todd, will be best man. Along with the ring, he can hold up a cue card. JENNIE, it’ll say, in capital letters. That will add a certain something to the wedding memories. Groom tries to think of bride’s name.”

They were both laughing.

Janie said, “You won’t have to remember long. In a minute, I’ll have turned into Mrs. Reeve Shields.”

This was such a startling fact that for a while, neither of them could speak.

Janie boarded the plane.

She barely knew that there were other passengers, that the plane was full, that she had a middle seat. She watched the little video Reeve had forwarded and held it to her heart.

Reeve loves me. She had always known that. She just hadn’t known how much he loved her.

“At this time, please turn off all electronic devices,” said the flight attendant.

Janie never thought of her beloved phone as an electronic device. She touched the tiny switch at the top and then she was no longer connected to Reeve.

This is crazy! she thought. Why did I even get on the plane? Reeve wants me to live with him! He wants a wedding so soon there isn’t even time to arrange one! And I’m flying away?

Janie groped for the seat belt release. She would get off. Everybody would understand.

But the plane was already taxiing toward the runway.

She had waited too long.

When the plane took off, she stared down at a city she didn’t know. Somewhere down there, in the unknown city of Charlotte in the unknown state of North Carolina, she and Reeve Shields would start their married lives.

Without access to her beloved electronic device, she had to resort to the pencil she found at the bottom of her purse. The only blank paper she had was the leftover piece of her ticket printout.

Things to do, she wrote at the top.

#1 Tell parents.

A task with many subdivisions and pitfalls. Her flight would land at Kennedy. New Jersey and Connecticut were equidistant. If I’m getting married as Jennie Spring, she thought, I need to tell my Spring parents first.

Donna loved texting and tweeting, so Janie knew that her parents had gone to a movie this afternoon and were firing up the grill tonight. Her plane would land at 6:01. She would call as soon as they touched the ground. She would take an airport bus to Jersey, where Jonathan and Donna would pick her up. By eight o’clock tonight, they’d know about the wedding.

Janie did not have the faintest idea how they would react.

Next, she would tell her other parents.

Every time Janie dealt with one mother and father first, she dealt with the other mother and father second. The others always knew that they were second and it always hurt.

How many blows could Miranda sustain without collapsing?


Sarah-Charlotte and her roommate, Lauren, watched the video over and over.

Lauren said, “She is the prettiest thing on earth and he is the most in love. Look at him! He’s such a puppy of a guy! You just want to cuddle him. The whole security line loves him too! I don’t think anybody is ever going to love me that much.”

Sarah-Charlotte called Janie but the phone went to voice mail. She had to leave a message. “Love the video,” she said. “Love the future. Call me, Janie.”

She was crushed. I’m the best friend and I find out along with the world? I didn’t even know she was still seeing Reeve. I thought she was in love with that Michael/Mick. I don’t even know what airport that video’s in.

She texted Reeve. Congratulations. She wanted to add “How come Janie hasn’t called me?” but stopped herself.

Reeve texted back immediately. Thx. She’s airborne. She’ll call u asap.

Lauren swooned. “Not only is he adorable, he’s thoughtful! I want him too. How can we pry him away from Janie and have him for ourselves?”


Stephen Spring was still sitting in front of his computer, trying to process the researcher’s request. Kathleen leaned over his shoulder and read the rest of the message out loud. “ ‘Would you consider having dinner with me while I am here in Boulder? I have found a clue to Hannah Javensen’s location and you and I can discuss it.’

“A clue!” cried Kathleen. “That’s so exciting.”

And so unlikely. Stephen had done his share of hunting for the kidnapper. Some grad student hired online to do preliminary interviews for the actual author (which was insulting; was it beneath Calvin Vinesett to meet the people he planned to make money off?) had found something Stephen hadn’t?

Kathleen bumped into the computer desk, and little florets from the dried bouquet she had insisted on putting there showered the keyboard. “Let’s go, Stephen! Aren’t you dying of curiosity?”

Stephen sometimes thought Kathleen dated him because she was still curious about Janie. He read on.

Based on the fact that Mr. Javensen (aka Johnson) used a Boulder post office, I have been searching Boulder public records for some time now.

Three women fit the profile of Hannah Javensen. All three live alone in the greater Boulder area. All three appear to be the right age—late forties or early fifties. All have unclear backgrounds.

Three possible Hannahs. Here. In Boulder.

He had always assumed that Hannah didn’t live here because it was so expensive. That she had traveled to the post office once a month. Certainly after Frank’s checks stopped coming, living here would have been very difficult.

Now he pictured her, walking the same sidewalks he did, drinking coffee at the same coffee shop, sitting on the same bench in the same open-air mall, enjoying the same mountain views.

He could imagine Hannah living a marginal existence. Renting under a roommate’s name. Living illegally in a warehouse, taking her baths in a sink. Getting paid cash. But such a person would not show up in public records.

“I have to know who those three possible Hannahs are,” he said to Kathleen. “I think this is a scam to get me to an interview. But maybe not. If I lay eyes on Hannah, I’ll know. I’ve studied her high school photograph all these years. Jodie and I even went to New York City with that photograph, believing we could find her. I know Frank and Miranda pretty well too. And we have the picture the FBI artists came up with, aging her. We know what Hannah would look like in middle age. We’re going to get the names and addresses of the possible Hannahs and check them out.”

We?

Kathleen was so excited. She’d get to meet these possible Hannahs? The researcher was obviously brilliant, to have gotten information the FBI hadn’t found. Of course, the FBI didn’t have the little piece of news that Hannah had had a Boulder post office box all these years.

Stephen paced. Kathleen loved when he paced. He was so adorable.

What she really wanted to do with her life was teach skiing in the winter here in Colorado and guide kayak tours on the coast of Alaska in the summer. Once she’d suggested that to Stephen and he had just looked at her. “I’m an engineer. I don’t like tourists, and people who can’t ski will have to do it without me.”

It was too bad. All his female clients would fall madly in love with him.

Like me, she thought. And what good will it do them? He won’t notice.

“You call the researcher, Kathleen,” he said. “I’m ready to meet the guy, but I’m not telling him anything. The goal is to learn everything he knows.”

Kathleen called the number the researcher had given in his email. She made her own voice uncertain and girlish, although she despised women who were uncertain and girlish. “Hi, this is Kathleen Donnelly? And I’m Stephen Spring’s girlfriend?”

The researcher’s voice was warm and friendly. “I’m delighted to hear from you.”

“Well!” said Kathleen. “I am very, very intuitive. And Stephen needs to talk. It is not good for him to tamp down his emotional needs. Stephen is very, very, very tamped down. Let’s meet for dinner tonight. I happen to be broke, so you’ll be the host. I’ll tell a few teeny-weeny details that you can use to move Stephen into those painful spaces he’s protecting. Stephen is very, very walled up.”

The researcher was thrilled. “That’s my skill,” he told her. “Convincing people to trust me.”

When Kathleen disconnected, Stephen was staring at her.

“He’s taking us to the Boulderado,” she said. “Tonight.”

“Nice. Be sure to eat well. It sounds as if you can handle it without me.”

“Oh, come on. Now he’ll underestimate us. Think of something you can tell him that will make him pliable, while I get dressed. The Boulderado is luxurious.” She was wearing hiking boots, camo pants, and an old sweatshirt. “I’m not sure I own a dress at all,” she told him, “never mind one I’d wear to the Boulderado. I don’t want to waste time going back to my own apartment, especially when I won’t find a dress there. Oh, this is such fun!”

She ran down the hall of Stephen’s grad student housing and banged on a door. “Mandy! I’m desperate! I have to borrow some clothes!”

“This isn’t a game!” Stephen yelled after her.


When Reeve had called Janie Friday afternoon and insisted that she fly down for the weekend, he made it sound simple. But weekends were when games happened. He had been scheduled to work the entire weekend, day and evening.

He had begged, pleaded, and offered trades, but everyone said no. By the time Janie’s plane was airborne, he hadn’t managed to get a single hour off. He had had to ask the boss.

The office was informal. He didn’t even know his boss’s real first name. He went by the nickname Bick.

“Janie?” said Bick, looking excited. “Janie Johnson is coming for the weekend? This is great. I can’t wait to meet the face on the milk carton.”

Reeve was stunned. They knew the media story of his girlfriend? He knew he had never mentioned it. “She hates when that comes up. Please, whatever you do—”

“Right. Absolutely. I won’t refer to it. But you know, I hired you because of the janies.”

The janies.

Reeve’s own boss—at his own job—in the town where he was bringing the real Janie—a thousand miles south of where he’d betrayed her—knew about the janies.

Reeve had been eighteen and a total jerk. All he had cared about was getting a slot on a late-night talk show at his college radio station. Almost immediately, he ran out of things to say on the air. He stumbled and flubbed. A failure in five minutes. And then he remembered that he possessed a story he could tell forever.

Janie’s.

He had spun it out, ratcheted up the emotion, strung it along night after night. It gave him a weird celebrity. The radio station had little power. It reached a small urban audience. They were fascinated by the janie episodes. In no time, he had a following.

It came to a halt when the living Janie, her sister, Jodie, and her brother Brian drove up to Boston to surprise him with a visit. It had never occurred to Reeve that Janie herself might ever be in his audience. Janie, Jodie, and Brian didn’t kill Reeve, but only because they had no weapons.

The worst of it was, he had used her real name. Everybody who listened to those episodes referred to them as “the janies.”

In Bick’s office, Reeve said thickly, “You hired me because of the janies?”

“Yep. I was in Boston doing college basketball games and that night I heard a janie live, and a friend taped the rest for me because I had to head back down here. You were really good, Reeve.”

“I shouldn’t have done them.”

“No, but you did them so well. You built up an audience. That’s what we’re all about here. Audience. I was scrolling through the applicants for this job and recognized your name. I figured, a guy like that—worth interviewing.”

Everybody always asked Reeve how he had landed this amazing job, since he did not have amazing credentials. Reeve had wondered too. Now he knew. He was surprised by how much it hurt.

What if Janie found out that Reeve’s betrayal had won him this job? Did he have to tell her? Guess what, Janie? That problem back in Boston we never refer to because it’s so upsetting? That’s why I was hired. Out loud he said to Bick, “The janies are not a good part of my past. If you run into her, please don’t mention them.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, because she’d probably have to kill you. How come she didn’t kill you back then?”

“She’s nice,” said Reeve.

Bick grinned. “Have a good weekend. See you Monday morning.”

Reeve had raced out of the building, driven fast to the bypass, and taken the speedy back entrance to the airport, substituting the demands of traffic for the shock of the janie problem. When he parked and got out of the car, he imagined Bick playing the janie tapes for Reeve’s colleagues.

But when he put his arms around the real Janie, when they were laughing again in a minute, like old friends, when she kept leaning over to give him a kiss, and when he hugged her fiercely at every red light, he forgot.

Now Reeve drove to Ballantyne, a massive planned area with handsome corporate buildings, sprawling golf courses, a resort, and attractively landscaped apartment complexes. Green grass surrounded tiny ponds and sidewalks curled around orderly trees, all planted the same day and, twenty years later, all the same height.

Too bad he hadn’t planned that carefully.

I will have to tell Janie that my voice on the radio didn’t go away, he thought. If I don’t, somebody else will. We’ll live right here. And this is a partying crowd. She’ll see those guys all the time.

And when he told her, what if Janie decided not to marry him after all?

His phone rang. It was his mother.

Reeve loved his mother, but he liked to talk to her under controlled circumstances. This was not one. She always wanted his full attention, and at work, he could give outsiders only about 1 percent of his attention. He’d call her later.

He waited a minute, and then listened to her message as he opened the car door.

He had completely forgotten that he had attached the pictures and video and sent them to everybody. Including his mother.

“Reeve darling,” said his mother, “of course I’ve always adored Janie. But you are far too young. Janie is much much much much too young! She needs to finish college and launch a career, and you’re working sixty-hour weeks and have a splendid career in front of you, and you cannot blockade whatever wonderful things come out of this ESPN job by getting married too young. Furthermore, you have no money.”

Good to know he was launching a new life with that many problems and that little support.

Reeve headed into his building. Along with catching up on the sports world, he had to arrange time off for the wedding. Most people went on honeymoons too. Where should he and Janie go? And how, precisely, would he pay for it?

Reeve walked in the door and found chaos.

Guys were shouting and laughing and stomping around. Sunday afternoons were busy because big games were scheduled then, but what was playing that would make everybody howl like this?

“Shields!” bellowed one of the guys, holding up his cell phone. “Man! You’re only twenty-three! You don’t wanna get married now!”

“But if you do get married now,” said another guy, “this is the one. She’s beautiful.” This in a voice of amazement, as if they had assumed that only a loser would want Reeve.

Their boss raced up. “Lemme see this video!” shouted Bick.

Again everybody watched Janie, her red hair everywhere, her eyes wide in amazement, holding out her arms, the passenger line parting, the crowd going wild and the kiss lasting forever.

“Wow,” said Bick. “Gonna be two faces on this milk carton!”

“No. Please,” said Reeve. “That’s history. I realize you all know about it, but Janie can’t handle it if you bring it up all the time. Or even once. You have to leave it alone. She’s just a girl named Janie, okay?” He corrected himself. “Jennie,” he said. “She wants to be Jennie now.”

The married guys gave him tender looks, whatever that meant. The single guys shrugged and returned to sports topics.

One of the job requirements here was “strong knowledge of college sports.” Reeve had been glued to television sports channels since he was a toddler. The rest of his family also loved sports, but their TV watching branched out into other things. His sister Lizzie, who had become a lawyer, preferred legal/police/forensic series. His mother liked food and house stuff, as if anybody cared how strangers fixed dinner.

It occurred to Reeve that he and Janie had never sat in front of a television watching anything. Not football, not basketball, not extreme sports. Not even the weather. This whole weekend, they hadn’t turned on the television. Reeve grinned, remembering this weekend.

But in fact, TV was a large portion of Reeve’s life, and it was how he earned his salary. He had to see those games.

He had the oddest sensation that he did not really know Janie very well.

Maybe she didn’t know him very well either.

Maybe all brides and grooms realized at the last second that in some ways they were strangers.

Maybe all other brides and grooms postponed the wedding till they knew each other better.

Reeve considered the forty-eight hours he had just spent with the girl he loved.

No.

He was not postponing the wedding.

He said to his boss, “We want to get married on July eighth. Any chance I could switch my vacation to that week?”

Bick’s face changed. In a different voice, he said, “Better come into my office, Reeve, and we’ll talk.”

They’re firing me, thought Reeve.

On the upside, I won’t have to tell Janie that my boss has copies of the janie tapes.


Brendan hardly ever paid close attention to anything these days, but he was struck by the researcher’s nervousness. What was wrong with letting Brendan read some of the book? The man pivoted his laptop so Brendan could see the screen, but he kept a grip on it. Did he think Brendan planned to snatch the laptop and throw it down a crevasse in a glacier?

Brendan used a thick stupid voice. “I don’t read a lot. This’ll take me a while.”

The researcher seemed reassured.

Brendan pulled the laptop away from the man and began to read.

He had expected a sort of newspaper article. At eleven a.m. that day, etc. But instead he found a long, terrifying narrative about a mother and father who were sadists.

It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Janie.

He was swept into the story. By the fourth page, he hated this mother and father.

The top of the fifth page began, Frank and Miranda Javensen bear full responsibility for damaging their little Hannah so severely that …

The sadists were Frank and Miranda?

But Janie loved them! And they loved her! And Jodie and his own twin, Brian, had spent tons of time in Connecticut visiting, and they loved Frank and Miranda! Even Stephen liked them, and Stephen had a pretty short list of people he liked. His own mom and dad thought highly of the way Frank and Miranda dealt with Janie.

Brendan read on.… Hannah was forced to flee to the safety of a religious order.

Religious order? Come on. She joined a sick, twisted cult whose leaders lived off the income their girls made being prostitutes. It wasn’t a convent. It was the opposite of a convent!

Who could Calvin Vinesett be interviewing? Brendan didn’t want to read any more. He closed the document.

Waiting behind it on the screen was the open application: a folder with the name The Happy Kidnap.

That was the book title?

The Happy Kidnap?

A book that proclaimed Janie had enjoyed her kidnapping? That Janie was happier with some other family?

It was a little bit true, a little bit of the time, thought Brendan, and it kills my parents. A book called The Happy Kidnap will destroy my mother and father.

For quite a while now, Brendan Spring had regarded his parents as losers: people who settled for suburbia and weight gain and pointless trips to a meaningless church. Jodie was a loser too—a cheerleader without a sport, running off to Haiti so she could cheer away poverty. Stephen was a loser—the silent engineer type, thrilled by geology textbooks and a girl not good enough at sports to play any, so instead she biked around Boulder wearing expensive pseudo-sports gear. Brian was definitely a loser, holding out his brains on a platter to the admiring professors.

Brendan saw his parents now as brave soldiers in a war they hadn’t wanted, standing guard over the four children left to them after Hannah Javensen seized Jennie.

The book would be yet another enemy, piercing their armor.

Because it wasn’t a book portraying an evil Hannah who must be captured. It was a book jeering at the families who had suffered. He couldn’t begin to imagine how the book would portray Janie herself.

He had vaguely thought his mother could be behind it, in her zeal to have the kidnapper brought to justice. But his mother would never say things like that. She would certainly never cooperate with a book with that title.

Where was Calvin Vinesett getting his information?

Maybe it was not information. Maybe it was all made up. Calvin Vinesett might be writing stuff that would sell, instead of the actual sad truth.

Because the sad truth was, Frank and Miranda had done their best, but Hannah had not.

Like me, thought Brendan, shocked.





THE SEVENTH PIECE OF THE KIDNAPPER’S PUZZLE




A year after all that publicity when the Jennie/Janie recognized her face on the milk carton, a made-for-TV movie was advertised. Hannah was thrilled. She was supposed to work that night, but seeing a television movie about herself was way more important.

She had lunch at the soup kitchen that day and took three desserts, even though that was not allowed and they glared at her, but who cared about them, anyway? This was supposed to be a charity. They were supposed to be nice about things.

She wrapped the little squares of cake in paper napkins and took them home so she would have a special snack for the movie.

She had popcorn, too. She was so excited. How would they portray her? Who would play her role? Some famous beautiful willowy blonde?

The movie began in a high school cafeteria with a pretty little red-haired teenager about to recognize her picture on that milk carton. Okay, Hannah understood. She would appear in flashbacks. The teenage girl would remember that beautiful golden woman with whom she had had ice cream and a ride.

But in the movie, the teenage girl did not remember!

What the teenage girl remembered was her first family! That lineup of red-haired Spring people. The girl in the movie even remembered the dog! But she did not remember Hannah.

The movie was about the girl’s agony when she found out that the parents she loved were not her parents.

And the movie was about Frank and Miranda! The movie felt sorry for Frank and Miranda. The movie dealt lovingly with the Spring family. The movie did not even name Hannah!

The next day, when Hannah showed up at her job, they said she had let them down. They had needed her last night and she had not even bothered to phone. She was always letting them down, they claimed, and they were letting her go. “Here’s what we owe you,” they said, handing her a skimpy little bit of money.

A few months after that, Hannah Javensen was featured on America’s Most Wanted. The point of that TV show was for somebody out there to recognize the criminal. It still puzzled Hannah that anybody could think of her as a criminal. But they loved that word, and she had to prepare herself for their ugliness.

The good thing was, the show would be entirely about Hannah and could not feature the Jennie/Janie or Frank and Miranda.

Hannah didn’t stock up on snacks this time. She wrapped herself in a blanket because her hands were icy. The first minute was very good. The reenactment had been filmed in the actual New Jersey mall. She recognized it.

But the woman playing Hannah was plain and whiny. In this version, the woman walked around the mall, eyes roving, looking for a victim. In this version, the woman snickered to herself when she spotted a cute little girl. The woman cooed and fussed over the little girl, which had not happened! They were making all this up!

They did get the ice cream right.

They had even located the actual clerks, who were fatter and dumber-looking after almost seventeen years. And the clerks said, “We mainly noticed the little girl. She was just adorable, with all those auburn ringlets.”

Well, sure, when you had some dull stupid woman playing Hannah.

Frank and Miranda had not given interviews. The Jennie/Janie had not given interviews. Even the red rabbit people had not given interviews! The TV people were obviously annoyed. So was Hannah. She would have liked to see them, and hear their lies and fabrications as they blamed everything on her.

At the end of the show, Hannah’s last known photograph was “aged.” “Have you seen this woman?” the announcer demanded sternly.

They had gotten it so wrong! She was not plain and thick and gray. Well, maybe a little gray. And missing a tooth, because how could she afford a dentist?

Hannah looked in the bathroom mirror, which she generally avoided. I’m not pretty anymore, she thought. I’m not anything anymore.

She tried to comfort herself with the childhood daydreams. When she could have been a ballet dancer or a high-fashion model, a poet or an ice skater. When she could have written a novel or captained a yacht.

But she wasn’t even going to be a waitress in a good restaurant.

She was going to bus tables in a scummy little diner.