Janie Face to Face

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Kathleen did not dare give advice. If she said, “It would be good for you to talk about it, Stephen. And a bestseller could flush out the kidnapper,” this romance would be over.

  Kathleen breathed quietly so Stephen would not remember she was there. Stephen liked a girl who was somewhat in his life, not a girl who dominated it.

  Stephen wouldn’t let Kathleen live with him or even spend the night. He felt that if she moved in, she’d feel all permanent and expect stuff. He’d run out of oxygen and have to throw himself off a cliff.

  Kathleen’s mother didn’t think Stephen even loved her.

  “He loves me sometimes,” Kathleen would say.

  Stephen and Kathleen were both twenty-four. Stephen was getting a graduate degree in engineering while Kathleen was still inching toward her undergrad degree. She loved college. Why rush it? Who cared how long it took? Well, her parents cared, since they were paying, but Kathleen tried not to worry about that.

  She had a sad fleeting thought that she should break up with Stephen. College was prime husband-hunting territory. This very semester, she would finally finish college and have to find work in an office somewhere, and she’d have no hope.

  Marriage and children are not what I want, she reminded herself sternly. I’m going to have a great career, if I can just think of one. I’ll worry about marriage and children some other decade.

  She was lying. She wanted Stephen.

  Like all his family, he had red hair. He had a buzz cut right now and looked completely different from the boy she had fallen in love with a few years ago. She liked to run her hand over the bristles.

  He was muscular, because Boulder was an outdoor kind of place, and the two of them were constantly outside: skiing in winter; bicycling, playing tennis, and hiking in summer. And right now, tough strong Stephen Spring was afraid of an email.

  When they first met, Kathleen had pushed hard for details about the Spring family saga. She demanded facts and photographs of the kidnapping. Stephen found out that Kathleen’s father was an FBI agent, and dumped her. It took Kathleen the whole next year of college to inch back into Stephen’s favor.

  Janie, the kidnapette, as Kathleen called her, with her mass of auburn curls, must have been adorable in her role. Kathleen could perfectly imagine Hannah, too, because of the well-publicized high school photograph—a slender, sober girl with long blond hair. Kathleen imagined pretty, wispy Hannah on a stool at the ice cream counter with this cute little toddler. Whisking her away for a fun little drive. And then Hannah thinking, Uh-oh. This is called kidnapping. I think I want to get out of this.

  Kathleen imagined Hannah driving all the way to Mommy and Daddy’s house and trilling a little song of need. “Oh, I know I’ve been away for years without calling or writing, and I know you’ve suffered, but after all, life isn’t fair, and meanwhile, here’s my darling baby girl. You bring her up! Won’t it be fun! Well—I’m off! Enjoy!”

  She could imagine Hannah giggling as she drove on.

  What vehicle had Hannah used? They never knew.

  It was a big country. Lots of stolen cars. Hannah had probably dumped hers somewhere, and after seventeen years, that getaway car had long ago come to the end of its road.

  Stephen pushed his rolling desk chair away from the screen. An expensive swivel chair with adjustable padded back, arms, and seat, it had been abandoned on a sidewalk on trash day because it was missing one caster. Stephen had lugged it home and bought another caster, and the chair worked fine. He loved adjusting it. So did Kathleen. She couldn’t help herself. When she sat at his desk, she had to change his chair, even though she knew it annoyed him.

  “You know what I think is the most startling part of the whole kidnap?” said Stephen suddenly.

  Stephen never discussed the kidnap. Kathleen listened eagerly.

  “Janie never had nightmares,” said Stephen. “She was the victim, but she never had nightmares. The rest of us—nightmares swarmed us for years after she disappeared. The terrible things that could happen to small children and the terrible things that probably had happened to our baby sister. The worst memory I have is the first day, a few hours after Jennie disappeared. The police were there. Half the shoppers in the mall were there. Security found this suspicious car on the side of the parking lot. It was an old four-door sedan. I was too little then to identify cars. But it was heavier and longer than the cars I knew. It was filthy. Its upholstery was torn, like something had chewed it. One of the policemen took a metal stick from his car and pried open the trunk. When my mother screamed, I realized that the policeman thought my baby sister might be in there. I remember looking around, quick, counting the rest of us. Yes, Jodie was there. Yes, Brian was there. Yes, Brendan was there. I remember Daddy’s car shooting into the parking lot. I remember how he leapt out of the car and forgot to close the door and ran over and it was like his face had fallen off and I didn’t know who he was. And I remember my mother tottering toward the abandoned car, making these little noises, like an animal, but there was nothing in the trunk after all, and we were supposed to feel better. I looked out at that huge parking lot, all those hundreds of cars, and all those trunks. For years, I kept counting my brothers and sister, to make sure the rest of us were all still here.”

  Kathleen sank down on the hard surface of Stephen’s IKEA sofa. She had pictured a giggly Hannah and an adorable Jennie/Janie. But it had been hell, and pieces of hell still lay around, waiting in ambush.

  She took Stephen’s hand. It lay hot and feverish in hers.

  Over the years Jennie was missing, there might have been days when Donna Spring did not worry about her baby.

  But she didn’t think so.

  The FBI believed that her missing daughter had been dead from the first day. Kidnappers rarely had long-term plans.

  From the beginning, Donna had been swamped in her guilt. I’m the mother. It’s my fault Jennie wandered away. My fault I didn’t notice until it was too late.

  Nobody had had cell phones the year Jennie was kidnapped.

  The minute they became widely available, Mrs. Spring bought one for each child, although at the time there was no such thing as a small child with a cell phone. Teachers and other parents disapproved. Donna and Jonathan Spring didn’t care. It was the duty of Stephen, Jodie, Brendan, and Brian not just to text or call several times a day, but also to send photographs to establish that they were alive and well in a known location. On their contact lists were the numbers for their family’s own personal FBI agent, local policeman, and state trooper.

  Cell phones siphoned off some of Donna Spring’s ongoing fear for her four remaining children.

  After a decade or so, guilt receded an inch and fury moved in.

  It was not my fault! It was the fault of the kidnapper. That hideous evil cruel woman who snatched my baby.

  Fury came in rounds, as if Donna Spring were being executed by the firing squad of her own rage.

  They had descriptions of that woman from the ice cream servers, and a fuzzy video of the back of a woman leaving the mall, holding Jennie’s hand.

  But they never had anything more.

  Twelve years had gone by when Donna and Jonathan Spring decided to put Jennie’s face on a milk carton.

  And then came the wonderful, awful year when Jennie was back so briefly and left so quickly. The year Donna sank into despair. She had no place to put her love for this child. And this child had no love for her.

  Almost as bad as losing Jennie a second time was the attack of the media. The media never failed to point out that Donna “let” one of her children wander off in a mall. They loved to dwell on their vision of Donna twelve years later, driving her child back to live with the “kidnap parents” again.

  The media loved that phrase, although Frank and Miranda had kidnapped nobody. But the media rarely mentioned Hannah. The success of the face on a milk carton and the endless unrolling of Janie’s saga were more interesting than some criminal who was never found and
whose life was guesswork.

  Over time, Donna and Jonathan’s lost daughter seemed less and less a girl named Jennie Spring and more and more a girl named Janie Johnson.

  And then, unnoticed by the media, a day here and a weekend there, Janie began to come home again. It was the most wonderful, unexpected gift in seventeen years: Donna Spring was getting her daughter back.

  Janie became close to Brian, the sweetest of the five Spring children. She even began getting along with Jodie, the prickliest. Stephen, the oldest, rarely came home from Colorado, and was hardly aware that Janie was reentering the family, while Brendan was always at some stadium or locker room and didn’t care.

  Brendan.

  In the end, Donna thought perhaps Brendan was her lost child. She had cheered him along through life, hoping that his daydreams were rational, but knowing in her heart that he would never become a professional athlete.

  She knew his freshman year at college was agony. She prayed he would grow stronger through adversity, but that didn’t always happen. They had a hideous example in Hannah Javensen. A child who never quite found friendship, scholarship, or even fun, and who, blaming the world, had left the world. Hannah had found comfort in a group of manipulative adults who hid her away, warped her mind, and eventually sent her out to earn money on the street.

  Donna knew that Brendan had given his second interview. He had texted her, his brief note a jab, as if he were saying, “Hah! So there!” She knew why he was giving interviews: they let him be important for an hour.

  Donna Spring gave a lot of thought to the concept of a true crime book.

  Most true crime books were about murders and, specifically, the murderer. Most featured in-depth analyses of the families and childhoods of the murderers and their victims. The problem Calvin Vinesett faced in writing this book was that the primary victim, Janie, would never consent to an interview. Janie wanted it over with, not reconstituted and served up in bookstores and online.

  But for Donna, a book was the last remaining tool to draw out Hannah Javensen. And Donna wanted this criminal behind bars.

  By now, Hannah Javensen was well into her forties. Was she fat, haggard, and a smoker? Or thin, wasted, and a druggie? Had she reformed and become a successful real estate agent, resembling any other suburban housewife?

  Donna imagined Calvin Vinesett’s book stacked in piles on bestseller tables, flying into e-readers, rushing into libraries.

  What if Hannah Javensen read it? Because Miranda and Frank’s daughter was still literate, whatever else she had lost.

  A shadow of fear landed on Donna Spring. It was physical, as if the kidnapper had tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled around to see who was there.

  Nobody, of course.

  And yet she felt the kidnapper’s presence, like a poison gas.

  She checked the front and back doors, to be sure they were locked and nobody was out there.

  The worst thing in life is to be nobody.

  If Hannah Javensen is still nobody, what might she do in order to become somebody? wondered Donna Spring. You don’t wake sleeping predators. You don’t poke a lion or throw stones at a rabid dog. You don’t knock on the door of a murderer.

  My daughter’s kidnapper is sleeping.

  Suppose the research for this book wakes her up.

  Suppose she remembers what fun it was, and wants to do it again.

  Suppose the book not only tells us things about her.…

  Suppose it tells her something about us?

  THE FIFTH PIECE OF THE KIDNAPPER’S PUZZLE

  Hannah could not understand how her parents’ phone number could be disconnected. Had they moved away from her childhood home? From the house where the three of them had planted tulip bulbs together and had her birthday parties and decorated Christmas trees and painted her bedroom?

  At pay phones, for weeks, she asked Directory Assistance to locate the new phone number of Frank Javensen. She named towns close to where she had grown up. But the mean phone company would never search more than a few towns at a time and she never located the Javensens.

  Yet the checks continued to come to the box, so wherever Frank and Miranda had gone, it wasn’t prison.

  The checks angered her. They expected their daughter to live on this measly amount of money? The one in prison, as far as Hannah could see, was herself. She had to work long nasty hours at long nasty jobs. She could not get jobs at fast-food places because she had no social security number. Tiffany Spratt’s driver’s license was not enough. Hannah had to slave at low-class motels or load dishwashers at greasy little diners. When she was so fragile!

  She held jobs that only undocumented and illegal immigrants took.

  But then, she too was undocumented, and probably more illegal than anybody sliding over a border in the dark.

  Sometimes, when she was scrubbing a toilet in a motel or pots and pans in a stinking kitchen, she remembered her childhood dreams. To be a ballet dancer or a high-fashion model. A poet or an ice skater. An archaeologist or a movie reviewer or a yacht captain. She remembered that she had meant to write the Great American Novel and get a 10 in an Olympics competition.

  The years passed.

  The world changed.

  The Internet exploded.

  Suddenly, a person could research with amazing ease. Hannah spent a lot of time at the library, where computers were free. But you could sit for only thirty minutes and then you had to give your seat to the next person. There was so much regulation in this world! She despised the librarians, who had those fake smiles and always, eventually, made her give the computer to somebody else.

  But no matter where and how she searched, and no matter how good at searching she became, she did not find Frank and Miranda Javensen. Javensen was such a rare name it should have popped up instantly.

  But it never popped up.

  She did find old newspaper articles on the kidnapping at that mall in New Jersey. She did not use the word “kidnap” herself. It sounded so criminal. She just thought of it as “that day.”

  “That day” had gotten a lot of coverage. Hannah devoured every word. She added to the list of people she hated. Those ice cream clerks, for example. What did the kidnapper look like? they were asked. “Long hair,” said the ice cream people. “Dishwater blond. But it was the little girl we looked at. She was totally adorable. We hardly noticed the woman.”

  Dishwater? Her beautiful yellow hair? How dare they?

  It turned out that the little kid’s name had been Jennie.

  Oh, thought Hannah, giggling. I thought she said her name was Janie. Oh, well.

  She scoured the online archives for follow-up articles. But it was a story without an ending, and interest in the disappearance of little Jennie Spring tapered away. The police never connected Hannah with it and therefore never connected Frank and Miranda.

  She wondered if Frank and Miranda had made the connection. Or had they been too busy shopping for the sippy cup, the pajamas, and the car seat?

  If she could figure out where Frank and Miranda had moved, she would just go there. She was in the perfect blackmail position. “Give me money,” she’d say, “or lose the kid.” One year she tried Houston, to see if life was easier there, but it wasn’t. Another year she drifted east and tried New York City. A bad experience. She’d been arrested.

  Well, it wasn’t her fault, she’d thought, sitting there in the cell.

  Jail was a scary stinking noisy place with scary people. She sat, trying not to be noticed, thinking of the group she had joined when she was young. What had she been looking for?

  Not independence. She did not want to be free to choose. She wanted somebody else to do the choosing.

  Not fashion. She did not want to worry about clothing and hair and nail polish. She wanted a uniform in which she would be invisible.

  Not fine restaurants or good cars or sparkling jewelry. She did not want stuff. She wanted a lack of stuff.

  She didn’t want to search for f
riends and work to keep them. She wanted people assigned to sit next to her who would automatically be her friends.

  The other women in that cell in New York got out quick, because somebody was posting bail for them. Hannah didn’t know anybody who would do it for her. Her very own parents didn’t know she was here and obviously didn’t care, or they would have kept in touch.

  She served her time. When the jail term was finally over, she’d gone back west, where the sun was warmer and the questions were fewer. A little pile of checks was waiting in Tiffany Spratt’s post office box.

  Life dragged on.

  She found a grim little place to live and bought a used television at a thrift shop. She had once despised people who watched television. They had no lives. Their friends were the emcees of quiz shows and the interviewers on talk shows. Their social life was the situation comedy, the drama, or the police series.

  But over the years, her own life dwindled to the screen in front of her.

  Sports saved her.

  It was the only bright and happy thing she had.

  Somebody always won.

  It was so mysterious, the way somebody always won.

  She had never won anything.

  Couldn’t there be a day, sometime, somewhere, when she would win?

  Hannah couldn’t remember what year she had been in that mall in New Jersey. At least a decade ago. Probably more than that, she thought.

  Her new hobby had been going into big-box stores that sold all kinds of electronic stuff and had whole walls of televisions. She loved to pretend she could afford a big-screen TV and pay the monthly fee for hundreds of channels.

  One day she was drifting past the television displays, wishing they weren’t all tuned to the same boring news station. Each screen showed the same news anchors sitting behind the same desk. Their huge gleaming smiles had beamed at Hannah. She herself could not afford a dentist. She had terrible teeth.

  “After twelve years, Jason,” the beautiful newswoman was saying, “the kidnap victim recognized her own face on a missing child picture on a milk carton!” The camera focused on a tiny white milk carton that sported a tiny black-and-white photograph.