Janie Face to Face

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “It’s only ten days,” said Janie. “Who needs sleep?” She stood close to her mother’s cell phone to hear the conversation with the priest. Father John just laughed. Yes, they could get married on June 3.

  Janie called Reeve back. “June third is on. Are your parents okay with that? What about your brother, Todd? What about Lizzie?”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot all of them. Can you text me a list?”

  “How about I just handle them?”

  “Wow,” said Reeve. “My bride isn’t just beautiful. She’s willing to be slaughtered on my behalf.”

  Dozens of people had only one thing to say on Facebook: Ten days?

  Mrs. Shields telephoned her son. “Ten days?” she said fiercely.

  “I know. Even for me, it’s a little speedy.”

  “Ten days is impossible, Reeve.”

  “All you have to do is show up, Mom. You’re only a few hours from New Jersey. We’ve scheduled the wedding for two o’clock in the afternoon, so no matter how bad the traffic is, you’ll make it. Ideally, though, you’ll come Friday and we’ll have a wedding rehearsal and a dinner. Mrs. Spring is working on hotel rooms.”

  “The Friday rehearsal dinner is our responsibility,” said his mother grimly. “I’ll call Mrs. Spring right now and she’ll have to make the reservations. What’s her first name again?”

  “Donna. You’ll like her, Mom.”

  His mother said nothing.

  Reeve said, “Or could you pretend to, Mom? Please?”

  “The third of June?” repeated Stephen Spring. “Are you serious? You expect me there in ten days?”

  “Actually, I need you in seven days,” said his mother. “We have to get you fitted for a tuxedo and you have to help with a million details.”

  “Has there ever been a time when Janie wasn’t a pain?” he asked.

  “Jennie,” she reminded him. “And I think it’s Reeve being the pain this time. And so what? We get to put on a wedding. Now don’t dillydally. Get your plane tickets.” His mother hung up.

  Kathleen was laughing. “When I get married,” she said, “it’s going to be a lot more organized.”

  Stephen didn’t ask who she planned to marry. He didn’t ask her to come to his sister’s wedding either. He said, “Let’s get our bikes. We need to track down those other two Hannahs.”

  THE TENTH PIECE OF THE KIDNAPPER’S PUZZLE

  The final check was big. Hannah spent it on three things.

  First, a dentist. The man had some nerve to charge that much for one silly tooth. But Hannah had known how to handle people from the day she got Tiffany Spratt a post office box. The dentist agreed to be paid in installments. She proved how reliable and honest she was by making payments each month for four months when he hadn’t even done anything yet. He was impressed and agreed to fix the tooth while she would keep paying him.

  What an idiot. Like she would keep paying after her mouth looked good.

  Second, she got her own cell phone. She’d been stealing them, and enjoyed playing the games and exploring the apps, but the phones were quickly canceled. And once everybody in the world got a cell phone, public phones vanished. Her own cell phone was a necessity.

  Third, a computer.

  She no longer needed the library; instead she needed the phone company and the Internet supplier. They were harder to scam than the dentist. You had to pay them. And Frank’s money was now gone.

  She had to work two lousy jobs instead of just one lousy job.

  She always disguised herself. When she was a maid at motels, she wore street clothes under her uniform so she’d look fat. But it was just habit. She no longer really believed anybody was after Hannah Javensen. She was old news.

  Also, they were stupid. She was smart.

  Sometimes she liked to read through her collection of old Jennie/Janie articles, where they said they were going to bring the kidnapper to justice. “Justice” sounded like a town, with streets and sidewalks and a courtroom. Well, they couldn’t bring her to the town of Justice. She had vanished better than anybody.

  That year, Hannah had her forty-sixth birthday. She could hardly imagine being that old. But she was. She thought sometimes about turning fifty. Or sixty. It was terrifying.

  They couldn’t expect her to scrub toilets and vacuum hotel rooms when she got old. Already her knees hurt and her back hurt.

  The coffee shop was hard. She bussed tables, loaded dishwashers, and put away the mugs when they were still so hot they burned her.

  The customers were always clean and chipper and chatty and young. They loved their little mugs. When she returned a mug to the display wall, she had to hang it with the customer’s name visible.

  They all got to use their real names. It was so unfair!

  She kept track of names of people she hated. There was the woman who got hired in Hannah’s place when a motel canned her. There was the woman who told on her when she was sneaking the waitresses’ tips out of the jar. The woman who ratted when she smuggled meat from the restaurant refrigerator. People had no sense of kinship.

  Sixteen years after that day in New Jersey, Hannah was watching TV in a sports bar. The bar was a rough place, but that was not a problem, because Hannah was a rough person. She did not have the cash to pay for her drink and was more focused on that than some college ball game. She pondered how to get money out of Frank and Miranda.

  Supposedly, knowledge was money. But Hannah had acquired a lot of knowledge and it hadn’t brought money.

  On wide screens in front of her, to her left, to her right, and behind, the announcers fumbled their patter. They ended up laughing. Those guys were probably paid a million dollars and when they made a mistake, everybody just laughed. When she made a mistake, they fired her.

  “We’ve just been saved!” said the commentator. “Our terrific researcher produced the facts.”

  “Let’s give credit where credit is due,” said the second guy. “Don’t we have a camera near that kid? Reeve Shields, take a bow.”

  Reeve Shields? It was not an ordinary name. Could it be the boy next door to the Jennie/Janie? The one who wouldn’t friend her on Facebook? The one who came here with the Jennie/Janie to visit the Stephen?

  For two seconds, the television showed this person Reeve in a cubicle somewhere. He was very young and very handsome, with moppy hair and a long narrow face split by a huge happy grin. He got to be on television and he was cute and people loved him and they remembered his name!

  Hannah had put up with a lot in this world. She was not putting up with this. That Jennie/Janie not only got two families—including Hannah’s own—but also this cute guy?

  That girl deserved nothing! That girl had just gone along for the ride.

  And that girl even had Hannah’s money! They probably had written their wills, those slimy parents of hers, and cut out their real true daughter in favor of this girl Hannah herself had given to them!

  Out of her rage burst a brilliant idea.

  It was an idea so amazing that it glittered, a jewel resting on velvet in a store window.

  After a while she could touch the idea and glow in its light. The idea solved everything. She would have money.

  And the Jennie/Janie would be very sorry.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Nicole gave Jodie a welcome-home party.

  Nicole’s house was a split-level, with the rec room on the lower floor opening to a big screened porch and a big untended yard. Kids poured in and out of the house, music reverberated, and neighbors looked tense.

  “Your welcome-home party is like a preview of Janie’s wedding,” Nicole told Jodie. “You weren’t due home till the end of the summer and that’s when I expected to give a party. My mother said just have the party in August anyway, but I said you can’t welcome somebody home three months after she gets here. So I slapped this together. You get what you get.”

  Nicole was serving giant subs, plus those round plastic trays from the supermarket filled with vegetables or
fruit and dip. Nobody had touched them yet, even the vegetarians. A stack of paper napkins, a thousand cans of soda, and a cooler of ice wrapped up party preparations.

  How awed and excited the little kids in Haiti would be by such a party. But Jodie skipped the Haiti comparison. “Nicole, this is perfect. I’m thrilled to see everybody. Especially you. Thank you so much. And we have so much to talk about.”

  Nicole nodded. “Real quick, while everybody is popping open a soda can, I’ll start on my cousin Vic. You’ll be so disappointed. That post office box where Frank sent the checks? It was closed two years ago. Nobody remembers a single thing about the woman who rented it. Her name was Tiffany Spratt. The police found a Tiffany Spratt who went to college there ages ago, but she never had a post office box and she is who she is, and she’s not Hannah. Her backpack was stolen once, when she was a freshman, and it had her wallet in it, and it was a real pain getting another driver’s license and canceling her credit card and her debit card. They’re guessing Hannah used Tiffany Spratt’s ID to rent the post office box, but the real Tiffany Spratt never got billed for a charge that wasn’t hers, and so she had no idea that anybody had used her driver’s license. It’s a dead end.”

  It wouldn’t have been a dead end if Janie had told the authorities about the box. Don’t go that way, Jodie told herself. Remember the plan: to love Janie.

  Okay, in a little dark corner of her heart, Jodie could still be furious that Janie had put comatose Frank and pathetic Miranda first. Jodie spent a few minutes in the little dark corner and then she joined the party.

  Stephen Spring not only wanted to be in the wedding party, he wanted it to be a party, with noise and dancing and toasts and tears. He was going to need a party after chasing three Hannahs. He wanted to locate the woman, or rule her out, and be done with it.

  He and Kathleen found the second possible Hannah slumped on a chair in a tiny side yard by a tiny garage apartment. She was very thin. Her old sweat suit had once been peach or pink. Now it had bleach stains. A cigarette hung from her lips. Her lips were thin, as was her hair. If “down and out” was your criterion, she fit. If thin and formerly blond were the criteria, she fit.

  Stephen thought, She really is possible.

  He had not expected Hannah to pull herself together in middle age. Hannah would not have become a good woman with a decent life. He had pictured her melting into her own evil, like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.

  Now, at the realization that the possible Hannah was possible, Stephen had trouble filling his lungs. He did not want to be near the woman. He wanted to have bullet- and fist-proof glass between him and her, because if she was Hannah, he did not want to damage her. He wanted a trial. He wanted the whole thing—exposure of every ugly vicious act of her ugly vicious life.

  No, he reminded himself. What I want is for my sister to have a life without that book title around. “Ma’am?” he said.

  The woman took the cigarette out of her mouth. She stabbed it into a metal coffee can at her door filled with sand and butts. “I’m not buying anything. Don’t think you can rip me off either.”

  She had a heavy Brooklyn accent.

  Hannah had grown up in Connecticut. Frank and Miranda had excellent diction, to the point of sounding pseudo-British.

  The aura of Hannah fell away and Stephen saw only a weary old woman, much too old to be Hannah Javensen. Although life could have aged her an extra decade or two.

  “We’re not selling anything,” he said. “We’re sorry to bother you. We’re trying to find a cheap place to rent.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ cheap in this town.”

  “We’re finding that out. Sounds as if you moved here from New York. Me too,” he fibbed. “What part of New York?”

  She softened. “Fort Greene, honey.”

  “You miss it?”

  “Sure. This dump? Compared to home? But I like the mountains.”

  There were beautiful mountains outside Boulder. But the view this woman had was peeling paint and a row of garbage cans.

  Stephen was suddenly deeply sorry for her. “Have you ever run into a woman named Tiffany Spratt? She was looking for apartments around here.”

  The woman shook her head and lit another cigarette.

  We’re not going to find Hannah, thought Stephen. These three names really are just bait, designed by Calvin Vinesett. No point rearranging my workweek to find the third name.

  Janie did not think of Facebook when she thought of spreading the news, because she never posted. But Sarah-Charlotte, Reeve, Adair, Eve, Reeve’s sister Lizzie, and everybody else posted the new wedding date: June 3.

  Sarah-Charlotte telephoned everybody who had planned to fly in so they could change their tickets. She reported back to Janie. “Some people can’t come after all, and they’re sad—but other people can come after all, and they’re tickled. So it’s going to work out fine. We had eleven people for our van and we still do, it’s just a different eleven. Plus several people are driving separately and a few are flying straight into Newark. I’m still working on a bridal shower. What day can you be up here?”

  “I don’t think there’s any day,” said Janie regretfully.

  “How about a shower down there? Maybe Jodie and I can cohost.”

  “But already there isn’t time. You’re arriving here that Friday for the rehearsal, Sarah-Charlotte. You don’t want to haul back and forth for a shower too.”

  “Of course I do. But tell me about the reception. How many people are coming?”

  “We’re not going to know till they get here. Dad says he’s buying enough hamburger patties and hot dogs for a couple hundred and he can just freeze them if we only have twenty-five. And Mom and two of her neighbors are going to make vats of potato salad and macaroni salad and my aunt and uncle are going to buy a ton of shrimp and then we’ll pack the freezer with ice cream to go with the cake. It’ll be your basic picnic, only with a bride.”

  Sarah-Charlotte did not approve. A wedding should be your basic formal sit-down dinner at a country club, with linens, silver, flowers, favors, and dinner-jacket-clad waiters. But she wouldn’t let her best friend down. “I like the theme,” she said. “A wedding that starts by leaping over security-line ropes should be frantic, with people bringing their own bags of chips and lugging their own folding chairs.”

  Janie giggled. “It won’t be that crazy. But just picking people up at the airport on that Friday is going to take the whole family and half the neighbors.”

  Back home in New Jersey, Brendan was in a terrible mood. His mother had just told him about that guy Michael Hastings, and how he stalked Janie and tried to use her. Brendan wanted to chain the guy to the bumper of a truck and drive down the thruway for a hundred miles. He couldn’t believe his family wasn’t going after this Michael creep. “No,” said his mother, “I want to leave it alone.”

  That’s the trouble with this world, thought Brendan. We leave things alone.

  He called Stephen, who was excellent at getting mad and would share his mood to perfection. “When are you getting here anyway?” Brendan demanded. “It’s very tiring being surrounded by wedding planners.”

  “I’m flying in Friday night. I actually won’t get there till after the rehearsal. My flight doesn’t even land until eleven p.m. Mom wanted me earlier but I couldn’t pull it off.”

  “You don’t have to try on a tux?”

  “Nope. I emailed the rental store. They have my size on file from my senior prom. Remember I went without a date and it was the worst evening of my life?”

  Brendan did not remember. He had spent his life thinking solely of himself.

  “Bren,” said Stephen, “I talked to the researcher. Not the same one you talked to. Calvin Vinesett has at least three researchers. The one who lied to Janie, the one you met, and the one out here. I agreed to meet the guy because he had a list of three possible Hannahs in Boulder.”

  What was a possible Hannah? wondered Brendan.

  �
��Kathleen stole the list,” said Stephen.

  “She stole it? I like that in a person,” said Brendan. “Is she coming to the wedding too?”

  “Don’t change the subject. The researcher insisted that the three names were just bait to get me to talk. ‘Bait’ is a strange word, Bren. I keep asking myself, what fish does Calvin Vinesett expect to catch?”

  “A bestseller,” said Brendan.

  “Yeah, but I’m wondering if somebody else is behind the whole project. One of us.”

  “I’m wondering the same thing. Can’t be Janie. All she wants is to marry Reeve and live happily ever after. Can’t be Jodie. All she wants is to save the world. Can’t be you. All you want is to drill down inside the earth.”

  “And it can’t be the Johnsons. Mr. Johnson can’t even steer a pencil and Mrs. Johnson would be the worst hurt in a story about the criminal her daughter became. But Brendan, could it be Brian? Brian’s a wonderful writer. He can’t even choose a major at college, he’s so eager to study everything and write about everything and learn everything. He’s your twin. You know him. You think Brian could have something to do with this?”

  Now Brendan wanted to chain Stephen to the truck as well. The methods behind this book were slimy and underhanded. “Brian is a good person,” said Brendan stiffly. “Listen, I have to go.”

  “Okay, but one last thought,” said Stephen. “Could it be Mom or Dad behind this? They want Hannah to get hers.”

  Brendan remembered something Stephen had probably never known, because Stephen had not been back East in a few years. Brendan wouldn’t have known either, except her schedule had forced him to hang around waiting to be picked up after practice. Their mother had taken a creative writing class last year.

  Brendan couldn’t say it out loud. “See you Friday at the airport,” he said to his brother. Then he checked Calvin Vinesett’s website.