What Janie Found (4 page)

Images of her father wavered in her mind, like heat devils on asphalt.

He loved good food and good company. He loved coaching after-school sports, always willing to take on a team nobody else wanted, like ninth grade or junior varsity. He loved watching TV with Janie and couldn’t stand it if she left the room and he had to watch alone. He loved documentaries, which Janie despised, but if she flounced out, he’d increase the volume until the house shook with World War II battles or life on coral reefs. He wouldn’t lower the volume until she surrendered. He liked neatness, the edges of things lined up, a tablecloth hanging the same number of inches all the way around. He liked laughing.

He liked secrets, thought Janie, and she had been right about the tears; they did burn; her cheeks were scorched where they fell.

Oh, Daddy! she thought. Please don’t be dead. I love you. Stay with us.

Her mother’s voice was thready and frayed. “They put him back in Intensive Care, Janie. I need you. Please come.’”

He wasn’t dead after all. He was just closer to it.

She got clammy, growing so cold she seemed to be shutting down; her machinery freezing up and failing. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes, Mom,’” she said. And forced from her lips the dutiful sentence, “I love you.’”

She did not love anybody right now.

She hung up. Her body felt clumsy and unoccupied.

“I’ll drive you, Janie,’” said Reeve, eager to be involved. “I’ll stay at the hospital with you. Run errands.’”

“No, thank you, Reeve.’” She felt carved from ice. The warm breath of another person might melt her. “But may Brian spend the night here with you guys? Then I don’t have to worry about Brian or what time Mom and I get home.’”

Brian did not want to stay with the neighbors. He wanted to be useful. Or at least not in the way. But it got settled without him, Mrs. Shields discussing available beds and Janie sweeping him across the two driveways into her house to get his pajamas and toothbrush.

“Janie,’” he protested, “let me stay here. I’m fine by myself. I’m not a little kid. I can answer the phone and stuff.’”

She shook her head. “There’s an answering machine. Got everything?’”

Brian nodded, defeated. She ushered him out into the warm night and locked the door after them. He knew why she wanted him at Reeve’s. She did not trust him. Alone in her house, so near the desk with the folder, he might be tempted to tiptoe into that office. Open that long drawer. Find out what paper had burned her fingers.

“I hope your father is okay,’” he said. Except that Janie’s father was not the man in the hospital bed. Brian’s father was Janie’s father. “Drive carefully,’” he said, feeling stupid. Of course she would drive carefully; Janie was an extremely careful kind of person.

Reeve was standing in the drive, backlit by the lights from his house, frontlit by the lights from Janie’s. Even to Brian he looked puppy-eager and puppy-sweet. “Janie, are you all right?’” he said anxiously.

She got into the Explorer, not swayed by pleading eyes. “It’ll be easier once I get to the hospital and see.’”

“I’ll go with you,’” he offered a second time.

“No, thanks.’”

Reeve seemed to tremble on the edge of a move.

Don’t mention the folder, thought Brian. That would be a mistake. It isn’t as important as her father. You bring up the folder, she’ll think less of you.

He remembered that he
wanted
Janie to think less of Reeve.

But he thought that in some way, Janie needed Reeve not to be a jerk. So Brian would have to be the jerk faster. “Are you going to look at the folder without us?’” he asked her.

That worked. She gave him exactly the look a jerk deserved, started the engine and put her Explorer in reverse. Through the open window, she said, “No. I’m going to burn it.’”

CHAPTER
FOUR

Would
she burn the folder?

It was appealing. The strike of a match. The burst of flame.

Shredding was trendier but would be more mechanical, and surely not so satisfying.

Janie and her mother were allowed five minutes in Intensive Care. She could think of no way to refuse, so she followed the nurse and her mother through glass doors into a room with four patients and an overdose of clicking, beeping, humming monitors.

Lying on the bed before them was a man punctured with tubes, sunken and pale and in need of a shave. She would not have known who this was. She would have said, Oh, the poor man, his poor family, and then walked on, looking for her father.

Janie’s mother took her husband’s hand, over and over telling Frank how much she loved him. He looked like pie dough, rolled out flat and thin.

You knew, thought Janie, staring at him. You always knew. When the FBI came, when the police came, when my real parents came—you knew,
and you never told.
Nobody ever read
your
face, Frank Johnson.

Her fingers felt like pencils that she could snap in half and throw away.

This is my father, she said to herself. I love him, and if he dies, it would be terrible.

But the thought sprang up:
So there, Frank Johnson. This is your punishment.

They were serious about the five-minute rule. Miranda Johnson knew that, but each time, it upset her to be sent out.

The waiting room was carpeted in blue and wallpapered in flowers. A television was softly delivering the news, as if, in this dreadful place, any news mattered except news of your own family.

Miranda Johnson thought of the daughter she and Frank had been so happy to have, so many years ago. Hannah. A fragile child, desperately shy. Never a best friend. Always on the fringes.

How could a parent solve that? You couldn’t buy friends; you couldn’t teach friends.

And then the thing they dreamed of (“At college, she’ll find friends’”) happened. Hannah did find a group. A cult, whose leader told Hannah that her parents had no value. Hannah must discard them.

Parents do not matter, said the cult. They will not matter again.

How vividly Miranda remembered the college visit when she and Frank first understood; shaking her daughter’s shoulder, shrieking, “These people are sick! They will ruin you!’”

But Hannah’s friends had told her to expect this. Her parents would try to wreck her new life.

So Hannah vanished, going west to the cult’s headquarters, never answering the letters her parents wrote over the years. Never agreeing to a compromise. Not one childhood hug or good-night kiss or gently applied Band-Aid mattered. Hannah shrugged off her first eighteen years as if they had never been.

How joyful then, that sunny afternoon more than a dozen years ago when Hannah had appeared on the doorstep with an adorable daughter of her own. Still thin and pale, eyes still full of confusion, shining hair an eerie halo, Hannah had been clear about one thing:
You raise my child.

And Miranda and Frank were clear about one thing:
They would.

And that meant flight.

The cult, whose leaders they knew all too well, whose attorneys and thugs they had met in the years of trying to get Hannah out, would regard this beautiful little girl as their property.

We look young enough to have a toddler, Frank and Miranda said to each other. We’ll say we’re the mommy and daddy. Who’s to know?

And their last name—Javensen; so unusual; so memorable—drop it. From now on, their name would be Johnson.

Their disappearance was accomplished with such speed and efficiency that afterward Miranda could never quite believe she was the one who had pulled it off. There must have been a team.

But no. It was just Frank and Miranda.

Goal: raise Janie as their own.

Aced.

Goal: never tell anybody, lest their address filter back to the cult.

Aced.

Goal: this time around, raise a daughter who would not fall for lies.

Aced.

Because Janie had discovered the worst lie of all. And she had done exactly what Frank and Miranda had raised her to do: uncovered the lie, kicked it around and forced everyone to face it.

There was only one problem.

It was not the lie Frank and Miranda had thought it was.

For this was not Hannah’s daughter. This was a stranger’s baby Hannah had coaxed out of a mall and into her car. Hannah was a plain old vicious criminal. The worst kind. Not a thief of property or money, of cars or coins.

She had stolen a child.

There were actually very few kidnappings. Two hundred fifty million people in America, and in any given year, hardly fifty children taken by strangers. More people were struck by lightning.

Every time she remembered that her very own daughter, the child of her body and heart, had committed such an evil, Miranda Johnson was struck by lightning too.

Frank is dying, she thought, staring at the flowered wallpaper of the waiting room. If I had a way to reach Hannah, would I ask her to come? Would she bother to come? Would she say,
I loved you all along?
Would she say,
I’m sorry?

Would she care what our lives have been—and what they have not?

Hannah, she thought, if Frank dies, you killed him.

Brian was grumpy. He yanked so hard on the covers of his borrowed bed that the sheets came undone and the whole thing fell on the floor in a slump of blue-and-white stripes. Who needed sheets anyway? Bare mattresses suited Brian’s mood. “Janie’s making me stay at your house so I’m not at her house sneaking a look at that folder,’” he said irritably to Reeve.

Reeve nodded. “I picked up on that.’”

“I bet your mother has a key to their house, Reeve. You guys are that kind of next-door neighbors.’”

Reeve gave him a long look. “Listen, Brian. Last winter, I dropped from boyfriend to scum in one semester. I believe the issue was trust. As in, nobody trusted me. Remember that? Remember they were right? Remember you were one of the people who wanted to chain me in a car and give me my own stick of dynamite to hold?’”

Brian remembered.

“Janie is showing signs of considering me mildly acceptable again. So your plan is that I break into her house, read the folder she’s ordered us not to open and then come back and tell you everything. I bet breakfast you’d tell on me, and I’d be back at the trust issue and the scum level.’”

“That was my plan,’” agreed Brian.

They both laughed.

What he had done hit Reeve sometimes, when he wasn’t busy enough or the house was too quiet. He would get a sick feeling in his chest. Dented, as if he’d been hit by a car.

He knew that Janie had forgiven him in a technical sense; it had happened, it was over. But she had not forgiven him in a real sense. They were just neighbors now.

“Janie wanted to rip that folder into pieces,’” Brian said. “But it’s reasonable for her father to keep a file on Hannah. She was his kid. So what could have been in there to get Janie so upset?’”

Reeve began making Brian’s bed again. It was something to do.

“Do you think she’ll burn it before we get to look at it?’” asked Brian.

Reeve yanked the bottom sheet taut. “I just hope she doesn’t burn it before
she
gets to look at it. If there are answers, shouldn’t she read them?’”

They tucked the top sheet in.

Reeve felt a tremor run down his back.

Answers to what? There are no more questions, he thought. We know what happened.

Or do we?

I won’t burn it, Janie decided. I need to read every page carefully. I need to find out what that small packet in the bottom of the folder is.

She knew what the packet was. The size and thickness were distinctive. It was a checkbook. There was a reason H. J. had been filed under Paid Bills.

How long? she thought. What day, what year, did it begin?

Was I three? Six? Eleven?

Taking flute lessons? Horseback riding?

Was it the year we went to Bermuda? The year we took a cruise to Mexico?

All that time, did he know?

“What are you thinking about?’” asked her mother.

Janie reminded herself to show nothing. “The paperwork we still have to go through.’”

Can I bury his secret with him? she thought. Throw that file folder into the coffin and seal them both forever?

“I don’t even know what he earns,’” said her mother gloomily.

“Mother! Are you serious? Of course you know what Dad earns.’”

“I don’t, though. It’s ridiculous in this day and age. I realize women have to know their financial circumstances, but I’ve always said to myself, Well, except if they’re married to Frank. Frank takes care of every detail.’”

Yes, thought Janie, he certainly does. “Does Dad give you an allowance?’”

“No, I have that income from my mother’s estate. Frank pays for the big things, and anything else, I get. It works fine. We’ve never quarreled about money like other couples.’”

Janie’s other family had had terrible fights about money.

After the kidnapping, the Springs had stayed in the tiny cramped house long after they could afford a bigger one. There was always at least one person yelling, “She’s dead! Whoever kidnapped Jennie killed her! There’s no point in staying here! She was little! She didn’t know her address or phone number
then,
she’s not going to know it
now
! Can we please move to a decent house where we have some space?’”

Stephen, Jodie, Brendan and Brian always wanted the best brand of sneakers and the widest television screen, while Mr. and Mrs. Spring were thrifty and wanted to find sneakers on sale and repair the old TV.

But Janie (with her kidnap family, though she hadn’t known) rarely gave money a thought. When she asked for something, it was given to her.

Hannah, the kidnapper, had asked for something, and Frank, the father, had given it to her.

And Janie? The somewhat sister? The pretend daughter? Did she go on giving? Or did she take away?