Janie Face to Face (13 page)

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.