Janie Face to Face (18 page)

“Ms. Donnelly,” said the researcher, “please remember that this is an interview with Mr. Spring.”

“Oh, he’s useless,” said Kathleen. She yanked the laptop in front of herself and began to read the interview with Miranda.

The researcher looked around. They were in the middle
of a huge formal dining room. His chair almost touched the chair of a stranger at the next table. Unwilling to cause a scene, he said in a low voice, “Please give me back the laptop, Ms. Donnelly.”

Kathleen’s eyes flew down the page.

There were no quotes.

The writing did not seem to be the result of interviews. In fact, it sounded as if somebody had been following Mrs. Johnson. Had entered a store after her, and then a restaurant, and a bank.

Kathleen had a bad feeling about this. Not about snatching the guy’s laptop—she felt great about that. But about the non-interview quality of the Miranda file. She closed the file and scanned the other document titles. She clicked on one called
Preface
.

If he reads this, Stephen will kill Calvin Vinesett, thought Kathleen. She closed the document. Next to it was a little icon labeled
The Hannahs
.

“Give that back!” said the researcher.

Kathleen had an app on her phone, Evernote, whose purpose was to capture text. Once she’d opened the Hannah material, she didn’t waste time reading it. She just photographed it.

The researcher yanked his laptop back. “Those names don’t mean anything,” he said. “You should not have those names!”

“You told us you discovered three Hannahs,” said Stephen.

“I was exaggerating. I’ve been working my way through public records, trying to find women in their forties or fifties who match Hannah in some way. There’s no reason to think any of them might really be Hannah. They just fit a little of the profile is all. I just mentioned them as bait so you’d give me an interview.”

“Bait!” Stephen stood up fast.

Kathleen was afraid he would hit the researcher. She stood up too, ready to block her boyfriend. A fistfight wouldn’t help.

But Stephen strode out of the restaurant. At the exit, he did remember to wait for Kathleen, but she had to slip off the yellow leather heels to keep up.

Outside, the air was wonderfully chilly. It tasted of mountains. The sky was bright and the stars hovered, as if they wanted to drop down and talk.

“I hate the media,” whispered Stephen. “Bait! Imagine taking three names out of the phone book and using them for bait. And I’m the stupid fish who bit!”

They had gone two long blocks before he realized she was barefoot. “Sorry,” he said. “Are your feet okay?”

“Yes. Just slow down, that’s all.”

They walked gingerly for another block. There was a bench. They sat.

Kathleen said, “I don’t believe that the list is bait. He did not plan to show you that list, Stephen. He was not going to give you the possible Hannahs. So the names and addresses do matter. And we do have them.”

“Why would he lie and pretend they don’t have meaning?”

“Probably Calvin Vinesett wants to find Hannah himself. Think what a coup that would be. Every talk show in America would ask him to be a guest. Another million copies sold.”

“We have to stop the book.”

Kathleen was doubtful. “No court is going to prevent
publication of a book about a famous crime and a famous victim. Janie is public property. And even if courts got involved, so what? The writer just e-publishes and it goes viral.”

Stephen groaned. “Kath, the timing couldn’t be worse. There’s a wedding coming up. I just found out. Actually, I got the news while you were borrowing clothes from Mandy. Then Brendan called and told me the book title and I forgot. Janie is marrying Reeve. In July! Janie has a shot at being happy, Kathleen. Happy all the way through for the rest of her life. We cannot have a book appear, using that word like that.”

Kathleen thought of the vicious preface Calvin Vinesett had written.

What if there were a wedding, she thought, and the bride was destroyed?

Fifteen years after that day in New Jersey, Hannah decided that she needed to be part of this thing called Facebook. She studied a tutorial before she opened her account. It said not to use her real date of birth because that might lead to identity theft.

It was the first laugh Hannah had had in a long time. Stealing credit cards was so much more fun when they called it identity theft. She had acquired a new ID from a careless college student named Jill Williams. Hannah loved that name. It sounded strong and aggressive. The real Jill Williams was already on Facebook, so Hannah acquired a new free email account and a new date of birth. She scanned good old Tiffany Spratt’s driver’s license photo and picked a university with a zillion students for her profile information.

The Jennie/Janie herself did not seem to be on Facebook. But the other Spring kids were. Stephen Spring turned out to be going to college right here in Colorado. That shook her up. Had he picked the University of Colorado so he could find
her? But if Stephen Spring had known that Frank used a bank here, he’d have told the FBI.

The trouble was, you had to be a Facebook “friend” to get at the real information.

Hannah went to her extensive file. A local Connecticut paper covering the first week of the milk carton excitement had mentioned a boy next door. Reeve Shields. There he was. He had more friends than anybody, but only friends could get past the limited profile. She offered up Jill Williams. “Classmate of Brian,” she notated.

But Reeve Shields did not accept Jill Williams as a friend.

The left-hand column of each profile—Stephen, Jodie, Brendan, Brian, and Reeve—showed the person’s Facebook friends, and Hannah began making lists, looking for overlap. The first overlap was a Nicole who was friends with each of the Springs.

But Nicole did not accept Jill Williams as a friend either.

The next overlap was a Sarah-Charlotte Sherwood, who was friends with both Reeve and Brian Spring. Like Reeve, she had a huge number of friends.

But Sarah-Charlotte did not accept Jill Williams either.

She didn’t even
exist
and they didn’t want her!

Hannah’s fists rained down on the computer. She didn’t damage it; she hit the plastic casing, not the screen. And yet the librarian made her leave the building. The librarian told her not to come back. Two other computer patrons escorted Hannah out the door.

She walked a long way to another library branch. A brilliant decision. At that branch, on that computer, a girl named
Adair, who was a friend to Reeve and to Sarah-Charlotte, accepted Jill Williams as a friend.

Hannah was in.

Adair liked to post. She and Sarah-Charlotte were in the Jennie/Janie’s high school class. Adair heard from everybody and uploaded everything that was interesting and everything that was not.

Now that she was a friend of Adair’s, Hannah managed to be accepted by Sarah-Charlotte as well. On their walls, Hannah found plenty about Janie. The parent thief was popular.

I was supposed to have that life! thought Hannah. That girl grabbed it away from me.

After a few months, she had all their addresses and most of their home phone numbers. Jennie/Janie. Miranda and Frank. Reeve. Sarah-Charlotte. The red rabbits from New Jersey. She had a little map of the United States and used neon thumbtacks to mark the spot where each person was. She loved shoving the little nails into their hearts.

Stephen was right here. It wasn’t that surprising that one of that bunch of red-haired children would end up in Colorado. She avoided his street, because he might recognize her. She hadn’t changed much and she was strikingly beautiful.

Hannah had spent so many hours online at libraries, searching for more on the Springs and the Johnsons, that she knew way more than the stupid librarians. They led such cushy lives, darting around a comfortable heated or air-conditioned library; snacking in some nice cozy staff room; now and then showing somebody how to apply for a job via computer.

She hated those librarians. Even now they were asking her to go. Her time was up, they said.

She couldn’t go yet. She was reading an amazing post from Adair, who reported that Janie, her brother Brian, and her boyfriend, Reeve, were all flying out to Boulder to visit Stephen and see whether Janie would like to attend college in Colorado.

That girl is flying here? To this very town? My parents must be paying for her ticket! With my money!

“Please,” said the librarian. “We have another patron waiting.”

Hannah gave up her computer and stomped out of the building. She could not make up her minds. Each of her minds had a different opinion. Should she stand in the shadows and watch the Jennie/Janie and the red rabbit brothers? Or lie low, because they couldn’t help but recognize her?

Her minds collided and crashed. The next day it was difficult to work at the motel, and she got yelled at, and even threatened. If she didn’t work harder, they’d let her go.

“Let” her go. As if she’d been trying and trying to go, and finally they would let her. Why didn’t they just say out loud that they would fire her?

Fire
. Like guns. Like flames.

In the end, she lay low. She even waited to visit her post office box until the scheduled trip to Colorado was over. It was fifteen and a half years since that day in New Jersey, but Hannah was still as intuitive today as she was back then. She got spooked just approaching the post office. She did not see anything irregular. But it was a trap.

If felt like a trap. Maybe they had lied on Facebook! Maybe they had not. They had not come here to see about colleges. They had come to catch her. Frank had told.

Her money was lying right there, right at the far end of that lobby, and she couldn’t get at it.

She walked on by. It took effort. She was so proud of her amazing self-control.

The third week she was desperate for the money.

She went very early, which she never did because she usually had to be at the Mug; people who drank coffee often drank it before the sun even came up. But it was her day off, and she went to the post office before it actually opened; only the lobby with boxes was open.

It felt safe. She opened her box.

The usual envelope from Frank was not there.

Instead she found a big plain envelope with her real name on it.
Hannah Javensen
. Was it a letter bomb? Was the FBI about to pop out of the tiny doors and slots around her?

She rolled up the envelope in her hand to keep the name from showing. She left the building. She was almost throwing up. She took side streets and an alley and dealt with a scary dog and finally reached a bench by the river.

She opened the envelope. There was a check in it. But there was also a slip of paper with a hand-printed message.

This is the final payment
.

Monday after lunch with her New Jersey parents, Janie drove up to Connecticut in Donna’s car.

No matter which bridge she took over the Hudson River, it was the wrong one. No matter how she timed this trip to avoid commuter traffic, she hit traffic. No matter how often she told herself that once she hit Connecticut the traffic would thin out, it never did.

It was only four days since her last trip to Connecticut. Four days since Miranda met and enjoyed Michael Hastings. Miranda would want to talk about Michael. Which meant Janie would have to discuss Calvin Vinesett’s book.

Michael was all lies, she thought, navigating the tricky connection from the GW Bridge onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. But that’s true of many people in my life. My Connecticut parents—my sturdy suburban straight-arrow parents—are world-class liars. When I first recognized myself on the milk carton, they even told me about their decision to lead a life of lies.

Miranda had insisted that she and Frank never wrote to Hannah again. Never telephoned. Never sent their real daughter a birthday present or a Christmas card. “We let her vanish,” said Miranda, who had wept.

Her father shed no tears. Janie had assumed he was too manly for weeping. But he was protecting yet another lie. A life built on lies must be shored up, day after day, fib after fib. Did the man inside Frank’s ruined body know what he had done? Did he continue to believe that he had done the best and only thing?

As for Michael, Janie believed that he had not thought particularly about telling lies. He had a chance to sidle into publishing, and he took it. The fun of being a spy without the risk of going to war.

Michael had lost his gamble. Janie had given him very little. He could contribute nothing to Calvin Vinesett’s book.

As for Frank and Miranda, she still loved them. But she loved them differently. She loved them sadly.

Last year she and her mother had had a terrible confrontation. Frank’s illness had taken such a toll, and that day, Miranda cried, “You aren’t helping me enough. You aren’t visiting your father enough! You only loved him when he was healthy and handsome. I need you, Janie! We both need you!”

“I’m going to tell you the truth,” said Janie cruelly. “Frank has always known where Hannah is. He’s been supporting her all these years. I found the checkbook and the bank account he used. He sent a check every month to a post office
box in Boulder, Colorado. For your sake and his, when I put a stop to that, I didn’t tell the FBI, so they didn’t catch Hannah. Every time I look at Frank, I know that he chose to take care of the woman who destroyed my real family. I love him, Mom, but not as much. It has nothing to do with his health. It has to do with his decision to protect Hannah.”