Janie Face to Face (6 page)

They ate in the private ell of the big dining room at the Harbor.

Michael had beautiful manners. He helped Janie’s father with the wheelchair and with his glass of water. He complimented Janie’s mother on her pretty scarf and glittery earrings. Miranda blossomed under his attention, and Frank gave Janie a smile that seemed real, that seemed to know things and to love her.

Michael took pictures of everybody. “We’ll want to remember this,” he told Janie.

Her heart double-timed in her chest.

For the rest of our lives, she thought.

She had no photograph of Michael, although of course a cell phone took photographs effortlessly and well. For everything else in her life, she took pictures and immediately sent them on to Sarah-Charlotte or whomever. She hadn’t even told Sarah-Charlotte about Michael, although Michael knew all about Sarah-Charlotte, and loved reading her tart little
texts. Janie could not believe she had never taken a picture of Michael. What had she been thinking?

While Michael was laughing, telling her mother a story, Janie snapped his profile, so sharp and strong, and sent it to Sarah-Charlotte:
The man I love
, she wrote in the text.
Can’t wait to tell you about him.
Which was quite a fib, since Janie had waited six weeks already to mention Michael to Sarah-Charlotte.

Before dessert, Janie and her mother went to the ladies’ room while Michael took her father to the men’s room. It happened easily, and without anybody having to say anything.

“He seems like a wonderful man,” said her mother excitedly. “Though part of me will always miss Reeve.”

“Part of me will always miss Reeve too.” In fact, the image of Reeve was all but in the mirror with her. Do I still love him? Janie asked herself. Yes. But do I love him enough?

When they returned to the table, Michael and her father were already seated and apparently having a conversation. Janie and her mother exchanged hopeful looks. Daddy could surface now and then, though rarely with a complete sentence.

“Barnette,” her father was saying.

“Goodness,” said Janie’s mother. “How did you two get on the topic of my mother?”

“I was just asking about family,” said Michael, beaming.

Janie’s mother beamed back.

“College money,” said her father thickly, but with a grasp of the topic.

Janie was so pleased! She circled Michael to reach her chair.

His cell phone was in his hand. On the tiny screen was a photograph he had taken of Janie’s father in the men’s room. Frank’s clothing and hair were in disarray and the half-fallen side of his face looked warped and deranged.

Janie opened her mouth to say,
Delete that! Take a better one right now, while he knows us and he’s part of the conversation!

But Michael was clicking through his contacts, preparing to send the ugly photo.

Janie had always been able to memorize phone numbers. The number to which Michael was sending Frank’s picture was Calvin Vinesett’s. This demeaning picture of Frank was for a book.

A few hours ago on the train, Michael had told the truth.

He had stalked her
.

He had stalked her from the beginning.

From the first powdered doughnut, Eve had known.
He’s buying you
.

And Calvin Vinesett was paying.

In Boston, at Sarah-Charlotte’s campus, the winter had been bleak, icy, and long.

Not until last week had there been one beautiful day. And on that day, Boston enjoyed a slice of summer. Sarah-Charlotte, a group of kids from class, and some grad student friend of somebody’s had gathered around a tiny café table on the sidewalk. Sarah-Charlotte had been feeling the peace of warm weather. How wonderful to be wearing no coat, no scarf, no hat, no mittens, and no snow boots. She slumped in her chair, as comfortable as a cat curled up in the sun.

One of the boys gestured toward the grad student and said to Sarah-Charlotte, “I was telling Mick how you’re the best friend of Janie Johnson, that kidnap girl.”

“Ancient history,” said Sarah-Charlotte. Her caramel latte slid sweetly down her throat.

“Not really,” said the man named Mick. “It’s only a few years ago that she recognized herself on the milk carton. That must have been weird. Were you there?”

Everybody wanted to cozy up to that old crime. Sarah-Charlotte would have to present a few tidbits or they’d chew at her ankles like annoying toy terriers. “We were all there,” she said. “The same crowd of kids had lunch every day at the same table in the same high school cafeteria. Janie waved a half-pint milk carton at us and said, ‘See this picture of a missing child on the side of the milk carton? It’s me.’ We laughed. Finished lunch. Went back to class. A few months later we found out that Janie hadn’t been kidding. It
was
her.”

She had told this much of the story a hundred times and it still spooked her. Sarah-Charlotte sat up straighter, as if to fend something off.

“I keep thinking about those kidnap parents,” said Mick. “Here we have a mother and father, a Mr. and Mrs. Javensen. They’re estranged from their daughter, Hannah, now about age thirty.”

Sarah-Charlotte put on her sunglasses to separate herself from the summary of a story this person Mick could not possibly understand.

“Daughter Hannah is living with a bunch of weirdos, basically a religious cult. The fringe kind that might attack
society with poison gas or just become drug dealers and prostitutes. Hannah has chosen to have no contact with Mom and Dad and claims to despise them. But one fine day, after years of absence, she shows up at their house with a little girl, tells Mom and Dad that this three-year-old is
hers
and therefore their grandchild.”

Sarah-Charlotte had always loved Mr. and Mrs. Johnson; loved spending time at their house with Janie. After the milk carton, Mrs. Johnson got thinner and grayer and shakier, while Mr. Johnson moved slowly toward the stroke that would leave him half alive.

There were so many victims of Hannah Javensen.

Sarah-Charlotte had even thought of herself as a victim, because Janie had not shared her horrifying guess (
the people I love and call mother and father are my kidnappers
). She had often wondered if she and Janie really were best friends. They were sophomores in college now, and being left out of Janie’s search for the truth didn’t hurt any longer, but it was there. As if her friendship with Janie were a pie chart and a dark wedge had been cut away.

The others were glued to Mick’s story. He obviously loved an audience—he spoke loudly enough that people at the next two tables leaned forward so they could hear too.

“And guess what?” said Mick. “The Javensen mom and dad
believe
Hannah! Next day, daughter Hannah drives away, never to be seen again. And what do Mom and Dad decide? They’ll vanish too! So they change their names from Javensen to Johnson, a name so common that, even online, they’ll share an identity with a million others. Then they
bring up this unknown little girl as their own. Hah! If you ask me, those Javensen people are coconspirators in the kidnapping. They wanted another child, so they assigned their grown-up daughter to pick one at a shopping mall. They got off, you know. Those Javensens never even spent a night in jail. Miscarriage of justice, if you ask me.”

Sarah-Charlotte’s fury was so intense she wanted to kick Mick to the ground and then kick him some more. How dare he be entertained by Janie’s nightmare? How dare he, without a speck of actual knowledge, pass judgment on anybody?

“There was no trial,” she snapped. “And nobody ‘got off.’ It was clear all along that Mr. and Mrs. Javensen never knew what their daughter, Hannah, had done. If the Javensens had known that this toddler had been snatched from a shopping mall and that there was a real family out there, crazed with worry, they would have called the police in a minute. All they knew was that Hannah would make an unfit mother. The only good thing Hannah ever did was to bring her baby girl to the household where Janie could grow up properly loved and cared for. The Javensens didn’t change their names to hide from the law or from a kidnapping they didn’t even know about. They changed their names to hide from
Hannah
. Hannah was a rotten person who lived with rotten people and did rotten things. Rotten like a fish lying dead on a riverbank, crawling with maggots. Because that’s what kidnappers are. Maggots!”

She was screaming.

People were staring at her.

The word “maggot” reverberated in the little group.

Nobody met her eyes.

Sarah-Charlotte stood up. On an icy day, she’d have a thick coat to wrap around herself, and keep her safe from invading worms like Mick.

She strode away.

Mick followed. “Sarah-Charlotte?”

She said nothing.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I want to be friends. Can I at least walk along and make up for saying stupid stuff? I didn’t know it was stupid, but maybe you can explain it to me.”

He was taller than she was. Bending down, shoving his face near hers. She could smell his coffee breath. She had a fleeting sense of fear.

Ridiculous. She was on a busy street in a busy city with a man her classmates knew. “I’m in a hurry.” She ran to catch a bus without caring where it went, and when he did not get on with her, she was weak with relief, and also embarrassed.

A sidewalk meltdown would be another episode in the long list Sarah-Charlotte did not share with Janie. Like that letter from the true crime writer. The author had found everybody. At least three of Janie’s other high school girlfriends had gotten letters from Calvin Vinesett.

But here in Boston, the group Sarah-Charlotte had left on the sidewalk were acquaintances, not friends. She never saw them except in a lecture hall, and after the final exam, she might not see them again. Boston was too big. Her freshman year, Reeve Shields had been a senior on a different campus and Sarah-Charlotte never once crossed his path.

She still could not believe that Janie was ignoring Reeve.

Reeve was 110 percent the boy every girl wanted. If Janie really did walk away from Reeve, what a wonderful guy would be available. Sarah-Charlotte generally blocked daydreams in which that wonderful guy sought
her
. But the daydreams were there.

As she did on and off all day, Sarah-Charlotte went to Facebook. Reeve had more friends than anybody in the entire world, except maybe Adair, another high school girlfriend. Reeve stayed in touch with everybody from high school and everybody from college. Anybody who wanted to know anything just went to Reeve’s Facebook page.

In honor of Janie’s desire for a low profile, and in spite of the fact that she was the most important friend in his life, Reeve had no photograph of Janie on his wall.

Get over it, Janie, thought Sarah-Charlotte. What could happen now, after all these years? Reeve loves you! Stay in his picture, for heaven’s sake!

Sarah-Charlotte got off a bus she hadn’t needed to take, barely able to remember why she had leapt onto it. The man Mick vanished from her mind.

At the Harbor, Janie quietly took Michael’s cell phone out of his hand before he could click Send. She walked over to her own chair, sat down, and deleted the photograph of her father. She checked for other photographs of herself and her family and deleted them. She dropped the phone into her own purse. She did not glance at Michael. She would cry.

She had loved him.

And he was a tool for Calvin Vinesett.

Had this happened as they were dating? Or had he introduced himself to her at that icy stone wall because Calvin Vinesett wanted him to?

Or maybe he
was
Calvin Vinesett!

No. The writer had published half a dozen bestsellers. Michael wasn’t old enough to have done that.

Her mother did not observe these cell phone moments. Miranda Johnson was more comfortable with a landline and found the constant cell phone use by Janie’s generation annoying and rude.

Her own phone signaled a text from Sarah-Charlotte, to whom she had just sent Michael’s photograph. The caption no longer fit. Michael was definitely not the man she loved.

She was going to need Sarah-Charlotte to get over this. How wonderful to have a best friend in reserve. She felt a flicker of shame. You didn’t keep a best friend in reserve for bad times.

She read Sarah-Charlotte’s text:
Janie—something’s wrong with this picture. I’ve met this guy. He called himself Mick. He’s very nosy. Be careful.

Dessert arrived. She couldn’t touch hers. She couldn’t even touch her fork. She couldn’t breathe, for that matter.

“I love this,” Michael was saying. “Chocolate cream pie? I could live here.”

Miranda was laughing. “You could
not
live here, Michael. You’d die of boredom. I’m practically dead of boredom. Chocolate pudding, even with real whipped cream, does not compensate.”

Somehow lunch ended.

An aide took her father back to his room. Janie and Michael and her mother went to the car. “You take the front,” Janie told Michael, and he got in front with Miranda. The two of them chatted happily during the long drive back to the train station.

Janie stared at the back of Michael’s head.

How could Sarah-Charlotte have met him?

Was Michael stalking more than one girl?

This was the man who had meant life after Reeve. Before Michael, “After Reeve” had seemed like the edge of a cliff.

And it was. Michael would have shoved her over. She had caught herself in time.

Janie’s mother dropped them off at Stamford station. Their side of the tracks was almost empty because on a Friday afternoon, people were coming out of New York, not heading in.

“May I have my phone?” asked Michael politely.

She handed it over.

“Jane, what are you mad about? I had a great time. I love your parents.”

“You are doing research for Calvin Vinesett. You took that hideous photograph of my father for that book.”

He took a step away from her. Wisely, it wasn’t a step closer to the tracks. She wanted to kick him down and watch the next train flatten him like a penny.