What Janie Found Read Online Free

of gravel under his sneakers, the greed of gravity stretching out for him; claiming him.
    Gravity wanted everything, and wanted it fast, and wanted Stephen.
    He had time to think: I never got my revenge.
    And then he was out of time, and there was nothing but the fall itself.
    Kathleen hurled her bike aside, leaped forward and grabbed at him. She missed, tried again and got the sleeve of his T-shirt. Now they both fell, scraping along the scree, hands and shoes flailing for a ledge. Ten feet down they found a grip.
    “You jerk,’” said Kathleen.
    His T-shirt sleeve had ripped off. It slid down his arm and hung around his wrist, a limp white cotton bracelet.
    They crawled back to the path, trembling, kneecaps and elbows bleeding. “Staying alive is the first step, Stephen,’” said Kathleen.
    He glanced down where they had fallen and had a strange vivid picture of himself pushing the kidnapper off this very ledge. How good it would feel to watch while the kidnapper screamed and broke and snapped. Stephen would kick stones after her—big ones; sharp ones—and they would crush her and—
    He stopped himself. He accepted a swig from Kathleen’s water bottle. You’re a civilized person, he told himself. You don’t dream of hurling people off cliffs and clapping as they die.

    Farther up was a level place where they could assess the damage to Stephen’s bike.
    Stephen yanked the bill of his cap down, as if shading his eyes from the bright sun, but he was just hiding. Sometimes he felt like a car, choking on the exhaust of his childhood.
    Five happy children in the Spring family.
    And then there were four.
    Skip the things that could have happened to the missing child.
    What about the four who were left?
    Stephen had been the jailer for Jodie and Brendan and Brian: the escort, the giver of permission, the fender-off of kidnappers. The oldest had to keep the others safe. The oldest did the head counts and checked the locks.
    When they had found his baby sister, Jennie, and found that Jennie had become Janie; that the man and woman Janie lovingly called Daddy and Mommy were in fact the parents of the kidnapper, Stephen expected hideous things to happen to Frank and Miranda Johnson.
    But nothing had happened to the Johnsons!
    Having failed with their real daughter, Frank and Miranda got to keep their stolen kid. They were allowed to go on pretending that Jennie was their own. They even got to call her by the name they’d chosen, Janie, instead of her real name, Jennie. They were the ones who got a second chance. Not Stephen’s parents.
    Maddeningly, everybody believed the Johnsons. (“Oh, we didn’t realize,’” insisted Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. “We thought she was Hannah’s little girl. We thought she was our granddaughter. We changed our names and disappeared and pretended to be Janie’s parents because the cult would come and get our little girl.’”)
    Right.
    Like that could possibly be the truth.
    Yet the FBI, the New Jersey state police and the local police let this flimsy story pass. Even Stephen’s mother and father accepted this ludicrous version of why their little girl grew up as Janie Johnson. She’s happy, she’s safe, said Stephen’s parents, and we must rejoice to have her back at all.
    Stephen hadn’t seen anything to rejoice about.
    But revenge was out of fashion. You were supposed to feel people’s pain. Sympathize with their unfortunate choices. Make allowance for any vice they might accidentally have acquired.
    Stephen was the only one who believed there had to be a prison somewhere that was just right for Frank and Miranda Johnson.
    He slid a thin slab of rock between the bent frame and the front wheel and used it as a lever to force the frame back into shape. He shoved so hard it bent in the other direction.
    “Calm down,’” said Kathleen. “You have enough adrenaline in you, you could probably reshape the bike with your teeth.’”
    Stephen pretended to laugh.
    “I finally heard