Whatever Happened to Janie? Read Online Free Page B

fine, life’s good, lots of friends, see you at Christmas.
    He had trained his body not to show his fury. He did not clench his fists, he did not grit his teeth, he did not narrow his eyes, he did not turn red or white. The fury instead raced inside his veins, a circulating demon. He had never gone to a counselor, although the family itself often had. He did not want to talk about his wrath, partly because it shamed and mystified him, and partly because it would give his mother and father just one more thing to worry about. They would feel responsible.
    But they were not responsible.
    Jennie was.
    Okay, he knew that was unfair. A little three-year-old who got lost in a shopping center could not be blamed for the following dozen years. He knew this little sister of his, whom he could barely remember, but who had left him a legacy of unending pain and fear, had had suffering of her own.
    They should have moved away; they should have left the nightmare of Jennie’s kidnapping right in this house, locked the doors and driven away.
    The split-level was not large. You came into the house in the middle, of course, on the landing, and went up directly into the kitchen-eating area. To the left was the L-shaped living and dining room. To the right were the bedrooms, two medium and one large, and a single ordinary bathroom. Downstairswere a two-car garage, a laundry room, and a playroom with a fireplace.
    When Mr. and Mrs. Spring bought the house, fierce with pride that they had managed to come up with the down payment, they had had two children: Stephen and Jodie. It was the perfect size house. Stephen’s bedroom was painted bright barn red and Jodie’s bedroom sunshine yellow.
    The house quickly became too small: baby Jennie’s crib was crowded into Jodie’s room and the new twins had to fit into Stephen’s. Mr. and Mrs. Spring had their eye on a colonial in another development: a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. A house with an immense kitchen, a workshop, and a yard big enough to play football in. They were close to making an offer on the big house on the day that Mrs. Spring took her five children shoe shopping.
    Sometimes Stephen still drove down that road, even though it was a dead end and he didn’t know anybody who lived there. They never moved. Mr. and Mrs. Spring wanted Jennie to know where to find them.
    Even the FBI man, Mr. Mollison, said they could not build the rest of their lives on a missing, and presumably dead, baby girl. Even Mr. Mollison said, as the years went on, “Move. You need the space.”
    But Mom didn’t want a different phone number. She didn’t want a different address. “What if …” she would begin.
    And of course not finish. What possible finish could there be? Jennie was not coming home. Evenif she were, a three-year-old wouldn’t remember her address or her telephone number. If she had remembered it, she would have phoned them to start with, wouldn’t she?
    Sometimes, crammed in that tiny bedroom with his twin brothers, Stephen would think: Jennie, it’s your fault I don’t have a room of my own.
    And then of course, would come the slamming guilt, like a door in his face, hitting so hard he should have a bloody nose. Jennie, who had been tortured and left dead in some tangled wood in some other state. Jennie, who had not grown up to have the life she deserved. And he was whining because Brian and Brendan swarmed over him like friendly wasps?
    Stephen never felt as if he knew Brian and Brendan. He lived practically on top of them, and yet they remained strangers. They were so enclosed in each other they were like a sealed envelope. Being a twin must be nice, but living with twins was not.
    Stephen had plenty of friends. He was popular. But he had never shared his soul the way Brian and Brendan routinely did each other’s. The twins did not even have to talk a great deal of the time. They could synchronize without speech.
    “I wish,” said his mother once, years ago,