"Cooney, Caroline B - Janie Johnson 02 - Whatever Happened to Janie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooney Caroline B)

The lawyer shifted into Drive and accelerated down the road. Away to New Jersey.
Mrs. Johnson started to fall.
Her husband and Reeve caught her.
"Don't let Janie see," she whispered.
The black car disappeared. Janie had not seen.
"You'll love this casserole," said Mrs. Shields. "Come on. It's January and we're standing around out here. Let's go in." She shepherded the Johnsons inside their house.
Reeve stood in the driveway a long time. After a while he noticed that he had never given Janle the doublechocolatechip cookies.
Three months of silence, he thought. It's good I have the cookies. I'm going to need chocolate to last that long.
CHAPTER
4.
Stephen was afraid of his own fury.
If he felt like running, he could run off the rage that lived inside him. But he was not an athlete like his younger brothers. Sports annoyed and bored him. Sporadically he went out for a team and found it difficult to get through the season.
Yet his rage settled to the bottom only when he was physically exhausted. Sophomore year he'd made swim team. They had been required to work out in the weight room five mornings a week and swim five afternoons a week. That season, there had been no anger.
But he didn't stay with the swim team. Stephen had never stayed with anything.
Along with the rage was a restlessness.
Stephen disliked being a teenager. He yearned to be gone, to be away from this confining house and these demanding parents.
He never allowed himself to scream at his mother and father. All the selfdiscipline Stephen had was poured into allowing his parents to live the way they had to live: in fear.
From the day that his sister Jennie disappeared, when Stephen was only six years old, the Spring household had been ruled by fear.
His mother literally could not live through a child being late. If Stephen said he'd be home at fivefifteen and he got home at fiveforty, he would find her whitefaced and trembling, pacing the house, hyperventilating, her icy hands touching the telephone and then yanking back. She had a habit of jamming her fingertips fiercely down into the pockets of her jeans. If she ran to the door and her hands were still thrust into her pockets, it meant she was terrified; she was holding on to herself in some desperate way.
She would greet Stephen with the peculiar combination of wrath and relief common to all frightened parents whose children come home at last.
Except that Jennie had never come home at last.
The family fear extended to many things. Having lost one child, Stephen's mother and father were terrified of losing another. They fretted about traffic, hot oil in the frying pan, a chain saw, deep water.
They taught their remaining four children to look both ways not only when crossing the street, but also at every other intersection of life: be cautious, be careful, think twice, reconsider, weigh the possibilities.
Worry was like another person living in the house. A person who, unlike Jennie, never left.
Stephen hated it. He could take care of himself. They lived in New Jersey, and Stephen's daydreams were of the opposite coast: he usually dreamed of
California, occasionally of Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, Wyoming. Distant realms, where they could not see him to worry about him. From which he would telephone once a week: Hi, Mom, I'm fine, life's good, lots offriends, 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 threeyearold 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 splitlevel was not large. You came into the house in the middle, of course, on the landing, and went up directly into the kitcheneating area. To the left was the Lshaped living and dining room. To the right were the bedrooms, two medium and one large, and a single ordinary bathroom. Downstairs
were a twocar 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 corning home. Even
if she were, a threeyearold 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, ~'that I could synchronize with Jennie like that. That just once, for just one conversation, I could touch Jenne with my mind, my heart, my need."
But Jennie remained hidden in the secret of her disappearance.
Stephen knew kids who believed in ESP-that
with your spirit, if you tried hard enough, you could communicate with another spirit. He knew better. His mother had tried so hard to communicate with Jenrile; had listened so carefully to hear Jennie's cries.