Learning to Swim

by Sara J. Henry

  “He starts school tomorrow,” I offered, trying to fill the silence.

  Claude was taking tiny precise bites of his cheesecake when Philippe rose. “Excuse me for a moment, please. I just need to check on Paul.” I nearly panicked that Philippe was leaving me alone with Claude, whom I disliked without entirely knowing why.

  Then Claude turned to me, and my hackles went up. “I’m rather confused about your connection,” he said pleasantly.

  “Connection?”

  “To the family.” He sipped his coffee and eyed me, almost mockingly. “Are you working here?”

  “Oh, no, just staying awhile, until Paul is settled in. Just to help out.”

  “How amazing that he turned up, so long after he was taken. So you found him?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I did.” I watched for a reaction, but his face remained blank. I know statistically it’s usually family members who commit violence against each other, and Claude made me uncomfortable.

  He went on. “My little nephew seems very attached to you.”

  “Yes, well, I’m very fond of him.”

  “And Philippe, too.” He smiled.

  The innuendo was apparent now. Gloves off.

  I reminded myself this man’s sister had died tragically. I reminded myself he was Paul’s uncle. I forced a smile. “Yes. Philippe, too.”

  Philippe returned at last. “So sorry it took so long. Paul’s rather excited about school tomorrow.” He and Claude chatted about work, while I tried not to let my eyes glaze over. At last Claude rose to leave, and on his way out said something in French I didn’t catch. After the door shut behind him, I sighed. Philippe laughed.

  “I’m sorry.” I was aghast that I’d made my relief so apparent.

  “No, no, it’s all right. Claude isn’t a wonderful conversationalist, unless it’s a business deal, and he was beside himself trying to figure you out. And losing Madeleine has been very hard on him. They were very close—they lost their parents when they were quite young. I’m sorry it was uncomfortable for you.”

  Of course sitting at a table with his brother-in-law, nephew, and me, with his sister gone, had been difficult. Of course it was worse because they had no other family, and I felt a pang of regret for my lack of compassion. For Claude’s first meeting with Paul, I should have been absent. On this, I think, Philippe had been wrong.

  But this was the most I’d heard Philippe say about his wife.

  That evening Paul had a nightmare, screaming, “Non, non, non!” Philippe was doing some work in his office; I was reading in my room and reached Paul first. He was still screaming when I grabbed him into my arms.

  “Baby, baby, it’s okay, everything’s all right,” I murmured, rubbing his back while his cries died away into a damp whimper against my neck. “C’est seulement un … nightmare … un cauchemar.”

  “Maman,” he whispered brokenly. I felt a sharp pain. He wasn’t mistaking me for his mother—he was calling to the woman who would never hold him again. I’d been wrong to assume that he hadn’t been missing his mother.

  “Paul, Paul, Paul,” I said, rocking him back and forth. By then Philippe had arrived, and I handed the limp, teary bundle to his father. I went off to read until I could numb my brain enough to go to sleep.

  THE NEXT MORNING PAUL HAD DARK CIRCLES UNDER HIS eyes, but he was excited about starting school. I admired his book bag and his blue slacks, polo shirt, and blazer, and snapped away with my little camera. Because of course you have to have first-day-of-school pictures. If I were Philippe, I think I’d be fighting the compulsion to lurk in the back of the classroom for the next few days.

  After they left, I wandered back to my room. I felt down, and wasn’t sure why. It was almost starting to seem that Madeleine haunted this house, and not just because of Claude’s visit. Madeleine somehow seemed more present than if the house still held her things: her clothes, her photos, her knickknacks, her magazines. Maybe her ghost couldn’t be vanquished until people stopped acting as if she’d never existed.

  Or maybe it was just me, and those emails I’d downloaded.

  I made myself read the printouts of them again, line by line. A few were confusing—probably personal jokes or idioms I didn’t get—but nothing gave any clues.

  Dead end.

  So I went upstairs to see what I could find out about Madeleine and her brother on the internet.

  Usually you can learn amazing amounts about people online, even if they’ve never used sites like Facebook or MySpace. You can find public records, newspaper articles, group memberships, reviews posted on Amazon, comments on other sites.

  With some simple Googling, I confirmed the spelling of Claude’s last name, Lemieux, and assumed Madeleine’s had been the same. I knew their approximate ages and where they’d been living the last decade. This should have been plenty. It wasn’t.

  I did find a few mentions of Madeleine in society pages, and some references to business accounts Claude had represented. I found a brief wedding announcement, and learned that both sets of parents were deceased. With concentrated digging I found records of the marriage and of Paul’s birth, and simple math told me he had been born less than nine months after the marriage. But without accidents, many of us wouldn’t be here, me included.

  I sat back. I’d never done so much research with so little result. No graduations, no previous jobs, no arrests. No photos, no comments, no book lists, no petitions signed, no donations given. It was as if Claude and Madeleine hadn’t existed before they met Philippe.

  Claude hadn’t been what I’d imagined. I’d expected either austere, like the furniture in parts of this house, or openly grieving. Instead he was almost sly, as if he was secretly amused by something or knew things other people didn’t.

  Of course I wondered if Claude could have planned the kidnapping. Dumond said he had been very close to his sister, but close relationships can go wrong. And from the tone and brevity of Elise’s comments, I’d gathered that brother and sister hadn’t always gotten along. Or Claude could have set up a fake kidnapping that had gone bad. But if he had been involved, would he have followed his brother-in-law to Ottawa?

  And could Paul be in danger from him?

  Maybe I was being paranoid, or going off on this tangent because I disliked Claude. Or maybe there was good reason to distrust him. But surely the police had checked him out.

  I emailed Simon from my laptop, telling him I’d met the mysterious brother, who wasn’t precisely warm and friendly. I phrased the next line carefully. I couldn’t ask Simon to check out Claude, but if I let him know my concern, his brain wouldn’t let it drop. I wrote: What if Claude planned the kidnapping and he knows the kidnappers can link him to it—where does that leave Paul?

  With that done, I opened Outlook Express and reread the last dozen incoming emails in Madeleine’s account. All offered some variation on Where are you and why haven’t I heard from you?

  None of these people had heard of Madeleine’s kidnapping or death: Philippe had let everyone think she was wintering in Florida. When he moved here, they would have assumed she’d moved, too, or stayed on in Florida. No one had notified these people of her death, and this seemed horrible.

  If they think she’s alive, I could send them emails from Madeleine’s account.

  I couldn’t let the thought go. How would someone involved in her kidnapping or death react to an email apparently from Madeleine? Not well, that was for sure. But they would react.

  I composed a generic email: I’ve been away, and lots has happened! What’s up with you? I copied it to each of her most recent correspondents, and clicked Send for each one. I had just sent the last one when a ding told me a reply had come in.

  I took a deep breath and clicked on it.

  Hey, girl, where have you been? It’s been for-evv-ee-rr. How are things shaping up? Did you go to Florida? Fill me in! Gina T

  This was no help, and it was abominably cruel to let this woman think her friend was alive. I’d jump
ed into this without thoroughly considering it, and now the damage was done. To buy time, I hit the Reply button and typed: Too much to tell now—more soon. How R U?

  What had I been thinking? I had stepped over a line, and there would be no stuffing this genie back in the bottle.

  My face burning with shame, I closed the program, shut down the computer, and took myself off to the library to pick up the books I’d requested about recovered kidnapped children: I Know My First Name is Steven, I Choose to Live, and Invisible Chains. So it didn’t look quite so strange, I picked up Ruth Rendell and Michael Robotham novels as well. Which, on second thought, probably didn’t help.

  On the way back I stopped at a chip wagon and ate poutine while driving, miraculously managing to avoid dribbling gravy down my front.

  As I took the books to my room, I heard Paul and Philippe come in. I joined them in the kitchen, where Paul was digging into a snack Elise had prepared, and discovered that school was great, the kids were fun, teachers nice, and lunch not so great—and that Philippe had, in fact, spent the whole day at school.

  He gave a little shrug. “It’s his first day.”

  So Dad had stayed in the back of the room for the entire school day. Which I thought was perfect for his son’s first day back. It made me realize that Philippe wasn’t confident about any of what he was doing—which I think was a strange place for him to be. Like the rest of us, he was just forging ahead as best he could.

  After Paul went off for his rest Philippe went upstairs to do some work, but was back in a few minutes.

  “I can’t find a file I’ve been working on,” he said. “It’s driving me nuts—do you think you could take a look?”

  I followed him up to his office. He was using the remote access program I’d told him about, which let his work computer’s desktop appear on the screen in front of him. I did a quick search. Nothing. “Was it a new file, or one you’d just resaved?” I asked.

  “It came in an email today,” he said.

  “You opened it directly from the email?”

  He nodded.

  Now I knew where it was—in a temporary folder where the Search function doesn’t penetrate. “You need to save files attached to emails before you start working on them,” I said. “Just show me the email it came with.” He pulled up the email. I clicked on the attached file, found the temporary folder it would have been saved in and the missing file, and showed Philippe how to save it to a new location.

  “Ahhh,” he said. “You make it look so easy.” Which it is, but I’d lost plenty of files myself before I figured it out.

  “Wait,” he said, as I started to leave. “Could you show me how to set this up so it shows the file extensions?”

  The default Windows setting hides doc, exe, pdf, jpg, and other file extensions, which I think is insane. So I showed him how to set folder options so you can see the file type at a glance.

  “Back up a minute,” Philippe said, looking over my shoulder. “That has to be a mistake. That says the date on that file is today.”

  “That would be the date you last saved it, not the date you wrote it.”

  “But that’s the point. That’s today’s date and I haven’t used it today—and no one should be using these files but me.”

  “Maybe your work computer somehow got set to the wrong date,” I said. I ran the cursor over the file name and idly double-clicked, and a message popped up: This file is currently being used by another user. Do you want to make a copy? “Hmmm,” I said. I tried a different file, which promptly opened. I closed it and went back to the first one. Still not available. “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What is it?”

  “This file won’t open. Which means either it’s been corrupted, or it’s in use.” I closed the file manager and reopened it. The file now showed a different time. I clicked on it, and now it opened. I turned to look at Philippe. “Someone’s accessing your files. Would your secretary be looking at these?”

  “No. Not my secretary and not anyone. I left my computer on, so I could use the remote program, but no one should be using it.” He glanced at his watch. “Excuse me while I call the office.” He pulled out his cell phone as he stepped out of the room, and I could hear a low murmur. When he returned he told me his receptionist had been away from her desk, and he had asked her to lock his office.

  “Your files aren’t password protected?”

  He shook his head.

  I made a face. “You need to install a boot protection program, Philippe, so no one can get into your files—and you should check to make sure no one has installed a keyboard capture or remote access program.”

  He looked at me the way Paul does when he wants something. “Could you … ?”

  Of course I could, but his was a professional office that needed an office-wide daily backup system and professional-level security on each computer. “You don’t have a computer person to do this stuff?”

  He shook his head. “I should, but I don’t. Could you do it? I’ll pay you, of course.”

  It amazes me that people entrust their entire businesses to computers with no one on-site who really understands them. A friend who does computer installations told me about a big organization whose computers were set to back up at midnight every day—but when everyone went home at six, they all turned their computers off. So when a virus struck, months of files were lost.

  I told him I’d come to his office tomorrow and do a basic security check and cleanup on his computer, if he would start looking for a pro to do company-wide security and backup. I wouldn’t let him pay me, but he could take me to lunch.

  THE NEXT MORNING PAUL WENT OFF CHEERFULLY TO school. Today Philippe would stay for only the first half hour, which Paul thought was fine. Apparently the routine of school and being around other kids appealed to him. Philippe had made a good decision enrolling Paul in school.

  No reply yet from Simon, but I knew he was thinking on it. He might even call Jameson, although he wouldn’t tell me about it.

  I opened Outlook Express and found one reply in Madeleine’s account, chat about what so-and-so was doing. It had been a dramatic notion to have sent out emails supposedly from Madeleine, but not, I realized, a particularly useful one. It would have been far smarter—and less nerve-wracking—to have pretended to be a mutual friend. Then I could have asked if anyone knew what had happened to her or who she had been hanging out with her last week or so, or if she had mentioned being followed or seeing someone suspicious.

  It would seem too coincidental to suddenly get in touch with all the people the fake Madeleine had just emailed, especially if any of them communicated with each other. But I’d try it with a few. I signed up for an anonymous email address and sent emails to the three women who seemed to be her chattiest friends: Hi, I’m a friend of Madeleine’s—haven’t heard from her and I’m wondering what’s up—do you have any idea?

  Then I headed off to Philippe’s office to do the work I’d promised to do on his computer. I wondered if Philippe’s receptionist would remember me and my odd story about the misdelivered FedEx envelope, but if she did, she was too well trained to show it. A few other employees walked past as she buzzed Philippe and waved me back to his office.

  He set me up at his desk, and went off elsewhere while I got to work. I checked for keyboard capture programs or remote access programs other than the one he’d installed, but didn’t find any. Either what we’d seen had been an obscure blip, or someone had been using his computer.

  I updated and ran his internet security program, ran Advanced System Care, defragged the hard drive, and installed a boot protection program. If he left his computer running, the screen would go blank, and couldn’t be accessed until the password was typed in. Then I set up his small backup drive to do automatic document backups near the end of every workday. Most people don’t seem to realize that it’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, but when. A better system would back up the
entire hard drive regularly, but this would do for now.

  I realized I was starving, and glanced at the clock—it was nearly noon. I’d been here more than two hours. Computers can be a huge time sink. As I stood, the door opened.

  It was Claude, and the look on his face wasn’t what you would call welcoming. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just helping Philippe out.”

  “What do you mean?” His vehemence was startling.

  “You can ask Philippe.” I thought for a moment he was going to grab my arm. But he let me pass, and followed me out of the room. Philippe was speaking to the receptionist and by the time he turned to us, belligerent Claude was gone and suave businessman Claude was in his place—a Jekyll and Hyde moment so perfect I couldn’t help but be impressed.

  “Are you ready?” Philippe asked. I nodded, and we headed for the elevator. At a nearby bistro we had soup-and-sandwich combos—when you’re eating Elise’s dinners, you need a light lunch—and I briefed him on what I’d done on his computer. I didn’t mention how annoyed Claude had seemed. I assumed he just didn’t like me on his home turf.

  I glanced at the time. I needed to get home in time to let Tiger out before going to pick Paul up from school.

  Yes, I was starting to think of it as home.

  At the school, cars were lined up to pick up children. Security guards checked license plates against a list before letting you through the gates, and if they didn’t know you on sight, you had to show ID. It was laborious, but not so bad when weighed against the risks of having your child kidnapped.