“This could have been an accident,” I insisted.
“But, Troy, you got hit and no one stopped.”
“I’ve had things like this happen. People don’t pay attention or just don’t care about someone on a bike—sometimes they don’t even notice. Or they try to run you off the road for the heck of it.”
He pursed his lips. It would have been a huge coincidence that I was nearly run over the same day someone tried to pick up Paul at school, and we both knew it.
“Does—”
“What—”
He gestured for me to go ahead.
“Is Paul safe?” I blurted.
“Safe?” Philippe waved his arm violently. “He’s safe here, at least as safe as I can make it without putting up bars. He’s safe at school, if someone doesn’t show up and gun down the guard and force his way in.” He was talking faster, sounding more French than I’d ever heard him. “I can’t protect him completely. Anytime he’s in the car, he’s at risk. A fender bender, something to force the car off the road. Boom, they could grab him. Anytime we take him out, someone could snatch him. But there’s nothing to do, unless I hire a bodyguard. And I’ve thought of that. But what kind of life would that be for Paul, to always be reminded that life isn’t safe, that someone is out there who could snatch him, that his own father can’t protect him?”
He stood, his breathing loud.
I’d forgotten the rage Philippe had shown when I first met him, and I hadn’t realized the amount of anger he was still carrying. He was coping, but barely.
I cleared my throat. “We can vary our routine, drive different ways to school. Limit the times you’re in public with him, make sure it’s never just one person out with him. Until these guys are caught.”
He looked up with a bitter half smile. “If they ever are.”
“We have to believe they will be.” My voice was sharp. “We have to.”
He nodded absently. “If you don’t mind, as soon as you can get around, I’d like you to always pick up Paul from school, not Elise. For now, I’ll take off work early and do it.”
“Sure,” I said, but Philippe seemed far away.
I was stiff the next morning, but I knew the following day would be even worse. I might as well face Jameson now. I’d give him the recording I’d made of the conversation with Gina and also that first conversation with Paul. That, at least, had simply slipped my mind. And copies of the Craigslist ad and the replies I’d gotten.
Full disclosure—supposedly good for the soul.
At the police station I followed a uniformed policeman in, and no one tried to stop me. I tapped on Jameson’s half-opened door.
He looked up without expression. “Something I forgot to give you,” I said, holding up the tapes. “From when I talked to that friend of Madeleine’s in Montreal, and when Paul told me about the kidnapping. And a Craigslist ad I did. Madeleine’s password, if you need it, is her first name backward.” He made no move to take the tapes or the pages. I set them on a corner of his desk, atop a pile of papers.
“I read the emails,” he said.
I waited, but he said nothing else. “I’m sorry I didn’t give them to you sooner.” My voice almost cracked. “But I knew they would make you suspect Philippe, and I didn’t want him to know about them. I wanted to … I wanted to see if anyone knew anything, so I sent out some emails.”
Silence. “I know you think I’m stupid,” I said, and limped away. It wasn’t a dignified exit.
My bike frame, I discovered when I’d gathered the courage to look at it, was scratched but not bent, but the front wheel was pretzeled. I bought a new rim and spokes at a nearby bike shop, and began building a new front wheel.
I hummed softly as I threaded spokes into the rim, standing to stretch when I got too stiff. Every other spoke hole is offset a little, and once I’d carelessly laced an entire wheel with the spokes through the wrong holes. I began truing it, adjusting the spoke tension bit by bit, then pushing the wheel against the floor sideways to seat the spokes and nipples. It’s slow work, but I like it. Next I moved on to cleaning the derailleurs, brakes, and drive train. I love getting all the parts clean and working smoothly.
I thought about the car that had almost hit me. I thought about someone calling the school about picking up Paul. I thought about Philippe and the strange limbo he lived in. I wondered if Claude had been different when Madeleine was alive, and when he’d been dating someone. I wondered if Jameson was finding out anything from the emails. I wondered if I had turned them over sooner, whether my accident and the threat against Paul would have occurred at all.
Had I somehow led the kidnappers back here? Had they seen me, followed me to Lake Placid? Or had my emails or my postings about the kidnappers somehow alerted them? I couldn’t figure out how.
Or maybe my crash was an accident and someone had simply played a cruel prank on Philippe and the school.
I was moving slowly, so it took the better part of two mornings to clean the bike and true the wheel as well as I could without a truing stand. I’d emailed Simon, and he called. He was worried, but didn’t try to talk me into leaving. He asked if I minded if he talked to Jameson, and I didn’t. I didn’t confess all the snooping I’d done, but Jameson could tell him if he chose. “Be very careful, Troy,” my brother said, and I agreed. I couldn’t do much else.
A response to my Craigslist ad came in: these look a lot like 2 guys I met in a bar in burlington near the university, they had funny accents & said they were from montreal. one was named jock i think.
I took a deep breath. I looked up Jameson’s email address at the Ottawa Police Service and forwarded it to him.
THE NEXT MORNING THE CALL CAME—THE ONE EVERYONE had been dreading. Elise brought the phone to the breakfast table, and Philippe’s face turned white as he listened. He stood and turned, as if to shield us. When he clicked off the phone and faced us, he was working hard to appear normal.
“Troy,” he said, too casually. “There’s something I need to ask you about on my computer.”
I winked at Paul and said, “Back in a flash, cowboy,” and followed Philippe upstairs. In his office he turned and leaned against the desk.
He spoke immediately. “They found a woman’s body, Troy, just outside Montreal. They think it’s Madeleine.”
My breath caught, and I made a sound.
He went on. “It was in her car, in the woods, and matches Madeleine’s description. They’re checking dental records now.”
I found my voice. “But, Philippe, it couldn’t be her, not in Montreal. Paul said he heard her shot, after they’d been moved.” My throat was dry.
He shook his head. “He must have been wrong.” He tapped his ring, and cleared his throat. “Wedding ring. We had them engraved.” His face crumpled, and he sat in his desk chair, his back to me.
He sat for a long moment, face in hands, and then straightened, back in control. “I have to go to Montreal to identify the body and meet with the Montreal police. Jameson will go with me.”
“What are you going to tell Paul?”
Philippe shook his head, picking up the phone on his desk and punching in numbers. “I’m not going to tell him that it’s her, not until I’m sure, but I’ll have to tell him something because Jameson will be here soon.” He spoke into the phone, telling his receptionist he wouldn’t be in. I wondered if he’d tell Claude or wait until the identity was confirmed. Or if the police had already called Claude.
I went downstairs and gulped coffee, almost burning my mouth. I smiled at Paul and nibbled at a muffin. Philippe followed moments later, and Paul looked up curiously.
“Paul, Papa is going to go off today with the police, to help them,” Philippe told him.
“To look for the bad men?” Paul asked, putting a blueberry from his muffin into his mouth.
“Well, yes.” Philippe shifted in his chair. “And perhaps to find out what happened to your mother.”
Paul looked at him calmly. “I
heard the bad men shoot her.”
We both froze. It was the first time we had heard Paul voluntarily say anything about the kidnapping.
“Yes, I know, Paul,” Philippe said. “But we would like to try to find her and if … if we can, bring her back and have a funeral.”
“When you die, your inside … votre esprit … goes away.” Paul waved one hand as if it were a small bird in flight.
Philippe couldn’t speak. I answered gently. “Yes, your spirit, your soul, goes away and your body is left behind, like a shell.”
“And you put the shell in the ground?”
“Yes. And then you put up a marker, or a stone, with the person’s name, to respect and remember them.” Paul nodded, and took a bite of the muffin he’d been picking the blueberries from.
The doorbell rang. Elise ushered in Jameson, and he stopped in the doorway. “Would you like coffee?” asked Elise, her eyes worried. She knew something was very wrong.
“No,” said Jameson, shaking his head. His eyes moved around the room, taking in the breakfast remains, moving past Philippe and Paul, stopping on me. He nodded brusquely. I nodded back, a tight knot in my throat. “We need to go,” he said to Philippe.
Philippe nodded, and set down his coffee. He gave Paul a hug, telling him that I would drive him to school today. “I’ll call when I can,” he told me.
The body was Madeleine’s, Philippe told me when he called a few hours later, but it would be much later before he could tell me more. Jameson got on the phone and told me to be at the Ottawa police station with Elise by two thirty.
“But I have to pick Paul up from school.”
“Monsieur Dumond will be able to pick his son up,” he said.
“Okay.” As I hung up I met Elise’s eyes. “They found Mrs. Dumond’s body,” I told her. “They want us at the police station at two thirty.”
She muttered something in French I didn’t understand, and switched back to English. “Why do they want to talk to us?” Twin strands of gray hair had escaped from her hair and were framing her worried brow.
“To find out if we know anything, I guess. Maybe if you remember anything from before, about people Madeleine knew, maybe.”
We busied ourselves, her scrubbing kitchen cupboards, me taking Tiger for a walk, and when it was time I drove us to the police station. A police officer took Elise somewhere, and a few minutes later Jameson appeared and waved me back into his cluttered office. I sat.
“Do you own a gun?” he asked, shuffling some papers at his desk.
“No.”
“Have you ever owned a gun?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fired a gun?”
“No. Well, not since I was a kid—a shotgun, at a target. Just once.” I had been about eight, and the recoil had nearly thrown me to the ground.
He watched me closely. “Did you ever meet Madeleine Dumond?”
“No. I mean, no, I don’t think I ever did, if I did, I didn’t know it.” I was babbling, and couldn’t help it.
“Were you aware of the manner of her death?”
“Paul said he heard her shot.”
“Were you aware of the whereabouts of Madame Dumond’s body?”
“No. From what Paul told me, I’d thought she was shot in Vermont, or wherever he was kept.”
He scribbled some notes on his paper, ignoring me, and then looked up blandly. “All right, thank you, Miss Chance.”
I hesitated. This was it? I met his stare, and knew he was baiting me. I stood up. “So I can go?”
“Yes,” he said, and I left without looking back.
Elise’s questioning had been along the same lines, I supposed, but with more specific questions, as her interview took longer. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. I caught sight of Claude in the waiting area, face ashen, looking as if he had crumpled in on himself. I hesitated, wanting to say something to him, but I didn’t think anything I could say would bring him any comfort. But I couldn’t not try.
I walked over to him. “I’m so sorry,” I said. He lifted his head, and it shocked me; I’ve never seen a face so ravaged with pain. He tried to sneer at me but couldn’t manage it, and somehow the attempt—and maybe the failure as well—made me like him more than I would have thought possible. “I’m so very sorry,” I said again, and he nodded. I left him alone.
Philippe was questioned extensively, he told me that evening. The body had been in Madeleine’s car in a ravine in a deeply wooded area outside Montreal. It wore the wedding ring and a leather coat and a pair of boots Philippe recognized. Apparently she had been strangled or garroted, not shot.
It took me a moment to digest all this, and to work out that Madeleine had been killed before Paul was taken to wherever he was kept captive—so what he had thought was his mother being shot must have been a horrible charade to get him to cooperate. And Jameson questioning me about a gun apparently had been to see if I’d slip and say something revealing like But she wasn’t killed with a gun.
Philippe told Paul that evening that his mother’s body had been found and would eventually be put into a grave. Paul seemed to take the news calmly, and my eyes met Philippe’s. Surely this can’t be a normal reaction, we were both thinking. But what did we know? Yet another question for the psychologist.
The police had asked Philippe if he had owned a watch like one they had found near the car with a broken pin (yes, it looked like one he’d once had, but hadn’t worn for years). They’d asked him a lot more, I could tell, but he, like Elise, didn’t want to talk about it.
I called Simon.
“Do they have any clues, any suspects?” he asked.
“They … I think they’re suspecting Philippe,” I whispered, sounding as miserable as I felt. “They found a man’s watch near the car they seem to think was his.”
“Have they traced it to him?” Simon’s voice was sharp.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, never mind that he couldn’t see me. “At least not that I know of. But he says it does look like one he used to have.”
Simon was quiet for a long moment. “Even if it is his watch, Troy, this was his wife, it was her car. She could have had the watch with her for some reason; she could have been taking it to be repaired.”
“I know.” I was crying quietly by now, and I think he knew it.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he said, and his matter-of-factness calmed me. “The killer could be anybody who knew Philippe had money. It could be a complete stranger; it could be someone he used to work with. It could be Madeleine’s brother. It could be someone trying to frame him.”
It hurt even to get the words out: “What do you think?”
“I think you should trust your instincts, Troy. The one thing I can tell you is that I don’t think that Philippe would ever hurt Paul, or do anything that could hurt him.”
Philippe knew the police considered him a suspect, but having his wife’s body found apparently provided him some closure. He seemed calmer. Paul seemed no different, but Claude took several days off work, and stopped coming for dinner.
Claude, I realized, must have been clinging to the hope that his sister would be found alive. Which I suppose hadn’t been much more unlikely than Paul’s coming home as he had.
They held a funeral service in Montreal. I didn’t know if the body would be buried or if the police had to keep it until the case was closed, and didn’t ask. After some thought, Philippe decided Paul should attend, and we took him out to buy a tiny suit. Elise and Claude went to the service. I didn’t. I hoped Jameson had notified Gina—it seemed that Madeleine should have at least one personal friend there.
It was a long day for me in Ottawa. I took a bike ride. I worked. I cleaned my bike. I walked Tiger for an hour. I emailed Baker. I thought. And then I called Thomas. It was a short and pained conversation. I told him I didn’t see a future ahead for us. He thanked me for calling, and that was that. I hung up, and then I cried.
IN SOME WAYS I
CAN BE DENSE. VERY DENSE.
I knew Philippe liked me. I knew he had found me attractive those two evenings we’d gone out. But I had thought it was attractive in a distant sense, like a cousin or sister or someone you’re fond of who happens to be devoted to your child. And except that one night on the sofa, we’d been living together for weeks with nothing more between us than if he had been Zach or one of my other housemates. I’d tamped down the attraction I’d felt for him because, one, it wasn’t appropriate, and, two, I’d learned long ago how painful it is to want someone you can’t have. But somewhere along the line things had changed, and I had been too stupid to see it. It hadn’t occurred to me that the discovery of Madeleine’s body had set Philippe free in some ways. Although I had noticed he’d stopped wearing his wedding ring.
We were in the library after dinner, as usual, with Paul asleep and Elise off in her apartment, and Philippe was showing me an old photo in a book about Montreal. I leaned in close to see it, never mind that I was pretty damned close to him, because we had been playing this platonic thing so long that in my brain that’s just the way it was. And then suddenly he turned my face toward his and the touch of his hand on my face was like fire. And then his lips were on mine and his tongue in my mouth, and I was feeling things I’d only ever dreamed of. It was nothing like kissing Thomas, or anyone else I’d kissed, for that matter.
At a certain point you have to come up for air, and we did, and I became aware he was speaking.
“Troy, we have to talk,” he was saying. “There are things I need to tell you, things about Madeleine.”
I was shaking my head without realizing it. For weeks I’d wanted to know more about Madeleine, but not now. She was dead, in the past, gone. I wanted to let her and everything about her stay buried. “I don’t want to know,” I said, and the words were thick and awkward.
He shook his head. “No, I need to tell you. You need to know.”
If I could have stopped him I would have. I had thought I was all for truth and straightforwardness, which shows just what a hypocrite I can be. “Okay,” I said, and shifted a few inches away from him. And he told me.
Learning to Swim Page 20