Learning to Swim

by Sara J. Henry

  Concerning the kidnapping of Paul Dumond, age 6, a Canadian citizen from Montreal: The kidnappers, who threw the boy off the 3:20 Burlington ferry the last Sunday in May, were driving a green 1996 or 1997 Plymouth Grand Voyager, according to a ferry worker named Dwight.

  I used Thomas’s printer to print out the note and an envelope. Then I emailed the details to Jameson. Of course he could tell the Burlington police about me, but I wasn’t going to keep this from him. If the police here tracked me down and I got in trouble, so be it.

  I dropped the letter in the drive-by box at the post office, then went inside to check my box. It had been empty except for an advertising circular the last time I’d looked, so hope flickered when I saw several envelopes stuffed in it.

  After I’d looked them over back at the apartment, I realized some people have nothing better to do than read personal ads and compose replies. And apparently a lot of them are crackpots. The pile included cryptic notes that said things like All foriners are devils and should be sent back where they come from, and a long letter in crabbed handwriting warning me about the end of the world and how to save myself. The saving process apparently involved much praying and copious donations to the included address.

  Thomas, back by now, glanced over my shoulder and raised an eyebrow.

  “Apparently classified ads bring out the nutcases,” I said. When my TracFone in my pocket rang, I jumped. I gave Thomas a look before pulling it out to answer it. He knew me well enough not to laugh at me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The voice on the other end was female, young, decisive. “Hello, this is Alyssa Cox from the Burlington Free Press. Is this the number to call about the two Canadian men?”

  My pulse quickened. I got up and walked into my room. “Yes-s-s. Do you know their whereabouts?”

  “No, but I’d like to talk to you about them.”

  I was automatically shaking my head. “No, no press coverage.”

  “Does this have anything to do with a young missing Canadian boy?”

  My brain did a stutter stop. “Why do you think that?”

  “Is your name by any chance Troy Chance?”

  I should have said a quick “No,” but I wasn’t thinking fast enough. Where could she have gotten my name? I had sent an email to the news desk at the Free Press the day I’d found Paul, but hadn’t used my name or real email address. But somehow she’d connected that email with me.

  “Look,” the woman said, “I don’t mean to upset you or anything, but I’d really like to talk to you. Do you think we could get together?”

  It didn’t seem I had a choice. We agreed to meet at a coffeehouse in the Church Street marketplace, a four-block area of shops with streets closed to traffic. Before I left I looked her up on the newspaper’s website, and read several of her stories. She was a good writer, her stories well sourced and rich with details.

  She was waiting for me in front of the coffee shop: a slight woman in her mid- to late twenties, with wiry brown hair in a French braid and a skin color that at first seemed to be a deep tan. But her features weren’t quite Caucasian. Part Filipino, I guessed, plus maybe Mexican or even African. Or all three. We ordered coffee and sat in a corner.

  She pulled out one of my posters from a voluminous bag and slid it across the table. Next came a copy of my classified ad, then a printout of my long-ago email, a screen shot of my eBay identity with the same email address I’d emailed the newspaper from, plus the same page with the coding revealed. She’d highlighted the URLs of the photos on my eBay page, which were hosted on my home page under my real name. She was thorough. The only thing she hadn’t found was the Craigslist posting.

  For a moment I looked at the papers on the table. I wasn’t used to people being as smart as me, let alone outsmarting me. Who traces email addresses to eBay accounts and looks at page coding to see where photos are stored? I would, but I never would have anticipated someone else doing it.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “This looks like a hell of a story.”

  “It is a hell of a story,” I said slowly. “But it isn’t my story, and if anything is printed it would endanger the child.”

  “Has he been kidnapped?” She leaned forward.

  I grimaced. “If the story gets out he could be in danger. Like, real danger.”

  She nodded. “I’ll agree not to print until the boy is safe, and I always keep my word. I’ll give you names of people you can call and ask.” She scribbled names and numbers on a page from her notebook, and pushed it at me. She handed me photocopied pages from a folder, saying, “These are some articles I’ve done recently, so you can see the type of work I do.”

  I took them. I didn’t mention that I’d already read some of her work. “Let me think about it. I’ll let you know.”

  “I can help,” she said. “Whatever you’re trying to find out, I have a lot of sources.”

  The coffee wasn’t as good as Elise’s, but I sat there until I finished it, and thought hard. This woman could put together a story based on what she had so far—the poster, the ad, a missing child—which would send the kidnappers into hiding, if they weren’t already. If she found out Paul’s name, and I had no doubt she could, we could kiss his chances of a quiet and safe life goodbye.

  At Thomas’s kitchen table I read the articles Alyssa had given me, and then I called her references, people she’d written about. None of them had anything but praise for her.

  I called her back an hour later, with the phone set to speakerphone and my recorder running. I told her I was taping the call, and she reiterated her promise not to print anything until it was safe. I told her the basics: the kidnapping, the murder, the attempted drowning.

  “The police are looking for these guys, but it doesn’t seem that they’ve even come close,” I told her. “And if there’s any news coverage, they’ll almost certainly track the boy down and try to kill him. Somebody already tried to run me over, and to pick him up from school.”

  She was a good reporter. She listened intently and asked pointed questions. “I won’t print anything until the kidnappers are caught. But I’ll do some checking for you if you promise to give me the first interview.”

  “His life may depend on this, Alyssa.”

  “Yes, I realize that.” And I thought she did.

  I gave her the description of the van, and the date Paul had been kidnapped and when I’d found him. We promised to keep each other updated.

  I hoped I hadn’t just made a serious error. I hoped I wouldn’t see headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers about a lurid murder and an unsolved kidnapping.

  It shook me that a tiny, forgotten act like a random email and an eBay account using photos stored on my personal web space might have jeopardized Paul’s life. It reminded me that I had no idea what I was doing. I was going to have to be very careful, more careful than I had been. And I had to stop underestimating people.

  I drove to the apartment-viewing appointment I’d made for that afternoon, in an older part of Burlington. Another dreary apartment, another dead end. I had four more appointments booked for tomorrow, back-to-back.

  I’d looked at so many apartments that it was becoming almost routine—so routine that at that third apartment the next day, I almost missed it. The middle-aged owner handed me the key, telling me to look around and that she’d be down in a few minutes. The smart ones did this, let you look around alone so you could envision yourself in the apartment, see your furniture in the rooms, imagine your posters on the walls. This apartment had three rooms, all a bright off-white. As I glanced around I noticed a faint smell.

  The rooms had been freshly painted, I realized. I walked into the smallest room. I went to the corner where a mattress could have lain, and ran my hand over the wall. My fingers found what I hadn’t seen: the slight unevenness of well-sanded patching material.

  I felt as if I had just stepped into a freezer. This was where Paul had scratched and dug into the particleboard with his little
plastic toy, and kept the hole covered with his pillow. It had been a small hole, leading to nowhere, and had been spackled over neatly.

  Now I heard the woman’s footsteps, and I straightened quickly. “This is nice,” I told her. “You’ve just painted it.”

  “Well, yes. It was so dark down here the way it was, and it really needed painting, too.”

  “Has it been vacant long?”

  “Oh, not long,” she said vaguely. “A few months. We took over when my mother-in-law had to go to a nursing home. She had it rented to some people who left without telling her, and she didn’t notice until she went down to see about the overdue rent. They left it a real mess, too, let me tell you. You wouldn’t believe how some people live.” She shook her head.

  “Did you know them? I thought I might have known the people who lived here.” I kept my voice casual.

  “No, no, I just saw them once from across the yard, two men it was, foreign, I think. Some kind of accent, anyway.”

  My pulse quickened. I forced my tone to be casual. “Yeah? It could have been the guys I knew.”

  “We’ll never know.” She made a face. “Granny didn’t take references and she let people pay in cash, and now she doesn’t even remember their names. I’ll tell you, I’d track them down if I could, and make them pay what it cost to clean and paint this place and haul off their trash. They left it like a pigsty.”

  “Did they leave furniture?”

  She nodded. “It was all junk. Some old mattresses, an old sofa. We had to cart it all to the dump.”

  I looked around the small rooms. Through the faint aroma of fresh paint and cleaning products, I thought I could smell evil. Suddenly it was difficult to breathe. I told her I didn’t think the apartment was quite right for me, and made my escape.

  As I drove back to Thomas’s, I couldn’t shake a crushing sense of depression. Yes, I’d made a big discovery—but how did it help? The apartment had been cleaned so thoroughly the chance of any clue remaining was infinitesimal.

  But perhaps the police could find clues that I couldn’t, and they could interview the landlady and the neighbors. I emailed details to Jameson, as promised, and wrote another note to the Burlington police and went out to mail it. I called Alyssa at home, and left a message when her voice mail clicked on.

  That night I dreamed that I saw the green van drive slowly past. As it went by I saw Paul’s forlorn face in the back window. I yelled and started running, chasing the van, banging on its side as it pulled away. I ran as hard as I could, but the van was pulling away from me.

  I awoke in a cold sweat.

  ALYSSA WAS A FAST WORKER. WHEN SHE CALLED THE NEXT morning she had already talked to the police. “So you found the apartment?” she asked.

  “It’s the second apartment where Paul was kept, I’m pretty sure, but I think it’s going to be a dead end.”

  She whistled. “Hey, good going. But why a dead end?”

  “The apartment’s been painted and cleaned from top to bottom, the guys paid in cash, and the owner is in a nursing home and apparently doesn’t remember their names.”

  She groaned. “You’re kidding. You’ve got to be kidding. You couldn’t have luck that bad.”

  “Yep. I talked to the daughter-in-law. I sent a note to the police, for what it’s worth.”

  “Unbelievable. Hey, I’ve read the police reports and asked around. You’re right, they basically know zippo, but they did get your note about the van. I suggested that they go have a chat with Dwight and maybe check out the apartment address you left on my voice mail.”

  “You told them about me?” My voice rose.

  “No, I just told them someone had mentioned those things to me. I get anonymous tips all the time; they’re used to it. They’d know by tomorrow, anyway, when your note gets there. Hey, somebody’s calling, I’ve got to go look something up. I’ll be in touch.” She broke the connection.

  When I checked my email, I saw a note from Alyssa’s home account that read, “Hi, you can email here; more private than work address.”

  I also had an email from the editor at Women’s Sports and Fitness about the article on gender testing in sports that I’d finished while in Ottawa. She’d attached a copy of my piece, with questions and suggestions typed into the text. Easy changes, but they’d take a while. I wasn’t in the mood, but I wouldn’t get paid until the piece was accepted. Might as well get it done.

  Alyssa rang me back in the afternoon. “Listen, the police have talked to Dwight, and he confirmed the identification. They’ve also had the daughter-in-law take the pictures of the guys to the old lady in the nursing home, and she said that it could be them.”

  “Could be them?

  “Well, she’s old and doesn’t see that well. Poor old coot. I talked to her for a while; she was happy to have a visitor. She never saw a kid, but she thought she heard a child crying once, but the guys convinced her it was just the TV. And here’s the clincher: the daughter-in-law says she found some little toy figures in the room when she cleaned it. They were those little McDonald’s toys, and sometimes adults collect them, so she didn’t think anything of it. But it all means the police for sure are buying the story that the kidnappers were here, and may still be here.”

  “But would they hang around after dumping a kid into the lake?”

  “No one knew they had him, so how would it make any difference? Unless that’s the only reason they were staying here. But I can’t believe they were here so long and didn’t have contact with somebody. I mean, these are guys, scumbags at that. I doubt they spent every evening at home watching the telly. I’ll take a girlfriend and go out tonight and ask around in the bars near that neighborhood.”

  I wished her luck, and rang off. It was strange to have someone helping, someone who could dig in places and ask questions where I couldn’t, and who thought of things I didn’t. But it was a relief to know she was working on this while I was revising my article. Alyssa wouldn’t be at this newspaper long, I thought—she’d be off to bigger and better things.

  I polished off the article Sunday night and sent it to the editor before I went to bed, wondering how Alyssa and her friend were doing on their bar-hopping jaunt. Monday I started calling about rentals again and checking out apartments to see if I could find the second place Paul had been kept. I hadn’t gotten any email responses to my ads or posters. In the afternoon Alyssa and I compared notes.

  Three days later my personal cell phone rang, with a number I didn’t recognize—from a 613 area code. I answered it.

  “Troy?”

  This time I recognized his voice. “Detective Jameson. What a surprise.” I’d never given him my cell phone number.

  “You’ve made some contacts in Burlington.”

  “Not really. I’ve just been looking around a little.” My mouth was dry.

  “You found the apartment; you got a description of the van. Sounds like more than a little looking around.”

  “I found the right person to talk to on the ferry. It was luck.”

  “And just stumbled across the apartment.”

  “Mmm. I checked out some basement apartments. Actually, a lot of basement apartments.” If it hadn’t been Jameson, I’d have thought what I heard was a muffled chuckle. “I haven’t been doing anything illegal. I mean, I didn’t break in or anything.”

  “These guys aren’t Boy Scouts, Troy.” His voice was serious.

  “I know.”

  “They may still be there, and they may not have worked alone.”

  I didn’t say anything. He sighed. “Troy, someone kidnapped two people, murdered a woman, and tried to drown a child—and tried to run you over. You have to be careful. And if you know anything or even suspect anything, you can’t keep it to yourself.” It was the longest speech I’d heard from him.

  “I won’t, I promise. I mean, I’m not. I’m telling you and the local police everything I know. Really.”

  “Next time you find something, call me, Troy. Don�
��t just email.”

  I agreed, and we hung up.

  He hadn’t told me to stop looking around. Either he understood I had to do this or he was happy that some progress was being made on the case.

  On my way back to Thomas’s I stopped at a McDonald’s to use the bathroom, and once back in my car it dawned on me: one of these guys had routinely bought Happy Meals for Paul. Maybe an employee would recognize the guy, or if he’d gone through a drive-through someone might remember the car, as the ferry worker had. But this area had several McDonald’s, with large and probably ever-changing shifts of workers. No doubt proprietors wouldn’t look kindly on me coming in and showing my poster to all their employees, and I’d find myself making explanations I didn’t want to have to make.

  Maybe the Burlington police had thought of this, but maybe not. I could have Alyssa ask them, but I thought it would have more weight coming from Jameson. Once I got back to the house I emailed Jameson and asked if he could check to see if the local police had shown the pictures of the kidnappers to McDonald’s employees.

  For good measure, I set up a new Craigslist posting looking for a guy driving a Voyager who had bought Happy Meals regularly.

  Jameson emailed back: We’re on it. This, for some reason, made me smile.

  THE NEXT MORNING MY CELL PHONE RANG EARLY. THE POLICE, Alyssa told me, had located a broken-down van that had been abandoned near the tiny town of Chazy in upstate New York. It matched Dwight’s description, and had been registered to a phony name and address.

  She had an interview to do in Essex Junction, a few miles east of Burlington, so we met at a wine and cheese shop where she said the owners made stupendous sandwiches. Alyssa had called ahead, and huge, wax paper–wrapped sandwiches were waiting when we got there.