I spent the rest of the day alone. I didn’t mind. It suited me to lie in this hospital bed, in my hospital gown, and let my mind run.
Maybe a shrink would have told me to block it all out for now, to accept the pill the nurse offered and just sleep the afternoon away. But I needed to think it through. I tried to imagine Madeleine in Montreal, carefully plotting her exit and her new life here, planning to have her own child kept captive as long as it suited her. I relived every encounter I’d had with her when I thought she was Marguerite, and every moment afterward with her on the boat and in the water. I wondered about her relationship with her brother and why she had abandoned him. I wondered about the woman she had killed, her dopplegänger. I thought about when and why she had decided to leave Paul and Philippe, and I thought about the nature of a psyche that had been compelled to invent a whole new persona and inflict as much pain and damage as possible before moving on.
And I couldn’t help but think of the eight-year-old boy I’d read about at the beginning of all this, whose mother had driven down from Montreal and tied him to a boat mooring in a tiny Vermont town—where he had drowned, in the same lake where Paul had nearly died.
Then I slept.
BEFORE I OPENED MY EYES IN THE MORNING IT ALL SEEMED like a ghastly dream. Then I heard the wheels of the cart in the hall, and a cheery assistant brought in a tasteless breakfast. I ate it, because I was ravenous—I couldn’t even remember if I’d had dinner. I called Alyssa and told her voice mail where I was, but not what had happened. I knew she’d show up or call when she could. I wondered how Philippe was doing.
Jameson arrived carrying a fragrant McDonald’s bag, and sipped his coffee as he watched me eat two Egg McMuffins, one after the other.
“Do you want to hear what’s going on?” he asked. I nodded.
So he told me.
It was a mess, of course: a multi-jurisdictional, cross-border mess involving law enforcement from two countries, two states, and two provinces.
The Ottawa police were interviewing Claude, who had had the news broken to him that his sister had been living here and had just died. I supposed Claude could have tried to deny any involvement in the kidnapping, no matter what Madeleine had told me. But maybe he figured the police would find some evidence, or maybe he was just in shock and needed to unburden himself. But he was talking and talking fast. He admitted picking up the ransoms, and had thought Paul would be sent back to Philippe at that point. He reconsidered the sketches of the “kidnappers” he’d barely glanced at before, and after an artist had regressed their ages, said he thought they might be two brothers who had been in foster care with Madeleine and him. The police had located the two in a small town north of Montreal and had them in custody. If the Canadian police had been slow to get results on the kidnapping, they were making up for it now.
“So Claude didn’t know Madeleine was here?” I asked.
Jameson shook his head. “He’d thought she’d gone to New York, and that he would join her there. But the accomplices were already living here. We’re still finding out details.”
No wonder Claude had needled me so much—when I’d shown up with Paul he must have been hugely confused, wondering if I knew Madeleine or was involved somehow.
“Gaius,” I said suddenly, thinking of the emails I’d seen. “Claude was Gaius.”
Jameson gave me an odd look, and nodded again.
“And the … the body?” I said. “The dead woman in Montreal?”
He paused before he spoke, and seemed to be sizing me up to see if I could handle this now. “It’s off the record until it’s confirmed and family notified, but they think it’s the woman Claude had been dating.”
This took more than a moment to digest. Madeleine had killed her brother’s girlfriend and stashed the body in her car—a woman who resembled her enough that six months later Philippe had identified the body as his wife’s. And presumably Madeleine had called in the tip herself so the body could be found when she chose.
Jameson could see me working on this. He cleared his throat. “Troy,” he said. “The Roman emperor Gaius was also known as Caligula. And two of his sisters were named Julia.”
The puzzle pieces started sliding into place. Even I knew that Caligula had been closer to his sisters than a brother is supposed to be, and if I’d known my Roman history better, maybe I would have figured it out sooner. But maybe not, because I can be astoundingly naïve.
“Does Claude know who the dead woman was?” I asked finally.
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
I felt more compassion for Claude than I would have thought possible.
When Philippe came to see me later that morning, he looked infinitely better. He had reverted to efficient businessman mode, where he was perhaps most comfortable. He’d talked to Elise, who knew some of what was going on, and to Paul, who didn’t. He told me Claude had supplied a copy of Madeleine’s birth certificate and Québec child services had located her fingerprints, so they wouldn’t have to wait for a DNA match. Of course at this point no one could be sure whose dental records were whose. I didn’t ask what had become of the person Madeleine had gotten to change names on the records.
Claude had assumed someone local was keeping Paul, and hadn’t known about the Burlington accomplices or about Vince. To Claude it all had seemed a clever and relatively harmless ploy to bypass the prenup, and this I could believe. Philippe, too.
“It’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to Claude,” Philippe said. He’d known his brother-in-law’s strengths and weaknesses. I didn’t ask if he knew about the Gaius-Julia thing, or if he thought it was anything more than a particularly tasteless joke between siblings. Some things you didn’t need to know.
Alyssa arrived around lunchtime, and was smart enough to have brought me a thick deli sandwich. She took one look at me and said, “Ah, Troy.” I think if not for my bandages, she would have perched on the side of the bed and hugged me. As it was, she did what Jameson had, and held my hand lightly. It opened the floodgates, and I cried again.
As I expected she would, she had already talked to the police. All she needed to write her article was the interview with me.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” she asked.
I wasn’t, but I’d promised, and maybe it would be good for me. Alyssa turned on her tape recorder and asked questions, taking notes as I talked. Then she flicked off her recorder and put away her pen.
Then I told her more: how Madeleine sounded, the look on her face, how I had reached out for her as she sank. She listened, which is what I needed. I was starting to get the hang of letting people be there for you, of not keeping everything to yourself.
We both had trouble wrapping our minds around Madeleine killing a woman, then using her like a set piece to frame her husband for her own murder. It was Alyssa who pointed out that Madeleine had in essence killed her old self in effigy, so Marguerite could emerge.
We both had brains that liked to work at things. We knew Madeleine could easily have found the photo of Philippe and me in the paper online; she could have had a Google Alert set up for Philippe’s name. And that photo must have been like a match lit under her—I was willing to bet she’d driven up to Ottawa the same day. It made me ill to think of Madeleine watching the house, following as Paul was driven to school, seeing me leave for my bike ride.
My name from the newspaper photo would have led her to my Twitter account and Craigslist posting, and luring me here had been simple. I’d reacted with Pavlovian predictability, coming to Burlington and going to the French club, the dinner, the sailboat outing. All along she had been taunting me, waiting for the moment when she would reveal just enough for me to figure it out.
“I knew this would be a heck of a story, but I never expected anything like this,” Alyssa said. She put her things in her bag—she had a story to write—and on the way out the door gave me a half salute. “Hang in there,” she said.
The story made the front
page of the paper, with a sidebar on Madeleine/Marguerite—the death of a prominent faculty member’s wife, who hadn’t been his wife at all. Philippe had talked to Alyssa, figuring that if he gave one interview the press might leave him alone. Alyssa had written the pieces well, but even handled with restraint, they were lurid. The wire service picked them up and they ran nationwide, and in Canada as well.
Alyssa had given me advance warning that the stories would be hitting the wires, so I called Simon for help with familial damage control. He said he’d alert our parents and sisters so they wouldn’t go berserk, and asked if I wanted him to come up. I said no. He didn’t say a lot, but I thought he knew pretty well what I was feeling. Philippe called Zach and Baker for me; I wasn’t up to talking to them yet.
By now I’d acquired a shiny cast, and I was glad I’d been faithfully paying my monthly health insurance premiums. My shoulder wound had avoided getting infected—washed clean by the cold water of that glacially formed lake, I supposed. The doctor pronounced me ready to leave. I had one last brief interview with the Burlington police, and Jameson stopped in before he headed back to Ottawa.
He told me the accomplices seemed stunned by the murder. They had been the ones who had driven Paul across the border, curling his small body inside their wheel well—and that image made me shiver. But they’d thought he would be turned loose eventually. When Madeleine had ordered them to get rid of him, they’d moved to another apartment instead, and sent a ransom demand of their own. But she’d seen one of them at a McDonald’s—buying a kids’ meal—and had confronted him.
They fled town, planning to abandon a drugged Paul on the New York side of the lake. But she’d followed them onto the ferry and taken Paul from the van’s backseat. They insisted that’s all they knew. No one could prove if Madeleine had been on the ferry, and it could have been them who dumped Paul overboard. But I thought I knew the truth. I’d seen it in Madeleine’s eyes.
Jameson promised he’d keep me up to date, and left.
Philippe wouldn’t hear of my returning to Lake Placid. I would go back with him to Ottawa to recover, and he would have my car brought up. I didn’t object. For now it felt good to have someone else making decisions.
Philippe drove me to Thomas’s apartment, and loaded the bags Thomas had packed for me. I couldn’t hug Thomas goodbye because of my injuries, but he patted my good shoulder, awkwardly, and knelt to pat Tiger before she jumped in the backseat.
“Thank you, Tommy,” I said. His expression was blandly pleasant, as usual. But as if watching the scene from afar, I saw from the twist of his mouth and how his eyes didn’t quite meet mine that his feelings for me had been more intense than I’d ever imagined. It was a shock, as if he, too, had had a secret identity.
I couldn’t have spoken again if I’d tried. This was like losing something I’d never had. Maybe my near-death had jolted Thomas enough to let his feelings show. Or maybe I was only now truly paying attention—and this was an even more unsettling thought.
Through the windshield I saw Thomas and Philippe cordially shaking hands. Then Philippe got in and we drove off. I forced my mind into blankness and closed my eyes.
FOUR HOURS LATER WE WERE PULLING INTO THE DRIVEWAY of the Tudor house.
Paul had filled out; he seemed taller and his cheeks plumper. He danced around the room and presented me with a huge get-well card Elise had helped him make, signed “Paul and Bear,” with an accompanying muddy paw print.
I blinked back tears when a beaming Elise served dinner, a steaming pot roast surrounded by vegetables, along with her homemade rolls.
So this was what home felt like.
Philippe and I told Paul only that I’d had an accident on a boat. Perhaps we would later tell him more, when he was older. Somehow I thought he would take the news calmly; he had to have known his mother hadn’t loved him.
For now, we told him only that the bad men who had kept him had been caught, and that Uncle Claude had taken money that wasn’t his and had to go away for a while. For now, we let him continue thinking the body in Montreal had been his mother’s, although it had been officially identified as the woman Claude had been seeing. Somewhere, a woman’s parents were weeping at the news their daughter was dead.
I called Baker and filled her in, and even she was shocked. We’d known the world wasn’t what we wanted it to be. We just hadn’t realized it could be quite this bad.
During the days, life was good. Paul was loving his summer classes; he had friends over and went to their houses, like a normal, happy boy. Bear was growing fast, and gradually learning a few manners. Philippe was working hard, but often came home early, and laughed more often. He got down on the floor to play with Paul, something I realized I’d never seen him do. Zach and Dave took a trip to Burlington and brought my car to Ottawa, and stayed for a raucous dinner before heading back to Lake Placid.
But at night I lay awake. I thought about the brothers who had kept Paul captive, but in a way had treated him decently, getting him Happy Meals and little cartons of milk. I thought about Claude, who had lost both girlfriend and sister, all because he had tried to break free of Madeleine. I thought about the woman who had made the mistake of loving Claude and trusting his sister enough to drive down a deserted road with her. I thought about Madeleine, so warped that her brother’s perceived defection had triggered a deconstruction this complete and awful.
When I did sleep I dreamed of being in the lake, unable to breathe. Sometimes I grasped Madeleine’s hand and saved her; sometimes she pulled me down with her. And sometimes I held her under.
Always, I awoke gasping for air.
I told Baker none of this; I didn’t want her to share my nightmares. Alyssa I told a little more.
It was Jameson I talked to the most. We met every few days for lunch, takeout on a bench in a park overlooking the Rideau Canal. Some days we just ate. Some days he told me about developments in the case. Some days I just talked, and he just listened.
Claude had been the one who had embezzled from Philippe’s company, which at this point seemed almost innocuous. The misdelivered ransom demand had been just that, courtesy of Canada Post: a mail carrier had stuck it in the wrong box. And it was the watch under the body that had led the police to suspect that Philippe was being framed—it was one touch too many. Madeleine had tried too hard.
I asked Jameson if he thought Claude had ever suspected that the body might have been his girlfriend’s. He shrugged.
Maybe, I thought, it had been easier for Claude to have believed it was Madeleine—because otherwise, he would have had to realize whose body it was, and that his sister had killed the woman who happened to resemble her.
It was an overcast afternoon when Jameson told me that Madeleine had been nine weeks’ pregnant when she died. Vince hadn’t known. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the math: when she knew she was pregnant, she had decided to get rid of Paul. And maybe in six years or so, she would have gotten bored with her current life or angry at someone, and started the cycle over again.
Jameson knew my brain would go to the unborn baby that had drowned with Madeleine. He spoke before I could: “Who pushed you into the water, Troy? Who shot you? Who broke your arm?”
Of course he was right. Would I have done anything differently had I known she was carrying a child? I could never know. But I did know that if I had hesitated at any point during our struggle, I would have been the one who ended up dead, not Madeleine.
I told Jameson, and only Jameson, how it had been on the boat with Madeleine, that the evil emanating from her had been nearly tangible. I told him about agonizing over having failed to guess that Marguerite wasn’t who she pretended to be, to sense the dichotomy of someone living a life that wasn’t theirs. It was true I hadn’t warmed up to her initially, but I’d assumed that was my usual discomfort around immaculately groomed and dressed women. But I had recognized her appeal; I’d watched her charm people and make them feel important.
&n
bsp; Jameson took a long breath and launched into the longest speech I’d heard from him. “She fooled everyone, Troy. Her friends, Philippe, Vince, even her brother. She was a pro—a professional psychopath, a professional liar, a professional actor, a professional killer. Don’t be egotistical enough to think you could possibly have recognized or comprehended that.” He turned my face toward him. I blinked tears back. “And, Troy, you stopped her. You won. You saved Paul. You saved yourself. You gave all these people the chance to begin to put their lives back together. Even Claude. You did a good thing.” Without seeming to realize he was doing it, he reached forward and tucked a strand of loose hair behind my ear.
And then my tears did fall. I felt shaky afterward, but better.
I stayed in Ottawa six weeks. We hiked in the Gatineaus. We saw every new movie suitable for Paul, and occasionally left him with Elise and went to some on our own. We tried out restaurants, and laughed when Paul made faces at foods he didn’t like. We sorted through his clothes again. We selected an iMac for him, one with games even better than the one with the little round men—and let him know that when I recovered, Tiger and I would be returning to my house in Lake Placid. Baker and family came up for a weekend, and all the boys insisted on staying in Paul’s room, cramming two to a bed and giggling much of the night.
Eventually we told Paul, casually, that his mother hadn’t died last year as he had thought, but had died not long ago, in Burlington.
“When you were there?” he asked.
I nodded. He thought a moment and then said, “Well, I am glad you are here now,” and went off to play.
His psychologist told us this wasn’t an unusual reaction at his age, especially since Paul hadn’t been close to his mother and she had been absent from his life so long. She advised us to answer other questions as they arose, as honestly as we could without being brutal. I privately wondered how much Paul would ask, and how much he had already figured out. I hoped he hadn’t seen the face of the person who had dropped him into Lake Champlain.
Learning to Swim Page 27