Learning to Swim (17 page)

“I’d love to.” I’d been itching to get my hands on it since I’d seen it.

“I’ll get you set up.” He put down his napkin, and I followed him upstairs. As the computer booted up, he noticed my instinctive frown. “Yes, it’s been running a bit slowly lately, and freezing now and then,” he said.

“You probably just need to clear out the registry and defrag,” I said, and it was clear from his expression that I might as well have been speaking Greek. “I can do a few things that will help.”

He agreed, and handed me the pad of paper and pen I asked for before he left. I like to write down everything I do to computers, just in case things go wrong.

It was odd to be there alone, and I more than halfway wanted to drape something over the photo of Madeleine across the room. But as soon as I sat at the computer I relaxed.
Someday
, I told myself. Someday I’d treat myself to a powerful new computer with a beautiful big monitor.

First I set a Restore Point, which I named
Just in case
. To me System Restore is the most valuable function in Windows—if things go completely blooey, you just restore your computer to before things went wrong. But you do have to have a Restore Point set.

Next I ran a hardware system check, updated and ran the virus program, and downloaded and ran a free program called Advanced System Care to clear out spyware programs, fix broken registry links, and solve other problems. I deleted several unused applications running in the background; they could still be opened, but wouldn’t be needlessly soaking up RAM. I opened Outlook Express to compact the folders—me, I’d switched long ago to Mozilla Thunderbird—and noticed a second identity called Julia.
An assistant? A girlfriend? House guest? Feminine alter ego?
I pictured Philippe as a cross-dresser, and laughed out loud.

Defragging takes a while—it’s basically reorganizing stored data so it can be accessed more quickly—so I’d do that last.

What I wanted to do now was research.

First I ran a search for
abducted children
, and up popped page after page of children, abducted in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Belgium, Austria, and countries I’d never heard of. Some of the children had escaped or been rescued; most had not. It shouldn’t have shocked me that there were so many.

But I wanted specific knowledge, so I searched for
psychological results child kidnapping
. The screen flooded with child custody cases, so I searched again, this time excluding the word
parental
, then clicked through and started reading sections of books on Amazon.com.

In
Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America
, I read about the psychological power of kidnapper over victim, and learned it’s easier to track a stolen car than a stolen child. In
Children Who See Too Much
, I read about Californian children kidnapped on their way to summer camp in a school bus and buried underground for sixteen hours. Afterward the younger kids would hide whenever they saw a school bus, and had trouble imagining the future—something the author called a
sense of foreshortened future
or
pervasive pessimism
. Which
seemed to be a fancy way of saying
knowing the world is a scary place and not being sure tomorrow will come
.

Of course Paul would be having some of these same feelings.

I wanted to download my emails, so I plugged my laptop into Philippe’s modem, and the first email to hit the screen was a
Hi, Troy, hope everything is well
from Thomas.

Crap. I didn’t want to face this now. But even I couldn’t disappear for days without explanation, so after a few false starts I wrote that I’d found a Canadian boy, returned him home, and was staying to help him settle in. Short and simple. Leaving out
death-defying rescue, kidnapped from Montreal
, and
mother murdered
. I also emailed my parents that I was out of town, in case they happened to call, which wasn’t likely. I didn’t mention that Simon was coming up.

And now it was time to go. I checked the route to the airport on MapQuest, set the hard drive to defrag, and went to tell Elise I was ready for her to drop me at my car.

Simon’s plane was six minutes late. He strode down the corridor briskly, a small black duffel and briefcase slung over his shoulder—no dorky roller bag for him. He was tall and thin like me, with a patrician nose like mine, unlike the button noses of our mother and sisters. He wore his dark blond hair in short curls that drove women crazy, and somehow innately knew how to choose clothes that looked good on him. Today he wore crisp black jeans and a cotton pullover.

I threw my arms around him and hugged, tighter and harder than usual. We were more of a
hug hug pat pat
kind of family on those rare occasions when physical contact was required. He pulled back to look at my face. “You okay?”

“Yep.” Of course you’re not going to announce in an airport corridor,
I’m crazy about this intense little boy, the police seem to suspect me, and his father is … oh, never mind
.

“Let’s get something to eat; I’m starving,” he said cheerfully.

“You’re always starving,” I told him, but drove to a Great Canadian Bagel. Because when you’re in Canada it’s just wrong to go to Burger King or Wendy’s.

Simon chose a carrot pineapple bagel with cream cheese, which seemed a revolting combination. But I put crunchy peanut butter in my oatmeal, so I guess I can’t judge. He let me elbow him aside to pay with loonies and toonies from my stash of Canadian change.

Because the one-dollar coin has a loon on the back, Canadians call it a loonie, so when the two-dollar coin came out it of course became a toonie—Canadians do have a sense of humor. They also figured out that people change only when they’re forced to. In the States, dollar coins failed because we didn’t have the sense to simultaneously phase out dollar bills.

“Tell me everything,” Simon said as we sat down.

I did, step by step, and he didn’t speak until I stopped. “You saw no one on the other ferry?”

I closed my eyes and took myself back there, on the deck, feeling the boat moving, seeing the small body fall toward the water. I almost shivered. I shook my head. “All I remember is seeing him falling. That’s it.”

Simon had his eyes narrowed, which meant his law enforcement brain was ticking. He’s as analytical as I am, but better at compartmentalizing it. He finished his bagel and was neatly folding the paper it came on.

“The Ottawa police are handling this?”

I nodded. “The Montreal police are officially in charge, but now they’ve pretty much handed the investigation off to the local guys. I know they can pull in the RCMP, especially if they think the child has been taken out of Canada, but in this case they apparently didn’t.”

“Do they think Paul was kept in Burlington?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think they know. He said most of the television he heard was in English, but that could be anywhere.”

Simon pointed at the menu board. I followed his gaze. “Bilingual,” he said succinctly.

It took a moment, and then I got it: the McDonald’s meals Paul had gotten while held captive. I said aloud what Simon was thinking. “If he was kept in Canada, the stuff printed on the box would be in both French and English.”

He nodded. I hadn’t thought to ask Paul this, but surely the police had.

“So do they have any leads?” Simon asked.

“Don’t think so. They tried to suggest I was involved, but after they talked to Paul I assume they gave up on that.”

“I’m sure Dumond is on their list—the first suspect is always the spouse. Plenty of people try to get rid of their spouse or ex-spouse and sometimes kids, too, in one fell swoop.”

I shook my head. “I was there when Philippe saw Paul for the first time in Saranac Lake, Simon. You can’t fake that kind of emotion.”

“Being crazy about his kid doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t arrange to have his wife kidnapped. Maybe the kid wasn’t supposed to have been taken. Maybe the wife wasn’t supposed to have been killed. He could have set up a kidnapping, fake or real, and things went wrong.”

I must have looked aghast, because Simon softened his tone. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, just that those are possibilities. Does Dumond talk about his wife?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “Just the bare essentials.” I didn’t mention that there seemed to be no trace of her in the house; he’d see that soon enough.

“And the body was never found?”

I shook my head.

“Any other relatives in the picture? Girlfriend?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know of.”

“What about the nanny?”

“Elise? She’s Mary Poppins, only in her sixties, and French. She’s devoted to Paul; she’d never put him at risk.”

“They managed to keep this out of the news?”

“Yep.”

Simon drummed his fingers on the tabletop, thinking aloud. “The kidnappers got rid of the mother right away, because she was harder to keep captive—they’d probably planned to kill her all along. They kept the child to send proof of life, and demanded ransoms until Dumond stopped paying.”

“He couldn’t keep it up forever.” I knew I sounded defensive. “And by then he was convinced Paul was gone.”

“No, of course he wouldn’t keep paying, and they knew that. They just wanted to get as much money as possible. But then they kept Paul, what, a month or more after Dumond stopped responding?” He nodded toward the car, and as he dumped his trash I pulled out my keys. In the car he asked quietly, “Do you know if Paul was sexually abused?”

I shook my head. “The doctor said no.”

He thought. “Then who knows? They hid their faces, which means they hadn’t originally planned to kill him. Maybe they planned to sell him and it fell through. Maybe they were going to try for more ransom, but they thought police were closing in, so they dumped him.”

I winced.

“Definitely cold-blooded,” he admitted. “Especially when they’d kept him alive so long. Do the police think they may come looking for him?”

“Not unless someone learns that Paul is back. But they’re assuming the kidnappers were from Montreal.”

As I started the car he asked, “Do the folks know you’re here?”

“I emailed them I’m out of town, in case they call.”

Although we both knew they wouldn’t.

If not for Simon, I would happily have assumed I was one of those switched-at-the-hospital babies brought home to the wrong family. We were both unplanned—our sisters had been eight and ten when Simon arrived. But Simon was the male heir that completes the southern family, and he was attractive and outgoing and personable and more than competent at all the things he was expected to do: football and baseball, Scouts and Cotillion.

By the time surprise number two, me, arrived less than a year later, the baby novelty had worn off. Judging from the pointed reminders my mother made to new mothers, my conception had resulted from the belief that you can’t get pregnant while nursing. Apparently, you can.

If either Suzanne or Lynette had wanted a baby sister, let’s just say I wasn’t it. I hated the frilly, fussy clothing they and my mother
chose—I buried one particularly hated outfit in the backyard—and instead snagged Simon’s clothes as he outgrew them. I wouldn’t play with Barbies and their pointy heels and tight outfits. I tagged around after Simon and his friends when I could, and read and rode my bike when I couldn’t. I didn’t do Cotillion. I didn’t do Junior Miss. I didn’t go to school dances or football games.

What I did was bury myself in books, discover bicycle racing, out-score everyone at my high school on the SATs, win a scholarship to Oregon State, and skip my senior year of high school. Which pissed off my family, who expected me to live meekly at home and go to Vanderbilt, where our father is a physics professor. But Vanderbilt reimburses part of faculty children’s tuition at other schools, and my scholarship and part-time jobs covered the rest. Otherwise, besides health insurance and occasional plane tickets home (and twenties my dad slipped me when my mother wasn’t looking), I’ve been supporting myself since I turned seventeen, soon after I arrived at university.

I don’t go back to Nashville often.

We drove in silence, Simon’s brain working on the case and mine wondering how this weekend was going to go. My brother had never visited me at someone else’s house, let alone in the aftermath of a kidnapping.

In the driveway I rolled down my window and punched in the code Philippe had given me. As we waited for the gate to open I could see Simon surveying the house.

A low whistle. “Nice digs, Sis,” he said, raising his eyebrows. I made a face. I hadn’t mentioned that Philippe’s income level far exceeded that of our usual circle of acquaintances. But kids and wives of poor people don’t often get kidnapped, I suppose.

E
LISE CHATTED ANIMATEDLY AS SHE SHOWED SIMON HIS
room, apologizing for its size, although it wasn’t exactly tiny. At least I didn’t get bumped from my room in his honor, which my family would have done.

Paul and Philippe arrived soon after, looking weary, Paul with a pinched look on his face. I automatically reached for him and hoisted him onto my hip, and just as automatically he rested his head on my shoulder. Philippe gave a tiny Gallic shrug that meant he didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t want to talk, or would tell me later. And I realized from a fleeting expression on Simon’s face that the three of us were acting very much like a family unit.