Learning to Swim (15 page)

At the front counter Dumond asked for the detective he’d been talking to.

“What’s this in reference to, sir?” asked a policewoman in a crisp blue uniform, a slender black woman with precise British intonation. One of the things I like about Ottawa is the apparently seamless mix of nationalities and races. Although of course Canadians have their own biases.

“The kidnapping of my son, last year, whom we have now found.” Dumond was holding Paul’s hand firmly.

The woman blinked, probably wondering if a set of nutcases had just wandered in.

“Detective Jameson should be expecting us. I told him we’d be in this morning.”

Another polite blink, a polite smile. This woman wasn’t stupid. This was important, or at least more than she could handle. “Just a moment, please,” she said, picking up the phone and murmuring into it.

Almost as soon as she had hung up, a man appeared. His suit was rumpled without quite being wrinkled and his hair looked as if he had a habit of running his fingers through it. He shook Dumond’s hand, murmured a greeting, nodded at Paul. Then he turned to me.

“This is Troy Chance, of Lake Placid, New York,” Dumond said. “She found my son, Paul. Troy, this is Detective Jameson.”

His pale eyes assessed me, impersonally, coldly. My stomach did a loop-the-loop. Now I couldn’t ignore what I hadn’t verbalized even to myself: to a policeman’s brain, this didn’t look good. Because I hadn’t gone straight to the police, I must be involved.
Cherchez la femme
, so to speak. Only I was the
femme
, and here I was, walking straight into the spider’s web. To mix a couple of metaphors.

Jameson nodded at me, and led us down a hallway. He paused at an open door and said, “Miss Chance, if you’d wait here, please.”

I gave Paul’s hand a little squeeze as I released it, and knelt to give him a quick hug. “I will see you in a little while,” I told him.
“Je te verrai bientôt.”
He clung a half beat longer and tighter than normal. Just when I was starting to think I was going to have to pry him loose, Dumond gently tugged him away and swung him onto his hip, a comforting arm loosely around him.

“We’ll see you soon, Troy,” he said cheerily.

The room was as institutional as you’d expect: table, metal chairs, a bookcase with thick uninviting tomes, a cabinet with a fat padlock. I sat in one of the metal chairs. I fidgeted. I inspected my fingernails. I thought about trying the door. I considered getting a dusty book from the shelves and reading about Canadian jurisprudence.

This is the warm-up time, I figured, to get you ready to confess or so uncomfortable you’ll talk freely.
But all I have to do is tell the truth
, I reminded myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong—not much anyway.

The door swung open and two neatly dressed and crisply groomed men stepped in, one Caucasian and the other dark-skinned and shorter—Pakistani, I thought.

The basics were simple: name, age, citizenship, address, occupation. Although after I answered “freelance writer” to the job question, their pause prompted me to babble, “I write for magazines, mostly sports magazines, some airline ones, and I do some work for the local newspaper.”

“Do you live with anyone, Miss Chance?” This was the Pakistani policeman.

“Well, yes, I have several roommates.” Then I had to list them—and because Dave had just moved in I couldn’t remember his last name, so made something up rather than admit I didn’t know. Then their occupations, which sounded more than mildly bohemian even to me. Zach paints houses and does yard work. Ben is a waiter. Dave works at a sports shop. Patrick seems not to work at all, but has an amazing talent for scrounging free meals, free lift tickets, free concert passes. It probably didn’t help that right now all the roommates are guys. So much for sounding respectable.

“Is one of these men your partner?” the shorter man asked. They’d told me their names, but I’d forgotten them. I looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Partner, boyfriend, lover,” snapped the other, in the first show of impatience I’d seen.

Okay, gloves off. I sat up straighter. “No. I’m dating Dr. Thomas Rouse, a professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington.”

I’d been incredibly naïve not to have realized I’d be considered a suspect. I’d expected to get reprimanded for not reporting the near-drowning right away—and figured the New York police could charge me with something—but none of this. Never mind that I’d thought of several horrible ways Dumond could have been involved; it was a shock that anyone could imagine equally grim scenarios for me. Me, whose worse crime is a tendency to jaywalk and reuse unpostmarked postage stamps.

The detectives were far more polite than, say,
NYPD Blue
detectives—no Andy Sipowicz screaming, threatening, or table-banging—but they were thorough. And tedious. Apparently if you ask a question enough times,
ad infinitum
, people eventually tire and tell the truth: Did you rob the bank?
No
. Did you rob the bank?
No
. Did you rob the bank?
Oh, okay, I did
. They kept asking the same questions over and over, particularly about the leap off the ferry.

You jumped off the ferry?

Yes, I jumped off the ferry
.

Why did you jump off the ferry?

Because I saw Paul go in the water
.

How did Paul go into the water?

Apparently someone threw him in
.

You jumped off the ferry?

And of course they wanted to know why I hadn’t immediately gone to the police. There was no easy answer to this, and I wasn’t going to trot out sad stories of abused children I’d known or bad foster homes I’d heard about. No point in sounding like an Oprah show. So I stuck to the basics.

I was tired. We were cold, we were wet. I wanted to get home
.

I wanted to let Paul get comfortable before we went to the police
.

I thought it’d be better to find his father first
.

As soon as I located his father, I went to see him
.

I didn’t call his father because I was afraid he’d think it was a hoax
.

I told my story, over and over. The policemen wrote down ferry schedules and names and phone numbers. They asked if I swam competitively, and I nearly laughed aloud, thinking of the Monday night triathlons. They were polite, but seemed to think it impossible to survive the chill waters of Lake Champlain as long as we had. They were probably right, but here we were, alive and well.

By now Elise’s hearty breakfast seemed a long way away. I was beginning to feel dizzy. “Could I have some coffee?” I asked.

They glanced at each other. “In a little while,” Tall Cop said.

Suddenly I’d had enough. I scooted my chair back from the table, and the skittering noise on the floor made them jump. “No,” I said, surprising even myself. “I would like it now. Coffee, double cream. And something to eat, please.”

They seemed taken aback by my defiance, but brought me coffee and a doughnut that tasted like a stale Krispy Kreme, a particularly greasy kind I thought you could get only in the South. I ate it, and drank the coffee with its awful fake creamer—this was Canada; they should be getting their coffee and doughnuts from Tim Hortons. Maybe they did, but kept the good stuff for themselves.

Then they started again, more insistently.

They asked more about how I made a living. What was my monthly income? No pension and retirement plan? Finally they went off,
presumably to call Baker, consult Jameson or whoever was interviewing Paul, and check my bank account for fat deposits. Then back they came, to ask me the questions all over again, with various permutations. When had I met Philippe Dumond? Why had I disliked Madeleine? How much was I paid? I answered steadfastly and calmly, but I was beginning to understand how false confessions happen.
Yes, yes, I did it all, just shut up and leave me alone!

For extra credit in university I’d taken a psychological test called the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Among the hundreds of questions were occasional bizarre ones, like
Do you ever feel you have a band of intense pain around your head?
or
Have you ever had a desire to kill someone?
Occasionally a question was repeated, to make sure you weren’t answering randomly, the examiner told me later. This felt like that test, but longer and more intense, and I couldn’t quit and go home whenever I wanted.

Suddenly something in me said,
This has gone on long enough
. Perhaps I hadn’t used the best judgment, but I had, after all, risked my own stupid life to save Paul. I straightened up. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I’ve answered all your questions, several times. Now I would either like to leave, or make a phone call.”

I refused to speak again. Perhaps, I thought as they left the room, I should have asked for a lawyer from the start. But it seems that only guilty people demand a lawyer right away. On
Law & Order
, anyway. I never once realized I could have called the U.S. embassy—it’s easy to forget Canada is a foreign country.

The door opened. Jameson walked in, expression blank, carrying a squat black telephone with cord dangling. He plugged it into an outlet in the wall, put it in front of me, and pulled out a chair and sat.

“The phone.” His voice was flat, his face expressionless.

He seemed to be daring me to ask him to leave. But I wasn’t in the mood to play games, and didn’t care if he overheard me. I pulled my card of important phone numbers out of my wallet, and hoped my brother would be at his desk.

I punched in the numbers. “Simon Chance, please. Troy Chance calling.” Because I was calling him at work, Simon would know it was important. Then I heard his voice: clear, decisive, hugely comforting.

“Troy, what’s up?”

“Simon, I’m at the city police station in Ottawa, Ontario,” I said. “I found a young boy in New York, who turned out to have been kidnapped. I returned him to his father here, and now police have been questioning me for several hours.”

Pause. Simon was remembering our earlier conversation. He’d be pissed off, but he’d forgive me. “Have you been charged with anything?”

“No. At least they haven’t said anything. But I’m tired and hungry and I’ve told them everything I know, and I want to leave.”

Another pause. “Is there someone there I can speak to?”

I held out the phone to Jameson. “My brother would like to speak to you.” His expression didn’t change, but he took the phone.

Having a brother who is a policeman, a young and undistinguished one in the States at that, shouldn’t make much of a difference, but it did. Simon spoke volubly and Jameson answered tersely, but when he handed me back the phone his manner wasn’t quite as cold.

“Troy,” Simon said, “listen, how soon do you need me there?”

“Look, Si, you don’t need to come up—”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m with Paul, the boy, and his father, at their home here in Ottawa.”

A half-beat pause. “Give me the phone number there and I’ll call you with my flight information. I’ve got frequent-flyer points and plenty of use-or-lose vacation days. It won’t cost me a dime.”

I recited Dumond’s name and phone number. I owed Simon, and if that meant tolerating him swinging into Protective Big Brother mode, so be it. And to say that I was out of my comfort zone would be putting it mildly.

Jameson met my eyes as I clicked the receiver into place. “You can leave now, but we would like to talk to you again.”

“Fine. I’m not going anywhere.” I was exhausted.

On the way out of the room Jameson turned abruptly, pulled a card from his wallet, and scrawled across the back with a fat black pen. He handed it to me. “If you think of anything, call me. The office number’s on the front, home on the back.”

I blinked, confused.

He repeated, looking straight at me, “If you think of anything, if there’s anything I need to know.” I was too tired to try to figure out what he meant, and slid the card in my wallet.