Learning to Swim (41 page)

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.

F
OUR 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.