Learning to Swim (7 page)

I
THINK I’D EXPECTED PAUL’S STORY TO TRICKLE OUT IN BITS
and pieces, gradually revealing a bit more of the puzzle until it became a neat tidy package and I could calmly decide what to do. I suppose I had hoped he was simply a child no one wanted.

In my wildest imagination I wouldn’t have come up with anything like this.

I was itching to start researching, but Paul needed to be calmed. So I moved to the computer and slid in a simple two-player game I’d found in the five-dollar bin at Staples, one with funny little characters that scurry down halls and up and down stairs, grabbing prizes and avoiding traps. Paul snuffled and blew his nose with the tissue I handed him, then climbed onto my lap. He began to tap at the keys, and we chased down bad guys as if our lives depended on it. After his tears dried I got out a coloring book and crayons, plus markers and old computer paper, the kind with the punched-out sides made for a tractor feed.

“Il faut que je travaille maintenant.”
I nodded toward the computer.
“Je dois écrire à l’ordinateur.”
He seemed to understand that I needed to work, and began pulling crayons out of the box. I guess if you’ve been kept locked up in a room for weeks on end, coloring seems like a blast.

It took only seconds to locate a Canadian online phone directory. I found plenty of people named Dumond in Montreal and suburbs, including three Philippes, with addresses and phone numbers. Then I checked Montreal newspapers for Philippe Dumond, Madeline
Dumond, and a few alternative spellings of each. I knew that women can’t automatically change their last name in Québec when they marry, but can use their husband’s name socially.

I found nothing in the archives for the
Montreal Gazette
. I began searching archives of Montreal’s French-language newspaper,
Le Journal de Montréal
, from last fall.

Then I found something: Madeleine Dumond mentioned in a brief article on a social page. I couldn’t translate the whole article, but it said she had chaired the event the previous year. The words that jumped out were
“Mme Dumond est l’épouse de Philippe Dumond, président de l’Agence Dumond.”
Wife of Philippe Dumond, president of the Dumond Agency.

I glanced over at Paul, busily crayoning. I searched other Montreal-area publications, including a glossy monthly magazine,
Montreal Monthly
, and in less than a minute got a hit—a photo.

It appeared first as a ghostly image, then the pixels filled in until three people were smiling out at me, a frozen moment in an apparently gala evening.

Madeleine was the central figure: head thrown back, smiling gracefully. She had gently waving honey-colored hair, high elegant cheekbones, dark eyes, and a wide Julia Roberts mouth. She was dressed chicly, a trifle daringly compared to the other woman in the picture, in a silvery snug dress cut across one bare shoulder. The caption read, “Yves and Geneviève Bédard and Madeleine Dumond at the Spring Festival of Arts dinner.”

I looked at the photo. I looked for any resemblance to Paul, with his dark hair and thin face. I tried to imagine this woman holding Paul, combing his hair, hugging him, tying his shoes, walking him to school. I couldn’t. But neither could I imagine her kidnapped and dead.

I saved the photo, and moved on to searching the
Gazette
’s archives. I found a few mentions on the business page about companies whose marketing was handled by the Dumond Agency. Then I hit the jackpot: a tiny blurb in the business section that said the agency was moving to Ottawa.

Back to the
Ottawa Citizen
, where I found two small articles, one on the company’s move and another mentioning an account it had just landed. In years past people might have assumed Dumond was moving out of Québec because of the risk of it seceding from Canada, which would be somewhat like Florida or California pulling out of the United States. Once the vote for separation had been razor close—49.4 to 50.6 percent—but since then the separatist movement seemed to have died down.

I found nothing about a kidnapping, missing wife, missing child.
How could this have been kept out of the news?
The police could keep it quiet in response to kidnappers’ threats, I suppose. And picking up and moving 125 miles would certainly let you dodge unpleasant questions about absent wife and child. I glanced at Paul, still busy coloring.

My brain was going down a path I didn’t want it to. Most people don’t make such major life changes a few short months after a tragedy. I supposed Paul’s father had given up hope of wife and child returning; I supposed the walls of the home they’d shared would haunt him. But that little voice in my head asked,
How could you abandon it so quickly? Wouldn’t you want to stay in the home you’d shared, on the tiny chance they would return someday?

Unless, of course, you knew they wouldn’t.

In Nashville in the late 1990s, a lawyer named Perry March had killed his wife, apparently after she threatened to divorce him and take their two small children. He got away with it for a decade, until his father confessed to helping him dump the body. And in a notorious Washington, D.C., case I’d read about, a former Motown recording engineer had his ex-wife and disabled son killed, along with the son’s nurse, so he would get the child’s huge trust fund. The killer apparently consulted a how-to book called
Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors
. The surviving family sued the publishers, who lost.

Paul had turned to a new page in the coloring book and begun filling in the characters in bright colors. He was a neat crayoner, staying carefully inside the lines.

I couldn’t locate a home address for Philippe Dumond in Ottawa or suburbs, but found an address for the downtown business, with phone and fax numbers. For one insane moment I thought of sending a fax:
Dear Mr. Dumond: Are you missing someone?

I flicked off the computer and moved to the sofa. I admired the pages Paul had colored, and read
Harold and the Purple Crayon
to him. Which he liked so much we did it twice more. Fortunately, it’s a short book.

I’d almost forgotten about the play I was due to review that evening for the newspaper. I usually ask Baker or Kate along, but tonight I’d take Paul.

I ran a bath for him, setting out clean clothes from the ones Baker had loaned us. His own had dried, but they were too small, and I didn’t want to put him back in them, anyway. When he emerged from the tub, his wet hair was hanging down past his eyes, several inches too long.

Time for a trim, I thought. I draped a towel around Paul’s shoulders and perched him on the edge of my desk, explaining with a combination of French, English, and gestures that I wanted to
couper
his
cheveux
with my
ciseaux
. I’ve been cutting friends’ hair since high school—nothing fancy, but I can do a decent simple cut. He seemed agreeable, so I got out scissors and comb.

His hair was full and straight, but long and uneven. I combed and snipped and layered, and when I finished, his face didn’t seem as thin and he didn’t quite have that abandoned, neglected look. “Very nice.
C’est beau,
” I told him, and he smiled shyly. He hopped down and without prompting held the dustpan as I swept up the hair. Someone had trained him to do this, which didn’t seem to fit with being a child someone would throw away, a child wearing too-small clothes that were gray from wear.

On the way to Saranac Lake we zoomed through the McDonald’s drive-through, which I disapprove of on several counts. Fast food and drive-throughs seem to represent a lot that’s wrong with this country: fatty, salty, cheap food delivered while you sit in your fossil-fuel-wasting, pollutant-spewing vehicle. But it wouldn’t kill me to do
it once. I hesitated before ordering a Happy Meal for Paul, not wanting to remind him of the ones he’d gotten in captivity. But he seemed pleased with the brightly colored carton and cheap toy, and not at all traumatized.

Damn
. Damn damn damn. Time to shut off my brain.

Going to the theater that evening was probably the best thing we could have done. It was a Larry Shue play called
The Foreigner
, by a local theater group founded by a couple who had left Off-Broadway. The play features a timid Englishman stuck in a lodge in Georgia for three days, introduced as a foreigner who knows no English. I wouldn’t have thought we could have laughed so hard. I’m not sure how much Paul understood, but the exaggerated dialects and facial expressions required no translation. Or maybe it was just emotional release. He nodded off in the car on the way home, and I walked him upstairs, steered him into the bathroom, pulled off his sneakers and jeans, and rolled him under the covers. He was instantly asleep.

I was yawning, so I detoured down to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, using the paper-towel-as-filter drip method. Then I sat down and started typing:
What can you say about a play that has you laughing out loud minutes after it starts?
I hammered out a thousand words, printed it, edited it, then emailed it to the editor at the
Enterprise
. Then lay awake long into the night, thinking.

I woke early, plans made. Before Paul stirred, I slipped out of bed and fired up my computer to print some business cards. I packed a few things and made a quick call to Baker before waking Paul. Then a trip to the corner with Tiger, Cheerios at the kitchen picnic table, a note asking Zach to watch Tiger, and we were off to Saranac Lake.

T
HIS IS CRAZY, TROY,” BAKER SAID FLATLY. “YOU’RE GOING
to go up to Ottawa to find Paul’s father, and then what?”

I didn’t say anything.

She turned from the kitchen sink and faced me. “Okay, you kept Paul until he was comfortable talking. Probably you found out a whole lot more than the police would have by now. But now you know who he is. You know he was kidnapped. You know his mother was murdered. You know he has a father. Troy, you have to report this.”

I could hear the
tunk, tunk
of her quartz-powered wall clock. The house was quiet. Her two oldest boys had left for school, and we’d stashed her youngest son and Paul at Holly’s, across the street.

I was trying to formulate words, figuring out how to explain something that wasn’t entirely clear even to me. Finally I started to speak and, God help me, my voice cracked and a tear slipped down my cheek. Baker stared at me in something approaching horror, as I’d put my head in my hands and narrowly avoided outright sobbing. She’d never seen me cry. She’d never even known I could cry, she told me later.

I finally got it out, more or less lucidly. I’d thought about it long into the night. Maybe Paul’s father had nothing to do with this kidnapping or his wife’s death. Maybe there was an innocent reason for his moving to Ottawa and for the lack of news coverage. But maybe he had everything to do with it.

Maybe he had wanted to get rid of wife and child without the expense of a divorce. No muss, no fuss, no alimony or child support.
If he had arranged all this but it couldn’t be proved, Paul would be turned over to him. Just like the children of the Nashville lawyer, Paul would grow up with the man responsible for his mother’s death.

Baker listened. She’d not only made a whole pot of Earl Grey, but was drinking some, too. Apparently emotional crises merited hot expensive tea instead of the Red Rose brand she used for my iced tea.

“I can’t let that happen,” I said. “I’m not having him go back to someone who could harm him, or who killed his mother.” I took a deep breath. “But I think if I see him, if I look him in the eye when I tell him, I’ll know if he had anything to do with this.”

What I couldn’t say was that something had made me see Paul plummet off the ferry; something had led me to him in Lake Champlain and had let me swim long enough and hard enough to save him. Surely when I saw his father, I would know if he had been responsible for any of this.

“And if you think he was involved?” Baker prompted.

“Then I’ll show him a photo I’m taking along of one of my nephews when he was that age, and say that was who I found.” Paul’s father would tell me I was mistaken; I’d express regret and leave and come back to Paul.