Learning to Swim

I DIVED DOWN ONCE, AWKWARDLY, BUT SHE WAS GONE.

The movement of the water had pulled me away from the boat. I was oddly calm. I knew this lake flowed north; I knew it had been glacially formed and that the water was around sixty degrees this time of year. I knew the ladder on the side of the boat hadn’t been extended, and I wouldn’t be able to board. I shouted, in case she had been lying about Thomas and Vince, but there was no response.

I rolled onto my back. My shoulder was bleeding and there must be something I should do to stop it, but I couldn’t think what. I was grateful my shirt and shorts were lightweight synthetic that I’d chosen in case I got wet on the boat. Heavy cold cotton would have dragged me down.

I began gently kicking, aiming where I thought shore might be. I think I eventually fell asleep, or may have passed out. I came to, sputtering, when water washed over my head, a wake from something far off or long gone. Then I floated on, fluttering my legs gently, letting the water carry me where it would.

I thought about Paul and I thought about Philippe. I thought about little blond Janey at the children’s shelter, and wondered if she had ever found a home where she was loved. I thought about all the things in life I hadn’t done yet. I thought about when I’d learned to swim at age fifteen, alone at night in the pool of a neighbor who was out of town, pushing myself off into the deep end and making myself learn to tread water. I thought about an evening swim at the beach I’d taken a few years ago, where the darkness of the night and the immenseness of the ocean had triggered the release of some of the emotion and pain bottled up inside me, which was when I’d discovered that you can’t swim and cry at the same time.

But when you’re floating on your back, you can, in fact, cry quietly.

A long time later my head nudged against something. When I twisted around, my grasping fingers found the dark, wet wood of a dock piling. I could smell the creosote that coated it. When I peered upward, I saw one odd large figure standing on the deck. “Help me,” I whispered, trying to shout. I tried again, my voice a hoarse squawk, and slapped at the water with my left hand. The figure separated eerily into two. It was a pair of students, I found out later, who had thought a 1:00 a.m. stroll at the waterside would be romantic. Probably I took the glamour out of moonlit strolls for them forever, but very likely they saved my life.

The boy pulled me out, with help from his girlfriend, but I screamed when they took hold of my right arm, and fainted dead away.

I awoke in a hospital bed. The room was nearly dark, and it took a moment to recognize the hanging curtain and the controls on the bed and realize where I was. My broken right arm was heavily wrapped, and I could feel a thick bandage on my left shoulder. There was a phone beside the bed. With some effort I pulled it to me with my left hand, lifted the receiver, and pressed zero. I licked my lips. “Collect,” I croaked out. “From Troy.”

Philippe answered on the first ring. “Philippe,” I said, “you need to come here.”

“Where are you? I can barely hear you.” His tone was sharp.

“In the hospital, in Burlington.”

“What’s happened? Are you hurt?”

“Please come.” I dropped the receiver.

I always will maintain that I didn’t faint that second time; I just fell asleep. At that point, I thought later, Thomas and Vince were likely just beginning to wake up from the drug Madeleine had given them, and wondering where the two of us were.

I awoke once more, and pulled open the drawer of the bedside table. There was my bedraggled wallet, sitting atop a plastic bag. I needed to stop jumping into lakes with my wallet in my pocket—it wasn’t going to survive another dunking. I pulled it open and fumbled out the card from one of its compartments. Wet but readable. I punched in my phone card number, concentrating to get the numbers right, then the number from the business card.

“Alan Jameson, please,” I whispered.

“He’s not in. May I take a message, please?”

It was difficult to think. “Tell him … tell him Troy is in the hospital. Tell him Madeleine is dead.”

“Hello? Who is this calling, please? Hello?”

“This is Troy,” I said, and hung up. I realized it was late Saturday or, more likely, very early Sunday, and fumbled the card over. Now I punched in the home number, concentrating to place my finger squarely on each button. A machine answered, with Jameson’s terse voice.

“It’s over,” I said to the machine, tears beginning to stream down my face. “It’s over. She’s dead now. She’s really dead. She drowned.”

I let the receiver drop into the cradle and cried until I fell asleep.





JAMESON GOT THERE FIRST. HE’D BEEN AT HOME AND HEARD his machine record my message, and had called his office and my cell phone. Somehow he’d tracked me down, and then gotten in his car and driven through the night, undoubtedly faster than someone without a police badge could have.

When I opened my eyes, he was sitting by the bed.

“You picked a helluva time to call me at home, Troy,” he said. “The first time I’ve had a woman in my house in a year, and you leave a message like that.”

I tried to force a smile. “You said I could call you anytime.” My throat hurt, and my voice seemed to be coming from a long way away. “Did they find her? Did they find Madeleine?”

“Divers are looking now. So she drugged Vince and Thomas and, what, threw you overboard?” It wasn’t quite a question.

“We both went over,” I whispered. “I hit her in the jaw to make her let go of me. I saw her drowning.”

He looked at me, eyes narrowed. “Troy,” he said, almost harshly. “You were shot. Your arm was broken. What, you were supposed to let her drown you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, hot tears running down my face. He grasped my left hand roughly, and held it until I stopped. I wouldn’t have thought of Jameson as the hand-holding type, but the warmth of his hand was a connection to life, pulling me back from yesterday’s nightmare. I hung on as if it were a lifeline, lifting me out of the lake.

“So what happened to your date?” I asked, finally.

He shrugged. “Put her in a cab and sent her home. Guess she’s pretty ticked.”

I smiled weakly. “Flowers. Flowers are always good.”

He gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, and handed me the box of tissues from the bedside table. I wiped my face and blew my nose and then, without prompting, I talked. I told him every word Madeleine had said on the boat, every move she’d made. I told him about the moment when I realized she was Madeleine, and about our battle, move by move. I could have been recounting a bad dream to a therapist. He pulled out a small notebook and scribbled notes, then went off to talk to the local police. And presumably to let the Montreal police know the body they had found was not Madeleine Dumond’s.

A nurse checked my temperature and pulse, and a doctor appeared. He told me the bullet had passed through my left shoulder and they needed to let the swelling subside in my broken arm before casting it, probably tomorrow. I was grateful for their briskness and efficiency—I couldn’t have handled compassion at this point. I’d never felt so adrift, so not quite human. My emotions seemed to have frozen.

Jameson returned with two members of the Burlington police, and sat in a corner of the room as they talked to me. They were far less skeptical than they had every reason to be. I knew it was because Jameson had known the right people to talk to, the right things to say, the right things to be done. No one seemed amazed at my story that the Burlington professor’s wife had really been the Canadian businessman’s wife who had faked her own murder and had her son kept captive and dumped off the side of a ferry. I had to repeat parts of it several times, but they seemed to believe me. And no one admonished me for having poked around looking for kidnappers as I had. Maybe they figured I’d been punished enough. I’d seen myself in the bathroom mirror; I knew how bad I looked. And how bad I felt.

Philippe was on his way here, Jameson told me, and would be in by early afternoon. I didn’t ask how he knew.

I’d done all this for Philippe and for Paul—okay, maybe some for me, so I could stop feeling guilty about having delayed the search for the kidnappers—but this wasn’t what I’d envisioned. I’d been foreseeing a tidy wrap-up, with anonymous kidnappers handily caught and locked up. Troy exit stage left, to enthusiastic applause.

Instead, Philippe would be finding out that his wife had murdered someone, that she had tried to drown me and likely tried to drown their son. And that she was only just now dead.

In a bizarre way I felt guilty, which even I knew didn’t make sense. Most of this had happened long before I appeared on scene. Without me, Paul would have drowned. But without me, Madeleine wouldn’t have. It was too much for me.

But I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Philippe.

It was early afternoon before I did. He appeared in the doorway of my room, looking more drawn than I could have imagined. Jameson nodded curtly at him and left us alone.

“I’m sorry it took so long to get here,” Philippe said. He spoke like an automaton, probably the same way I was talking. “I waited until dawn to leave, and then the police here wanted to see me.”

“So … they told you?” What I meant was They told you Madeleine is dead?

He nodded. “They found the body,” he said, and by his expression I knew he’d seen it. Maybe he’d wanted to, or maybe the police had asked him to identify her. Of course he’d already made one misidentification, but maybe there was a specific feature he could point out—a scar, a birthmark. Although I suspected that this time they’d be doing DNA testing as well.

We didn’t talk long. I was exhausted and he was in shock, and it seemed clear that he would rather have been in denial. If he hadn’t just seen the body of his wife and if I wasn’t swathed in bandages in a hospital bed, I don’t think he would have believed any of it.

Before he came in I’d pulled the collar of my hospital gown up around my neck. Because no one’s last memory of their wife should be the marks of her fingers around someone’s throat.

He kissed my forehead before he went, telling me he was going to check into a nearby motel and make phone calls.

Then Thomas stopped in, so soon after Philippe left that he might have been waiting in the hall. He’d brought my toiletries, some clothing, and my cell phone, and for once I greatly appreciated his methodical nature.

He was still gray with shock, horrified that he had introduced me to a woman who had tried her best to kill me. But when he tried to say something, to start to apologize, I cut him off. He couldn’t possibly have imagined that his friend’s wife was the mother of the child I’d rescued—although I wished he had happened to mention that Vince had married this woman less than a year ago. Not that I would have guessed she was Madeleine, although maybe something in my brain would have kicked into gear fractionally sooner. But I doubt it.

Vince, Thomas told me, was grief-stricken, incredulous, finding it difficult to believe that the beautiful, charming Marguerite he’d met in an online French-language chat room had faked her own kidnapping and death. And had not, in fact, been his wife at all, because her own husband was alive and well.

I imagined Vince was more than a little relieved that his children were safely off at boarding school.



Philippe called to say that he was tied up for the rest of the afternoon. I supposed I’d realized he would have some arrangements to make. He was, after all, the widower—previously the prime suspect, now just a widower. I thought about calling Alyssa, but the idea exhausted me. Thomas would be picking up Tiger from her, and would fill her in and tell her I’d contact her tomorrow. The news couldn’t be released yet, so she wouldn’t miss her story.

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.