Learning to Swim

Saturday dawned bright and clear, and my spirits began to lift as we headed to the marina. For the first time since this had started, I had the feeling it would all be over soon: kidnappers behind bars, murder solved, Philippe cleared, Paul safe. Chapter closed. Time to start the next chapter, whatever it would be.

It turned out to be one of those unexpectedly magical days. The weather was perfect: sky clear and sunny, the air with that crisp feel that makes it seem that something wonderful is just around the corner. Vince and Marguerite were experienced sailors and Thomas had done some sailing as well. For me it was brand new, and I loved it. I loved the sound of the sails crackling, the feel of the wind, and the warmth of the sun on my skin.

We docked at a small marina at Malletts Bay, poked around in a few shops, and stopped for lunch in a small restaurant and had mouthwatering fresh trout. The meal was relaxed and easy, the conversation witty and light, and Vince smoothly picked up the bill. Back on the boat, I sat at the bow, basking in the sun and feeling one with the boat as it moved through the water. We anchored before dusk in an open area. The wind had died down before we could reach the bay where we’d planned to anchor, but Vince said we’d be fine, even this far out, as this was a little-traveled area.

Dinner was a picnic the Thibaults had brought along, unlike any I’d ever had: delectable little sandwiches whose contents I could only guess at, fruit salads, and a variety of individual baked desserts. We ate until we could eat no more, and packed away the rest. We watched the sun set, and went below to sip wine and chat.

Vince and Thomas began playing gin rummy, with Marguerite watching and hanging onto Vince’s arm, Thomas chuckling at her witticisms. She shook her hair back in a way that seemed familiar. Something about her reminded me of someone, maybe an actress I’d seen on a TV show. She must have felt me looking at her, because she glanced up.

Suddenly my meal seemed heavy in my stomach. I’d eaten too much, I thought. I set my wine down, murmuring that I wanted some air, and slipped away to go topside.

It had been good for me to get away from town, to be out on the water and away from everything. The day had provided a bookend for my time in Burlington. I’d done what I could to catch the kidnappers, to make up for my mistakes, to work through my guilt, and I’d given Philippe space to start working through his.

Things would work out. Life would go on. I would head back to Lake Placid and take up my life again. I’d figure out if it still worked for me, and change it if it didn’t. Philippe and Paul, I knew, would always be a part of my life, some way or another. Some people you can erase as if they were characters on a canceled TV show, but others are with you forever.

The boat was rocking gently, and I leaned against a stanchion as I stared up at the sky. It was a rich dark blue, the stars brilliant slits of light, the moon luminous. I breathed in the cool night air. This is the same sky Philippe looks at, the same one Paul sees at night. I could imagine them here with me, standing beside me.

I’d been up there probably a quarter of an hour when I heard a faint noise. I turned to see Marguerite approaching, quiet in her deck shoes.

“Oh, hi,” I said brightly, to cover my annoyance at being interrupted. “It’s a nice night, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s lovely,” she agreed. “Did you enjoy the day?”

“It was great,” I said, and meant it. “You were wonderful to ask us.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

Silence. “You got tired of watching the card game?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said with a smile, “I got tired of watching.” She tossed her hair back in that curiously familiar gesture, giving me an odd look.

“Do you take the boat out often?” I asked, because it seemed rude not to make conversation.

“We’ve tried to get out every nice weekend this summer, and we’ll keep it up until it gets too cold. We do love the water.” She turned and looked directly at me. Her eyes, I saw, were brown, a little too dark for her auburn hair.

I blinked. She again shook her hair back, with a smile that seemed almost taunting. Her posture and the way she held her head had changed subtly, making her seem somehow quite different.

My heart skipped a beat. Suddenly I realized what that movement reminded me of: the way Paul shook his hair back when it fell into his face. I looked at her and suddenly I was looking into Paul’s eyes.





IT WAS LIKE LOOKING AT A MOVIE RIGHT AFTER THE FOCUS has been adjusted. The hair wasn’t long or blond and the nose was more rounded and upturned than in the photos I’d seen. But it was her, or her doppelgänger. The things that had seemed hauntingly familiar, the toss of the head, the shape of the eyes, were Paul’s. The face I was looking at was the one that had stared across the room at me from the photo on Philippe’s desk: Madeleine.

Or her twin sister, I thought. I blinked. It was like the old TV show Sliders, where the characters kept sliding into parallel universes and running into their doubles, with different hair and a different life, but the same face. Just like now. This was Madeleine, but somehow not her.

She smiled, a graceful Mona Lisa smile. “Madeleine?” I whispered.

“I thought you figured it out downstairs.” She sounded amused, as if I’d made a joke.

My mind was reeling. Had she escaped the kidnappers and taken a new identity? Had she had amnesia? “You’re not dead,” I said stupidly.

“Of course not.” She laughed, and it was so like Paul’s happy trill I couldn’t keep from shuddering.

“But you’re married to Vince—you have the twins.” I’d seen the portrait on the wall of their home: the beautiful shiny-haired boy and girl, off at school in Connecticut.

“Oh, we’re married all right. It’s been more than six months now.” Her tone was pleasant, what you might use chatting to a friend at a party. “But the twins aren’t mine; they belong to Vince and his dearly departed first wife.”

This was a bad dream come to life, one of those where bizarre things happen that couldn’t possibly be happening.

“But your body was found. In your car. The dental records matched.” Even to me my voice sounded flat.

She smiled at me indulgently, like you’d smile at someone who’s a bit slow. “Troy, getting the name changed on dental records was simple—men are easy to manipulate. Of course the body wasn’t me; she was just someone who was getting in the way of things, and needed to disappear. She looked like me, so it worked out wonderfully.” She said it as if it all made perfect sense, and in a way it did.

And that was the moment when I realized—while standing on this gently rocking sailboat on a lovely moonlit night—that I was talking to a psychopath. Who had been married to Philippe, who was still married to Philippe, who had given birth to Paul. Who had adroitly and convincingly pretended to be dead for the last six months, and who seemed to be telling me she had killed a woman in her place.

Suddenly I was calm. My breathing evened out and my brain clicked into survival mode. As I was forming my next sentence I was analyzing the distance between us, how composed she was, what her next move might be, what options I had. This woman was placidly telling me about killing her double or having her killed; I doubted she intended for me to leave this boat alive.

“So you were never kidnapped.” I kept my voice steady.

“Of course not.” Her hair was perfect, the strands falling evenly. Her outfit and makeup were immaculate.

Somehow I knew I needed to keep her talking. “If you wanted out, why didn’t you just leave?”

She laughed. “The prenup I’d signed would have meant I would have hardly gotten a dime. This way I ended up with quite a stash, more than enough so that Vince didn’t think I was after his money.” She seemed proud of a game well played.

“You convinced everyone—even Claude.” I watched to see her reaction.

Her eyes flickered. “So Claude believed it was my body?”

“Yes, I think so. He was very upset.”

Something shifted in her then, and I could almost see two people within her: one angry and resentful, one who felt something like regret at having abandoned her brother. “Claude wasn’t as indispensable as he thought he was,” she said at last.

She altered her stance, and her tone became almost mocking. “Poor Claude—I’m sure he was shocked when I cut off communications with him, especially after he picked up the ransom for me. But then you came along with Paul, taking him to Ottawa, going out with Philippe as if you thought you could take my place.” She laughed at my stunned expression. “Oh, yes, I saw the newspaper photo, and I came up there. I missed running you over, but this is even better, getting you down here.”

She watched my face as I took this in. She had wanted me here in Burlington, away from Paul and Philippe. I had played right into her hands. Somehow she had lured me here. Something clicked in my head, and then I knew she had been the one who had sent the Craigslist response about the kidnappers having lived here. She had played with me, setting up meetings, waiting for this moment when she could watch me learn the truth.

Sweat trickled down my side, despite the coolness of the evening. I had blundered along and ruined part of her intricate, brilliant plan, so she had needed to prove she was smarter than me. And she just had.

Then she reached into the purse on her shoulder and pulled out a small gun that glinted in the moonlight.

I couldn’t keep the disbelief from my voice. This was a scene from a bad detective novel. “You’re going to shoot me? And what, tell the guys you thought I was a burglar?” Even as I said it, I was figuring how fast her finger could pull the trigger, calculating how quickly I could drop to the deck or if I could leap overboard before she could adjust her aim and fire. And how loudly I would have to yell to bring Vince and Thomas above deck.

She raised an eyebrow. “I won’t have to tell them anything. They’re out cold from the Rohypnol I put in their wine, but they’ll just think they drank too much and fell asleep. If you had drunk yours, I could have just walked you up the stairs and pushed you overboard.”

I couldn’t imagine how she thought she could get away with shooting me. But she’d pulled off everything so far, so of course she thought she could. And not that it mattered—I’d be dead whether she got away with it or not.

I had to ask one more thing: “What about Paul?”

She knew what I meant. “Oh, I had him kept as long as Philippe continued paying, and when that was over, zut, time to get rid of him.” She waved the gun theatrically.

The one truly crazy thing I’d done in my life was diving off the Burlington ferry, and I’d done that without a moment’s thought. This woman had a gun pointed at me, and I knew enough about guns to know it’s hard to miss something vital from such a short distance. But when I heard her speak so casually about getting rid of her son—a child I’d loved probably since I’d seen the look on his face when he was beginning to drown in Lake Champlain—something exploded within me.

I lunged without thinking.

She fired, but not before the force of my body had swung her arm into the air. The shot went high and I felt a burning pain in my left shoulder. I grappled with her gun hand, banging her arm against the mast. The gun fell from her fingers and skittered across the deck.

She was smaller and older and less fit than me. But she was vicious and acted without hesitation. She twisted one arm away from me and hammered at my bleeding shoulder, sending waves of pain through my body. She kicked at my shin while I was still reeling, and I fell to the deck. Get up, get up, get up, a voice was telling me, and I was forcing myself to my feet when something hit the arm I was using to lever myself up.

There was a sickening snap as the bone in my right forearm cracked, and the arm was instantly numb, a dangling dead weight. As I fell forward I saw Madeleine coming at me again, swinging a fire extinguisher at my head. Simple physics told me it could likely crush my skull. I spun on my butt, scissoring my legs and knocking her off balance. She fell heavily, and I heard the fire extinguisher thud to the deck and roll away.

She dived after the gun and I flopped after her desperately, pushing myself up with my left arm, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. She was twisting, reaching out for the gun, her fingers inching closer to it. I hesitated momentarily and then lunged upward desperately, slamming her throat with the edge of my left hand.

I think I pulled the blow at the last moment, with awful visions of crushing her larynx. I’d never hit anyone before, and it’s more difficult than you might think. It made a horrible thwack and she gagged, but as I fell back she got her hands around my neck, those immaculate nails digging into my throat. I couldn’t pry her fingers loose. I slid on the deck, desperately pushing with my heels to get away from her, but she came with me. Part of me slid under the bottom cable of the railing and over the slight lip at the edge, and she was pushing against my broken arm with her body weight while choking me. I felt wave after wave of pain. I couldn’t get a full breath. She banged against my broken arm with her torso. I wrenched back, pushing away from her, trying to escape the pain, and toppled into space. Her hands were still around my throat, and slowly, horribly, she tumbled with me.

As we fell, I swung my left arm and hit her jaw with my elbow as hard as I could. Her hold broke, and I hit the water alone.

It seemed I went down forever. It wasn’t as cold as when I had dived after Paul, but it was darker, and I was almost numb with pain. Finally I stopped descending. I was tired, so tired, and part of me wanted to let go, to drift off into nothingness.

But I saw Paul’s face, and I thought of the nightmares he would have if I drowned. I thought of the other people who would miss me. And from somewhere I found the will to toe off my sneakers and force myself to kick, softly at first and then harder, bracing my broken arm against my side. Up and up I went, as if something were pulling me along.

I saw her then, a few yards away, lit eerily by the moonlight shining through the water. Her eyes were open, looking straight at me. Her hair was floating above her as Paul’s had, with one hand at her throat where I’d hit her. She pirouetted slowly, reaching her other hand out toward me. I hesitated, then stretched out my left arm. Our fingertips brushed as I rose and she sank.