Free Learning to Swim by Sara J Henry Page A

car with Paul’s father hadn’t been in my script. But I could see his point: he didn’t want to run the risk of my getting away from him. And he was, after all, the person I’d decided to turn Paul over to.
    “All right,” I said after thinking it through. “But you need to call the police, tell them I said I found your son, and that you’re going to go see him.”
    We stared at each other. But on this I wasn’t giving in. I was all too aware that I could be making entirely the wrong decision about a man who may have plotted the murder of his wife and child. With deliberation, he picked up his desk phone. As he punched in a number that he read off his cell phone I could see the wedding band on his ring finger. He pushed the speakerphone button and I heard voice mail kick in.
    Dumond shoved a pad of paper and pen at me, making a writing motion as he spoke. “Yes, this is Philippe Dumond and I have spoken to you about my son’s kidnapping last winter from Montreal. I am with a young woman whose name is”—I’d figured out what he wanted and hastily printed on the pad—“Troy Chance, from Lake Placid, New York. She says she found my son at the ferry station in the New York town of Port Kent, day before yesterday. We are traveling to New York State now so I can determine if this is my son.” He rattled off his cell phone number, hung up, and stood.
    I followed him out of the office as he spoke briskly to his secretary, and then he strode beside me to my car, waiting with barely restrained impatience as I scrabbled to move map, water bottle, and other odds and ends from the passenger side. I’d never realized howmuch stuff I travel with. He directed me curtly into a slot in his underground garage and waited while I got my things. As I rummaged in the glove box for my ID and phone, I slipped the tape recorder out of my blazer pocket and into the compartment. If the worst happened, someone would find the tape of our conversation. Like the schoolteacher from Maryland years ago who had recorded her conversations with her teenaged carjacker, trying patiently to talk him out of killing her, but failing.
    He silently ushered me into a black Mercedes a few spaces over. Awkwardly, I sat in the leather seat and buckled up.
    “What about—” I started.
    “What?” he asked sharply, as he backed the car out.
    “I thought maybe … shouldn’t you, well, take along something of Paul’s? I mean, he’s been gone for a long time. Does he have a favorite toy, a teddy bear or something?”
    He looked at me as if I were crazy. But I could remember Paul saying his father didn’t want him. Maybe the kidnappers had told him this; maybe he’d just assumed it because his father hadn’t come and rescued him. But having a tangible reminder of happier times couldn’t hurt.
    Again he made a quick decision. We veered away from downtown and toward an elite area with winding roads and stately homes of diplomats and a few embassy compounds, with private homes mixed in.
    We stopped at an elaborate Tudor home nestled behind a tall wrought-iron fence with a hedge thickly entwined. The gate swung open when he fingered a gadget in his car. He parked in front of the house and ushered me in front of him, through the heavy oak door and across the polished floor of the hallway.
    He moved fast. He punched off an alarm, then stalked down a corridor. He paused to pull down a soft black bag from a hallway closet, and continued down the hall and into a room. I followed, tentatively. From the doorway I could see a child’s furniture: oak bunk beds with matching dresser, desk and chair, rocker, and toy box. Otherwise the room was bare, with a row of stacked boxes still sealed withmovers’ tape. Dumond moved to the boxes and ripped four or five of them open, one after another. In silence he rooted through them, grabbing a stuffed bear, a truck, and action figures and cramming them into the bag. I didn’t say a word; I scarcely breathed. My