Paris by the Book(69)

* * *



—

Eleanor gamely offered to take over the bedtime routine, which was incentive enough for everyone to race up the spiral stairs. She dispatched me, meanwhile, to the lobby of the hotel: later, she said, we would talk.

And we eventually did, but the conversation did not go as I had planned. After waiting an hour for her—they’d all wanted bedtime stories, of course—and after I spent that hour rewinding, replaying, zooming in, zooming out, proving to my eyes what I’d known immediately in my bones—I shared my discovery with Eleanor. She took it poorly. At first, I understood her reaction to be rooted in her general reaction to technology: not to be trusted. And it wasn’t. But here, I showed her. I slowed it down, I advanced it frame by frame. I said no, you can’t see his face, but you can see his shoulders, his hips, how he moved—I told her all about how he’d moved; she’d had to have seen this herself, hadn’t she? I would still need to see him in the flesh, somehow, somewhere, but until then—

She shook her head.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Why can’t you see this?”

Her eyes were red-rimmed, watery, but intent. “Because I know what happened to Robert,” she said, and then started again. “Leah, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. I know that’s not him because, months ago—actually, days ago . . .”

I waited.

“I’m so sorry, dearest,” Eleanor said. “I called them.”

Them: back before we left for Paris, I had met with the police for a final “update.” I put the word in quotation marks because there was no update. There was no nothing. This may not have been their fault, but it broke me, enraged me. Displaced anger, I suppose. There was some shouting, a chair I helped fall over, a door I slammed whose glass, I argue, was already broken. But I did not argue, and nor did the police, when Eleanor suggested she become the designated intermediary henceforward. We even signed a form.

I had found I liked having a buffer, liked it up until this very moment, in fact, when my buffer told me that Robert, my husband, the author, Daphne’s and Ellie’s dad, was dead.

Because the police said so. Because a “preponderance of evidence” said so. Eleanor had dutifully checked in with them the day she left the States, and this is what they told her, my duly designated representative, that this looked to be the determination they were going to make. They were still preparing the report, but—

But I had just seen him.

Eleanor was still talking: “There is not—I want this to sound like a comfort, but I know it won’t, and I really don’t want to use the word—there is not—”

“There’s no body,” I said quietly.

She looked surprised, and then nodded. “I’m sorry, Leah.”

I studied her for a moment.

“Not sorry enough,” I said.

“Leah.”

But it was true. Eleanor had sent Robert’s manuscript to the girls! Before that, Eleanor had sent us to Paris. And before that, Eleanor had believed. That Robert was alive. That I should believe so, too. And now, now that I knew—

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re wrong.” Because she had to be, and so, too, the police. There was no body because the body was here, in Paris, and I’d just seen it, not dead, but alive, wandering a bookstore thirty meters from where Eleanor and I were sitting.

I picked up the tablet but could only stare at the black screen. I was too tired or confused or angry to turn it on.

“Sometimes,” Eleanor said, “we see things that . . .” She set her lips in a line.

“What did they say?” I said. “What did they see?”

“There was a boat,” she said. “The college’s sailing center.”

I was ready for her to say that they’d found a pair of shoes and a note by a bridge. Or an abandoned rental car an hour west of Green Bay. Or Montego Bay. Something so cliché I could say, not him. Can’t be him. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t ever, not even for an hour, ordinary.

But the sailing center. It had been his one escape. He never went out of a love of sailing, but out of a need to get away, alone, and water worked. He’d first gone there to research an early book of his where some too-young heroine sails from Miami to Cuba. (Of course, Robert reversed the usual direction.) He quickly learned, I recalled, that Lake Michigan wasn’t the Gulf of Mexico. No sharks, true, but Lake Michigan wasn’t warm, either. It was an inland ocean; weather came up fast. There were more shipwrecks bubbling beneath than historians could count. But with training and grit and, most important, good weather, it could be sailed successfully. So long as you were prepared. So long as you had the right boat. So long as you had a partner, but as I’ve said, he hated sailing with someone. It would be very much like him to evade this rule. Especially if he wasn’t planning on coming back.

“The Coast Guard found a boat not long ago on the Michigan side of the lake, which turns out to be not only a Great Lake, but a gigantic one,” she said. “Gigantic enough that this boat—that is, the boat, could go missing for as long as it did. And we know it’s the boat because there’s a log there, at the sailing center.” I waited, wordless. “What I mean is—you’re going to get a long letter from the police, and you should answer the phone when they call next. There are legal things, which will be an agony, but they will ultimately make life easier for you.” She paused to let me respond. When I didn’t, she went on. “The detective said you’ll see that Robert signed out a boat in this log. Robert wasn’t supposed to go out alone that day—or any day—but especially that kind of day, something about how the wind was code yellow or—who knows? We live in an age that relies on kindergarten colors for safety—he signed out the boat. It wasn’t stormy, but the seas were high, say the weather records. It’s a good boat, what he signed out, but not for that kind of weather. Way too small.”