Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

As Dagmore graduated to fugues and sonatinas, his playing acquired an almost magical allure. Soon the clouds cottoned on, and the birds, who thumped at the windows of the lecture hall when Dagmore was late to his lesson. His was the song that, until now, had only been whispered by the wind, a remnant of Dagmore’s island world that haunted him since the day he had left it. Thus, Dagmore threw himself into his playing, not for his father, or Miss Veronica, not because he possessed a natural talent for it. He threw himself into it, like a dolphin tossing in the sea, because it was his only means of escape, his only way home for real.

  By the time a few more birthdays had come and gone, Dagmore was a true virtuoso, having mastered the twists and turns of some of the most famed and daunting sonatas ever composed. He had never slighted his academics—quite the contrary—still everyone agreed (the Headmaster, the Captain, Miss Veronica, and Dagmore himself) that his bright future was best secured at the Conservatory, though university might rather have seemed the next logical step. For the first time in his life, through his music-making, Dagmore had managed to genuinely please both his father and himself at once. He was so happy at his piano, so joyfully lost in the sounds of the birds and rain and wind, that he hardly noticed the absence of the real thing anymore. He didn’t miss the seas, or the sun, as much as he once did, for they trickled out of his fingertips every time he pressed a key.

  Captain Thomson was as pleased as rum punch and, one hot and sunny day, took the grown-up Dagmore from his proper school and set him up in a stylish apartment a stone’s throw from the Conservatory—where, as it happened, Dagmore didn’t spend as many birthdays as he had planned. A year had hardly passed when his teachers decided he’d surpassed them all. There wasn’t a concerto he couldn’t play, no emotion he couldn’t evoke, from allegro to legato con amore. His grandioso was grand, his grave dignified, his leggiero light as air. His talents were such, it was deemed sinful that he should keep them to himself, and so before long the island rain that dripped from his fingers, fell in concert halls dripping in velvet. Pretty soon, every rich father wanted Dagmore to mentor his musical daughter, every rich mother sought his presence at her swank soirees—where to the delight and amazement of all, Dagmore could entertain them with equal flair in matters of Bach and biology, Schubert and sugarcane. Thus the next few birthdays passed to the tinkling of champagne flutes and the swoosh of silk.

  Even so, island boys born to read the stars and chat with the breeze can only hide behind fake piano rain and rustling petticoats for so long. Dagmore was no exception. There were rats in need of catching and corncobs to roast. Sunlight destined for his brow that was tired of tiptoeing through a cloudy English veil. Dagmore became Dagmore on Oh, after all, and Oh had decided that it wanted him back.

  As fate would have it—island fate—around that same time Captain Thomson found himself caught up in a terrible squall. He had never seen anything like it. Angry gales tossed his massive ship windward and leeward, while a vengeful wave bobbed it up and down like an empty nutmeg shell. The strategies that had served the Captain and his men so well during a near-lifetime at sea were suddenly and decidedly not going to be enough. The wind was blowing in two directions at once and the water seemed to leap straight up into the sky. What, Captain Thomson wondered, had he and his men ever done to deserve all of this?

  In the end there was little more to do than huddle together and say their prayers, so that’s what they did. To the accompaniment of pleas and mea culpas and apologies and promises barely discernible in the noisy storm, each clutched in strained and whitened fingers some icon to his faith. The cook held his Bible, the deckhands their rum, Enoch his favorite book of poetry. The Captain held and pressed to his lips a bundle of letters from his son. The early missives, accounts of cricket and badminton and the Natural History Museum, betrayed the false bravado with which they were composed and had broken the Captain’s heart every time he read them. The ones after that made less and less an effort to hide Dagmore’s melancholy, even as they bragged of his success. Then came the ones about the music lessons. About Ms. Veronica’s nit-picking, or the Variations on a Theme that reminded Dagmore of the time he and his father watched a bird peck into a coconut, beak-rhythm on shell. Next came fame and fortune and private lessons in private apartments, and these had evoked from the Captain a devilish smirk that his not-quite-old-aged face had almost forgotten.

  Sitting close in the circle of his men, the Captain replayed every letter in his head, and somewhere between Dagmore’s first football match and his first performance at the Royal Hall, wind and wave conspired. A leeward tilt, then a starboard tongue of wave, jumped-aboard and demanding passage. Water slid across the deck and burrowed deep into the heart of the vessel, where it lay down, stretched itself, and got comfortable. Then it silently swallowed the Captain’s ship, in a black and easy yawn not even the moon could bear to watch.

  Dagmore spent the last of his birthdays in his home-that-turned-out-not-to-be-a-home packing trunks and signing papers. He was almost twenty-five and his father was dead. His piano no longer trilled birdsong or rained rain. It plunked and sputtered and twanged. His stylish apartment sold, its contents had been dismantled into crate-size portions of memories hammered shut and sent away. Dagmore would meet them again at the port from which he would embark on the rest of his life. He was headed home, for real this time. Not to the sea, not exactly. Though he would journey by ship, he would never sail the globe from end to end, looking for whatever it was his father couldn’t find. No, Dagmore was headed home to Oh, to the island where Captain Thomson Bowles had opened his heart to a scared little orphan called Quick, and given him a finer start in life than he could ever have imagined.

  At least, that’s what Dagmore wanted to believe, that his return to Oh was a tribute to a great and generous soul. Partly it was. Partly, he was running from his sorrow, like his father had run from his.

  If the place Dagmore chose to run away to was Oh, there was a very definite reason for that. When you’re born under the stars and weaned on pineapple juice, when there’s sand in your bones and sea salt in your blood, an island is your fate. No matter how many sonatas you master and how many fancy shoes you buy. Time away is always just an interlude, even years abroad just a moment’s head-turn from the blistering tropical sun. You can tell yourself you’re moving on—or up—but sooner or later you’ll find yourself moving back, as Dagmore did.

  To the island with a name almost as beautiful as his own.

  20

  When the Morning Crier crying Murder hit the stands, Raoul was first in line to buy one. Despite his tryst with Ms. Lila the night before, he had woken up agitated, and eager to discover how much of a mess of things Bruce had really made. (Raoul knew a mess was guaranteed, but as to the degree of it, Bruce sometimes surprised him.) As he walked home to have his breakfast, he read the front-page article about Madison Fuller, collecting flies in his head along the way.

  Although Bruce hadn’t stressed Madison’s reputation or good name, like Trevor had asked him to, Raoul knew that Trevor’s belief in the boy’s innocence was right. This was one fly, and it suggested two more: if Madison wasn’t the murderer, but the police thought he was…oh, dear. Raoul didn’t dare finish his thought. And, if Madison wasn’t the murderer, then who was? Each of these flies triggered others in turn.

  How would this Madison Fuller protect himself from the unchecked investigators on Oh?

  Was Rena really dead, if some vandal in-the-know was ordering Raoul to find her? Surely even a graffiti-painting thug would have little use for a corpse. Presumably, Rena Baker was alive but merely lost.

  Was this thug then her killer? That hardly seemed likely; had he done her in, he would know where he had done so.

  Or was he boasting of his crime by taunting Raoul? Egging him on, daring him to find the evidence?

  So on and so on, the flies that accompanied Raoul home multiplied in the wake of the ones that came before.

  By the time he reached the cot
tage, his tummy was grumbling for breakfast and his head was a-hum with bugs. The paper, which he would re-read a dozen times that day, was folded in thirds. He grasped it tightly in one hand and slapped it, over and over, against the palm of the other as he studied the cottage wall that had once borne Rena’s name. The scraped and yellowish wall now housed only the sloppy pink cloud that Raoul had painted in the dark to cover the letters. Annoyed, he realized he would have to scrape the wall again to put on a more even first coat of paint. Ms. Lila was picky about things like that.

  Raoul started to calculate how many hours of his next “day off” the second wall would require, when he remembered that the third was as yet unfinished, too. He sighed and went to have a look at it, to remind himself how far he had gotten before leaving it to go and search for clues.

  “What the…?” he said when he saw it, and dropped his paper on the ground.

  Now this scraped and yellowish wall was marked with pink, too! Only instead of a cloud there were letters. Another request from the murderous message-writer? A clue to Rena’s whereabouts? Raoul stood back to take in the words. D-A-G M-O-R-E. DAG MORE. What did that mean? He read it again. “Dag more” was no kind of command. “Dig more,” maybe, but this definitely said DAG. As Raoul repeated the strange syllables over and over, and surveyed the wall again, he realized the words were not two, but one. DAGMORE was what the wall said.

  Huh.

  Not Captain Dagmore? The one who had crossed Raoul’s mind only two days before, the one so worried about magic? What could he possibly have to do with any of this? Dagmore was long dead, jumped from the rocky perch where once he lived. All of Oh knew the story (or so they thought!). Did this mean that Rena was dead, too? Had she done herself in just like Dagmore? Perhaps her murderer had pushed her off a precipice? Was that what the message meant?

  Suddenly Raoul’s appetite was gone. His head was a hive of questions and there wasn’t an answer in sight. Lovelorn fishermen and hits-and-runs and Rena Baker messages might all be connected, but surely this dead Dagmore was a separate kettle of fish?

  “Just a minute!” Raoul said out loud. How had this message appeared on his wall when his paint tins and brushes were put away and locked up? He picked up the newspaper, ran to the front of the house and burst inside.

  “Now what?” Mrs. Lila asked him, looking up from her breakfast. But Raoul was too busy to answer. He rushed to where he had stored his paints and brushes and they appeared to be untouched. One of the brushes seemed a bit wet with paint still, but was that the one he had used late at night, and in the dark not properly cleaned? Or had the vandal been inside his home?! Raoul dropped immediately to the ground and crawled backward from the closet that housed the paint paraphernalia to the cottage’s front door. He could see no sign of drippings or dirt or footprints anywhere on the floor. Next, he crawled to each of the windows, but they were all pristine as well. Had the picky, polishing Ms. Lila inadvertently wiped away the traces of whoever had broken in?

  “When was the last time you cleaned the floors and the windows?” Raoul asked her as she shared a fishcake with Fragile, who sat on her lap.

  “Why?” she demanded defensively. “Are they dirty?”

  “No, damn it! They’re as clean as can be!”

  “Why are you so upset? Aren’t they supposed to be clean?”

  “We’ve been robbed, and you’ve wiped away the clues!”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Ms. Lila asked him. “I don’t see anything missing.”

  “I don’t see anything either! That’s the problem!”

  Before Raoul could keep Ms. Lila talking in circles the whole of the morning, making them both late for work, she deposited Fragile on the floor, stood up, and gently pushed Raoul onto his favorite chair. She put two fishcakes in front of him, and a stiff cup of coffee, which she demanded that he down in one gulp. Then she returned to her place at the table and as a calmer Raoul sliced tentatively at his breakfast, she asked him to begin all over again with whatever it was he was trying to get off his mind. “Take your time, dear,” she said.

  Raoul told her about Trevor’s talk with Bruce, about Bruce’s article, about how Madison couldn’t possibly be a murderer. He told her he was mulling the lot of it over in front of the first vandalized wall, when he peeked around the corner and found the name DAGMORE splashed across the next.

  “Dagmore?” she interrupted. “Dagmore Bowles? The dead one?”

  He told her he wasn’t sure, but that there had never been another Dagmore on Oh as far as he could recall. He told her that he couldn’t imagine how all of it fit together, the anonymous messages, and the hit-and-run, Rena and the suicidal sea captain. Then he told her the worst of it: that whoever had painted Dagmore’s name had broken into their house to get at the brushes and Playful Rose.

  She assured him she hadn’t cleaned for at least three days and that if there were no clues to be found, it was because the culprit hadn’t left any behind.

  “Not unless,” she chuckled, “it was the work of a ghost. Maybe old Dagmore is your message-writer. Do you think we could get him to paint the whole house?”

  Raoul was in no mood for jokes. Certainly not jokes about spirits or spooks, which were in his book just another branch of magic. His very own wife should know better and he told her so. No fishcake, however golden or crispy, was worth listening to this!

  Raoul started to get up from his chair, to gather his things for work, but a repentant Ms. Lila stopped him.

  “Now, now,” she said. “Don’t get so hot and bothered. I have an idea that might help.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You want to know if your two messages, FIND R. BAKER and DAGMORE, are connected, right?”

  “Right,” he answered cautiously.

  “Well, you can’t talk to Rena, not unless you find her first, and since you haven’t the faintest idea where to look—”

  “Is there a point to all this?” Raoul interjected, offended.

  “You can’t talk to Rena, but you can talk to Dagmore Bowles—or at least to the next best thing. His Mrs. Jaymes.”

  “His who?”

  “Mrs. Jaymes. She was his cook and his housekeeper. She married his handyman, Hammer Coates, after she married off Dagmore to some girl she hand-picked for him herself. She looked after Dagmore. She knew his life inside and out. My guess is she was his only friend in the world. If it weren’t for her, Dagmore Bowles would have lost his sanity in that big empty house of his.

  “He jumped off a cliff and into the sea. That doesn’t say ‘sane’ to me.”

  “Maybe,” Ms. Lila agreed, “but I know for a fact that if anyone can tell you about that crazy old Captain, it’s Dorothea Jaymes.”

  Hmm.

  Ms. Lila might be right, but Raoul was bothered by the prospect of interviewing the Captain’s former maid. It smacked of ghost-hunting, and though his methods were unorthodox, he hadn’t yet ever resorted to that!

  What truly troubled him, though, was a different ghost entirely: Rena Baker’s. He didn’t really believe she was dead…or didn’t want to believe it. But finding a dead man’s name on your doorstep—or nearly—was bound to rattle even the staunchest proponent of the plain-as-noses-on-faces philosophical school.

  21

  The Morning Crier was notoriously hit or miss. Either it scintillated to the point of selling out, or was so dull that not even the chickens could abide it at the bottom of their coops. The edition that named Madison Fuller a suspect in the murder of Rena Baker was of the former sort, striking a bull’s-eye of the kind that only Bruce could manage. No islander talked of anything but. Raoul couldn’t stop re-reading it. At the bakery they couldn’t stop discussing it. May Fuller couldn’t get it off her mind.

  As she walked farther and farther from Branson’s beach and from their stunning early morning interview, her thoughts turned more and more to Madison and the accusations against him. She was so agitated and so angry by the time she reache
d her house, that she walked right past it and headed straight to the grimy-windowed office of the Morning Crier. There was no time, she decided, to explain things to Madison or to cajole Trevor into getting the truth from Bruce. May would handle the matter herself.

  “Bruce!” May shouted, as she burst through the door. “Where are you? I’ve got some business to discuss with you!” Bruce didn’t answer, because he wasn’t there. He had opened up the office and lined up his pencils, then gone off to the bakery for breakfast. (Not that her shouting would have bothered him if he had been there. He had grown accustomed over the years to women barging in and yelling at him, what with his line of work.)

  “Bruce!” May tried again. “I’ll find you,” she yelled at the empty room and rushed back out the door. No use wasting all this anger, she thought, and she proceeded to the bakery, where she planned to give Trevor a good talking-to about his friend Branson, who—she was still convinced—had placed the ad and now would not admit to it. When she got there and found Bruce as well, she was only too happy to kill two birds with one stone.

  “Aha! There you are!” May planted herself an inch from Bruce’s face.

  Poor Bruce! May was not the only one of a mind to reprimand him on that shiny, early morn, for Trevor and a handful of bakery regulars were already up to their elbows in biscuits and how-could-yous, while Bruce, for his part, countered with how-could-I-whats.

  “I thought you were going to help matters, not make them worse,” Trevor scolded him.

  “What have I made worse? I put right in the article that the man had no prior indictments!” Bruce replied.

  “And you accused me of obstruction of justice!” Trevor added.

  “Ooohh,” Bruce growled. “You all think I invent the news, do you? I simply report the facts as they stand.”

  “Facts?” May squealed. “You want to talk about facts, do you? Well how about, as a matter of fact, you tell us who it was who placed that stupid ad that has those stupid officers accusing my brother of murder.”