Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  May was speechless. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have thought for sure she was dreaming and would have shook herself awake. Alas, hers was a nightmare that was very real and becoming more nightmarish by the minute. She took a deep breath and with uncharacteristic calm addressed the officers.

  “Rena and Madison are in love. Rena cooks him lunch every day and sometimes she takes it to him in those bowls with those lids in that basket. Sometimes in between a lunch and another, the basket and the bowls and the lids all end up here. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Is it?” Officer Tullsey asked. “Are you sure it’s not as simple as your brother got rid of Rena and hid her bowls and basket where he thought no one would find them?”

  “In plain sight?” May squealed. “Are you both mad?”

  “They weren’t in plain sight. They were under a beach towel,” Officer Smart corrected her. “I’m afraid we’ll have to take these, too.”

  In the end, besides the yellow shirt, the muddy shoes, the fishing pole, the beach towel, and the basket (with all that was inside), Officers Tullsey and Smart made off with a beer tumbler, dishwashing gloves, an apron, an umbrella, and a box of macaroni, but not before May made them polish all her drinking glasses and every last of her utensils, to rid them of the smudges the officers had left behind.

  They headed to the truck to deposit their plunder and were about to dig up May’s vegetable garden on the way (to see what evidence they might find buried there), when May put her foot down.

  “I have tried to be cooperative with the pair of you, and with your foolishness, but enough is enough,” she threatened. “Touch so much as a leaf on a tomato plant and neither one of you will know what hit you!”

  “Fine!” Officer Smart yelled back at May, emboldened by the screen door that separated them. “We already have more than enough.”

  “Enough for what?” May hollered.

  “A warrant.”

  “You already have a warrant. What more do you want?”

  “Not a search warrant,” Officer Smart yelled from the window of the truck as Officer Tullsey put it in gear and pulled onto the road. “A warrant for arrest.”

  May rushed outside, but all she could do was watch them drive off, the sun refracted in the lenses of Officer Smart’s sunglasses, which appeared to shoot broken-rainbow daggers in every direction.

  24

  When things start off badly on Oh, generally they tend to get worse. A longer-than-usual dry season will typically end in fire; a too-wet rainy one won’t stop until every river has flooded its banks; and a mudslide isn’t a mudslide until it has carried off a dozen homes. A tingling tooth will always need pulling, a grey hair will turn into ten, and that spot of humidity on your ceiling will eventually come crashing down on your head.

  The islanders don’t worry about trouble. They take challenge in stride, rally in the face of seeming defeat, and are as routinely resilient as the island itself. So acquainted with trouble are some of them that they tend to seek it out, to slip it on like a favorite pair of football boots. These daring and misguided souls would tell you that problems follow them wherever they tread. They would argue that any fight is heavensent and preach the folly of forgiveness. Oh has no interest in characters like these, brawlers and scrappers who wage imaginary war. The island much prefers the subtler charms of the innocent and true, of the gentle and unsuspecting. What fun in an enemy poised for the fight?

  A surprise attack where none is expected, now that’s a fish of a different color! The tug and jostle, the thrill of defeat. What’s more, an unwary adversary, once bested, will on Oh come back for more. Take a snapper, for example (a red one, or yellowtail), hooked and reeling, who will flop and dance until he finally falls down dead. Or a lizard who will turn himself a dozen shades of green to save his skin.

  Trial is the spice of island life, and every island creature knows it. From bakers and newspapermen, to the birds in the treetops and the fish in the seas.

  25

  Against his better judgment, Raoul took his wife’s advice. After an obligatory stop at the headquarters of Customs and Excise, where he told his staff that a pressing case required his attention, he left for the Office of Vital Records to find Mrs. Jaymes’s last known address. She was apparently Mrs. Coates now, longtime widow of Darion Jaymes and re-married to a so-called Hammer, presumably the handyman of which Ms. Lila had spoken. They lived on Ladywood Road not too far away, but because Raoul was anxious and pressed for time, he took a taxi instead of going on foot. When the driver deposited him at the Coateses’ front gate, it was just after nine o’clock.

  “Hello,” he called out, as he tapped on the frame of the open front door. “Mrs. Jaymes? I mean, Mrs. Coates? Are you there?”

  The years (well over ninety of them) had slowed Mrs. Jaymes down (although not to the extent you might expect), but her mind remained as sharp as ever, and her tongue as pointed. When she reached the doorway, she surveyed Raoul suspiciously. “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions. I’m with the government.”

  “Questions about what?” she snapped.

  “Mrs. Jay—,” Raoul stopped himself. “Mrs. Coates—”

  “Mrs. Jaymes is fine,” she interrupted him. “Hammer gave me his name too late for it to stick,” she explained.

  “Thank you,” he nodded. “Mrs. Jaymes, I’d like to talk to you about a previous employer of yours. Dagmore Bowles.”

  At the mention of the name, Mrs. Jaymes was clearly taken aback. “Who did you say you were?” she asked.

  “My name is Raoul Orlean. I’m head of Customs and Excise and I’m doing some research for a case.”

  “Dagmore’s been dead thirty years.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. He…er, that is, his estate, is not in any trouble. I just need some background information.”

  Mrs. Jaymes was about to send the tax man before her straight to the devil, when his name triggered a faraway memory.

  “Did you say your name was Raoul Orlean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if memory serves, you met my employer once many years ago, Mr. Orlean.”

  “That’s right!” Raoul confirmed. “We had a conversation once, he and I. You know about it? May I come in?”

  It turned out that Mrs. Jaymes and Dagmore Bowles were indeed as close as Ms. Lila had said. Mrs. Jaymes was the one constant in Dagmore’s rocky years on Oh and the only companion in whom he could confide. Well she remembered hearing about his chat with Raoul Orlean at the Belly years before, and for that reason, she stepped aside and invited Raoul to come in.

  “Thanks to you he finally gave up on that silly Abigail Davies he was so smitten with,” she said.

  “Did he?” Raoul said. “That’s good.” Raoul had never been a fan of Abigail Davies. Abigail, still the island’s most sought-after midwife despite her years, had been the best friend of Raoul’s first wife, Emma Patrice. Emma Patrice went missing a few years after she and Raoul wed. She skied down a long, slippery slope during a holiday with him in Switzerland and never made it to the bottom. He didn’t think her disappearance intentional, not exactly, but her body was never recovered—despite a team of sniffing Saint Bernards—and, well, you never know one-hundred-percent-surely, do you? He couldn’t help but wonder if Abigail knew more about his wife’s whereabouts than she had ever said.

  “Would you like some tea?” Mrs. Jaymes offered. She and Hammer had already finished breakfast, but she was happy to put on a pot.

  “No, thank you. If I could just ask you some questions.”

  They sat down, Mrs. Jaymes growing more and more animated as her memories of Dagmore flooded to mind. “What is it you’d like to know?” she asked Raoul.

  He didn’t dare reveal that Dagmore’s name might somehow be mixed up in the Rena Baker case splashed across the headlines, so he simply replied that confidentiality forbade his telling her the circumstances surrounding his offic
ial investigation. He infused his tone with all the authority he could muster, hoping it would sway Mrs. Jaymes to cooperate. “I’d like to know everything you can recall, from the time Captain Dagmore came to Oh and moved into his villa,” Raoul ventured.

  “Oh my,” Mrs. Jaymes said, clapping her palms to her smiling cheeks. “I haven’t thought about all that in years!”

  “But you remember?”

  “Remember?! Why, I could tell you the story of Captain Dagmore Bowles, and that miserable old house of his, just like he would tell it to you himself!”

  Mrs. Jaymes proceeded to do just that, as Hammer puttered outside in the garden and Raoul, in a notebook he had brought from his office, wrote down every word she said.

  Captain Dagmore had no sooner settled into his relaxing life on Oh than he started second-guessing his early morning swims and his sandy siestas. His walks to town, too, had grown tedious; his rum punch tasted weak; and evenings home with little more than the moon began to pale in comparison to the life he had left behind. He had come back to Oh to honor his father and his fatherland—what Mrs. Jaymes meant by that was another story entirely, she explained—and a daily walk to town for dominoes was just not enough.

  As Dagmore strolled along the harbor one typical afternoon, fielding “Hello, Captains” and trying to put his finger on the problem, his eyes looked down into the murky port waters. Suddenly he was reminded of the island’s reefs and corals. Then one-by-one its waterfalls and forests came to mind, followed by its plantations of pineapple and cocoa. Could it be as simple as that? he wondered. Had Dagmore, snug in his hilltop villa, taken Oh and her beauty for granted?

  He stopped and directed his gaze out to sea, to the fishing boats that dotted the wavy surface and the cargo ships he could barely make out in the distance. Before long, Dagmore felt himself swept up in a wave of nostalgia for the years he spent criss-crossing islands with his father’s crew. (“His father, Captain Thomson, had a ship, you know,” Mrs. Jaymes told Raoul.) All at once he missed making notes about trees and sketching bugs and indigenous vegetables. He missed the thrill of discovering a secret beach or a nest of tiny birds. He gripped his belly and doubled over, right there in the center of town, painfully homesick, though he was as “home” as he had ever been.

  Dagmore decided then and there that it was time to roll up his sleeves and to remember what island life was all about. What kind of islander had he become, lounging all day in the sun and the sea, when there were hills to be climbed and monkeys to be studied and bigger fish to fry? He headed straight for Higgins Hardware, Home, and Garden. There he purchased a long piece of rope, sturdy gloves, a set of graduated shovels, a bucket, and a canvas sack. At Samuel’s Sundry, he bought books filled with empty pages, a box of pencils, and a caramel candy that he ate straightaway. He just had time to pop into a shoe shop that was about to close its doors for the evening, and there he got himself a pair of hardy boots with laces. With his packages in hand and his head full of plans, Dagmore was far too impatient for his usual long walk home that day and instead jumped on a bus for Tempperdu, which was more or less where he was headed.

  The Captain spent months after that putting his new tools to good use. He covered the island end to end and filled half a dozen notebooks with drawings and data and poetry inspired by Oh’s scenery. His canvas sack during that time housed any number of petals and pineapples, iguanas, crabs, beetles, and leaves of banana. He had observed the waterfalls they called the Seven Brothers, had canoed up and down Oh’s canals, collected water samples from Crater Lake, and scrutinized the surf at Black Pearl Beach, which had stolen many a swimmer over the years.

  Dagmore’s research wasn’t limited to pollen and lizards. He indulged in every island delicacy as well, consulting the local ladies for recipes and advice on how to cook everything from cou cou to callaloo soup. He planted his own corn and pigeon peas. He even learned to spice rum, and which bush to boil for tisanes to cure any ailment.

  The island’s history drew Dagmore’s attention, too. Its forts and caves and cannons and peaks that had all played part in the island’s colorful and violent past. He studied the remnants (linguistic, architectural, sartorial) of the island’s invaders over the centuries, and read all that he could find about Oh’s governance.

  Occasionally he consulted some islander who might be able to share his or her particular expertise (which vines to feed a goat, what phase of the moon was conducive for planting yams), but for the most part Dagmore’s wanderings were solo, his company primarily the island itself. Though his haughty hilltop abode had bothered the butterflies and encroached upon the stars, the island embraced the new-and-improved Captain Dagmore, who devoted his every waking moment to what Oh had to offer. The wind was always at his back, the sun shed light on whatever puzzled him, and it only rained when Dagmore’s hardy boots and laces were in need of a good rinse.

  Still, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and this new arrangement was satisfying Dagmore little more than the last one had. When he had hopped about islands as a boy with his father’s men, there was someone to share the findings with. Why, the men on Captain Thomson’s ship had been known to debate the merits of a particular kind of fish for two or three nights running. Dagmore’s notebooks now stirred no such dialogue. When he found a perfect shell or saw a perfect sunset, the best he could do was reproduce a poor sketch of it. Soon Dagmore grew nostalgic for the English gatherings—“Yes, England!” Mrs. Jaymes boasted. “He studied there and lived there until his father died.”—where he had pontificated on bee nectar and Beethoven, the silked and powdered audience hanging on his every last word.

  So now what? he asked himself, one fine day on Dante’s Mountain when the clouds had hung themselves over his picnic lunch, cooling his hot head and soothing his itchy feet. Abandoning his research hardly seemed the answer, but neither could he scrounge a crew with which to debate it in the evenings over cigars and spiced rum punch.

  Or could he?

  Dagmore had an idea. He finished his fried fish and homemade bread as quickly as his teeth would allow, put his boots back on and tied them tight, packed his things in his bag, slung it over his shoulder, then stood up and brushed himself off. With a furtive glance left and right for the too-chatty goatherd Pedro, who would certainly have cost him some time, Dagmore dashed back down the mountain and into town.

  Later that night, Mrs. Jaymes couldn’t get him to eat any dinner.

  “Captain, aren’t you going to have any supper?” she called up to him in his study, where he had locked himself away since returning from town earlier that day.

  “Just leave it, please, Mrs. Jaymes,” Dagmore yelled down to her. “You can go, if you like.”

  “Well, you leave me no choice,” Mrs. Jaymes yelled back in reply, not hiding her anger.

  She wasn’t angry that Captain Dagmore had let his supper get cold, or that her own culinary efforts had gone to waste. Heavens, no! As long as Mrs. Jaymes got her pay every week, which she did, it was no concern of hers if Captain Dagmore ate her food or not. If he failed to include her in the household affairs, well, that was another matter entirely.

  Mrs. Jaymes knew that something was afoot at the villa, and she was loath to set foot outside of it until she knew exactly what. The captain had come home at a very unusual hour in the middle of the afternoon (he typically conducted his research until dusk), with small but mysterious packages from town, some of them tied with delicate ribbons that gave Mrs. Jaymes an awful sense of foreboding. She dilly-dallied in the kitchen and tidied up where no tidying was needed, but no sign of the Captain (or what he was up to) came, so finally she collected her things and took herself reluctantly home.

  Reluctantly, because Mrs. Jaymes had a knack for sniffing trouble. And her instincts had served her well that day at Dagmore’s. Those fancy packages of his were indeed going to be a problem, though this would not have immediately appeared the case to the innocent onlooker. They contained little more than
writing materials: the finest quality paper to be found on Oh, envelopes to match, the ink of blackest black, and a stick of golden wax for sealing up the whole kit and caboodle with a capital B (a stamp of which Dagmore had inherited from his father, Thomson Bowles).

  Dagmore spent all of that evening drafting and composing, folding and sealing. When Mrs. Jaymes arrived the next morning with fresh eggs for his breakfast, she found him next to a tall stack of thick envelopes, hard at work writing more letters still. He was dressed in such finery as she had never seen him. Her hunch of the day before was full-fledged fear now, and she couldn’t hold her tongue a minute longer.

  “What in the name of all things holy are you up to? And why are you dressed so?” she demanded to know.

  “Calm down, Mrs. Jaymes. It’s just a few invitations,” Dagmore assured her. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Invitations? She didn’t like the sound of this at all! Mrs. Jaymes furrowed her brow and studied the Captain. As near as she could tell, he had no inkling whatsoever that he was stirring a hornet’s nest. Funny, that, she thought to herself, her own intuition so feverishly astir that she was sure she heard the angry insects buzzing about her head.

  “What sort of invitations?” she asked, skeptical and stern.

  “Invitations for some old acquaintances of mine, from…” (Did Dagmore really start to say ‘from home’?) “…from my piano days.”

  “Piano days? What’s ‘piano days’?”

  “I used to play. Concerts. I’m very good, you know. Better than very good. I was quite sought-after, to tell you the truth.”

  “So you’re inviting your old friends to a concert. Is that it?”

  “Not exactly. I’m just inviting them to visit. I was a guest in some very fine homes and I thought it might be nice to repay some old kindnesses.”

  “And when these—what did you call them?— ‘acquaintances’ turn up? Then what?” Mrs. Jaymes was unconvinced of the harmlessness in hosting old piano people.