Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  “We will show them some island hospitality! We’ll give them a bed, and they’ll swim, and sun themselves, and in the evening we’ll have parties.”

  “Parties?! Good gracious!” It was worse than she had imagined!

  “What’s the matter with you? Who doesn’t like a party? We’ll get you in some extra help, if you need it. I’ll pay you extra, too.”

  Mrs. Jaymes puffed her chest and put her hand to her temple and let out a long, significant sigh. Her worries had nothing to do with finger sandwiches or pineapple cake or with whatever extra cooking the presence of the guests would require. It wasn’t even the guests or a party per se that had her hot and bothered. It was a funny feeling about these guests and these parties, and in all her years (Mrs. Jaymes was not yet forty then) her funny feelings had never failed her once.

  “You’ve given me an idea, though,” Captain Dagmore continued.

  “An idea?” Mrs. Jaymes wrung her hands.

  “What you said before about a concert. Maybe I will play for our guests. You’re absolutely right, you know. They’ll expect it.”

  “But you never play,” she said.

  She was right again. Not once since Dagmore arrived on Oh had he dared touch a key on the piano Captain Thomson had given him after his thirteenth birthday. The mere idea of it made him sad, as if to play a note were to lose his father all over again. Hundreds—thousands—of deaths on every page of every musical score. Dagmore couldn’t bear it, and yet, as he watched Mrs. Jaymes and her wringing hands and considered the company he hoped to draw to Oh, the thought of his fingers on the soft, smooth ivory struck him as a comfort, not a punishment. The memory of a life gone by—and the music that had marked it—began to buzz in Dagmore’s ears. His hands became fists, then opened, the fingers spread and taut. Dagmore looked at his palms, as if trying to place them, to remember how it was that he and they were acquainted. He looked up at Mrs. Jaymes, whose eyes awaited his in near horror, and he hurried to the room where the piano had stood silent for nearly a year.

  “Captain, no! Are you sure?” she implored him, rushing behind and grabbing at the hem of his fine coat.

  “Mrs. Jaymes! Please!” he scolded her and twisted free of her grip. “Get a hold of yourself!”

  Captain Dagmore gently pulled out the bench and sat down. Slowly he lifted the lid that protected the keys. As he did, a gnat lazily swooned upward from C-sharp and Dagmore flicked at it with the back of his hand.

  “Captain, I really don’t think…,” Mrs. Jaymes started, but before she could finish, the room was awash in a bath of notes—two, three, four at a time, flat and sharp and jumping and pinging and splashing against the walls and onto the floor.

  “We’re doomed!” she cried, raising her eyes and her hands heavenward.

  The Captain, meanwhile, had grown more animated than she had ever seen him, and this only added to her discomfort. His head was bobbing up and down, his toes rising and falling on the pedals and his hands a fluttery blur that slid around the keyboard. Without skipping a beat he shouted to her, “We’ll need to find a tuner,” but she didn’t know what to say to that.

  When Dagmore finally had enough, or when the song was done, Mrs. Jaymes wasn’t sure which, he got up and rubbed his hand lovingly across the flat, curved piano top.

  “Not bad, eh, Mrs. Jaymes? A bit of practice every day and I’ll be as good as I ever was.” Dagmore looked the instrument over from stem to stern, as if he were noticing it there in his house for the very first time. “Now, shall we see about some breakfast? I need to get to the Post.”

  Mrs. Jaymes knew when she was defeated, nay, when she couldn’t even compete. There would be no conquering this great noisy beast in the sitting room. The best she could do, for now, was to dust it every day and say her prayers.

  She scrambled the Captain’s eggs that morning, whisking them into a frenzy to match her own, and burnt his toast to a crisp, not from any ill will in his regard but from sheer discombobulation. After breakfast he left with his fine, fat envelopes, still wearing what Mrs. Jaymes now recognized could only be “piano clothes.” He told her he would send his letters, then would bring back a man to get the piano tuned up. To Mrs. Jaymes’s knowledge, no such man on Oh existed, and under any other circumstances, the prospect of his coming might have made her wary, even bothered. On this particular day, however, she didn’t care if the Captain brought a stranger home. Mrs. Jaymes was too preoccupied with those dratted invitations that, as she sipped her solitary tea, had already begun their journey to heaven-knew-where and -whom. Compared to the mysterious hands for which they were destined, a piano tuner (albeit unknown) was indeed a paltry affair.

  26

  Lunchtime was nearing, and Raoul was growing impatient. Though the story of Captain Dagmore and his research touched Raoul’s truth-seeking heart, and though he was intrigued by the Captain’s piano-playing and curious to know what came of his invitations, Raoul’s notebook was over half full, and he was not one clue closer to finding out how the Captain was connected to Rena Baker—or if he really was. He couldn’t help but wonder if his time might not be better spent scouring the island with his magnifying glass.

  “Mrs. Jaymes,” he interrupted her, “this is all very interesting, and I can certainly see what a pleasure it is for you to remember your dearly departed friend, but perhaps I’ve learned all that I need to. I’m very grateful for your time.”

  “Learned all you need to?” she rebutted. “You haven’t heard the half of it! You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “About Dagmore and his life on Oh. He had to live here, you see. Even though he never figured out how to get along with the island—he did try, believe you me—it still wouldn’t let him go.”

  “I don’t understand,” Raoul admitted.

  “You certainly don’t!” Mrs. Jaymes chided him. “Dagmore tried everything, but he never quite…fit here, if you know what I’m saying.”

  As a matter of fact, Raoul did know. How many times had he asked himself why everyone around him was thinking one thing, while he was thinking something else? Why every islander but he swore by moonbeams and raindrops, while he declared loyalty to his library books and the principles of Stan Kalpi maths? (Stan Kalpi was the mathematician-musician hero of Raoul’s favorite book. Mr. Stan let his observations guide him, and kept the variables of his equations neatly in line.)

  Raoul turned his attention back to Mrs. Jaymes. “I don’t see what pianos and party invitations have to do with fitting in.”

  “Why, nothing at all! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Those invitations were only the beginning of the trouble in that house. It had a mind of its own, that villa, sending the Captain messages that he refused to see or hear.”

  Houses sending messages? Imagine that! Raoul knew a thing or two about houses and messages. Maybe he could learn more from Captain Dagmore than he realized. He thumbed through the remainder of his notebook and glanced at the clock on Mrs. Jaymes’s wall.

  “Well,” he conceded, “I suppose I could stay a few minutes more. I would like to know how those invitations turned out, I admit. You say the Captain went to town for a piano tuner?”

  Raoul opened his notebook to a clean page and smoothed it on his lap, then prompted Mrs. Jaymes to go on.

  “He came back with Hammer,” Mrs. Jaymes said, pointing through the window at her husband. “He wasn’t my husband back then.”

  Outside, Hammer had finished his gardening. He had deduced that his lunch would be delayed, and patiently he waited, swaying in a hammock, stretched between two royal palms.

  As Mrs. Jaymes suspected, Hammer Coates, the piano tuner Captain Dagmore found, turned out not to be a problem. He turned out not to be a piano tuner, either. He was simply the best the Captain could find in town, where all the islanders swore that no one on Oh had ever touched the insides of such an instrument. Famed for his general handiness—he could fix almost anything with some cardbo
ard and a piece of string, they said—Hammer was hired, and Dagmore took him home.

  At the Captain’s house, Mrs. Jaymes greeted them cautiously, as she did almost everything now, sure as she was that disaster would strike at any time. From the safety of her kitchen, she listened to their muffled puzzlings over how to get the piano in tune, and when strange buzzes and plinks wafted into her sanctuary, she promptly set off for the sitting room with ice-cold lemonade. There she found Hammer bent over the piano’s innards and the Captain bent over Hammer, humming loudly into his ear.

  “Mrs. Jaymes!” Dagmore said excitedly, when he saw her come in. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Mrs. Jaymes.” He smiled triumphantly.

  “How so, now?”

  “I hum the pitch, and Mr. Hammer here tightens up the pins. Or loosens them, as the case may be. We’ll have her fine-tuned in a jiff!”

  They took a short break and downed the cold drinks, then got back to work. The Captain sounded like an angry, monotone duck, and Hammer looked like a man possessed, fully intent on comprehending every word the duck had to say. “A fine pair!” Mrs. Jaymes said to herself, as she took the tray of empty glasses away.

  It took the two men the better part of a day, but as the sun began to set, Hammer Coates packed up his tools and shook the Captain’s hand. With his pocket full of Oh’s rainbow bills, Hammer set off, and Dagmore sat down to his newly tuned piano. He practiced well into the evening, not stopping even for his dinner, a habit Mrs. Jaymes was beginning to get used to, though its implications continued to perturb. For an entire week Dagmore did little more than play the piano, in fact. The music that in England had reminded him of Oh, on Oh was sending him back, magically, into the company of his father. He could smell his father’s whiskey and cigar, could hear him shuffling his feet in a nearby chair, listening as Dagmore played for hours. It seemed impossible to him that mere notes could conjure up such physical sensations, but that’s exactly what they did. Alas, when Dagmore finished his piece, and turned to ask his father what he thought, to explain to him why he had altered the andante ever so slightly, his father was gone.

  Dagmore played four, five, sometimes six hours a day. Anything to keep his father’s spirit close by. The practicing paid off, for his skills and his memory were as sharp as they had ever been, his interpretations never more masterful. Even the wary Mrs. Jaymes found herself humming along to an especially lively passage one afternoon as she stewed her plums. Could her instincts have misled her? Was it possible that things weren’t destined to be as bad as all that? She was rather enjoying the music that now filled her days, and couldn’t quite work out how this piano might bring about the disaster she had been fearing. Dagmore was calmer, too, than he had been in a good long while. He would have spent the rest of his life at the keyboard, warmed by his father’s nearby love, had those plum invitations he had sent to drizzly England not suddenly born some juicy island fruit.

  It was a typically windy day on Oh, the day trouble first came knocking. Mrs. Jaymes had just come in from hanging the Captain’s freshly laundered tops and bottoms to dry on the line, when she heard pounding at the door.

  “Afternoon! Is someone there?” a voice shouted.

  Mrs. Jaymes, who had grown complacent and forgotten her fearfulness, what with all that classical music clouding her head, threw the door open without thinking twice.

  “Hello, can I help?” she asked cheerfully. As the words left her lips and her eyes fell on the official shirt of the man who stood before her, her jaw fell, too, the allegro in her head suddenly stamped-out. “Island Post” the pocket of the man’s shirt said, and below the words, a small, embroidered pineapple of green and brown, it’s bulbous body sporting a pair of wings.

  Mrs. Jaymes had no time to react before the man had pushed into her hands a thick stack of cards and letters, mumbled something she didn’t understand, tipped his hat and turned back down the road.

  “Wait!” she called to him pitifully, but he didn’t hear her, and she didn’t know what she would have said to him if he had. With shaky hands she shuffled through the pile. The envelopes were beautiful, in spite of what must have been a long and arduous journey. The handwriting was curled and confident, romantic even. The paper, solid and strong. The stamps, in every color. Mrs. Jaymes retched and steadied herself against the frame of the door. “I knew it!” she hissed. Her knack for sniffing trouble was always on the nose.

  For a moment she contemplated tossing the lot of it right into the sea, waxy seals and all, then reason prevailed. A known threat is far more easily dealt with than an unknown one, and something told her that the authors of those letters she held would not be kept at bay. (Right she was, as it turned out, for many were already at sea, half the way to Oh.)

  “Captain!” she cried, bursting into the sitting room right in the middle of a delicate decrescendo. “Look at these!” She handed him the bundle as if it were proof positive of a crime just committed or a lie just told. “Now what are we to do?”

  The Captain got up from the keyboard and gently folded the wooden cover over it. He took the envelopes from Mrs. Jaymes and sat on the divan to look them over. Without even opening them, he was moved to half-a-dozen shades of a smile, as he recognized their senders from the return addresses or the script.

  “Oh, Mrs. Jaymes,” he said, “let’s hope it’s good news!” He pulled them open one by one and read every line on every page of every letter. He chuckled, he marveled, sometimes he talked back to them, unable to contain himself. Mrs. Jaymes watched him, stunned into anticipatory silence and chanting Hail Marys in her head. When he had finished, he gently returned the last one to its envelope, which he reverently placed on top of the stack with the others.

  “Well?!” she nearly yelled.

  “They’re coming! They’ve all said yes!”

  “All who? When?”

  “Not all at once, don’t worry. Some of the letters are two months old. Others were sent just over a week ago.” (It wasn’t uncommon on Oh for mail to arrive in spurts.)

  She looked at him with a blank expression that prompted greater specificity on his part.

  “It looks like the first guests will arrive in about ten days. Just three of them. Professor Emmitt Abbelscott, with his wife and daughter. Then a large group a month after that: all the Shelbys, with the Fitches. Won’t that be lovely!”

  Mrs. Jaymes didn’t know about Applescotts or Finches, but she did know about “lovely,” and it hardly seemed the most suitable word for the awful news that she was hearing.

  “‘Lovely,’ did you say, Captain?” she asked. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Well, of course, I am. I’ll tell them all about the island. I’ll finally have people to discuss my research with, Mrs. Jaymes— people who can appreciate the island like no islander ever could.”

  Mrs. Jaymes took little consolation from this explanation of the Captain’s, this metaphorical rubbing of salt in the wound, and for lack of a more fitting reply, she grumpily returned to the kitchen. The Captain didn’t notice her departure. His guests’ arrival dominated his every thought and sense. He could smell the feast they would share, could feel their admiring eyes upon him and his home, and hear their sighs of wonderment at the island’s vistas. In his head he saw the scenes exactly, and he went to his study to jot down some ideas. He would show his guests a fine time indeed! he told himself, giggling like an excited child. Seated at his desk, he pulled out a sheet of paper, dipped his pen in ink and began to make some notes, never doubting for a moment that everything would go perfectly—melodically—according to his plan.

  27

  *

  Arrest Made in Glutton Hill Murder

  Plans for Trial Under Way

  A warrant for arrest was executed late last night by Officers Arnold Tullsey and Joshua Smart at the Port-St. Luke home of fisherman Madison Fuller. Mr. Fuller is charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Ms. Rena Baker of Glutton Hill, who recently went missing, the likely victim
of a hit-and-run perpetrated on the Thyme shortcut. The warrant was issued on the basis of evidence collected after a thorough search of the suspect’s home earlier in the day, namely incriminating articles of clothing, a telltale fishing pole, kitchen items, a beach towel, and the very same picnic basket in which the victim is known to have delivered lunch to the accused every day. As many readers will recall, Mr. Fuller allegedly placed an anonymous ad in this newspaper soliciting a young woman to cook for him, which not only confirmed police suspicions of his involvement in the Rena Baker case, but also led investigators to speculate that Mr. Fuller was orchestrating what may well have proved the second in a string of murders. The Chief of Police, Lucas Davenport, has already set in motion the plans for Mr. Fuller’s trial, which promises to be a legal spectacle, drawing a record number of observers from Port-St. Luke, Glutton Hill, and respective outlying areas. It has not yet been determined if the prosecution will be represented by the legal authorities of Oh, or if experts will be called in from the neighboring islands of Killig or Esterina. The date of the trial will be finalized once details such as this, and the matter of sufficient seating in the courtroom, have been ironed out. All efforts will be made to ensure that the trial does not interfere with the island’s annual Rainbow Fair. For the record, Mr. Fuller adamantly maintains his innocence; his sister, Ms. May Fuller, maintains it even more adamantly than he. As this edition went to press, Mr. Fuller was not yet represented by legal counsel.

  *

  The day the news of Madison’s arrest broke, Trevor’s Bakery was packed morning to night. Every islander who could find the time stopped in to make a purchase, knowing full well that the bakery was—hands down—the best place to put his (or her) finger on the pulse of the island. There, every theory was tested, every opinion flaunted, and no one wanted to miss a word. Extra bread sales were a by-product of island tragedy, and Trevor always tallied his take at the end of such days with a bittersweetness in his heart.

  The general consensus of the clientele was that Madison was innocent. His quiet life had conducted itself well under the radar for as long as anyone could remember and this murder business was surely just a blip, one that would fall away as suddenly as it had arisen. Cries rang out of police brutality and persecution of the common man, until some smart and cheeky feminine soul shouted, “What about the common woman?” This marked an abrupt shift in the discoursing crowd now forced to recall that a woman was dead. At least she seemed to be. The brutality wasn’t at the hands of the police, then, but of man in general, who no longer knew how to respect a woman, and would sooner kill her and feed her to the fishes than treat her as he ought! “Now wait just a bloody minute,” said an offended masculine voice. “How do you know Rena is dead? There’s not even a body, and you’re calling every man a murderer?” And the discourse shifted again.