Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  “So, what are we looking at here?” Raoul asked the Chief. “Chairs? Tents? What kind of crowd are we expecting?”

  “We already have workmen building benches and a dais, so you don’t have to worry about chairs. Tarpaulins or tents, that’s up to you. We need to keep the spectators hydrated and dry. We also need a public address system, portable toilets, and a prosecutor.”

  “A prosecutor. Sure.” Raoul scribbled something on his pad. “You need me to sort out a visa for him?”

  “No. I need you to sort out a prosecutor. I hear Monday Jones from Killig is good. He’s never lost a case.”

  “What are you saying? I’m with Customs. Prosecution is your business.”

  “My hands are tied, Raoul. PM’s orders. He doesn’t want too many cooks spoiling the broth, so you’re in charge of the whole stove, the kitchen, and the kitchen sink.”

  Raoul raised his voice. “What do I know about prosecutors?” It was bad enough he had been saddled with the logistics of this dog and pony show. Now they expected him to round up the dogs and ponies, too?

  “Sorry, man. Who are we to question the authority of the powers that be?” the Police Chief replied, tilting his head upward. Raoul followed the Chief’s gaze, half expecting to see the Prime Minister’s photo stuck to the ceiling with Sellotape.

  Though Raoul didn’t have all the information he needed, he got up and stormed out of the office. He supposed that Lucas Davenport wasn’t to blame for the way the duties had been meted out, but he found it galling that Customs and Excise should be called on to do the work of the Police. He hoped at least to manage it without speaking to the Chief in person again, and to that end, Raoul headed to the office of the Morning Crier. He figured Bruce, who knew all about the Bicycle Trial, could get him up to speed.

  “The way I see it, your problem is the crowd. They’ll turn the trial into a real bashment,” Bruce predicted.

  “Bashment, eh?” Raoul repeated.

  “Barbecued-chicken stands, fresh sorrel, rum on the sly, and DJs ready to blast their racket the minute the gavel goes down for the day,” Bruce elaborated. “How’d you get involved in all this anyway?”

  “Hell if I know,” Raoul told him. “They want to centralize the planning, and it looks like I’m the eye of the storm.”

  “Customs and Excise? How do they figure?”

  “The prosecutor’s coming from abroad, so is the public address system and the toilets and tarps. Since Customs has to be involved, they decided I should do it all.”

  “You up on the facts of the case?”

  “Only what I read in the paper. In my official capacity, I’m more concerned with the crowd than with the criminals on the dais. I won’t tolerate tomfoolery at a formal government hearing.”

  Bruce shrugged his shoulders. “You may not have a choice, Raoul,” he said with foreboding, and repeated it for effect. “You may not have a choice.”

  Bruce suggested that Raoul accompany him to the bakery, where from Trevor and whatever customers were around, Raoul might get a feel for how excited the islanders were about the trial. Raoul agreed, not least of all because, in his personal capacity, he was still as determined as ever to delve into the matter of Rena Baker. As Raoul and Bruce walked, they discussed the weather, not for small talk, but because weather was a real concern of Raoul’s in light of the outdoor trial he had to coordinate.

  Typically on Oh, the harder the first rain fell, the longer the wait until the rainy season started. Since the storm that led to the discovery of the bike had been such a doozy, Raoul figured he had a good month to get the trial wrapped up before it began to rain every single day. (And a month to get his house painted, a niggling gnat reminded him.)

  “Well, close to a month, anyway,” Bruce told him. “The Fair’s coming. You need to finish up by then.”

  “True. True,” Raoul agreed. “How long does this sort of trial usually take?”

  “Hard to say. We’ve never had one here before.”

  “Mm,” Raoul answered, too preoccupied with the clouds to banter further with Bruce. He kept his eyes on the sky as he walked, searching for some sign of what the island had in store for them, and when.

  The bakery, it turned out, was not as busy as Bruce had hoped. Trevor and Randolph had gone to the courthouse jail to talk to Madison about a lawyer. Patience, Trevor’s wife, was manning the shop, something the Bicycle Trial was forcing her to do more and more often of late. The presence of Patience, who only shared gossip in private, dissuaded customers from lingering, so when Raoul and Bruce arrived, they found her there alone.

  “Can I help?” Patience asked, as the two men reached the counter. She assumed they had come for bread.

  “No Trevor, eh?” Bruce said, in what was both a question and an observation.

  “He went out. What do you need?”

  “Raoul here is setting things up for the Bicycle Trial and I thought Trevor might give him an idea of what people are thinking, is all.”

  Patience, who up to then had treated the men dismissively, suddenly became animated. Her husband had taken the trial to heart, and she didn’t like his getting mixed up in (even alleged) murder.

  “So you’re the one! Sending an innocent man to jail!” she accused Raoul. “And without a stitch of evidence, too!”

  “I…uh…I…,” Raoul offered, a little stunned by Patience’s attack.

  “Calm yourself,” Bruce intervened. “He’s not Police. He’s just Central Planning.”

  “Planning of an innocent man’s demise, maybe! You have Trevor at his wits’ end. Randolph, too. How any of you can have a hand in it, I don’t know.”

  “What makes you so sure the man is innocent?” asked Bruce, indignant.

  “Madison’s not a criminal! There’s not even a body. How can they say there’s been a murder?”

  “There is a girl missing,” Bruce countered. “How do you explain that?”

  “A missing girl is a missing girl. A missing girl is not necessarily the same as a dead one! You want to put a man away for not necessarily committing a crime?”

  “Bruce and I really have nothing to do with that side of things, ma’am,” Raoul said. “Not officially.”

  “You see this?” she shouted at him, ignoring his words entirely. “Do you?” She held a perfect, honey-scented, golden doughnut right up to Raoul’s face. “You see this doughnut with the hole in the middle?”

  Raoul and Bruce nodded, not understanding where Patience’s line of reasoning was headed, but suddenly very hungry for doughnuts.

  “The doughnut has a hole because that’s how doughnuts are. Some of them have holes. We make them that way, missing the centers. On purpose. Sometimes missing things are just supposed to be missing. It doesn’t mean they were murdered!”

  “You can’t know that about Rena Baker,” Bruce said.

  “The police can’t know the contrary!” Patience rebutted. “Now, do you need some bread or don’t you?”

  Bruce and Raoul looked at each other and replied in unison, “Two doughnuts, please.”

  They paid for them and left the shop, eating as they walked back to Bruce’s office. Though Raoul was enjoying the sweet, warm snack, their encounter with Patience had left a bad taste in his mouth. He didn’t doubt that she was absolutely right. He decided to test the waters with Bruce.

  “You think she’s right?” Raoul asked him. “About the girl, I mean.”

  “She could be,” Bruce mused, not too worried, for he had confidence in island institutions like the press and the justice system. “That’s what the trial is for. Whatever needs to come out will come out there.”

  “I sure hope so,” Raoul said, rather wishing they might have avoided a trial altogether. He examined the half-eaten doughnut in his hand. The doughy semi-circle, the missing center now lost to the nothingness beyond the doughnut’s golden edge. In his head a tsetse fly darted and a smile broke out on his face.

  “What is it?” Bruce asked.

 
“Hmm? Oh, nothing,” Raoul said. “Nothing.”

  But it wasn’t nothing. It was something. A variable in the equation. The solution’s next logical step. Raoul had seen it. He had seen it very clearly.

  32

  Less than an hour later, Raoul was at the airport, sleuthing. Dare he hope he had found a way to stop the trial before it started? If he could prove that Rena Baker wasn’t dead, the charges against Madison would have to be dropped. His doughnut with its missing middle—it’s purposefully missing middle, as Patience pointed out—had reminded Raoul of the obvious. Like bakers who knew of every hole they—on purpose—poked out, Customs kept track of every islander who poked his (or her) head past Oh’s borders. Rena might not be dead but simply ducked-out, departed, run-away. If that were the case, it would be on record, in the registers of Customs and Excise.

  During Raoul’s early Customs career, at the airport, he had monitored the comings and goings of locals and foreigners alike. It might just be possible that Rena Baker had sneaked off the island on a predawn flight, her departure recorded by some drowsy or hung-over entry-level officer, who didn’t remember what he had done and so had not spoken up when Rena went officially missing.

  How had Raoul not thought of it before? Wives (and girlfriends) had been known to make themselves disappear, and husbands (and boyfriends) were in no way to blame if they did! This much Raoul knew firsthand. If Rena Baker was one of these “lost” island loves, it would warm the cockles of Raoul’s heart to catch her out.

  Raoul needed no credentials or warrant to gain access to the airport logs he wished to examine. He was practically a legend at Arrivals and Departures and the young man on duty was happy to hand over everything he wanted. Raoul began with the log for the day that Rena went missing. Nothing. Next he checked the logs for seven days before and after. Still nothing. Had Rena kept herself hidden and sneaked off well after Madison’s arrest? Raoul pored over the entries for every single day since the mangled bike was discovered. No Rena Baker had departed from Oh by plane. If she left by boat, then Raoul might never find her; the record-keeping of the maritime officials was notoriously fluid.

  Raoul’s mind raced. He felt certain the answer was right at his fingertips and yet the pages he flipped and turned offered up no clues. What was he missing? Was he going too fast? A man’s freedom was at stake. He couldn’t dawdle. It was almost four o’clock! Raoul closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Stan Kalpi would never approve of such haste. Raoul needed to keep calm and to line up the variables he had so far.

  He took the departure registers, which were in a jumbled mess on a table, closed them, and stood them upright, putting them in order by date. He noticed their spines all had bright green dots stuck on them, which signified round-trip travel.

  “I need the orange dots!” Raoul cried out, smacking his forehead with his palm. “I need the one-way registers right away.”

  The young man brought him the registers marked with adhesive orange dots and took away the others. Again Raoul began with the day the bike was found. Nothing. He checked seven days before and after. Still nothing. He checked every single day since Rena went missing. Nothing nothing nothing. Raoul felt the answer close at hand. He started again on the one-way data for the day that Rena disappeared, checking it carefully line by line. Most of the names belonged to foreigners, who had no reason to come back to Oh. Amongst the few declared citizens with no return ticket, Raoul recognized all the surnames but one (he knew all the family names on Oh, as most islanders did). The unfamiliar surname was Arbe.

  It was nearly five o’clock by then, but the Office of Vital Records wasn’t far away. Raoul rushed out of the airport and jumped in a taxi. He got there just as a young lady was locking the door. She told Raoul he would have to return in the morning.

  “Sorry, miss. This is official business,” Raoul said, pulling rank and flashing a badge that said he was Head of Customs and Excise. She wasn’t at all convinced it meant she had to work overtime for his benefit, but she chose not to argue.

  Raoul felt a tinge of guilt for inconveniencing the girl. He didn’t really know what he was looking for. The name he hadn’t recognized had nothing to do with the case as far as he could tell, but it bothered him that he had never come across it in all his years of checking passports and collecting tax. “I need you to look up a person, please,” Raoul told her. She passed him a form, which he filled out in block letters. Personal/Fiscal Data requested for Oh citizen of family name: A-R-B-E. First name: K-A-R-E-N. (Signed, R. Orlean.)

  The young lady disappeared into a back room and returned after just a minute. “You sure you have the name right?” she asked Raoul.

  “Yes, I’m sure. Karen Arbe. A-R-B-E.”

  “I don’t have a record for a Karen Arbe,” the young lady told him.

  “What does that mean?” Raoul asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders and handed him back his form. “It means Karen Arbe doesn’t exist. There’s no one on Oh by that name.”

  Raoul thanked her for her assistance and left. He didn’t know what to make of his discovery. Oh had only one unaccounted-for female when Raoul went into the Office of Vital Records, and now it had two? His investigation seemed to be making matters worse! If Karen Arbe didn’t exist, then who signed the register and flew out on a one-way ticket? Frustrated, Raoul crumpled the useless paper in his hand. He walked forward a couple paces and spotting a rubbish bin in the distance, stopped and took aim, about to throw away the balled-up form. As he did so, the setting sun fell into his line of vision and momentarily blinded him (as, you’ve seen, the sun on Oh sometimes does). It pushed him, as if back in time. He withdrew from its shine, turned his face away, and like a corkscrew unwinding, he un-made the last of his moves. He lowered the arm that was poised to toss out the paper, walked backwards a couple of paces, and un-crumpled the crumpled form he held in his hand. As he flattened it out and studied it in the sun’s angry rays, the solution to the riddle appeared.

  “I see it,” he said, as if answering to the sun itself. “I see it very clearly.”

  Waving the wrinkled form wildly over his head, Raoul flagged a taxi. He had to get to Bruce before Bruce put the morning edition to bed.

  33

  *

  Mystery Woman Runs Away From Oh

  Is Rena Baker Really Dead?

  According to an official airport departure roster that has recently come to our attention, the day of the discovery of a mangled bicycle on the Thyme shortcut, a young citizen of Oh calling herself Karen Arbe left the island, on an early morning flight, for a one-way journey to an unknown destination. Based on the required information supplied by the young lady at the time of her departure, her itinerary was to take her to Killig, where she was to board a series of connecting flights. Her ultimate destination, although recorded with her departure data, is illegible. Whether this is owing to her own efforts to conceal her whereabouts or to the poor record-keeping of the officer on duty at the time is impossible to ascertain; while passenger departures are reported in the registry, the names of on-duty Customs officers reporting said departures are not. What makes the one-way flight of the young Ms. Arbe particularly significant is that no Karen Arbe is listed in the birth registries of Oh. This begs the question, if it was not Karen Arbe who left the island that morning (since Ms. Arbe does not exist), then who was it? There is in fact a young female citizen of Oh who is presently missing, Ms. Rena Baker of Glutton Hill, better known as the alleged victim in the Bicycle Trial soon to take place in Port-St. Luke, where Madison Fuller is facing charges for Ms. Baker’s murder. Because the body of the allegedly dead Ms. Baker has never been recovered, this reporter is forced to ask himself if Ms. Baker and Ms. Arbe might not be one and the same. Evidence would indicate that they are: Ms. Arbe departed the same day that Ms. Baker supposedly died; Ms. Baker’s body has never been found, suggesting she may be vacationing in the illegible land whose name she scrawled in the airport roster under the pseudonym of Karen Arbe;
the name of RENA BAKER is easily scrambled to produce the convenient alias KAREN ARBE, a coincidence that we are not prepared to attribute to the magic of Oh or to island caprice. As the trial of Mr. Fuller gears up—if indeed a trial is warranted—we can only hope that the prosecuting authorities will have the foresight to read not only between the lines, but between the letters.

  *

  Bruce was delighted to cause a stir with his news report, because, he believed, that was what effective journalism aimed to do. Police Chief Lucas Davenport, upon reading the article about Karen Arbe at work the following morning, immediately summoned Officers Tullsey and Smart to his office. He sent them straight to Bruce’s house.

  The officers banged on Bruce’s door, threatening him with charges of obstructing justice and demanding he tell them how he came upon the information contained in his inflammatory report. Bruce refused to reveal his sources, but he suggested the officers investigate his theory and verify it for themselves at the airport. “Don’t think we won’t do it!” they threatened, and suggested in turn that Bruce not leave the island until further notice. (Police procedure called for confiscation of his passport, but Arnold and Joshua both forgot about that.)

  They stormed off, while Bruce (déshabillé and drinking his morning Milo) stood grinning in the doorway, watching them go. For fun, in his head he scrambled his name into possible aliases, just in case, and nearly laughed out loud when he came up with DEREK CABLUNE.

  Bruce’s mood was not the only one lightened by his headline. Trevor and Randolph were happy and hopeful, as was Branson, and May. They couldn’t prosecute her brother for a crime that hadn’t been committed, could they? Patience was thrilled that her husband might soon be able to wash his hands of the Fullers forever. Even Ms. Lila had visions of a dismissal and of four finally finished cottage walls. Raoul, cloaked in blissful journalistic anonymity, went to work on what should have been his day off, to wait for the call from Chief Davenport, or the Prime Minister maybe, informing him that the trial had been called off.