Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  “Did your son drink, too?” Officer Tullsey asked.

  “He did.”

  “Hmm.” Officer Tullsey rubbed his chin. “Okay. We’ll take his statement next. I hope he wasn’t so drunk that he’s forgotten what happened.” Officer Tullsey nudged Officer Smart. “You get all that?” he asked. “I’m going to question Randolph now.”

  “Got it,” Officer Smart confirmed, scribbling on his notepad. “Drank beer. Drunk.”

  Randolph opened his mouth to object, then shrugged his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets.

  “Randolph, tell me what happened on the road up there,” Officer Tullsey began.

  “Not much to tell,” Randolph said. “I was in the truck with Jarvis, coming back to town on the shortcut, to get help for Dodger. That’s when we found the bike in the road.”

  “What happened next?” Officer Tullsey asked slowly, studying Randolph.

  “Nothing. We picked up the bike and brought it home.”

  “Did you search the scene for clues?”

  “We had a look around. I don’t know for clues.”

  “You find anything? See anyone nearby?” Officer Tullsey asked.

  “Nah.”

  “No young woman fleeing the scene, like the paper says?”

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  Officer Tullsey ran his fingers through his hair, frustrated, then dismissed Randolph with a wave of his hand.

  Their civic duties seen to, Trevor and Randolph began to fill the empty bread baskets still resting on the floor. It was then that Branson and Bruce walked into the bakery.

  “Well, well,” Officer Tullsey remarked as he looked at Bruce. “We just took Randolph’s and Trevor’s statements. I don’t know what’s worse, Bruce, the fact that you looked into the case without calling us, or the fact that you did such a shoddy job of it.”

  “C’mon, Arnold, no hard feelings. I can’t sell papers full of rainbows forever, can I?”

  “That article’s all wrong!” Officer Tullsey complained.

  “It isn’t!” Bruce insisted, a staunch defender of his particular brand of journalism. “It’s one-hundred percent true to my intentions.”

  “What about the facts of the case?” Officer Smart demanded. “That article was irresponsible, you know.”

  But the island, it seems, had as much time for Joshua Smart’s demands as it had for Angela Ratte’s earlier queries. Before Bruce could utter a syllable in response, the widow Corinna arrived.

  “Halloo, halloo! Good Morning! One pineapple cobbler, please.” The widow Corinna, nearly ninety years old and nearly deaf, pushed her way through the crowd of Officers Tullsey and Smart, the spectating Buster, a silenced Bruce, and ever-present Branson. She stood leaning on her walking stick in front of Trevor’s counter.

  “Good morning, Corinna,” Trevor said. “I got one for you just now coming out of the oven.”

  “Seven? I paid six last time!”

  “No. I say it’s coming from the oven,” Trevor repeated, a bit louder.

  “Well, where else would it come from? You’re not getting in cobblers from Killig, are you? I want a fresh one!”

  “No, no, don’t worry. This is one of ours and it’s fresh.”

  “That’s still no reason to charge me more this week than last week.” (Corinna bought a cobbler every week for her grandkids.)

  “I’m not charging you anything more,” Trevor nearly shouted.

  “I should hope not,” Corinna said. “My word!”

  After Corinna left, the police tried to pick up the thread of the conversation she had cut off, but to no effect: Bruce saw no reason for their reprimands, Buster now wanted cobbler for his mother, and Randolph began to carry his newly full baskets to the bakery truck outside. Branson suddenly remembered the swordfish in his hand, which had already begun to sweat, and asked if he and Bruce could put their packages in the fridge.

  The thread was too thin for such yanking about and broke.

  Their investigation stymied for the moment, Officers Tullsey and Smart unbuttoned their jackets and slipped off their official demeanors. Now simply longtime pals Arnold and Joshua, they helped themselves to cold drinks, while Trevor made sandwiches.

  “So what do you make of this bicycle business?” Trevor asked them as he worked. “You think someone got hurt?”

  “Well, after hearing what Randolph had to say, I can’t figure who it might be,” Arnold said.

  “It’s surely strange, no one in the area knowing about a lady with a bike, nobody seeing what happened. You can’t make a move on this island without somebody somewhere seeing something,” Joshua (correctly) pointed out.

  “We’ll go ask more questions tomorrow, up by where it happened,” Arnold said. “See if we find out more than the boys did. Get a statement from Jarvis, too. And from Mr. Orlean.”

  “What about that lonely hearts ad? It couldn’t really be connected, could it?” Branson asked, his islander veneer not so thinned that he had lost all interest in Oh’s affairs. (But thin enough that the officers had seen no point in questioning him.)

  “Don’t see how,” Arnold said.

  “Awful coincidence, though, isn’t it,” Joshua mused.

  “Yes, indeed,” Bruce agreed, with the same strange smile from the night before.

  “What? You’re not cooking up another half-invented story, are you?” Branson asked.

  Bruce sighed. “I’m getting a little tired of explaining the finer points of journalism to the likes of all of you. If you don’t mind, I have a newspaper to run.” He left, feigning injury and indignation.

  Branson rushed out after him. As he stepped outside, the sun angrily emerged from behind a cloud and, catching him unawares, nearly blinded him! All of its brilliance was concentrated into two pinpoints of light aimed straight at Branson’s eyes, and his eyes alone, or so it felt in that split second. He stopped dead on the bakery step and shaded his face with his hands. By the time his stinging, watery vision re-adjusted itself, Bruce was an already small silhouette, getting smaller with every step.

  Branson looked up, squinting and cautious, to where the sun burned a hole in the sky. It dazzled bright and innocent. And completely ordinary. He could detect no sign whatsoever of the malice he had sensed only a second before, could discern no hint of ill will. Not that he should have, for what had he ever done to incur the sun’s wrath?

  He remained on Trevor’s step, however, unable to shake the foolish and self-aggrandizing sensation that the sun had indeed driven two purposeful spears of light into his pupils. Certainly not to impede his pestering Bruce?

  Despite the heat, Branson shivered. He recalled suddenly the stories his captain father used to tell about go-rounds with the island elements. Branson had always thought the tales as tall as papayas. Huh. Maybe not!

  Maybe Dagmore Bowles really did fight with the moon and the stars, and clash with the capricious tide.

  “What are you doing out here alone?” Trevor poked his head through the doorway. His words undid Branson’s daydream, dragging him from his father’s affairs back to the step in front of the bakery. “Did you catch him?”

  “Who?”

  “Bruce.”

  “Nah, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”

  “What about the fish?”

  “What fish?”

  “You didn’t go after him to tell him he left his swordfish in the fridge?”

  “Oh. Right. He’ll come back for it. You know Bruce. There’s no stopping him when he hits his stride.”

  Back inside, cold with sweat and prickly with foreboding, Branson leaned against the wall and let the others talk. The police team had a football match coming up, and Arnold and Joshua proceeded to analyze the holes in the opposing team’s line-up.

  “We can beat ’em with our eyes closed,” Joshua said. “Their team’s been fighting like cats and dogs.”

  “Fighting over what?” Arnold asked.

>   Joshua took a deep breath. “After they won a game last month, Shoop, the goalkeeper, got some fish and cooked up by his place. His grandma gave him the potatoes and the breadfruit and the dasheen, but he didn’t have any flour. So he couldn’t make the dumplings. The first man comes and takes his bowl and says, ‘The soup is nice, but you didn’t make any dumplings?’ So Shoop says, ‘Nah man. No flour.’ Then the next man comes and takes his bowl and says, ‘Shoop, you ain’t put no dumplings in the broth?’ And Shoop again says, ‘Nah man. No flour.’ Each time a new man reaches the pot, the man says the same thing. It got to be a bigger and bigger joke, and Shoop got more and more vexed. You know Shoop. By the time the tenth man got his bowl and said, ‘Shoop, man…,’ there was no reasoning with him.”

  Buster and Arnold started to laugh, and Joshua continued. “Shoop threw ’em all out. He snatched the bowls right from their fingers. ‘I’ll eat the whole pot for myself!’ he cried. They call him ‘Dumpling’ now.”

  Even Trevor, more sensitive than the others, was chuckling. “Poor Shoop.”

  “Every time he lets a goal slip by, the rest of the team harasses him. They yell at him on the field, ‘Why you do that, Dumpling?’ and ‘Open your eyes, Dumpling.’”

  By this time the men were all laughing so hard, they had tears running down their faces. Their cheerful talk went from Dumpling to Dumpling’s girl to someone else’s girl and, before they knew it, they were debating the Prime Minister’s latest tax hike and the new pizza shop opened in town.

  Together they ranted and reasoned, joked and gibed. Their chatter was loud and jovial and filled the air like balmy fog after a tropical rain. It rubbed against the humid walls, caressed the glass of the bakery counter where Arnold and Trevor leaned, even melted the chill that shadowed Branson’s thoughts and his skin. It wrapped itself around them all, warm and benevolent, like a rainbow around a cool and stormy sun.

  10

  While one half of Oh discussed the lonely heart who got thrown from her bike in the night, and the other half debated whether the lonely-heart fisherman who placed the ad to find her was even a fisherman at all, a real lonely heart on Oh suffered something fierce. It belonged to Madison Fuller (a fisherman himself, though this was incidental to his pain). Madison’s heart ached for his lost girlfriend, Rena Baker. Not the metaphorical sort of “lost,” one heart tiring of another and thumping off to new adventures; no, Madison had truly and literally lost Rena. She was nowhere to be found.

  Every afternoon Madison met Rena at the roundabout, the one that spun out roads to Beaureveille, Fort Tuesday, and Glutton Hill (where Rena lived), and every afternoon she gave him a steamy homemade lunch (sometimes an even steamier dessert). But now two days had passed without so much as a heel of bread and cheese. Madison was sick. Sick with worry (had Rena fallen into the river and drowned?), sick with hunger (who could eat at a time like that?), sick with sorrow (how would he survive without her?). Rena had left no message or note. Could she have gotten lost? he wondered. Or simply run away? (This happened on Oh from time to time.)

  Madison borrowed a vehicle from a friend and drove all over the island looking for her. Rena loved to walk. She never ever took a bus or accepted a ride in a car. Perhaps she had taken a long, long walk and was late in getting back, which had happened once or twice before. Madison drove and drove, but found not a trace of Rena or his lunch. He returned home exhausted and confused and too upset to think straight. He collapsed on his bed without removing his shoes, and sought refuge in the long, thick sleep of the sad and hopeless. Not even when Madison’s sister, May, pounded on the door of his room to offer him dinner could she rouse him.

  Poor Madison! Sound asleep with no inkling of the nightmare about to come knocking! When Oh’s whims and rains whisk away your one true love, they rarely stop at a tap on the front door. They drag you out of bed, rummage through your cupboards, and so ravage the walls of your house, that it feels like any place but home.

  Officers Tullsey and Smart (or, Arnold and Joshua), after conducting their initial investigation at Trevor’s Bakery, spent the next day in full-on policing. The scene of the crime had to be examined for clues and bus-conductor Jarvis Coutrelle needed questioning, as did Raoul Orlean.

  They started off with Jarvis in his village of Beaureveille, just up the road from Thyme. They traveled in a marked police pick-up truck, Arnold driving and Joshua thinking aloud.

  “From Beaureveille we can take the shortcut back down to town, pass by where the bike was found, maybe get out and ask a few questions.”

  “Good,” Arnold said.

  “If Jarvis can’t tell us anything, we’ll need to sniff around the crime scene and see what we can dig up ourselves.”

  “I got some shovels in the back.”

  “Good,” Joshua said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this before you can say ‘Morning Crier.’ Teach that Bruce a thing or two,” he snorted. “He forgets we’re trained professionals.”

  “Exactly,” Arnold agreed. “I bet we get back to the station tonight with the name and full description of the lady who got knocked off that bike. For surety she’s from one of the villages near where the accident happened.”

  “Exactly.”

  Such was the rhythm and gist of their talk as they bounced up the rough and rocky road to Beaureveille. They speculated and extrapolated, spouted theories and invented clues, sang reggae with the radio when they got bored. Then after about twenty minutes, they pulled off the main road and into the gap where Jarvis lived in a small wooden house. They parked their truck as far off the narrow road as they could and headed for Jarvis’s front door, calling out his name as they approached.

  “Mr. Coutrelle? Are you there? We need to ask you a few questions.”

  Jarvis, who lay dozing on the verandah, opened his eyes and focused on the two approaching figures.

  “Arnold? Is that you? What’s this ‘Mr. Coutrelle’ business?”

  “We’re conducting an official investigation, that’s what,” Joshua said. “We need you to tell us about the bike.”

  “Nothing to tell. Randolph and me, we found it in the road. On the shortcut. Don’t you guys read the paper?”

  “We’re not interested in Bruce’s version, we want to hear yours.”

  “I told you. Nothing to tell. We looked all around. Not sure for what, but there was nothing to find. No body, no clothes, no packages rolled in the ditch. Whoever she was, she just…I don’t know, man. Disappeared. There was a full moon that night, you know.”

  “Well, won’t that look good on our official report?” Arnold said. “‘Woman done in by full moon.’”

  “Can’t you tell us anything else?” Jarvis asked. “What happened after you searched the ditches?”

  “We knocked on a few doors, but nobody had heard or seen a thing. Nobody was missing. Nobody was missing a bike. Nobody even knew anyone who owned a bike.”

  “What then?” Arnold asked.

  “That’s it. We had to move the bike out of the road so we could pass. Randolph thought his dad might know what to do about it. We loaded it up and took it with us to the bakery. Then Bruce showed up. Then Randolph’s uncle, Ernest. Then Ernest and me, we went to get Dodger and the bus. End of story.”

  End of story, indeed. Jarvis’s statement, which in their zeal the officers had forgotten to write down, proved to be of no help whatsoever. A complete waste of time. Arnold and Joshua said hurried goodbyes to Jarvis and jumped back into their truck. A sniff around the crime scene was most definitely in order now. Wheels spinning in the dirt, they sped off toward the secondary road that went from Thyme to town.

  When they reached the spot where the bike had been found (or what they believed to be the spot where the bike had been found, for not the faintest trace of the accident remained), Arnold and Joshua went over it with a fine-toothed comb, so to speak. They bent down and touched the dirt, sifted fistfuls of sandy pebbles that they let fall back to the ground like noisy rain. They circled the spot,
kicked at suspicious nicks and holes in the road with the toes of their shoes. They measured the spot’s circumference and diameter and its distance from every nearby ditch. They even dusted the dusty spot for fingerprints. Nothing.

  “Huh,” was all that Arnold could say. He stood with his hands on his hips wondering what to do next, while Joshua crouched in the road, still gazing intently at every tiny stone.

  “Seems clear to me,” Joshua said. “Someone has carried off every last clue. Someone doesn’t want us to find out who got knocked off that bike the other night.”

  “Yes!” Arnold agreed. “Now why would anyone do that?” He started circling the spot again, tapping his chin and thinking.

  Joshua stood up and did the same. “I think someone tried to get rid of someone else.”

  “Yes!” Arnold agreed again. “There’s just one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Joshua asked.

  “No one’s missing. Jarvis said so.” Arnold and Joshua continued to circle the alleged scene of the alleged crime, stopping intermittently to glance across it at one another. At a shop not too far away, a shopkeeper and his customers marveled at their investigative dance. In turn the officers stopped, held up their index fingers and opened their mouths to share some grand idea, then closed their mouths again on second thought, before a sound slipped out.

  Finally, Joshua got an idea worth setting free. “Maybe,” he said, index finger pointing straight up to the sky, “maybe no one was missing when Jarvis asked. But what if someone’s missing now?”

  Arnold sensed a flaw in this new theory. He tasted it on the tip of his tongue for the briefest of moments, but was unable to spit it out, and by then the moment had passed. “Yes!” he agreed once more. “Let’s go see.”

  Close to the shortcut that had witnessed the officers’ investigation and their conclusion was a string of half a dozen houses and a shop. Not a village proper, just a small hamlet on the side of a hill. Arnold and Joshua knocked at every front door, but their questions evoked answers identical to those relayed by Jarvis an hour earlier. No one knew anything, no one had seen or heard anything, nobody was missing a bike or knew anyone who was. Everything was in order.