Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  *

  Fisherman Suspect in Glutton Hill Murder

  Search Warrant Expected

  Sources tell this reporter that charges will shortly be brought against Mr. Madison Fuller for the cold-blooded murder of Ms. Rena Baker of Glutton Hill. Mr. Fuller, fisherman, of Port-St. Luke, denies the charges that he killed Ms. Baker, his longtime girlfriend, and then placed an ad in this very newspaper to solicit her replacement. The investigation, led by Officers Arnold Tullsey and Joshua Smart of local football renown, pointed to Mr. Fuller when it was learned that the missing Ms. Baker routinely took the fisherman his lunch. The loyal readers of this paper will recall that in the ad allegedly placed by Mr. Fuller, a young woman with a bicycle and cooking skills was sought. Though Ms. Baker was not known to own a bike, and was in fact known to be an avid and exclusive walker, police surmised that, as the only lady currently missing on Oh, she could be none other than the victim of the hit-and-run near Thyme, at the scene of which a mangled and abandoned bicycle was discovered. Police Chief Lucas Davenport has ordered that the investigating officers file a petition to obtain a search warrant for the home and property of Mr. Fuller, who has already undergone a preliminary interrogation. Police have also interviewed the two young men who happened upon the mangled bicycle, Mr. Jarvis Coutrelle of Beaureveille and Mr. Randolph Rouge of Port-St. Luke; Mr. Rouge’s father, Trevor Rouge, who may face obstruction of justice charges for his role in the tampering with and the concealing of evidence; the inhabitants of Glutton Hill and its outlying areas; Ms. May Fuller, the suspect’s sister; and a high-ranking government official, privy to details about the night in question. Though, across the island, friends and family of Mr. Fuller are rallying to assert his innocence, this reporter can take no official stance except to confirm the fact that Mr. Fuller has no prior indictments or police record of any kind. Efforts by this paper to ascertain the identity of the individual who anonymously placed the lonely hearts ad of which Mr. Fuller is accused have so far proven unproductive. We are however confident that, with the rainy season nearly upon us, they will soon bear fruit.

  *

  16

  Little Dagmore Bowles proved himself as resourceful a lad on sea as he had on shore. In no time he had endeared himself to his father’s crew for his skillfulness in ridding their ship of its rats. He achieved this remarkable feat by trapping the little pests in an equally remarkable web of homemade piping and tubes, and smoking them to near-death. Then he collected their dizzied bodies and flung them into the sea.

  Captain Thomson Bowles couldn’t have been prouder. He immediately recognized in his brand new son the heir that his sea-searching heart had desired, and his little Dagmore’s rearing became the order of every day. The captain enlisted Enoch Bell, a scientist on board, to furnish the rudimentary elements of Dagmore’s education: reading and writing. It seemed implausible to the boy that Enoch’s markings in his leather notebook could have any correspondence to the words they spoke every day, but Dagmore played along, fearing it might be as easy to become unadopted and un-christened as it had been to become so. Dagmore enjoyed being a pirate son on the captain’s ship much more than he enjoyed being an orphan boy on an island.

  Before long, his lessons with Enoch, which had begun as obligatory curiosities, became genuinely fascinating and pleasurable. Not only did Enoch’s markings begin to make sense under Dagmore’s pen, but Enoch himself was a wellspring of unimaginable tales. Enoch had been a seaman for a very long time, searching the corners of the globe for undocumented animals and plants. He was a prolific artist, too, and showed Dagmore all sorts of biological sketches with arrows and annotations and cross-sections colored and magnified. His stories were so engrossing that Dagmore happily practiced his alphabet and grammar, for it was his secret hope to assist Enoch in his note-taking at the ship’s next stop.

  While Enoch sharpened Dagmore’s language skills, the deckhands honed his mathematics. They taught him all their favorite card games, which demanded that he count and add and subtract. They would have let him win, of course—he was the Captain’s son, after all—but this particular charity was not long required of them, for the boy showed an innate talent for calculations, both of the men’s hands and of their bluffs. Though he readily outsmarted them at cards, they trumped him in matters of life, about which he was only too eager to listen, peering into the men’s bragging faces with such awe and admiration that each felt as important as a king of hearts or diamonds.

  To supplement the deckhands’ arithmetic and Enoch’s anatomical poetry, Captain Thomson Bowles took Dagmore under wing in the fields of geography, astronomy, navigation, and the sea. With spyglass, sextant, and globe, Thomson taught Dagmore about the earth and the heavens, following each lesson with a cup of tea and a lecture on men. He explained their whims and humors, their weaknesses and strengths. Whether it were easier to dominate a man or a mountain (he told his son), he wasn’t sure. And a woman? Well, that was a different conundrum entirely.

  Dagmore didn’t know women and conundrums from whisky and codfish, but no matter. Evening tea with his new father was the best part of the day. The Captain shared with him his finest stash of crumbly biscuits and allowed him to sweeten his tea with sugar or honey, according to his mood. He felt a right gentleman in the Captain’s quarters, with his leather shoes and china cup. He could hardly believe his luck.

  One night as Dagmore and Thomson sat down to tea, Dagmore asked him, “Father, when can I be a pirate like you?”

  “What are you talking about, son? I told you I’m not a pirate,” his father replied.

  “What are you?”

  “Some days I’m a merchant, some days an explorer. Mainly it’s this wretched sea that keeps me out here. Heaven knows what she hides from me, but I’d scour her very depths if I could.” He gazed out at the water through the porthole in his cabin, for what felt to Quick, or rather Dagmore, like a very long time.

  “Sir?”

  The Captain turned his eyes back to those of his son. “But of course, I can’t do that,” he smiled. “Instead, I’ll just cross her end to end and find what I find.”

  “So you’re a seaman?” Dagmore suggested.

  “Yes, you could say that. And when I get back home every so often, people like to hear about all the marvels I’ve come across and the riches I’ve found.” His eyes drifted away again.

  “Will I be a seaman, too, father?”

  “For a while. But you’re a smart boy, son, and you have to study. We’ll have to send you to school. You might want to learn about engineering or biology or history. A smart man like you can’t spend his life arguing with the wind and the waves, can he?”

  “No sir,” Dagmore agreed, his little heart sinking into the pit of his stomach. He didn’t know exactly what school his father had in mind, but he didn’t see how attending one could mean anything short of separation from this man he had already grown to love. Dagmore could simply not allow it.

  While his father’s tired gaze drifted back to the sea, Dagmore got up and poured him some brandy. Captain Thomson downed the shot in one gulp, then patted the boy on the back and gently pulled him onto his knee. In silence they both watched the black water, and Dagmore reached a decision: to be the best seaman ever. From that moment on he would make himself so useful—no, utterly indispensable, he planned to be—that not only would the captain never agree to his going off to some lonely school, but he would forget the idea altogether!

  The next day Dagmore put his plan into action. Always an obedient and helpful child, he became as if possessed by an unrelenting will. He swabbed the deck and assisted the cook with breakfast, then he washed and dressed and met Enoch for his daily lessons. Only on this day, he had little interest in calligraphy and spelling. He wouldn’t give Enoch a moment’s peace until the man agreed to explain to him every last one of his biological annotations, even the ones in Latin. Dagmore knew that, sooner or later, the ship would have to land somewhere, and when it did, he intended to be th
e pride of the landing party, observing more astutely than anyone else. He would even ask the Captain for his very own book in which to take notes and draw sketches.

  Dagmore studied feverishly, every day of the week. He would gobble his lunch and instead of napping afterward would devote his afternoons to maps and astronomical charts. Soon he could name every star and constellation, and draw the outline of all the lands he never even knew existed. After his evening tea with the captain, he would retire to his bunk, where he memorized poems about the sea, from a slim blue volume that Enoch had given to him.

  Dagmore’s transformation didn’t go unnoticed on the ship. How could it? Every man on board had his own explanation for it, though these told more about the men themselves than they did about Dagmore. Enoch’s hairy chest grew puffier, as he attributed the boy’s enthusiasm to the masterful inspiration of his teacher. The deckhands, with whom Dagmore rarely ever played cards anymore, decided that the Captain was behind all this activity, torturing the poor lad to study day and night. Only the Captain, who prided himself on his discerning taste, knew the truth: he had seen through Quick’s ragamuffin exterior and had adopted himself a real prodigy!

  In fact, the Captain admired his son almost as much as his son admired him. Thomson couldn’t wait to get home and show off his boy, take him to a tailor for some suits à la mode, and to a restaurant, and the theater! He would take him to a physician, too. Have him checked out, though he appeared to be of plenty-robust stock.

  So it was that the Bowles gentlemen, Dagmore and Thomson, toiled at cross-purposes. The one worked and studied and wrote and memorized and flaunted the fruits of his labor in front of his sea-faring father. He predicted the weather by watching the moon and navigated the ship by the wind and the stars. He even gained dominion over the other men’s tempers, for they felt both pity and pride in his presence, and were reduced to good behavior whenever he was around. The other planned and prepared and laid the ground for a proper city upbringing. He noted the best schools and devised a budget to pay for them. He made a list of all the prominent men he knew. Every night he wrote a letter to a different one, expressing his desire to introduce his son to society and his hope that each man would champion the boy’s admittance to the tightest circles. The letters would be delivered first thing when they reached home.

  That’s right. Dagmore had no idea of it, but he was headed home. Or to what would be his home for a while. He would need his skills of observation, alright, but not to impress his father on any expedition. He would need them to survive in a strange, new world, where there were no such things as manchineel trees or waterfalls. Where the seaman he had taught himself to be, would have to roll up his wanderlust and tuck it away, like a sail in need of mending.

  Oh, but when it unfurled! What winds would await! What fortune, beneath the glittering, glassy surface of the wretched sea!

  17

  Had you been a firefly on Oh, navigating the moon-bathed night that would culminate the next morning in Bruce’s inflammatory front-page report—the one about the murderous Madison—you would have lit up quite an array of characters, in various shades of optimism. Raoul, gratified, asleep in the arms of Ms. Lila and biding the hours till morn. Madison, hopeful and alone in his room, discerning in the shadows on the ceiling Rena’s returning silhouette. Bruce, chipper at his typewriter, an icy tumbler of pineapple juice dripping onto his desk. And Officers Tullsey and Smart at a rum shop, downing congratulatory shots. Their search warrant had come through and would be executed at dawn. Only May would you have found turning in her bed, tossed by a sea of bad dreams, if none so immediate as the one splashed across the headlines that morning when she awoke.

  May found the Morning Crier curled up at her doorstep. (Bruce offered home delivery for a fee.) With foreboding and a cup of tea, she sat in her kitchen and unfolded it. She was quite prepared for some embarrassing, even worrisome, mention of her brother on Page 5 or Page 6. The accusation that screamed at her from the front page—Murder—well, for this she was not prepared, and her tea cup crashed to the floor.

  May gripped the newspaper and read on. Her shock turned to fright, paused at despair, and stopped finally at rage.

  “‘Efforts by this paper to ascertain the identity of the individual who anonymously placed the lonely hearts ad of which Mr. Fuller is accused have so far proven unproductive’? How dare he?” May shrieked. “That weasel Bruce would have the whole island believe he doesn’t know who wrote the ad? What does he take us for?” May stomped her foot, nearly impaling her pinky toe on a shard of wet porcelain.

  As her temper cooled and she cleaned up the broken bits, May realized that Bruce had unwittingly slipped her the key. The ad was the answer! If she could figure out who placed it, then half of the wholly circumstantial evidence against Madison would crumble like May’s china cup. But how could she go about that?

  May paced her little kitchen, back and forth and back and forth, but found she was getting nowhere.

  Bruce knows who wrote it, he simply must, she reasoned. Why won’t he say? Surely he would not be so stupid, so self-serving, as to jeopardize a man’s freedom to protect some lovesick fool? Surely not just to sell papers?

  Pace though she might, May could come to no better answer. A murder suspect as unsuspecting as Madison made for hefty profits.

  “I’ve got to get to Bruce,” she said and sat down again.

  May looked around the kitchen, as if further instructions might present themselves on a breadbox or a shiny pot. When they didn’t, she got up and paced some more. Back and forth and back again, until a thought crossed her mind: how had Madison fared with Trevor? she wondered. With the shock of the morning news, she had almost forgotten having sent him to seek advice. (His return from the bakery the night before had found her already fast in a fitful sleep.) Anxious though she was, she couldn’t bring herself to wake him, not with the morning paper that awaited.

  “He’ll be up soon enough, I suppose,” she said to the empty room, and poured herself a fresh cup of tea.

  May stepped out onto the verandah and into the morning air, pure and almost heartening. The sun hadn’t long begun its climb, and together with the flowers, she turned her face to watch it. Her eyes were locked on the burning orb for so long that they began to hurt, until finally with a jerk she forced herself to look away. Angry from the spots that taunted her vision, she grew uneasy again and stormed back inside.

  Seated at her kitchen table, May sipped and reflected. She prayed, too, that Madison would have good news to relay about his tête-à-tête with Trevor. If anyone could help them solve a problem like this, Trevor would be it. Trevor was wise and kind and respected. He knew everything about everyone, was always willing to help a friend in need, always eager to solve a riddle, and he was friends with everyone, wasn’t he? With the police, all the islanders, and…of course! With Bruce!

  May relaxed, if tentatively, for the first time since the day before, and heaved a sigh of relief. She saw in Trevor’s friendship with Bruce her brother’s exoneration. Chances are they wouldn’t have made the charges stick, she told herself, seeing how Madison is innocent. But on Oh you just never know, do you? A baker in the hand would be worth more than two bumbling policemen snooping in the bush. She sighed again, more confident now that hers and Madison’s was a battle that could be won, and her mind drifted to Trevor. It drifted to his shop and his bakery crowd, to Bruce, Randolph, even to the Officers Arnold and Joshua who she knew spent time there.

  Then it drifted to Trevor’s best pal, Dr. Branson Bowles.

  Perhaps I should tell you more about May and my Branson while Madison sleeps. We’ll have to go back some twenty years, but that’s to be expected. New stories often have old beginnings, fresh plots rooted deeply in the past. Especially where lonely hearts are concerned.

  At the age of fifteen, May fell in love with Branson, on a Sunday morning when he rescued her lazy black-and-white pup from a petty thief named Melvin Jones. Melvin had swiped the
furry bundle from under the feathery tamarind tree in May’s yard, and Madison chased him through town, past the post office, the middle school, and the Staircase to Beauty salon, tackling him finally (flailing pup still in hand) at the church where May and her family worshipped, just as the congregation was pouring out. When May realized what Branson had done for her, she was smitten, and she flirted in the only way she knew how: with fish broth, corn chowder, and cashew nut ice cream.

  Branson, who was sixteen and boasted a burgeoning appetite, couldn’t but capitulate to May’s steamy sauces and spicy sweets, and before long he was quite in love himself. In fact, practically from the day that Branson saved May’s stolen puppy, the three were never apart. Branson walked May and her puppy to school; in the evening May and her puppy brought Branson his supper. Branson so adored May’s cooking—the pleasure her dishes gave him was so deep and true—that May went to great lengths to expand her culinary repertoire. She borrowed books from the local library and listened to cooking shows on her battery-powered radio, studied spices and herbs and consulted her elders, and experimented with marinades and dough.

  While May cooked, Branson studied. He wanted nothing more than to make a fine future for himself and for May and to make her his bride. He would finish school first, then go to the island’s teaching college. He would get a job and a loan and build her a house, and they would live happily and heartily ever after off his teacher’s stipend and May’s saltfish souse.

  Branson told May about his plans on a day so sunny it made the sea look silver and gold. May had prepared for them an abundant lunch of fish, breadfruit, cabbage salad, and cake, and packed it in a hamper woven of palm leaves. From a quiet bay, they rowed off in a small fishing boat, a boat that had once been my own. It was a sturdy little craft, nicked and dinged from years of use and wear, but seaworthy (within reason) and clean, and painted a bright shade of yellow. It was Branson’s pride and joy as a young man, for it gave him a sense of freedom and authority that no other aspect of his young existence afforded him. In it he could command the direction that his life should take, and at what speed; this was a great satisfaction, a salve for the terrible patience that growing up required.