Away with the Fishes (15 page)

Dagmore would celebrate fifteen birthdays in his new home, but none that would match the last one on his father’s ship. Nearly half of them would be feted rather unceremoniously (little cakes in foil cups, a new box of pencils) at the “proper” school his father had found for him in England. It was a stuffy place, he thought, but he flourished there—if only because it broke his heart to think of disappointing the Captain, who came to visit him as often as he could (and wrote to him every day in between).

Captain Thomson had spared no expense. Dagmore’s new home was certainly one to envy. Marble and ivy halls with masters who coddled the youth and genius (and wealth) in their charge, horses or cricket on Saturdays, and tea every afternoon. While the other boys seemed content with long runs on the manicured lawns and weren’t bothered by the oft-cloudy skies, Dagmore quietly puzzled at his new life. Calculus and Plato and museums were all well and good, especially if they made his father proud, but the white shirts and porcelain cups so precious to Dagmore at sea, were in his new home merely a reminder of all he missed. The waves and the wind that smelled of saltwater. The stars, which here seemed not to burn as brightly. And there wasn’t a palm or a mango for miles and miles, at least as far as he could tell. There were apples and pears to eat, and berries of every color. Dagmore did enjoy those. When he crawled into bed at the end of every day, however, he missed the tree frogs, the way their chirping had lulled him to sleep when he was Quick and alone.

Dagmore’s nostalgia grew, until it was the only thing he could talk about when his father came to visit. Captain Thomson understood. If anyone knew the draw of the sea, it was he. There would be plenty of time for islands and ships, he assured his son, if he only finished his studies first. His future was bright, but its
brightness had to be backed by degrees and certificates. Dagmore loved his father so much, worshipped him, really, that in the end he couldn’t argue. He resigned to busy himself with his books, and quietly counted the days until he would serve under the Captain once again.

In the meantime, when the first four of Dagmore’s birthdays at school had gone by without any sea change in his disposition, Captain Thomson got an idea. It seemed clear to him that what his son was missing was music. The tweet of the frogs, the whistle of the wind, the lap and smack of water on wood. So he arranged for Dagmore to make some music of his own. After Dagmore’s thirteenth birthday, the Captain took him a piano. Not just any piano, but one with a top that curved and gaped, covered in a red cherry finish. It was housed in a lecture hall at the school and at first Dagmore had no idea what to make of it. Shiny and big and imposing, it reminded him vaguely of his father’s ship, but when he touched the keys and their dull, random notes rang out, he jerked, startled.

“Well?” his father said.

Dagmore hadn’t the faintest idea what to say, but his father’s eyes were moist with anticipation and excitement, and so Dagmore smiled at him, and one smile led to another, which led to a series of exchanged giggles, and finally a guffaw from Captain Thomson.

“That’s not all,” his father told him. There was Miss Veronica, too.

“Miss Veronica?” Dagmore said.

The two words conjured an image of youth and bounce in Dagmore’s barely teenaged head, but alas Miss Veronica was a “miss” by marital status alone. She turned out to be close to seventy, sprightly if spindly, her bounce now a mere shadow of what
it must have once been. Miss Veronica, he was told, would give him a piano lesson every afternoon when his schoolday was done. Dagmore, on principle, would never have dreamed of refusing a gift from his father. This one, though, this mammoth, noisy instrument with its comparatively tiny and twittering teacher appealed for the sheer strangeness of its proportions, principles aside. So Dagmore, with a “pleased to meet you, Miss” and a peck on his father’s cheek, sealed the deal.

The three birthdays after that found Dagmore much happier indeed, to his father’s delight. The boy demonstrated a unique and natural talent, and he and Miss Veronica forged quite a friendship over scales and minuets. She couldn’t have imagined that when Dagmore played, the
reason
he played, was to take himself as far away from her as he could go. The piano, like his father’s ship, carried him across the sea, and back to the islands that he was missing more than ever. Music became his solace. The notes that mottled the parchment, like whirring fruitflies on coconut flesh, oozed from his fingers and transported him. Every trill was an island bird, every swell a thunderstorm that diminuendoed into the drip of lingering drops of rain. Not only did the music tell him what to do, where to pause, where to breathe, when to tread lightly and when to pounce, but the starkness of the keys, the black against the white, reminded him of the simplicity of his youth. On an island you always knew who you were, regardless of what name they gave you.

As Dagmore graduated to fugues and sonatinas, his playing acquired an almost magical allure. Soon the clouds cottoned on, and the birds, who thumped at the windows of the lecture hall when Dagmore was late to his lesson. His was the song that, until now, had only been whispered by the wind, a remnant of
Dagmore’s island world that haunted him since the day he had left it. Thus, Dagmore threw himself into his playing, not for his father, or Miss Veronica, not because he possessed a natural talent for it. He threw himself into it, like a dolphin tossing in the sea, because it was his only means of escape, his only way home
for real
.

By the time a few more birthdays had come and gone, Dagmore was a true virtuoso, having mastered the twists and turns of some of the most famed and daunting sonatas ever composed. He had never slighted his academics—quite the contrary—still everyone agreed (the Headmaster, the Captain, Miss Veronica, and Dagmore himself) that his bright future was best secured at the Conservatory, though university might rather have seemed the next logical step. For the first time in his life, through his music-making, Dagmore had managed to genuinely please both his father and himself at once. He was
so
happy at his piano, so joyfully lost in the sounds of the birds and rain and wind, that he hardly noticed the absence of the real thing anymore. He didn’t miss the seas, or the sun, as much as he once did, for they trickled out of his fingertips every time he pressed a key.

Captain Thomson was as pleased as rum punch and, one hot and sunny day, took the grown-up Dagmore from his proper school and set him up in a stylish apartment a stone’s throw from the Conservatory—where, as it happened, Dagmore didn’t spend as many birthdays as he had planned. A year had hardly passed when his teachers decided he’d surpassed them all. There wasn’t a concerto he couldn’t play, no emotion he couldn’t evoke, from
allegro
to
legato con amore
. His
grandioso
was grand, his
grave
dignified, his
leggiero
light as air. His talents were such, it was deemed sinful that he should keep them to himself, and so before long the island rain that dripped from his fingers, fell in concert halls dripping
in velvet. Pretty soon, every rich father wanted Dagmore to mentor his musical daughter, every rich mother sought his presence at her swank soirees—where to the delight and amazement of all, Dagmore could entertain them with equal flair in matters of Bach and biology, Schubert and sugarcane. Thus the next few birthdays passed to the tinkling of champagne flutes and the swoosh of silk.

Even so, island boys born to read the stars and chat with the breeze can only hide behind fake piano rain and rustling petticoats for so long. Dagmore was no exception. There were rats in need of catching and corncobs to roast. Sunlight destined for his brow that was tired of tip-toeing through a cloudy English veil. Dagmore became Dagmore on Oh, after all, and Oh had decided that it wanted him back.

As fate would have it—
island
fate—around that same time Captain Thomson found himself caught up in a terrible squall. He had never seen anything like it. Angry gales tossed his massive ship windward and leeward, while a vengeful wave bobbed it up and down like an empty nutmeg shell. The strategies that had served the Captain and his men so well during a near-lifetime at sea were suddenly and decidedly not going to be enough. The wind was blowing in two directions at once and the water seemed to leap straight up into the sky. What, Captain Thomson wondered, had he and his men ever done to deserve all of this?

In the end there was little more to do than huddle together and say their prayers, so that’s what they did. To the accompaniment of pleas and mea culpas and apologies and promises barely discernible in the noisy storm, each clutched in strained and whitened fingers some icon to his faith. The cook held his Bible, the deckhands their rum, Enoch his favorite book of poetry. The Captain held and pressed to his lips a bundle of letters from his
son. The early missives, accounts of cricket and badminton and the Natural History Museum, betrayed the false bravado with which they were composed and had broken the Captain’s heart every time he read them. The ones after that made less and less an effort to hide Dagmore’s melancholy, even as they bragged of his success. Then came the ones about the music lessons. About Ms. Veronica’s nit-picking, or the Variations on a Theme that reminded Dagmore of the time he and his father watched a bird peck into a coconut, beak-rhythm on shell. Next came fame and fortune and private lessons in private apartments, and these had evoked from the Captain a devilish smirk that his not-quite-old-aged face had almost forgotten.

Sitting close in the circle of his men, the Captain replayed every letter in his head, and somewhere between Dagmore’s first football match and his first performance at the Royal Hall, wind and wave conspired. A leeward tilt, then a starboard tongue of wave, jumped-aboard and demanding passage. Water slid across the deck and burrowed deep into the heart of the vessel, where it lay down, stretched itself, and got comfortable. Then it silently swallowed the Captain’s ship, in a black and easy yawn not even the moon could bear to watch.

Dagmore spent the last of his birthdays in his home-that-turned-out-not-to-be-a-home packing trunks and signing papers. He was almost twenty-five and his father was dead. His piano no longer trilled birdsong or rained rain. It plunked and sputtered and twanged. His stylish apartment sold, its contents had been dismantled into crate-size portions of memories hammered shut and sent
away. Dagmore would meet them again at the port from which he would embark on the rest of his life. He was headed home, for real this time. Not to the sea, not exactly. Though he would journey by ship, he would never sail the globe from end to end, looking for whatever it was his father couldn’t find. No, Dagmore was headed home to Oh, to the island where Captain Thomson Bowles had opened his heart to a scared little orphan called Quick, and given him a finer start in life than he could ever have imagined.

At least, that’s what Dagmore wanted to believe, that his return to Oh was a tribute to a great and generous soul. Partly it was. Partly, he was running from his sorrow, like his father had run from his.

If the place Dagmore chose to run away to was Oh, there was a very definite reason for that. When you’re born under the stars and weaned on pineapple juice, when there’s sand in your bones and sea salt in your blood, an island is your fate. No matter how many sonatas you master and how many fancy shoes you buy. Time away is always just an interlude, even
years
abroad just a moment’s head-turn from the blistering tropical sun. You can tell yourself you’re moving on—or up—but sooner or later you’ll find yourself moving back, as Dagmore did.

To the island with a name almost as beautiful as his own.

20

W
hen the
Morning Crier
crying
Murder
hit the stands, Raoul was first in line to buy one. Despite his tryst with Ms. Lila the night before, he had woken up agitated, and eager to discover how much of a mess of things Bruce had really made. (Raoul knew a mess was guaranteed, but as to the degree of it, Bruce sometimes surprised him.) As he walked home to have his breakfast, he read the front-page article about Madison Fuller, collecting flies in his head along the way.

Although Bruce hadn’t stressed Madison’s reputation or good name, like Trevor had asked him to, Raoul knew that Trevor’s belief in the boy’s innocence was right. This was one fly, and it suggested two more: if Madison wasn’t the murderer, but the police thought he
was
…oh, dear. Raoul didn’t dare finish his thought. And, if Madison
wasn’t
the murderer, then who was? Each of these flies triggered others in turn.

How would this Madison Fuller protect himself from the unchecked investigators on Oh?

Was Rena really dead, if some vandal in-the-know was ordering Raoul to find her? Surely even a graffiti-painting thug would
have little use for a corpse. Presumably, Rena Baker was alive but merely lost.

Was this thug then her killer? That hardly seemed likely; had he done her in, he would know where he had done so.