Away with the Fishes (34 page)

Raoul was upset. The Bicycle Trial was turning into a kangaroo court—with
his
name all over it. He was “Central Planning” and the one they would blame if the case went awry in the end. Things were looking terrible for Madison. Bruce had been tricked on the witness stand, and Glynray had spent the rest of the day boring jurors and spectators both, with a list of character witnesses nobody cared about. As near as Raoul could tell, few truths had been exposed by either side, and still a girl was missing. He had the weekend to figure something out—if he could—before closing arguments began on Monday.

Luckily, whatever ghost or vandal or meddler was mucking up Raoul’s walls was inclined to agree, and he (or she) was about to point to him in the direction of the missing girl.

43

R
aoul rushed home from court on Friday evening, resolute in his intentions. Before the weekend was done, he would come up with a clue, if it meant he had to go all the way to Killig himself to scour the airport registers there. As it turned out, that wouldn’t be necessary, for the answers he sought—or the hint of them—were no farther than his own backyard (there, and perhaps Ladywood Road).

Raoul stormed into his cottage when he got there, gave his wife a peck on the cheek, and pulled out the notebooks from his sessions with Mrs. Jaymes. Next he gathered up his newspaper clippings of every article about the Bicycle Trial and its run-up. Finally, he dragged out his personal trial dossier, which contained everything from copies of the request for blood analysis to invoices for toilet rentals and tarps. He sat himself down in the middle of the sitting room and spread all his papers around him, a doughnut of variables and he, the hole. “I’m not moving from this spot,” he shouted to his wife, “until I’ve solved the riddle!”

Ms. Lila looked at him with a mix of pity and amusement, for she had an announcement of her own to make, one that would supersede Raoul’s by a mile. No sense torturing him, she thought,
and simply blurted it out: “You’ve got a new message on the wall outside.”

“I do?” Raoul jumped up, betraying his enthusiasm, which surely went against every tenet of the plain-as-noses-on-faces school of thinking.

“See for yourself.”

Raoul ran outside. His first pink wall, where Dagmore and Rena had once appeared interconnected, now boasted a new intersected cross. Dagmore’s name had re-surfaced in vertical ghostly white-ish squiggles, but this time, the D in DAGMORE led to a horizontal DAVIES.

Davies?

Raoul went back inside to reason with Ms. Lila. “What does Davies have to do with anything?” he asked her. (He already knew the answer, but was hoping he was wrong.)

“Only one ‘Davies’ of any relevance around here,” she said, tilting her head suggestively. She meant Abigail Davies, island midwife, and, if not Raoul’s enemy, certainly not his friend.

“It figures that wretched woman would have her hand in this!” he complained. “I can’t bear the thought of going to see her.”

In addition to the bad blood between Raoul and Abigail on account of her being his (missing) first wife’s confidante (and, he suspected, her accomplice), there was a little matter of his granddaughter, Almondine, which had never sat well with Raoul. Abigail had been his daughter’s midwife and, though Raoul couldn’t prove it, had had a hand in little Almondine’s mysterious (and maybe magical) arrival.

“I won’t do it,” he said. “I won’t go begging that woman for information. If she has any, I’m the last person she’d tell it to anyway. She’s proven that time and again.”

It pained Ms. Lila to see her husband tormented by old hurts, and she suggested that, since the name Davies had shown up interlocked with Dagmore’s, maybe Raoul could ask Mrs. Jaymes about the connection between the two.

“A fine idea!” Raoul exclaimed, grabbing her by the shoulders and planting a congratulatory kiss on her lips. “I’ll go see Mrs. Jaymes in the morning. But just to be safe, I better study my variables a while longer.” She nodded at him affectionately, as if in agreement, and went to the bedroom to read. Raoul plopped himself back down into his doughnut.

“Wait just a minute!” he called out as he settled on the floor.

“What is it?” Ms. Lila came running.

“Dagmore and Abigail! Of course they’re connected! How could I forget? The one and only time I met the man, years ago, he was asking about Abigail. He was in love with her and was sure island magic was somehow keeping them apart. Well, you know what I think of that kind of talk, and I told him so! The first time I went to see Mrs. Jaymes she said
I
was the reason Dagmore finally gave up on Abigail.”

Before returning to bed, Ms. Lila said something like “That’s wonderful, dear” or “I’m glad you’re getting somewhere” or maybe even simply “good night.” Whatever it was, Raoul didn’t hear it. His head was buzzing and his neck hurt from surveying his circle of clues. What did it all mean? Things seemed to be coming full circle and yet the ends weren’t quite matching up. He pored over his doughnut until late in the night, but still he couldn’t put his finger on the part of it that was missing.

44

I
n the morning, Raoul woke up early, and chipper. Back to Mrs. Jaymes’s house he rushed, not even bothering to stop at his office first. How lucky, he thought, that two whole days lay ahead before the trial reconvened! If he could get her to line up the rest of her clouds, he was sure he could work out the Rena riddle in time.

“Mrs. Jaymes,” he yelled through her open front door. “Mrs. Jaymes, I need to talk to you. Are you there?”

“What’s all this excitement on a Saturday morning?” she inquired as she reached the doorway and invited him in.

“Mrs. Jaymes, I have to ask you about Abigail Davies. About her and the Captain.”

“You want to hear now, do you? I tried to tell you last time and you ran off.”

“You mean the girl at the bank? That was Abigail?” Raoul was stunned into momentary silence. Abigail’s name had turned up on his wall just two days after she turned up in Mrs. Jaymes’s story.

“It was Abigail, alright. ‘I found her, Mrs. Jaymes! I found her!’ the Captain came in yelling. He didn’t even know her name. I was so happy for him. Until he told me who the ‘her’ was.”

“How did he tell you if he didn’t know her name?” Raoul asked, making furious notes in his notebook as he took a seat on the sofa.

Dagmore told her how tall the girl was, she explained, and described the girl’s deep eyes, her moist lips and her regal cheekbones. He said her shape was pleasant, slim in the middle and wider below and above. When he got to her bosoms, poorly contained in their cotton, Mrs. Jaymes had cottoned on.

She told Raoul: “‘Not Abigail Davies?!’ I shouted, and I described Abigail to him again, with a woman’s eye for detail, and we agreed it had to be her. ‘You don’t want that one,’ I told him. ‘She has a handful of children, and she can’t yet be more than twenty years old.’ All he wanted to know was if she was married. I told him she wasn’t, though a decent girl with a handful of children ought to be, but he didn’t care. You know what he said?”

“What?” Raoul asked.

“‘Thank goodness!’ So I said, ‘Don’t think for one minute that I’m going to start changing diapers and cooking up bottles at
my
age, Captain!’ He had his hand in another hornet’s nest and didn’t even know it.”

Before settling into midwifery at the age of nineteen or thereabouts, Abigail Davies had assumed a number of positions, each of which compromised her in turn. She had worked for a plumber, a painter, and a bookkeeper (who insisted on showing her their pipes and strokes and assets), and by the time Dagmore set his sights on her, she knew all too well that a sea captain would be no less of a distraction. Abigail had four little mouths to feed and
her only concern was her gainful work, assisting the young island ladies who, like her, had had their fill of men.

Dagmore had little experience with courtship (he had filled up his share of female houseguests, but they always came and went) and so approached the matter of Abigail like any other of his island research projects. Notebook in hand and packed lunch tucked in his shoulder bag, he began to follow her around town, recording her every move, every purchase, and every preference, so as to formulate his plan of attack. He couldn’t blurt out his attentions like some rash, lovesick fool, not with a woman as practical and experienced and intelligent as Abigail must be. He would declare his feelings and his intentions more efficiently, scientifically. What sensible woman would refuse an advance unspoiled by poetry, one perfectly timed?

It took a week for Dagmore to collect the data he needed. He learned that Abigail woke up every day by six a.m., dressed and fed her babies, and left them in her mother’s care (Abigail still lived with her parents and siblings). She walked to town, treated herself to a leisurely breakfast of coffee and buns in a shop by the docks, then spent her mornings visiting clients at their homes. In the afternoons she ran her errands and, at the end of the day, went home by bus.

These were just her movements; a seasoned researcher like Dagmore was capable of discovering far more than
that
. He noted that she preferred her buns with raisins, that she always stopped to admire jacaranda trees, and that when she had extra cash, she bought herself skin cream made from honey. On a hot day she fancied ice cream, always vanilla, and she never carried an umbrella when it rained. Instead, she removed her shoes and went on her way in stocking feet (thanks to a gossipy shopgirl, Dagmore
also discovered Abigail wore the kind of stockings that stopped mid-thigh).

He observed that Abigail’s favorite color was red. She liked her mangoes soft, her plums stewed, and her favorite fish was snapper. She wore dresses and skirts, not denims or trousers; she could carry a tune; and she was always on time. Her fees were fair, her services fairly sought-after, her demeanor reservedly firm.

Had Abigail lived alone, Dagmore would have called on her at her house, and professed his love there, but because she lived with her babies and brothers and sisters, that wouldn’t do. Dagmore’s declaration required some peace and privacy. He hated to admit it, but he would have to ask Mrs. Jaymes for help. He sat her down and explained that he planned, very plainly, to tell Abigail Davies she had stolen his heart and he wished her hand in exchange. He wanted Abigail to marry him and live with him at the villa, with her four little ones, for whom he would happily provide.

“You can’t tell her that!” Mrs. Jaymes hollered when she heard the plan.

“Why not? It’s the truth.”

“For one thing, if you tell her you want to take care of her and her babies, she might just say ‘yes’ for the free room and board,” Mrs. Jaymes explained.

“That’s unfair of you to say, Mrs. Jaymes. You don’t even know her!”

“Nor do you! You can’t tap a woman you don’t even know on the shoulder and tell her, ‘Let’s get married and live on a mountaintop.’ She’s likely to call the police!”

“I see no point in games or pretexts,” he objected. “My mind and my heart are made up. She’s the only one I want.”

“Maybe so, but it’s a safe bet she doesn’t want
you
. She has no idea who you are.”

In spite of her feelings for Abigail, Mrs. Jaymes found herself dispensing romantic advice, telling the Captain what it was that every woman needed and longed for. It was not the time to be avoiding poetry, she chided him, the more the better! The same for flowers and chocolates and pretty things. If he wanted to conquer a woman, he had to write her a song and row her in his boat and not send her a marriage contract by way of the Island Post.

“Fine,” the Captain replied, and retired to his study to compose an invitation.

“Dear Ms. Davies,” he wrote, then decided that was too formal and wrote “Dear Abigail” instead, but that looked too forward. He ended up with “To Abigail Davies from Captain Dagmore Bowles.” He wrote that although she didn’t know him formally, they had met once at the Savings Bank and she had struck him then as a very fine girl. He hoped that she would find it agreeable to take tea with him in his home, and if so, he would be happy to meet her in town and escort her up his hill. He suggested the following afternoon, and said that he would wait for her at the port at three o’clock. Then he sealed the letter with a dollop of wax (in red, her favorite color), and he impressed his “B” upon it.

Now, how would he get it to her? The surest way, he figured, was to catch her on her way home in the afternoon. He put on piano clothes and polished his shoes, perched his hat on his head and, shouting “Off I go” to Mrs. Jaymes, went to the bus stop to sit and wait. When Abigail finally turned up, Dagmore, faced with her heaving cleavage, was a fish out of water. He flopped through his introduction and his discourse in a manner that boasted little
of either efficiency or science, and sloppily thrust his invitation at her as she boarded the bus.

Back at the villa, Mrs. Jaymes wanted to know how the Captain had fared, and he honestly couldn’t say. He told her he got nervous and tongue-tied but had delivered his invitation and time would tell. He would go and wait for Abigail the following day. In the meantime, and in hopes that she would indeed come to tea, he had Mrs. Jaymes prepare all her favorite things: raisin buns and stewed plums, and jam made with soft, ripe mangoes.