Away with the Fishes (8 page)

“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.

“Check in the village,” the shopkeeper suggested. “Maybe someone there can help.”

For want of a better strategy, the officers obeyed. They left the string of houses behind them, walked back to their truck at the scene of the crime, and set off for the village closest by.

Glutton Hill.

They arrived after only a minute or two, leaving their vehicle at one end of the main road, which they planned to canvass on foot. Their first stop was the pharmacy, owned and run by a Nathan Broom. “Good morning,” he greeted them as they walked through the door. “Can I help?”

“Hope so,” Joshua said. “You know anything about the bike accident that happened near here?”

“Only what I read in the paper. Quite a mystery.”

“So you didn’t see or hear anything unusual?” Arnold asked.

“No.”

“You know anyone around here owns a bike?” Joshua asked.

“No.”

“How about missing ladies? You know of any of those?” Arnold asked.

“Now you mention it, I did hear someone say something about Rena Baker missing. Didn’t think much of it, though. Rena’s like that. Probably just went off to clear her head and couldn’t be bothered to tell anyone.”

Arnold and Joshua looked at each other anxiously. “Did Rena ride a bike?” Joshua asked.

“No. Never saw her ride one in my life. Rena’s a walker.”

Arnold and Joshua thanked the pharmacist and continued their stroll down Glutton Hill’s main road. They visited a supermarket, a bar, a mechanic’s garage, and a seamstress’s shop before reaching the road’s other end. At every stop en route the conversation ensued much as it had at the pharmacy. No one knew anything, except that headstrong Rena Baker hadn’t been seen for a while. No one was especially concerned or in the least bit convinced that Rena had been riding the bike in question.

Before turning back down the road again, Arnold and Joshua stopped to collect their thoughts. “What do you think of all that?” Arnold asked Joshua.

“I think it’s obvious. We just found our missing lady.”

“What about the bike? They all said she never rode a bike.”

“You find that significant?” Joshua asked Arnold.

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“Rena Baker is the only lady who’s missing. It
had
to be her who got knocked off that lady’s bike,” Joshua said.

“So now what?” Arnold asked.

“Now, we find out who it was who knocked her off.”

They set off in reverse, stopping once more at the seamstress’s, the mechanic’s, the bar, the supermarket, the pharmacy. They
asked everyone they encountered for more information about Rena Baker. What did she look like? What did she do? Who did she frequent? They found out that Rena was as stubborn as she was slender and dainty, with a teeny tiny waist and a great big heart. They discovered that she liked to take long walks around the island all alone. They learned that her boyfriend was a fisherman from town (that meant Port-St. Luke), whose name was Madison Fuller. And they learned that every day, rain or shine, Rena prepared her boyfriend Madison Fuller a picnic lunch, which she delivered to him at the Glutton Hill roundabout.

They left Glutton Hill and returned to town, the next step in the investigation clear: Madison Fuller must be questioned, for he might very well know when Rena was last seen.

“He might even have been the last one to see her,” Joshua suggested.

“You mean before the accident?” asked Arnold, who was driving their truck.

“I mean
at
the accident,” Joshua replied ominously.

They rode in silence until the truck rolled up to the house where Madison lay sleeping. Arnold switched off the motor and looked over at Joshua. “You think he knocked her off that bike?”

Joshua jumped out of the truck and slammed the door, then leaned in toward Arnold through the truck’s open window. “More than that,” he said. “I’d bet his fishing boat on it.”

11

G
etting to Oh is tricky. There is one flight a day from neighboring Killig, and this, usually booked up by wealthy tourists—who fall in love with the island then fly out again, never to return. So getting
away
from Oh is tricky, too. The odd yacht lays anchor long enough to take on supplies, but is hardly likely to offer you passage. A fisherman might be more generous, but his fishing boat won’t get you very far. Still, if leaving Oh is a chore, then staying is even worse. Few outsiders boast the requisite patience or the gumption to endure Oh’s hardiness. The islanders are tough coconuts to crack.

Which is not to say that once in a while someone doesn’t do it, find the right hammer, I mean, and enjoy the islanders’ softer insides. This someone might, say, buy a little piece of land, build a lovely house, and settle in for a perfectly lovely little life, confident that he’s dented the unyielding islander shells. And perhaps he will have done. At least for a little while.

But what of the island itself? Will his hammer be steady enough to master that, too? Sometimes even a local admits defeat in the face of Oh’s trials—the nosey birds and the pungent,
eavesdropping sugar cane—and hops a barge that will take her to freedom, wherever that may reside.

The beauty of Oh is that it knows how to balance its subjects. Sun, moon, fish, flower, all in perfect measure. No bird has a feather too many, no forest a tree too few. And for every someone who hops a barge, someone else is forever bound.

12

Q
uick and his pirates reached the island of Oh after a sea journey of three days, during which Quick managed to live undetected on the ship. By day, he slept hidden under bunks or lay eavesdropping on the boat where he had first stowed away. At night, he crept about below deck, by light of a stolen candle, snatching food and marveling at the strange objects of the captain and his men (their books, their drawings, their scribbles and symbols). When the moon was full and the night crew drunk and dozy, Quick climbed amid the ropes the men maneuvered to control the ship. They enchanted him, those cords as big as his fist, wrapped around wood so smooth and polished he could see his warped reflection in its sheen.

Quick relished every aspect of this lonely stowaway’s existence. He enjoyed being privy to the men’s private talks, enjoyed eating what tickled his tummy on any given night, enjoyed sleeping tucked up against wood that smelled of the sea. By day the men’s voices were his company, and by night, the stars and moon, who watched over and guided his travels without his ever knowing.

When the ship got to Oh, the first stop it was to make since leaving Quick’s island on that cloudy day, Quick was eager and
filled with glee. So eager that he could barely keep his body still under the stern-most plank of bench in the boat where he once again hid. So filled with glee that he almost giggled as the boat was lowered from the ship to the sea and began its short journey to the island. Once the boat was pulled ashore, he waited for the men in the party to disembark and collect their things and set out on their way. It seemed to him that one pirate took an eternity to find his leather notebook, and the pirate captain another ten years to decide if they should turn right or left at the mango tree that stood a stone’s throw from the sea’s edge.

Decide he finally did, and as the men’s voices were lost to birdsong and windsong and the buzzing of bees, Quick crept out of the boat. His eyes didn’t know where to look first. There were mangoes and palms and papayas, bougainvilleas and buttercups, crabs in the sand and dogs in the shade. Everything he recognized from home. Yet Oh wasn’t his home at all. When he looked to the east he saw great rolling hills instead of the distant sea. And to the north there was no village of islanders in need of a trapper of rats. Here, the villages dotted the island’s southern tip. Quick was sharp enough to know that these differences must be just the tip of the iceberg, if you will, and so off his legs carried him to explore his first foreign land.

He found waterfalls and rivers. His island had these, too, only they were different from the ones on Oh. Different in number and different in depth. He found craters and hot springs, and the lushest forest he had ever seen, with a monkey atop every tree. His island certainly did not have one of those! Quick hoped that somewhere else on Oh just then the foolish pirate was realizing how wrong he’d been: islands are most definitely
not
all alike!

Quick even talked to some of the islanders. He found a lady washing clothes in a river and greeted her, “Good morning!”

“Good morning!” she replied. “Who are you?”

“I’m a pirate, lady. I’m traveling all over the world in my ship.”

“Whose boy are you, son? Where’s your mother?”

“I don’t have a mother and I don’t have a father. I just have a ship. Good morning, lady.” And off his legs took him again.

He found a boy roasting corn cobs over a fire and greeted him. “Hello!” he said. “I’m a pirate. Could I try some of your corn?”

“You don’t look like a pirate to me.”

“I am so a pirate! I even have a ship. The biggest ship you ever saw.”

“If I give you some corn, will you show me your ship?”

Quick was reluctant. “I guess so.” (He was possessive of his ship, but he was hungry, too.) The two boys ate and Quick was disappointed to note that the corn tasted just like the corn back home. When they had finished, he led the way to the shore beyond which the ship was anchored. His explorations had taken him from one end of the island to the other and it wasn’t until he saw the dark silhouette of the pirate ship against the setting sun that he realized just how long he’d been away. His heart was struck with terror. Had they returned to the ship without him? Had he missed the boat? From the tall hillside where the two boys stood, it was impossible to tell.

Quick concentrated all his energies on stifling the tears that tried to spring to his eyes. A pirate couldn’t cry in front of an island boy who roasted corn! He looked toward the sun and held his breath. The yellow ball burned back at him, daring him not to turn away. He was sure he could hear it whisper in his ear. Crybaby Quick! it said over and over. Cry-baby Quick!

The sun on
his
island never did that.

“Did you hear something?” Quick asked his new friend.

“Hear what?”

The sun started to laugh.

Quick’s cheeks burned with anger. He would
not
cry. He was a pirate! He stared the sun in the face, his eyes open as wide as they would go. He knew if he closed them the tears would come—a satisfaction he would never give this taunting, foreign sun.

The sun, which could have blinded him in an instant, backed down, or, rather, ducked behind a passing cloud, and as it did, Quick heard the faint voices of his pirate companions. Had he not still feared the sun’s jeers, he would have cried from sheer relief. He hadn’t missed the boat! The pirates hadn’t left without him!

Quick turned abruptly and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Thanks for the corn,” he said. “I have to go.” He nearly tumbled down the hillside, so fast were his happy feet carrying him. His friend said nothing. He simply stood rooted in the dirt, in awe of the great ship that loomed in the distance and of the very first pirate he had ever met.

Quick, on the other hand, barreled through brush and branches, scraping his skin in a dozen places. As he got closer to the familiar voices, the voices he usually heard from under a bench or a thick canvas tarpaulin, he was able to see the faces out of which each one came.

“Nothing but a bunch of pineapples on this one,” a tall, bony man with a map and a cap said.

“That’s no surprise. Oh’s known for ’em,” a hairy man furiously writing in a leather book said.

“You ever taste one sweeter than what you had here?” asked the oldest pirate in the party, with a long cutlass hanging from his belt.

How funny to see the voices embodied! Fat-sounding ones coming from thin men and ones that sounded clean-shaven exhaled past fuzzy, matted beards. Just in time, Quick fought the urge to shout out to the pirates and share the joke with them. He suddenly remembered that, though
he
considered them
his
companions, they hardly considered him theirs. Terror gripped his heart again as he realized that with the pirates in view, with them all so close to the boat, he had no way to sneak back into it before they rowed off to the ship.