She gave me a smile so small and gentle that it made me lonely just to look at it. “With all due respect,” she said, “you’re a very strange young man, Lemony Snicket.”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m just someone who wandered into town and found myself in a story full of treachery and trouble. I’m going to do what I can to stop it. You can join me, Ellington. You can join anyone who’s trying to save Stain’d-by-the-Sea, instead of destroying it.”
“Join V.F.D.?” Ellington said quietly. “They’d never associate with me. After what happened at the Wade Academy…” Her voice trailed off. My account of our time at the Wade Academy is enough to make anyone’s voice trail off, which is why I do not recommend reading it.
“I would associate with you, Ellington,” I said.
“Even after everything?”
“Even after everything.”
Her green eyes searched me. “Why?” she said.
I looked away and thought of all the books she’d almost destroyed when the library flooded. I thought of the book next to my bed in the Far East Suite, which I would never finish, and the book about caviar that had burned to ashes, which I would never read, and I thought about the librarian who had given me both. “I want to know what happens next,” I said.
She reached out to touch the French press. It was cool by now, and for a moment it looked like she was going to put it back in the secret compartment in her bag. “What does happen next?” she asked.
“Next we hide you,” I said. “Hangfire thinks you are dead. We can’t have you wandering around the train.”
“That would be undesirable,” she agreed. “Can your associates hide me?”
“I don’t want them to know you’re out of your cell,” I said.
“Why not?”
“They won’t trust you.”
“Even if I’m with you?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Even the noblest of volunteers can associate with the wrong people.”
She blinked at me. “Do you really think I could join V.F.D. when this is all over?”
“If you help us defeat Hangfire,” I said, “you will already have joined.”
She pointed at my ankle. “Will it be absolutely necessary to get a tattoo like yours?”
“Moxie made us some business cards,” I said, “that seem to be working well enough. Come on, grab your French press and we’ll get out of here.”
Ellington put her bag on her shoulder. “Forget the press,” she said. “Tell me, Snicket, what makes you so sure you tricked Hangfire, and didn’t get tricked yourself?”
I looked at the bag. I could have searched it. She’d challenged me to search it. “With all due respect,” I said, adopting an expression she’d used that would always make me think of her, “that’s the wrong question.”
“What’s the right one?”
I handed her one mask and lowered the other one over myself, and masked, we left the Café Compartment. “The right one is, where are we going?”
“And where are we going?” she asked.
“To the scene of the crime,” I said, and led her back down the train, through sliding doors which rattled as we went through. A few passengers passed us by, their masked faces strange and impossible to read. We passed the librarians’ compartment and then Sally Murphy’s. We passed the compartment where I had found Kellar, and Moxie’s, where my associates were waiting, and finally we arrived at the sliding doors to the prison car. I peered through to check for the Officers Mitchum, but they were nowhere to be seen. That wasn’t why I had stopped.
“Locked,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I shook them to show her. “We’ve got to get in there,” I said. “You’ve got to be hidden before my associates come out of the compartment, or Hangfire approaches the Officers’ Lounge to meet me.”
“Surely you know how to pick a lock,” she said.
“Do you have a hairpin?” I said. “A nail file? Do you have anything at all that might do the trick?”
Ellington was still masked, so I couldn’t read her expression as she took her bag off her shoulder. She unzipped it and then there was a small object in her slender fingers.
“I thought so,” I said.
“I thought you thought so,” she said, and unlocked the door.
“Is there anything else in that bag you want to show me?”
“You can see for yourself,” Ellington said, tucking the key back into the bag’s secret compartment. “I don’t have the statue, Snicket. What will you do when you meet Hangfire in the Officers’ Lounge?”
“We’ll find out,” I said, and we went in. The prison car was rattly but empty, with one cell door open and the other closed, and the irritating lettering on the door in the back where Hangfire and I would soon rendezvous. “Rendezvous” is just a fancy word for “meet.” There are others. Don’t think about them. Don’t think about anything, Snicket. Keep going. You have to be certain.
Cell One was windy and noisy and very cold. After recent events, I almost expected Qwerty to be alive and well, having played dead even better than Ellington had. It would have been nice to see him. But Qwerty was not in the compartment. I looked around the empty cell and then at Ellington. She’s a box of fire, I thought. You cannot keep her near you for long, but there is no safe place to stow her away.
Ellington turned her mask to look at me. “I’m going to hide here?”
“You’re going to hide where the killer hid,” I said, and stepped carefully across the broken glass and leaned out the window. The black air rushed by. “All of us rushed into the compartment and found Qwerty murdered, but nobody thought to look out the window.”
She stood next to me and peered out of the shattered hole. “The railing looks decorative,” she said. “It won’t support my weight.”
“It supported mine,” I said, and unclipped my belt, “and when I was nine years old, I learned how to fashion a makeshift harness from a strong belt. It would be a shame to waste that expertise.”
“You know what else would be a shame?” she asked. Even through the mask’s filter I could hear the tremble in her voice. “Falling off a speeding train.”
“It would be a shame,” I agreed, “but it’s not going to happen.”
“There must be another place to hide.” Her eyes blinked very fast behind her mask. “The Mitchums let me out of my cell. Maybe they’ll hide me, too.”
“It won’t work,” I said. “The Mitchums will tell Stew, and Stew will tell Hangfire.”
“I’m not going out there.”
“People all over the world, in every age in history, have done daring, impossible things for more or less noble reasons. Your turn now, Ellington.”
“I won’t do it. Please, Snicket. I’m scared!” Her voice rose over the sound of the wind, and I shivered in the broken cell.
“Get scared later,” I told her. “I’ll take you to those wonderful places I told you about, and you can get scared then.”
She took a step toward me, clasping the bag tightly. I wrapped the belt crisscross around her and started a Devil’s Tongue knot, which had never failed me. “Tell me about the places,” she said, as I worked on the harness.
“Winnipeg is supposed to be lovely this time of year,” I said.
“Winnipeg?”
“It’s at the confluence of two large rivers that turn gray and still at night,” I said. “Winnipeg has been greatly influenced by French culture, so it will be no chore at all to find a good French press. We will drink coffee and watch the river from the balcony of the house of an associate of mine. We will attend masked balls at her castle, and you can get scared then.”
“Castle?” she said.
“My associate is the Duchess of Winnipeg,” I said, “or she will be, when her mother dies.”
“My father is already dead,” she said.
“Don’t think about him,” I said, and I reached out my hand. Ellington grasped it, and together we stepped onto
the little table by the window. The wind rustled through us. She held on tightly to me, and I could feel how frightened she was.
“It’s important, Snicket,” she said, and she had to raise her voice now that we were so close to the clattering night. “It’s very important that you come back for me.”
“I think that every time you go away,” I told her, and lowered her down. I double-knotted the belt to the railing. Then I triple-knotted it. Then I triple-checked it. And then I let go. I could see her dimly in the dark, a masked bundle tied to the side of the train, like some trapped orphan in a wicked book. She might have been quiet, or perhaps she was screaming. I couldn’t hear anything but the noise of the train. Dear Kit, show me a man who dangles a girl from a train and I will show you a villain. Are you, I asked myself. Are you a villain? You are part of a noble organization. You have noble associates on the train, and those are just the ones you know about. Together you will defeat the treachery of the devious man and solve the murder of the noble one. It will be a triumph of libraries over treachery. The town will cease to be tormented by the myth of the Bombinating Beast, and the world will be quiet again, and the volunteers will gather around a table and feast on good food in celebration of a new formula for invisible ink that will restore the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. You’re not a villain. Are you?
No one answered. It wasn’t really the kind of question that gets an answer, which was too bad, because I wanted one. So I had to answer myself. Keep going, Snicket. You must be certain, because you might be wrong. You might be wrong about all of it. You could burn down a whole glyptotheca and not find the statue you wanted to steal. You might be wrong, so you must be certain, and the way to be certain is to dangle the frightened girl from the speeding train. It is a relief, Snicket, how frightened she is. It means she’s never done it before.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was an empty journey out of the prison car. There wasn’t a sign of anyone and out the windows was nothing but night and noise. The train whistle blew and I thought of my early bedtime, and the lonely sound I heard from my bed in the Far East Suite that began this journey. I wondered where it would end.
I let myself into Moxie’s compartment, my thoughts as dark as the view outside, and for a moment I felt like an intruder, intruding on my favorite kind of gathering. Masks and coats had been piled into a corner and everyone was quiet and focused on the task at hand. Here and there on the carpet were crumpled-up pieces of paper, tossed away when something hadn’t been figured right, and there were neat stacks of typed pages lined up on the bench, when something had been figured out exactly. And doing the figuring were all my associates from Stain’d-by-the-Sea, Moxie Mallahan and Kellar Haines at the typewriter, Jake Hix and Cleo Knight standing over the notes with Ornette Lost, who was the first to look up at my arrival, her eyes bright and cautious under her cap.
“Lemony Snicket,” she said. “Surprised to see me?”
“I knew you were on board,” I said, as the others gathered around. Jake clapped me on the shoulder, and Moxie gave me a hug I wasn’t sure I deserved.
“You’re back,” she said. “You’re back, and you’re safe.”
I tried to return her smile, and gestured to the typed pages. “Dashiell Qwerty would be proud to see this.”
“We’ve been working hard comparing notes,” Moxie said, “but what about you, Snicket? Have you learned anything while you were away?”
It was a question my parents always asked when I walked in the door, and for a moment I wondered if I would ever hear it again. “I hope so,” I said, and moved a stack of paper so I could sit down. The two cardboard statues were busy being paperweights, and I reached into my pocket for another of Ornette’s paper sculptures, the folded cup with the crinkly steam.
“You found my message,” Ornette said with a smile. “The others were sure you would.”
“Ornette had Pip and Squeak taxi her to Offshore Island,” Kellar explained, “and she snuck aboard when the train stopped.”
“I’m the one who made the beasts,” Ornette said. “If I hadn’t made two of them, Hangfire never would have realized what we were up to. I’m responsible for the mess we’re in.”
“Kellar and I are responsible,” Moxie said. “We each cooked up the same plan.”
“We’re all responsible,” Cleo said. “If my formula was done, we wouldn’t worry about Hangfire’s mess.”
“I knew I had to warn everyone,” Ornette said, “but I was caught sneaking aboard.”
“Who caught you?” I asked.
“Two people who said they were real live train conductors.”
“Gifford and Ghede,” Kellar said, frowning over his notes.
“I managed to distract them,” said Ornette, whose powers of distraction had helped us before, “and I left a message on the floor. I saw a masked figure enter the Café Compartment, before the bell even rang. I figured it was Hangfire.”
Everyone turned to me. “Was it Hangfire?” Moxie asked quietly. “Did you find him?”
“He found me,” I said.
Moxie straightened her hat and went to her typewriter, flexing her fingers like a pianist or someone who handles poisonous snakes. “Tell us everything,” she said.
“Well, first I had some coffee.”
Moxie narrowed her eyes at me. “There’s only one person who would make you drink coffee, Snicket.”
“Ellington Feint made me a cup with a device she brought with her,” I admitted.
Jake gasped. “How did that girl get out of her cell?”
“It wasn’t much of a cell,” I said, “not with the window shattered.”
“Ellington Feint and Dashiell Qwerty shared Cell One,” Moxie said, typing it as she realized it, and then she stopped and looked at me. “She must have killed him.”
I thought of Ellington dangling out the window of the train, and shook my head.
“I know how you feel about Feint,” Cleo said to me. “We all do, Snicket. But if Theodora is not the murderer, then Ellington Feint must be. There was no one else in the compartment.”
“I didn’t see anyone else,” I said. “That’s not quite the same thing.”
Kellar looked around the room. “There aren’t too many places to hide in these compartments,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose you could duck down under the table, or curl up in one of the racks.”
I shook my head. “Someone would have noticed,” I said.
“Maybe the killer ran out of the compartment before anyone else arrived,” Ornette said.
I shook my head at her, too. “The Mitchums were coming from the Officers’ Lounge,” I said, “and I was coming from the opposite direction. Somebody would have seen the murderer.”
“But nobody did,” Moxie said.
“Well, it can’t have happened like those so-called witnesses told it,” Jake said sourly.
“I talked to those three myself,” I said. “They’re librarians, and they’re scared. They witnessed something, all right. But it wasn’t Qwerty’s murder.” I sighed, and looked at all the shared research. “Dashiell Qwerty was a noble librarian, working with us on a volunteer basis. He recommended book after book until I uncovered the sinister mystery that surrounded me, and saw the entire story of this town. The Inhumane Society realized this, and framed Dashiell Qwerty for arson to get him out of town. My chaperone had a plan to set him free, by disguising herself as a train conductor and sneaking him out of his cell. Qwerty wanted to stay on board so he might warn others in the city about Hangfire’s plans. He was murdered in the middle of their argument.”
“So Hangfire killed Qwerty?” Jake asked. “That scoundrel will stop at nothing.”
“It would have been impossible for an adult to commit the crime,” I said, “even an adult scoundrel. Qwerty was killed from outside the train, by a person hanging on to the railing. An adult would have been too heavy to hang on to the outside of the train. The killer was a child.”
“So it was Ellington Fei
nt,” Moxie said.
I shook my head again. “Ellington didn’t commit the crime, but she witnessed it. When the Mitchums arrived on the scene, she traded her freedom for her silence about the killer. The officers granted her freedom, and hid her in the Officers’ Lounge while they covered up for the crime.”
“Why would they do that?” Cleo asked. “Why would they cover up a murder?”
“I’m sure it was heartbreaking,” I said, “for the law to do something so lawless. But they were protecting someone important to them—their darling little boy. It was Stew Mitchum who clung to the railings of The Thistle of the Valley, shot Dashiell Qwerty with a poison dart, and then escaped into a compartment full of librarians scared into hiding the truth.”
“He must have passed right by our window,” Moxie said with a shudder, looking out at the blackness.
“So Theodora was railroaded,” Kellar said, “and is locked in Cell Two for a crime she didn’t commit.”
“Tonight,” I said, “we’re going to get her out.”
Everyone looked at me. “How are we going to do that?” Jake asked me.
“The Mitchums aren’t going to let her out of there,” Moxie said. “They helped frame her for murder to protect their son.”
“They’ll let her out if Hangfire tells them to,” I said.
“And why would Hangfire tell them to?” Cleo asked.
I picked up a cardboard paperweight. “In exchange for the Bombinating Beast.”
Kellar frowned. “But that’s the wrong plan,” he said. “Hangfire received too many messages, so he knows our statue is a decoy.”
Moxie blinked, and I saw her hand reach for her typewriter and stop. “The real one,” she said quietly. “The real statue. Ellington had it, last we knew. Did she give it to you?”
“She said it was confiscated a long time ago,” I reminded her. “When we were at Wade Academy.”
“No way, Fay Wray,” Jake scoffed, using a favorite expression of his. “It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. If Hangfire had the Bombinating Beast, his plan would be complete.”
“Did you search her bag, Snicket?” Cleo asked. “You told us it had a secret compartment.”