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13 Suspicious Incidents
Reports 7–13
Lemony Snicket
Art by Seth
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A Sneak Peek of “Who Could That Be at This Hour?”
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Please find enclosed herein seven (7) reports filed under “Suspicious Incidents” in our archives. The seven (7) reports have seven (7) conclusions which have been separated from their corresponding reports for security reasons. The reports are contained in sub-file One (1) and the conclusions in sub-file B (b) so that it is impossible for each report and conclusion to be in the same place at once. For your convenience, both sub-files are enclosed together here.
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Sub-file One: Reports.
Violent Butcher. Twelve or Thirteen. Midnight Demon. Three Suspects. Vanished Message. Troublesome Ghost. Figure in Fog.
VIOLENT BUTCHER.
It seemed as good a day as any to go to Black Cat Coffee, one of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s last businesses and certainly its most unusual one. There was a girl who spent a lot of time there, drinking the strong, bitter coffee served up by the place’s enormous and elaborate machinery. The girl was Ellington Feint, and she’s a long story all by herself. I hadn’t seen her in quite some time, and I thought Black Cat Coffee was my best chance of spotting her. But as soon as I hit the corner of Caravan and Parfait, I knew I’d walked into a different story altogether. My path was largely blocked by a large man sitting largely on the curb. He was reading a magazine and wearing an apron, although he was such a big man that it looked like he was reading a matchbook and wearing a handkerchief. Normally, I don’t like to use the word “mountainous” about a person, but this man was so large, and his shoulders so peaked, and his beard so rough and scraggly like a grouping of trees on his chin, that he actually looked like a mountain. I didn’t have the proper equipment to climb him, so I tried a different approach.
“Excuse me,” I said, but the man shook his mountainous head.
“Sorry, chief,” the man said. “I can’t let anybody in here. You shouldn’t drink coffee, anyway. It’s bad for you.”
“It’s bad for you if you never do anything bad for you,” I said, “but I’m not here for coffee. I’m looking for someone.”
“Well, I’m looking for someone, too,” the man said, “and until I find who I’m looking for, I can’t let you in.”
“Maybe I can help you,” I said. “I’ve been known to find a person or two. It’s more or less my job.”
“My job’s being a butcher,” the man said. He pointed to his apron, which I now saw was quite stained, and held up his magazine, which I now saw was called Read Meat. “My name’s Mack. I used to work over at Partial Foods, but now I’m freelancing. I don’t know you. Usually I don’t like people I don’t know, so why don’t you skedaddle? I can’t let anyone in here until I find the kid I’m here to find.”
“Maybe we’re looking for the same person,” I said.
He looked interested, but not mountainously so.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Mine is a girl,” I said. “A little taller than I am, with black hair, green eyes, and unusual eyebrows.”
“Wrong,” the man said, with another gigantic shake of his head. “Mine’s a boy named Drumstick, and he’s preternaturally short, with curly red hair and extremely normal eyebrows. I don’t know what color his eyes are, because I never noticed. He’s my son and I need to find him.”
“Preternaturally” is a word which here means “extra.” I was beginning to preternaturally dislike this butcher. “What makes you think your son is at Black Cat Coffee?”
“Because I saw him run right in there.”
“Why did he do that?”
“For the reason that I was chasing him.”
“Why were you chasing him?”
“For the reason that I would hit him with this magazine,” Mack said. “Drumstick was a very bad boy today. I told him to stick around the house and not go outside, and then he kept getting in my way and wouldn’t leave. I yelled at him about it for around an hour, and then he told me he was going to take the train into the city to live with his mother. She’s a butcher, too, but not as good with venison. He took all the money he’s earned repairing women’s shoes and ran out the door. I chased him here.”
“Why did you stop at the door?” I asked, hoping the answer was “Because I realized I was doing something wrong.”
“I got real tired,” the man said instead. “Now I’m just going to wait him out. He can’t stay in there forever.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “There’s bread and coffee, and a piano that plays lonely tunes all by itself.”
“Say, I have an idea,” Mack said, leaning in close to talk quietly. His breath was warm and full of meat. “Why don’t you go in with me? If I go in alone, I know he’ll slip away. He moves quick as a game hen. But two of us could corner him. If you help me out here, I’ll give you a rack of lamb.”
“No, thanks,” I said, thinking that it wasn’t a good day to go to Black Cat Coffee after all. It was a good day to sit at the library by myself and fill my head with something other than the story of this family.
“Nothing I can say to convince you?” Mack asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“You ever get hit with a magazine?” Mack asked me. His voice was friendly enough, but he was rolling Read Meat up into a mean-looking tube. “They say it stings something awful.”
I looked up and down the empty streets. “Well,” I said, “you’ve convinced me.”
“Thattaboy,” Mack said, and rose up from the sidewalk like a new volcanic island. He lurched through the door with thattaboy following glumly behind. Black Cat Coffee looked the same as always and as empty as usual, but even when the place was empty, it was usually loud. The vast, rackety machinery which produced Black Cat Coffee’s only refreshments was completely still, and the piano which usually played melancholy tunes was closed and quiet. It was quiet enough that I stopped to listen for a moment. Then I walked up to the counter and looked at the three buttons the place had instead of people who worked there. If you pressed the C button, the shiny machinery behind the counter whirred into life and brewed a single cup of coffee. The B button produced a small loaf of hot, fresh bread, which I liked much better. The A button activated a folding staircase which clicked into place so you could walk up to the attic, which was a good place to hide secrets. If I were Drumstick, I thought, I’d hide in the attic. I would also change my name.
“I thought I heard a crash after my son ran in here,” Mack said, and headed over to peer behind the counter, and I peered with him. There were cups and saucers stacked up on shelves, and a surprising mess on the floor. Someone had overturned a dented metal trash can, which lay on its side surrounded by bread crusts, glass bottles, a cracked flowerpot, and what looked like a
flattened clump of tissue paper. But there wasn’t a preternaturally small boy with curly hair and eyes his father should have looked at. If you look someone in the eyes, really look at them, you are much less likely to hit them. You are less likely to even think of it.
“I saw a movie once where something important was hidden in a piano,” I said.
“I saw that one,” Mack said. “All those fools singing in French. Hold on and I’ll check.”
I held on and he checked. Drumstick was not inside the piano. I didn’t think he would be. A piano that plays by itself is called a player piano, and it has various mechanisms inside it that would prevent even the smallest person from crawling inside. I did not want Mack to find his son, but the trouble is that not wanting someone to be found is almost the same as wanting to find them. In either case, you need to know where they are.
“There is another door to Black Cat Coffee,” I said hopefully. “Maybe Drumstick simply ran back out again.”
Mack either grunted or laughed. It’s hard to tell which with some people. He walked to the door I’d pointed out, his thick feet moving on the floor like sad toads. It was closed, and it was still closed when Mack was through rattling and pounding it. “Locked,” he said. “Locked tight as last year’s pants. Drumstick didn’t leave. My son is hidden somewhere in here. I’d bet my juiciest veal chops on it.”
I looked again at the machinery and looked again at the piano. I looked everywhere in the quiet room but at the button marked A. I did not like Mack, but I could not disagree with his reasoning. He wiped his hands on his apron and walked slowly toward the counter. “Drumstick!” he called. “Come on out and get your punishment! I’m going to wallop you over and over, and then we’ll go home and have some bone marrow for supper!”
“Bone marrow?” I said, trying my best to stand in his way. “What’s the best way to prepare that, in your opinion? Roasted? Creamed? Discarded?”
Mack glared at me and looked over my shoulder. “I forgot about that staircase,” he said, and reached over me to press the A button. The staircase whirred into life and descended with great creakings and groanings. “That’s why he threw all that trash around,” the butcher said, raising his voice over the noise. “To cover up for this sound. Then he ran up and hid in the attic. Well, he’s caught now, like a cow on my workbench.” He waved his magazine back and forth for practice and began to thump up the stairs. I moved, too. By the time he was up the stairs, I was behind the counter. I waited and I kept waiting. I was listening closely, but it was hard to listen closely while Mack kept calling “Drumstick!” in a fake friendly voice that made me shudder. Then Mack was all the way up the stairs and then I heard it, a small metallic sound that made me press the button, the one marked A. There were more metallic sounds as the staircase folded itself up again and Mack started yelling. The button in the attic was tricky to find, so it would take a little while for Mack to lower the staircase and get down again. I hoped it was enough to give a head start to a preternaturally small boy with curly hair, normal eyebrows, and hazel eyes, fleeing toward safety and his mother.
The conclusion to “Violent Butcher” is filed under “Small Sound,” here.
TWELVE OR THIRTEEN.
“Lemony Snicket,” said Moxie Mallahan. She was talking to me. “Do you want to see something funny?”
It was an ordinary day, and Moxie had found me sitting on the lawn in front of one of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s most impressive buildings, looking at a large object. The building had once been City Hall and was now a library in one half and a police station in the other. The lawn had once been pretty but was now scraggly, and the large object I was looking at had once been an enormous statue and was now a metal lump, following a suspicious explosion some years previous. The explosion and the lump were part of my biggest case, and on some ordinary days I liked to sit and look at the statue’s remains, hoping that a new clue would drop upon me. So far the only thing to drop upon me had been an acorn. An acorn was not a clue to anything, as far as I could tell. Something funny seemed like it could be a nice break.
“What kind of funny?” I asked her. “Funny like a clown onstage? Or funny like a clown hanging around the entrance to a bank?”
“The bank one.” Moxie sat down next to me and opened her typewriter case with a click.
“What’s the news, Moxie?”
“I was in the archives of The Stain’d Lighthouse,” she told me, “looking through the articles my mother wrote when she was still a reporter in town.”
“I bet she was a good one,” I said, “if her daughter is any indication.”
“I like to think I developed some of my journalism skills on my own,” Moxie said.
“I’m sure she’ll be very proud when she sees you again.”
She handed me an envelope. “In the meantime, take a look.”
“I don’t see anything funny about an envelope,” I said.
Moxie took off her hat and rolled her eyes. “And I don’t see anything funny about that remark,” she said. “Why don’t you look inside the envelope?”
“Good idea,” I said, but when I slid the crumpled newspaper article into my hands, I still didn’t see anything funny.
“Tepid Turnout for Frome Race,” I read out loud. “Only a dozen sledders competed in this year’s race down Homily Hill for the Ethan Frome Festival. Organizers said attendance at the auction was also a disappointment, despite such distinguished items as an oil painting of Gary Dorian, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s famed cosmetician. Hot cider sales were also low. Complete story on page thirty-four.”
There wasn’t any more to it, so I turned my eyes to Moxie and shrugged.
“Don’t shrug at me, Snicket.”
“I shrug when there’s something to shrug about,” I explained. “I’m sorry it’s not a very interesting article, but it’s not your mother’s fault. It sounds like the Ethan Frome Festival wasn’t very interesting.”
“You’re wrong there,” Moxie said, her voice a little wistful. “The Ethan Frome Festival was once a wondrous event in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Every winter there would be a large auction where people would bid large sums of money on various items, and all the money would be donated to the library. After the auction there would be a competitive sled race down to the bottom of the hill, where the fastest sledder would win a medal and a very handsome fountain pen provided by Ink Inc. But when the ink industry began to fade, the festival got smaller and smaller until they canceled it altogether.”
“That’s a sad story,” I said, “but I don’t see much funny about it.”
“Take another look.”
“Tepid Turnout—”
“Another look, Snicket. Not another read.”
My eye moved to the photograph which accompanied the article. It wasn’t a very good photograph, and it was made worse by the fading, shriveled paper on which it was printed.
“Looks like tough sledding,” I said. “Lots of trees and rocks, unless those are just ink smudges.”
“The Stain’d Lighthouse never smudged,” Moxie said sternly, “and it’s not the landscape I noticed. It’s the sledders.”
“This photograph was taken from the top of Homily Hill,” I said. “The sledders look like little bugs in the snow.”
“How many bugs?”
I looked at the photograph again and then I looked at it again and once more. Then I looked at Moxie.
“I knew you’d catch on eventually,” she told me.
“I count thirteen.”
“So do I,” Moxie said, taking the newspaper, “and the article says a dozen.”
“Well, somebody miscounted.”
“My mother was a very good journalist,” Moxie said. “If she said there were a dozen sledders competing in the race, that’s how many there were.”
It is useless to argue with somebody about their mother. Even if you win the argument, you feel like a scoundrel. “Well, then perhaps someone just happened to be sledding down the same hill,” I said. ??
?Someone who wasn’t competing.”
“That doesn’t seem very likely. If you liked sledding, why wouldn’t you participate in the race?”
“I don’t know why anyone likes sledding in the first place,” I said. “Life goes downhill enough without speeding the process along. Was there a referee, perhaps?”
“There was no referee.”
“Another photographer, then? Getting pictures of the racers close up?”
“At the time this article appeared, The Stain’d Lighthouse had only one photographer.”
“A rock that happened to be shaped like a sledder?”
Moxie gave this last guess of mine the glare it deserved. “I was hoping a pair of fresh eyes would solve this mystery,” she said. “I’ve been staring at this photograph for quite some time trying to figure it out.”
“Fresh eyes might not be enough for figuring,” I said. “We need more to go on than an old photograph. The rest of the article would be helpful. Where’s page thirty-four?”
Moxie shook her head. “I searched the archives for hours, but page thirty-four is nowhere to be found.”
“Do you mind if I ask you why you’re investigating this particular mystery?” I said, looking back at the ruined statue. “I don’t have to remind you that we have quite a bit of pressing business to attend to.”
“Of course you don’t have to remind me, Snicket,” Moxie said. “I was investigating our big case, but I got distracted by this other crime.”
“I don’t know if you can call a mysterious photograph of sledders a crime,” I said. “It’s more like a curiosity.”
“Well, I got curious about a theft that was committed on the day of the festival,” Moxie said, “and I thought the photograph might be a clue.”
“Theft?” I asked. “What was stolen?”
“An oil painting of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s famed cosmetician,” Moxie said.