I never would have guessed what it was.
“Honeydew melons!” she cried. “Grab all of the honeydew melons!”
Stew Mitchum banged his stick against the side of the building. “You heard her!” he shouted to the people gathered on the dock. “Honeydew melons! Get moving!” He sounded as surprised as I was that the crucial item in Hangfire’s sinister fragmentary plot was every sensible person’s least favorite item in fruit salad.
A successful fish business, I remembered, requires loyal workers and a steady supply of food.
Sharon led the way inside, dragging Kellar as if to the dentist. The children began to file in after them, with Stew keeping watch by the door. I saw the masked figure of Ornette walk up to Stew and ask something. Ornette kept talking, gesturing wildly. Whatever she was saying was making Stew look embarrassed. He shuffled his feet. He clenched and unclenched his hands. He was probably blushing, because he looked down at the ground, and when he looked down I saw Jake, Cleo, and Moxie make their move, moving quickly, quietly, and scurrying down the alley. They were going to make it to our meeting as arranged. I thought I was probably going to be late.
The last child filed into the store, and I waited a moment before skulking onto the loading dock. They’d left the door open, but I did not need to go inside. I knew what I’d see. The last remaining schoolchildren of Stain’d-by-the-Sea would be in the produce section, stealing honeydew melons while Polly Partial lay too dazed to call the police.
And what would the police think, I wondered, if they learned their adorable son was participating in a robbery?
I found a pretty good hiding place, over by a few trash bins, and I stood amid a few disorganized prunes and waited to see what happened next. I didn’t wait long. The children filed back out, holding their melons in their arms like precious bundles. As they began to file onto the school bus, I saw Ornette, holding not one but two honeydews, and she saw me and took a few cautious steps toward the trash bins.
“I might not be able to meet our peers,” she murmured. “Stew is peering at me too closely.”
“I don’t need you to meet us,” I said. “Not if you can trust your uncles.”
“Doesn’t everybody trust their uncles?”
“Everybody does, but not everybody should. Do they buy you popcorn at the movies or do they say it’s too expensive?”
“They taught me how to sneak it into the movies under my coat.”
“Then you can probably trust them. I need you to bring them a message.”
Ornette shifted her melons to one hand so she could reach into a pocket and pull out another square of paper. I reached into my pocket and found a small pencil. We held out the items to each other, like matching pieces of a puzzle. It just might work, I thought, as I took the paper and wrote a few words in the handwriting I never had time to improve. You just might have the right group of volunteers.
I heard footsteps approaching just as I was done. It was too late to duck behind the trash bins. There is a walk that mothers have when they are striding angrily toward other people’s children. Nothing else sounds like it in the world.
“What are you two students up to?” she asked. Her voice was buzzy behind the mask and her yellow fingernails looked chipped away. “We don’t have time for nonsense. We’re stealing honeydew melons.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound as dazed as possible. “I got dizzy.”
“Don’t be sorry and don’t be dizzy. Be on the bus.”
“Mother,” came the voice of Kellar Haines. “Leave my friends alone.”
Sharon whirled around to face him. Both mother and son were masked, so I couldn’t see their faces. But we all have seen the faces of other people’s families when they are fighting right in front of us.
“We didn’t come to Stain’d-by-the-Sea to make friends,” Sharon said. Her voice reminded me of Prosper Lost, or maybe it just sounded like the voice of every exhausted and worried adult.
Kellar Haines gave a mighty sigh, like a dam breaking. He’d been waiting to sigh like that for a long time. “Stop it, Mother,” he said fiercely, and took a step closer to whisper into her mask. “We can’t keep assisting Hangfire,” he said. “The only way to rescue Lizzie is to fight his treachery, not help it along.”
The mask gasped, and Sharon raised her hand for a moment. It was perhaps the same hand she had used to strike my chaperone, but she couldn’t do it again. After a pause, her shoes stalked her down the dock and onto the school bus. Kellar and I watched her go, but when I turned to see if Ornette was watching too, she was already gone.
“Thank you,” I said to Kellar.
“Thank you,” he replied. “I’d better keep an eye on my mother, though, in case she decides to warn Hangfire that some of us are working against him. Will you and the others be OK without me?”
“I think so,” I said. “Will you be OK without us?”
“I’ll catch the next bus into town,” he promised.
“Then you’d better hurry up and join your mother.”
“I’m hurryupping,” Kellar said, but then he paused for a moment and looked at his mother, who was back behind the windshield. “She wasn’t always like this, you know,” he said.
“None of us were,” I said, and let him go. The school bus started its engine as Kellar climbed aboard, and in a rising cloud of exhaust, vanishing into the sky like invisible ink, the students of Wade Academy were gone. I waited until I couldn’t hear the buzzing engine, and then walked back down the alley, breathing a little easier, even with the mask on.
It came out of the darkest doorway. Most violent things do. It shoved me down and I rolled against a garbage can, losing my mask, mucking up my pants, and seriously annoying my left side. I looked up at what had happened. Stew Mitchum stood with his hands on his hips, unmasked and unpleasant. He was looking daggers at me, a phrase which here means “giving me nasty looks.” I was in too much pain to look daggers back. The best I could manage was looking a couple of toothpicks.
“This is a relief,” I managed to say. “You gave me a new bump instead of exacerbating the first one.”
He just stared. The stick was still in his hands.
“Exacerbate,” I said, “is a word which here means ‘make worse,’ as in the sentence, ‘Stew Mitchum is exacerbating the whole world.’ ”
“I don’t like you, Snicket,” Stew said. “I’ve never liked you. You’re a full portion of my least favorite thing.”
“What would that be?” I said. “Justice? Kindness? Literacy?”
He gave me a kick. He was good at that and I told him so, but I was gasping so much that he might not have heard me.
“You’re a snoopy guy,” he told me. “We don’t like snoopy guys around here.”
“You know what I don’t like?” I said, when I was done gasping. “Suspicious fires. Enslaved schoolchildren. I don’t like a town having its life drained away from it, like ink from an octopus. And speaking of sea creatures, I don’t like—”
Someone cleared their throat and we both looked back at a tall, masked figure, watching us calmly. Too calmly, I thought. I wanted him worried. He gave Stew a calm wave, like a father picking up his son from school. Stew nodded and turned back to me. He stepped closer. He looked large. He smelled sweaty.
“This is your last warning,” he said. He was calm now, too. “We’re measuring you for a coffin. Get out of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. This town is a dangerous place for Lemony Snicket.”
“It’s dangerous for every decent person,” I said. “Measure me all you want. Kick me around and give me goose eggs. I’m not going to stop.”
Stew took one step closer, and raised his stick over his head. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” he told me. “This is something enormous, Snicket. It’s as big as the sea.”
“The sea’s gone,” I reminded him.
He gave me the worst kind of smile. “You’re very brave, Snicket, and very resourceful. But even if you stop us from burning
down Diceys—”
Hangfire cleared his throat again. Stew lowered his stick long enough for me to relax a little, and when I was relaxed he gave me one more kick, very hard. Someone made a bad noise, a wet cough of pain. That was you, I thought. You made the noise. That was you, and this is your own blood you’re tasting in your mouth.
The bell rang the all-clear. I just lay there and listened to two pairs of footsteps fading away. They’re gone, I told myself. Stand up. Don’t stop. You said you weren’t going to stop. Don’t let these criminals make you a liar.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I limped into Hungry’s like a broken parade. My associates blinked at me in amazement. Even Hungry stopped wiping the wall. I must have looked worse than I felt. I felt very, very awful.
“Egad, Snicket,” Cleo said, as Jake hurried from behind the counter. “What happened to you?”
“I abandoned my sister in a train station,” I said.
“You’re not making sense,” Moxie said, and took my arm. “Sit down here.”
Pip and Squeak cleared out of a booth. I sat down and leaned back. Cleo looked sharply into my eyes and then turned to her sweetheart. “Ice,” she told Jake. “Ice and towels. What part hurts the worst, Snicket?”
I closed my eyes to think about this. Hungry’s moved around me like a rocking chair. “All the parts I brought with me,” I said, “but there are some suitcases I left behind in the city. Those don’t hurt.”
“Don’t talk for a minute,” I heard Cleo say. I felt a towel on my lip and realized my lip hurt. My own blood was still in my mouth, and I still didn’t like it there. I made my eyes open and saw everyone worrying above me.
“Hungry,” I said, before I knew I said it. “I’m hurt and I’m hungry.”
“What’s that broth you have bubbling?” Cleo asked Jake.
“Porcini mushroom,” Jake said.
“Give him some,” Cleo said.
Jake footstepped away and Cleo wrapped some ice in a towel and gave it to me. I held it to my side, right where Stew had kicked me, and then took the mug of soup Jake handed me and sipped. The hot broth and the cold ice worked together on me. Porcini mushrooms are rich and smooth and whispered to my body that maybe things weren’t so bad. The ice was lumpy against my side and said that maybe things were bad but they would get better. I listened to them both. Hungry came over and glared at me and then looked at her nephew.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she said to him. “Didn’t I tell you that Snicket lad was a bad influence?”
“It’s true,” I said. “I am. I hope as the years pass you will find it in your heart to forgive me.”
She put her rag down. “Don’t get smart with me, sonny boy,” she said. “There was nothing wrong with this town until you and your crazy mom showed up and started stirring things up.”
A small piece of mushroom slipped down my throat. It was easier to swallow than the idea that Theodora was my mother. “There was everything wrong with this town,” I said. “Things are so rotten here that even the garbage is getting stolen.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “I had a very nice garbage can that we kept behind the counter, but now it’s gone.”
“I tracked it down for you, Hungry. It’s in the trunk of a Dilemma parked on Wayward Way.”
She blinked. “Really?”
“Go see for yourself,” I said.
She looked at me for a minute and I waited for it to work. Telling an adult to go see something for themselves always works. They never take your word for it. They always, always, have to go see, and Hungry was no different. She grumbled and she muttered and she looked at me again, but then she hurried out the door to find her garbage, and finally I could talk freely with my associates.
“That trunk probably smells awful by now,” I told Cleo.
“I’ll mix up a good deodorizer,” she said. “Let’s worry about other things.”
“Like why Kellar hasn’t shown up,” Moxie said with a frown.
“Or Ornette,” Jake said.
“Kellar’s taking the next bus,” I said, “and Ornette had to visit her family.”
“Then everyone’s accounted for,” Cleo said.
“Everyone,” I said, “except Filene N. Gottlin.”
“Why are you smiling?” Moxie asked me.
“I guess because I’m hungry,” I said. “Jake, how about lunch for everybody?”
Jake had already spooned out three more soups. “What goes great with porcini mushroom soup,” he said, “is a farro risotto. Hold on, everybody.”
We held on. The soup helped. Farro is a little like rice and a lot like delicious. Jake chopped onions and garlic while the farro bubbled away in a little pot, and then sautéed the whole thing up with a little cheese and served it on big round plates with a handful of fresh peas on top. If you don’t like peas, it is probably because you have not had them fresh. It is the difference between reading a great book and reading the summary on the back.
“This is terrific,” I said, after the first bite.
“When Cleo moved into Handkerchief Heights to continue her scientific work,” Jake said, “I started growing some vegetables in the garden just outside the cottage. It’s worked out pretty well.”
“Let’s hope the rest of the day goes the same way,” I said.
Cleo frowned at me. “Whatever this fragmentary plot is,” she said, “your part in it is done, Snicket. You need to spend the rest of the day in bed.”
I shook my head. Even that hurt a little. “None of us have time to lie around doing nothing,” I said.
“What happened to being patient in the face of perplexity?”
“The trouble with being patient is that eventually you get tired of it,” I said. “Hangfire’s striking tonight. He’s going to burn down Diceys Department Store. You’ve got to get there first and stop him.”
“Burning down a department store?” Jake asked. “That’s the big plot?”
“This all started with a barn fire,” I reminded him, “and now they have the schoolchildren of Stain’d-by-the-Sea under their control.”
Cleo frowned at me, or maybe at the cut on my lip. “But why Diceys? What’s there that Hangfire wants to destroy?”
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me,” I said. “What did you learn on the school bus?”
“Zilch,” Moxie said. “We kept our eyes and ears open, but we learned zilch.”
Zilch meant nothing. I was disappointed but not surprised. It’s rare to learn things on a school bus. You can’t get the windows open and someone’s always fighting.
Jake sighed. “Zilch isn’t enough. We can’t defeat Hangfire if we don’t know anything.”
“Maybe it’s our part not to know anything,” I said, and stood up. I didn’t feel great, but I didn’t fall down either. “Eat quickly, everybody, and get to Diceys before dark.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Cleo asked.
“I need to shower and get dressed up,” I said. “I’m taking a girl on a hayride.”
Moxie narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s your fragment of the plot?”
“Don’t get sore, Moxie,” I said.
“I’m not sore,” the journalist said, sorely, but then she reached into her pocket and handed something to me. I knew what it was before I felt it crinkle in my hand. It was the newspaper article I’d given her, back at the library. “I’ve been meaning to give you this back,” she said quietly. “It made for some interesting reading.”
“Really?” I said. “It’s just a newspaper article. It’s not about anyone you know.”
She shook her head like I wasn’t fooling her. “If I knew any of the people in that article,” she said, “I might have hightailed it back to the city instead of staying here in Stain’d-by-the-Sea.”
“And miss all the fun?” I said. “Don’t be daft, Moxie.” I turned my eyes from hers to say good-bye to my associates. “Good luck, everybody,” I said. “I’d better get going.”
/> “Should we call you a taxi?” Jake asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “I need the walk. I need to think.”
I walked. I thought. Each step hurt, and so did most of my thoughts. I thought of a deep hole they had been digging in the city when I’d left. By now the hole was probably a fountain. People likely walked past it every day and smiled at it in admiration. Then they went to work or home or school or a restaurant or a museum or a library or any other place that brought them comfort. I tried to lay the picture of the bustling city over the sparse streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It didn’t fit. I was still alone, walking up the stairs of the Lost Arms. I nodded at Prosper, standing all alone in the lobby, and went up to the Far East Suite. The glitter was gone from the floor, but otherwise the place looked usual. The girl and the dog were still in the painting. The light fixture was shaped like a star, as always. And Theodora and her hair, both still in town, were looking displeased, as they generally did.
“I don’t want to say I told you so,” Theodora said.
“Then don’t say I told you so.”
“You went off by yourself, and look what happened to you.”
“I’m a mess,” I agreed.
“You’re a bad apprentice.”
“Maybe being a bad apprentice is my fragment of the plot.”
She stood up and scowled. “Don’t talk to me about fragmentary plots,” she said. “I’ve been in V.F.D. since before you were born. I’ve been a part of ten thousand fragmentary plots all over the globe, doing my tiny part of a plan I can’t even imagine. When I’m on a case I hardly ever know what’s going on.”