“You know that restaurant Hungry’s?” I said. “You can find me there, when I’m not at the library or the Lost Arms.”
Kellar looked up at me and spoke very, very carefully, as if he were walking through shattered glass. “I’ll look up the address,” he said, “just like you’ll look up Harold Limetta.”
“Your mother already told us Harold Limetta’s address,” I said, and then Sharon walked back in. Kellar went back to his typing and I went out. Theodora was already in the roadster, pushing her head into her helmet. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, wondering about both of the people I had met inside. It was hard to figure them out, but that is true of almost everything when it is very hot outside.
“That went very well, Snicket,” Theodora said. “I’m glad Sharon gave me her phone number. I’m going to call her this evening and give her a full report.”
“I think it’s nice you’re making friends your own age,” I said.
Her smile faded and she started the motor. “You should have listened to what she said, Snicket. She said our progress is being evaluated.”
“You’re the one who said that.”
“Well, Sharon agreed with me, and it’s true. If you were a better apprentice, you’d remember I told you that someone from our organization was keeping an eye on us.”
I remembered. Theodora was quite nervous about this person, whoever it was. I didn’t think it was likely that it was Sharon Haines of the Department of Education. I had my own ideas. “I did listen to what she said,” I said. “She thinks all of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s schoolchildren are in danger because someone burned down a sheep barn. That doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“Well, I’m sure Harold Limetta will be able to tell us more.”
I looked down the empty block. The man who had asked for matches was long gone, of course. The dented trash can sulked on the corner. “Why would the Department of Education know about a witness to a fire?”
“It wasn’t just a fire, Snicket. It was arson. Any apprentice of S. Theodora Markson should know what that means.”
“What does the S stand for?”
She opened the passenger door. “Slide in, Snicket.”
I slid in and squinted out the window of the roadster. The sun told me that it was about noon. It also told me that it was going to continue to beat down on Stain’d-by-the-Sea and make it blazing hot and that there was no point in arguing with it, because it was the sun and I was a boy of about thirteen. The sun was right. There was no point in arguing. The roadster puttered us through Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and I didn’t say anything more to Theodora. She called herself an intrepid personage and said that was an expression which there meant an excellent investigator, and I didn’t correct her. She called me ungrateful and I didn’t disagree. I just sat in the heat and wished for an ice cream cone. Nobody brought me one. Maybe Harold Limetta has a freezer full of the stuff, I told myself. Peppermint ice cream in particular would really hit the spot.
But there was no freezer at 421 Ballpoint Avenue. I could tell that in a minute, when Theodora brought her automobile to a stop. A freezer is almost always made of metal, so when a house has been burned to the ground it usually remains there in the ashes, along with the oven, the wall safe, and any anvils lying around, each item a blackened gravestone for the home that has been destroyed. At 421 Ballpoint Avenue I could see a metal bench, which looked like it might have been by the front door, for taking off your boots. I could see a large set of small metal rectangles, each one about the size of a book, stacked up in several rows and surrounded by broken glass. I could see a metal picture frame, which might have held photographs of the Limetta children or grandchildren. But the rest of the house was nothing but ashes and smoke—thick gray smoke that was rising into the sky. I didn’t know if it would block the sun and make it cooler. I didn’t know whose pictures had been in the frames. I didn’t know what it meant that Harold Limetta’s house had burned down, just when we’d been sent to it. Fires were of grave importance to the organization of which I was a part. It would be a black mark on my record, I knew, to have suspicious fires occur and go unsolved and unpunished right under my eyes. Hangfire, I thought, I will find you and stop you. But I didn’t know how to find him. I didn’t know how to stop him. I didn’t even know for certain that this fire was his handiwork.
Ardere is the Latin, I thought. That’s what they said in ancient Rome when they were talking about fire. But that was all I knew as I stood and waited for the smoke to clear.
CHAPTER THREE
When the smoke cleared, there was something to see in the rubble of 421 Ballpoint Avenue, but it was the Officers Mitchum. I preferred smoke. Harvey and Mimi Mitchum were the only police officers in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but they spent less time enforcing the law and more time bickering over just about anything that struck their fancy.
“And let me tell you,” Harvey Mitchum was saying to his wife, “that it was Agnes who had the idea, and Harry just played along, so by the time Philip had him cornered the crime had already been committed.”
“You’re a half-wit,” Mimi Mitchum said. “Carmen is the mastermind behind the crime, and if you can’t figure that out for yourself you might as well toss your badge into the ashes.”
“Carmen’s no mastermind,” Harvey said. “She’s even more dimwitted than you are.”
“How dare you call me dimwitted?”
“How dare you call me a half-wit?”
“It’s crueler to say that wits are dim than that they’re chopped in half!”
“Mimi, you’re only proving yourself dimwitted when you say things like that.”
“If I’m so dimwitted, how did I manage to solve the crime?”
One of the first things I’d learned upon arriving in Stain’d-by-the-Sea was that the only way to get the Mitchums to stop arguing was to interrupt them. “Excuse me, Officers,” I said, and the officers turned to look at me the way they always did. It is the way you look at a squeaky door when you are trying to be quiet.
“What are you doing here, lad?” Harvey Mitchum asked me.
“Did I hear you say you’ve managed to solve this crime?” I asked. It is always better to ask a question than to answer one.
“Harvey was just arguing with me about a movie we saw,” Mimi said. Her eyes moved suspiciously through the smoke from me to Theodora and back again. “How is it you happen to be here?”
Theodora put a gloved hand on my shoulder. “My associate and I were going to talk to Harold Limetta, the owner of this house, as part of an investigation.”
Harvey frowned and kicked at the ashes on the ground. “And who, precisely, has asked you to investigate?”
“I’d rather not say,” Theodora said.
“Well, I’d rather not have you poking through the scene of a crime,” Mimi said.
“And I’d rather not have that kid around here either,” her husband added.
“I’d rather not have you call me a kid,” I said.
“I’d rather not have my apprentice talk like that to the police,” Theodora said.
“I’d rather not have to listen to you discipline a child,” Harvey Mitchum said.
“I’d rather not listen to my husband boss people around,” Mimi Mitchum said.
“Sorry,” I said, “is it my turn? I have a long list of things I’d rather not do.”
It is not pleasant to have a number of people glaring and sighing at you at the same time, even if you meant for them to do it. As I’d planned, once they were done glaring and sighing, the Mitchums forgot all about asking us why we were there or who had sent us, and so the four of us were soon picking through the wreckage together as if we had never argued at all.
In one of my favorite books, a sad young man stumbling around outside finds a tiny strange man with a sack of magic crystals that change his life. My hopes weren’t that high, but I kept my eyes open. Almost anything would do. Any kind of clue would be better than what I had now. What I had now was bu
pkes, a word which here means “The Department of Education told us to go interview someone about a sheep barn burning down, only to find that the man’s house had burned down.” The metal bench was still there, and the metal picture frame with the photographs burned out of it. The metal rectangles were still there too, stacked up like the books you were planning on reading next. My shoes crunched on the shattered glass. They’re tanks, I realized. Tanks for fish or small animals. They’re tanks and they’d probably be clues, I thought, if you knew what the mystery was.
“What do you know about Harold Limetta?” I asked the Mitchums.
“Not a lot,” Harvey Mitchum admitted. “He’s new in town.”
“He moved into this house only days ago,” Mimi said. “All anybody knows about him is that he is a leper.”
“He’s sick?” I said.
“No,” Harvey said. “He studies moths.”
“Then he’s a lepidopterist,” I said. “A leper is someone with a terrible skin disease.”
“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” Mimi said.
“He called us and said his house was on fire,” Harvey Mitchum said, “but when we arrived there was no sign of him, although it looks like his moths were burned to a crisp.”
Mimi pointed to some tiny black specks near the shattered glass of the tanks. They might have been moths, once. And it might have been Harold Limetta on the phone. “We were going to ask for him at Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn,” she said. “The barn supplied wool for Mr. Limetta’s moths to eat.”
“Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn has also burned down,” Theodora said, sitting on the bench before immediately getting up again and brushing the ashes off the back of her pants. It took her a long time.
“What do you know about these fires?” Harvey Mitchum demanded. “It’s still too early to make assumptions, but I’d say both of you have something to do with all this. Lately, whenever there’s a crime in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, we seem to find you and your whippersnapper poking around.”
“We’re here as professionals,” Theodora said stiffly, finishing up with her pants.
“We’ll do anything we can to help you solve this case,” said the whippersnapper.
“You can help by butting out,” Mimi Mitchum said. “And the same goes for you about butting, Harvey.”
Harvey gave his wife an exasperated frown. “Mimi, I’ll remind you that I’m an officer of the law, just like you are.”
“You’re not just like I am,” Mimi said. “I’m a brave and capable law enforcement official, and you’re a nincompoop!”
“If I’m such a nincompoop, why are you the one who forgot to put the milk back in the refrigerator, so it stayed on the counter all night?”
“Well, you’re the one who left the window open, so mosquitoes swarmed our bedroom!”
“Well, you’re the one who didn’t hang up your towel after your bath, so it stayed wet and clammy!”
Imagining the Mitchums getting out of the shower in clammy towels with the windows open and the air smelling of warm milk was a new item on my list of things I would rather not do. “Excuse me, Officers,” I said, “my associate and I are leaving now. Please send my regards to Stewart.”
Stewart Mitchum was the officers’ son, and I did not really want to send him my regards. I could not think of anything I wanted to send him that would be accepted for delivery. “Stew’s at school,” Harvey Mitchum said. “He insisted that he stop working for us by making a siren noise out of the back of our car, and focus on getting a top-drawer education.”
“How nice for him,” I lied. A top-drawer education is a very high-quality one, but the highest-quality anything in the world wouldn’t fix Stew.
“I’d suggest you do the same, Snicket,” Mimi said, and gave me a stern look. “We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
“And the milk,” Harvey added, glaring at his wife. As a good-bye, I gave them a nod I had practiced for quite some time in the mirror. It was polite enough that no one could complain but not so polite that the person receiving the nod would think you liked them. I trudged through the ashes, trying to think. I had been taught to spend longer than a few minutes at the scene of an investigation, but I was not quite sure what it was that I was investigating. Start from the beginning, I told myself. The Department of Education was concerned about a suspicious fire, and pointed us toward a witness to the fire. Upon arriving at his home, we found it too was burned to the ground. There were moths, there were sheep. The Department of Education had a child working there and was convinced that schoolchildren were in danger. The whole thing was gibberish. Only a babbling buffoon would think it made any sense.
“This is starting to make sense,” Theodora said, when we reached the roadster. “There’s an arsonist who is putting the schoolchildren of Stain’d-by-the-Sea in danger. We’ve got to find him and stop him, unless it’s a woman, in which case it is she who must be found and stopped.”
“Two buildings have been burned,” I agreed, “but why are schoolchildren in danger?”
“The Department of Education said they were in danger,” Theodora said. “Do you think my friend Sharon is lying?”
“She wouldn’t have to be lying to be wrong,” I said.
“Don’t simper nonsense at me, Snicket. I am not a baby. Our progress is being evaluated, and the case has been assigned extra-crucial status. We’ve got to speed up the investigation. I’m counting on your hard work and cooperation.”
I took a last look at the ashes as Theodora started up the roadster. Hangfire, I thought. Is this your handiwork? No one answered.
“Snicket, don’t be a Trappist monk. Answer my question.”
“You didn’t ask anything.”
“Well, I meant to ask something.”
“What is it?”
“It’s what are your suggestions?”
“Let’s go to Hungry’s.”
“Be sensible. You just want to have lunch with your friends.”
“I work better on a full stomach.”
“Well, two can play at that game, Snicket. I’m going to go see Sharon Haines, and we’ll see who comes closer to solving the case.”
The roadster took us back through town. It was hot, and the sun kept glaring at me. It reminded me of Stewart Mitchum, who also liked to glare but was nowhere near as bright. Why would Stew tell his parents he wanted to focus on his education, I asked myself. And then I asked Theodora to drop me at the corner. If too many people see you getting rides everyplace, they get the impression you belong in a car seat. The corner was hot, too. Peppermint ice cream. Maybe Jake Hix will have some in his freezer for dessert.
From the outside Hungry’s didn’t look like anything special, and inside it didn’t either. Certainly there wasn’t anything special about the owner, Hungry Hix, a bitter woman with little patience for young people. What was special about the place was Jake Hix. He was a young man, but old enough to have a sweetheart and a job. The sweetheart was Cleo Knight, the brilliant chemist, and the job was cooking up the food at Hungry’s. It is possible that his genius was more impressive than Cleo’s, and in my case he gave away the food for free, as my funds were limited, a phrase which here means that Theodora didn’t give me an allowance. When I walked into the room, he was standing at a blender that was whirring and crackling away at something the color of bricks. Watching him was Moxie Mallahan, sitting at the counter with her typewriter case hoisted up beside her. I almost didn’t see who was sitting next to her until I was already inside. Nobody noticed me for a second—Moxie because she was watching Jake, Jake because he had his nose in a book, and Kellar Haines because he was pretending not to notice me as I sat at the counter with everybody else.
Jake looked up and turned the blender off. “How are you, Snicket?”
“Hot and starving,” I said, nodding to Moxie.
“I have just the thing,” he said, “but I’m going to make you taste it before I tell you what it is.”
“Finally,” I said, “a mystery I might
solve. How’s the book?”
Jake marked his place and tossed it to me. “Has anybody made you read this?”
“No,” I said, looking it over. “I can never remember if that word in the title has one A or two.”
“I have the same trouble,” Moxie said sympathetically.
Jake cut big slices of homemade bread and tossed them into the oven to toast. Jake’s bread was delicious. It took days to make and started with a small bowl of milk rotting on the windowsill. He should tell the Mitchums the recipe, I thought. They have some warm milk at their house. But Jake was telling me the book’s story. “Two guys are friends, supposedly, and then one of them tricks the other one and he falls out of a tree and breaks his leg. The moral of the story seems to be, some boys are mean at school. I don’t need a book to tell me that.”
“If you want a good school story,” I said, “try The Children’s Hour.”
“I’m not sure I want a good school story,” Jake said. He took the blender and poured the brick-colored liquid into three bowls. “I like a story that could never happen to me. If I want real life I’ll read a newspaper.”
“But the newspaper folded,” Moxie said sadly.
At last Kellar Haines spoke up from his stool next to Moxie’s. “But you don’t go to school, do you, Jake? It sounds to me like a school story is something that could never happen to you.”
Jake whisked the bread out of the oven and opened a jar of something orange. It looked like jam maybe. He spread it on the bread. “I can’t go to school,” Jake said. “My aunt counts on me to run this place.”