There was still glitter on the floor when I was done. I went to bed, sliding into the covers as if into an envelope. I looked up at the painting that hung above my bed as usual, a little girl holding a dog with a bandaged paw. Who would paint such a thing, I wondered. First he painted the little girl and nobody cared, so he added a dog. Still nobody cared, so he added a bandage on the dog’s paw, and now it’s hanging in the Far East Suite watching me try to sleep. How long has that dog been hurt? How long has the girl been watching?
Look at everything in plain sight. The bed, the table, every object you see has likely been in the world longer than us, and they’ll still be in the world when we’re gone. It is the things that have a history, L.
People often forget to look at something right in front of them.
I sat up in bed and quickly turned the light on. I knelt beside the old-fashioned phonograph and looked carefully at it. It could be anybody’s, I told myself. It looks like Ellington Feint’s, but that doesn’t mean it is. I picked it up and turned it over and then saw a word, just one word stamped into the machine, right where the arm with the needle lay waiting to make the music play.
It was the wrong word. It made me take three steps back.
I hurried to the bathroom and splashed cold water onto my face. The book was sitting on the edge of the sink, Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea. It was heavy in my hands. Don’t smash the phonograph, I told myself. Don’t kill the messenger just because he brought bad news. “Kill the messenger” is a very old phrase. You can find it in the works of Sophocles, an ancient Greek who wrote more than one hundred plays. Only seven survived. The other ninety-something plays could be about eating lobster in synagogues, for all anyone knew. I was thinking anything I could, anything at all, to stop myself from thinking what I was thinking. I was taking the word I had seen, the wrong word on the phonograph, and using it to fill in a blank, as in a crossword puzzle. It made the puzzle ugly and unspeakable. “Unspeakable” means you should not speak about it, and sure enough no one came around to speak to me about it. S. Theodora Markson did not return from hitting the town. Ellington Feint did not show up for her library book. Even my sister didn’t appear, not even in my head, to speak with me about it. I was the only one. I spoke myself to sleep, speaking about an unspeakable thing, in an empty room.
CHAPTER SIX
In the morning Jake Hix was at Hungry’s fixing a Hangtown fry. It is the perfect breakfast after a rough night. Everyone in the place needed one.
“We were wondering when you’d turn up,” Jake said, grabbing oysters out of a bucket of ice. I sat at the counter next to Cleo Knight, who looked exhausted and cranky. So did Jake. So did Moxie, who had her typewriter out. So did the men sitting on the other side of Moxie. I’d seen them once before, but this was my first good look at them. They both had bandages on both their hands, and they both had wrinkled and blackened uniforms reading OFD, but other than that there was nothing alike about them. They were of different sizes, shapes, nationalities, facial expressions, hair lengths, ear sizes, nose shapes, mouth curves, brow furrows, and wristwatches. Hungry Hix, who was wiping down a booth, also looked exhausted and cranky, but she always looked exhausted and cranky. If you were Hungry Hix, you’d look exhausted and cranky too, just from being Hungry Hix.
“I had a lot to think about,” I said to Jake, and said hello to Cleo and Moxie. My chaperone still hadn’t come back by morning, so I’d treasured my time alone in the Far East Suite, thinking.
“I’m sure you did,” Cleo said. “Not long after Jake told me you were investigating suspicious fires, a suspicious fire started. We rushed to the scene to see if we could help.”
Moxie was typing so furiously she couldn’t look up. “Snicket,” she said, “these are the Talkie Brothers, our town’s only firefighters.”
They raised their bandaged hands to me in a salute, which I tried to copy. The Talkie Brothers didn’t seem to be very talky. They didn’t seem to be brothers, either.
“I also think the fire’s suspicious,” I said to my friends.
“So you know already,” Jake said. “I figured as much.” He opened a drawer and took out a large rubber glove and a small, curved knife. While he talked to me he held each oyster in a gloved hand and expertly shucked it. The word “shucked” means to take the part you can eat out of the shell. It looked brutal and delicious. “The Dilemma got us there just in time,” Jake said, referring to Cleo’s very fast and very beautiful automobile. “Something went wrong when they turned on the hoses. Instead of putting out the fire, the water only made it worse. Cleo and I had to pull the Talkie Brothers out of the blaze.”
Cleo nodded solemnly. “I know what went wrong,” she said. “It was sabotage.”
“That’s a strong word,” I said. Jake was done with the oysters and rolled the edible parts around in some bread crumbs before tossing them into a pan where bacon was already sizzling.
“It refers to a person damaging or destroying something on purpose,” Moxie said.
“I know what it means,” I said. “For complicated reasons, I had to learn that word in kindergarten. Why do you think the hoses were sabotaged?”
Cleo shook her head. “Not the hoses,” she said. “The hydrants. It wasn’t water the Talkies poured onto the fire. It was some chemical.”
“Some chemical,” I repeated, looking into Cleo’s eyes. She blinked back at me. Cleo Knight was a brilliant chemist. A brilliant chemist would no more say “some chemical” than a brilliant librarian would say “something to read” or a brilliant musician would say “some music.” The expected answer is “atropine” or “selections from The Goncourt Journals” or “Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano.” Not “some chemical.” Very, very slowly, Cleo’s eyes began to move. They moved in the direction of the only adults in the place—the Talkie Brothers and Hungry Hix, who was picking up a rag she had dropped. Drop it, I thought. Drop it about the chemical and ask something else.
“How about you, Moxie?” I asked Moxie. “Did you find out anything about the Department of Education?”
Moxie looked at me as Jake cracked some eggs into the pan. He watched over them like a wizard. He added a little cream from a pitcher and then something green and leafy from a little glass bowl. I was wild to devour it, but when Moxie shook her head, my stomach felt shivery instead. I nodded. We couldn’t talk here. There was a short list of places in Stain’d-by-the-Sea where I could talk with my associates without fear, and the list kept getting shorter. Hangfire had cast a pall over the town—a phrase which here means “made things shadowy and quiet”—and now he had cast a pall over the room. Jake went and turned on a radio playing music that made me think of Ellington’s phonograph. The pan sizzled away for a while, and then he divided up the Hangtown fry for everybody, on big plates with toasted bread and glasses of orange juice on the side and a few shakes from a bottle of spicy vinegar for those who liked it. I liked it. The whole thing was delicious. It was delicious, but I couldn’t finish it. “Some chemical,” I kept thinking, with each bite, and then I thought of something else I’d heard that didn’t make sense. I pushed my plate away.
“No way, Fay Wray,” Jake said, using one of his favorite expressions as he looked at my cluttered plate. “Don’t do this to me. Do you know how hard it is to get fresh oysters in this town nowadays?”
“It’s worth it,” I said. “This is a great breakfast like The Wind in the Willows is a great book.”
“Then why are you eating it like it’s as lousy as Old Yeller?”
“I guess I need some fresh air,” I said. “Anyone want to take a walk?”
“I do,” Cleo said, and pushed aside her plate.
“So do I,” Moxie said, and pushed aside hers.
The Talkie Brothers frowned at us. Watching Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only firefighters try to eat a Hangtown fry with their hands bandaged was not doing anything for my appetite. Jake wiped his hands on his apron. “Where are you thinking about walking, Sni
cket?”
“I thought I might go visit a prestigious client,” I said.
“I think I’ll go with you people,” he said.
“You’ll do no such thing,” growled Hungry Hix from the far end of the room.
“All right,” Jake said to his aunt. “But I do need to take the garbage out.”
“Come right back when you’re done,” Hungry said.
“As soon as the garbage is in the proper receptacle, I’ll be back behind this counter,” Jake promised, and he hung up his apron and picked up a metal barrel full of eggshells and other trimmings. “There’s no charge for breakfast, by the way,” he said, although he’d never charged me for anything since I’d arrived in town. “Anyone who helps out in a town emergency gets a free meal.”
“I suppose that’s all right,” Hungry said, with a scowl. The Talkie Brothers nodded their thanks and Moxie clicked her typewriter closed and we walked out of the diner onto the sidewalk. It was still morning and it was still very hot, but the air was coiled up like it was holding its breath. It felt like another disaster was coming, or maybe it was just rain.
“It really was a good breakfast,” I told Jake, as we stepped outside. “It was much, much better than Old Yeller. I’m sorry I wasn’t a member of the clean-plate club.”
“That always sounded like a boring club to me,” Jake said, hoisting the garbage pail onto his shoulders. “Let’s take the Dilemma. Cleo shouldn’t be seen much in town anyway.”
“You worry too much about me,” Cleo said.
“If I don’t worry,” Jake asked, “who will?”
“You can’t go with us,” Moxie reminded him. “You promised your aunt you’d be right back.”
“I said I’d be back as soon as this garbage was in the proper receptacle,” Jake said with a grin. “That might take some time.”
We joined Jake in a grin and headed down the block to Cleo’s car. She opened the back and Jake put the garbage pail in the trunk, which was not the proper receptacle, while I gazed at the shiny automobile. It was a marvel of a machine. I can say without a doubt that riding in that vehicle was one of the highlights of my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The Dilemma went down the street like it could fly if it wanted to but it didn’t want to show off. I sat and gave directions and listened to the humming engine as Cleo nimbly spun the wheel.
“Can we talk now?” I said.
“We probably could have talked in the diner,” Jake said. “My aunt’s a grump, but she’s not a villain, and the Talkie Brothers are firefighters. If you can’t trust firefighters, who can you trust?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Cleo said sadly. “Something’s happening in this town. The people inside this Dilemma might be the only ones I trust anymore.”
“What about the Bellerophon brothers?” Moxie asked. She was talking about Bouvard and Pecuchet, better known as Pip and Squeak, two young men who had taxied us out of a number of tight spots.
“We can trust them,” Jake said, “if they’re still around. I haven’t seen them for a little while.”
I looked out at the lonely streets. “Maybe their father isn’t sick,” I said, “so they don’t have to drive his taxi.”
Jake opened his mouth to say something and decided to say something else. “Tell Snicket about the chemical.”
“It has a complicated name I won’t bother you with,” Cleo said, “but I recognized it when I smelled it at the scene of the fire. I’ve had that strong, briny scent in my laboratory for weeks and weeks. I’m working with it myself.”
“It’s part of the formula for invisible ink?” Moxie asked.
Cleo looked over at Moxie. “This is off the record,” she said, “but yes, it is.”
“Are you close to finishing the formula?”
Cleo shook her head. “Not as close as I’d like to be.”
“You’ll get there,” Jake said, and patted her hand. “I know you will.”
“Don’t distract the driver, Hix,” Cleo said, but she was smiling. I smiled too. It is good to see people happy with one another. It is a glimpse of a world in which everyone is that way. A happy world might be boring, I told myself, but watching Jake grin at Cleo grinning at Jake grinning at Cleo and back again, I thought it was worth the risk.
The Dilemma stopped at the corner, so smoothly it was as if we had never been moving. I got out and stood in front of the dented garbage can. Cleo frowned into it, and reached down to retrieve the cigarette the man had thrown away. No one throws away a cigarette that they haven’t lit.
“What are we doing here?” Jake asked, looking first at his sweetheart and then at me.
“I thought Kellar Haines might be able to help us,” I said, leading the way down the block.
“That guy?” Moxie said with a frown. “Everything he says is like a foreign language.”
“I wish I’d taken Italian at my school,” I said, “instead of Esperanto and Morse.”
“I learned a few Italian cooking terms from Zada and Zora when I was small,” Cleo said.
“You must miss them,” I said, remembering the twin servants who had cared for her until they had to move away.
“I hope my work will eventually bring them back to town,” Cleo said. “Then I might learn more than anguilla Livornese and granita di nocino.”
“Do you know the Italian term for ‘lime’?” I asked.
“Limetta,” she said, but the answer had come to me along with the question.
“Limetta,” Moxie said, “like the witness to that barn fire.”
“There aren’t any Italian lime trees around here,” I said, “even though Sharon Haines speaks Italian and loves limes.”
Moxie switched her typewriter case to her other hand so it wouldn’t bump against my knee. “That’s what Kellar said.”
“There’s no such person as Harold Limetta,” I said, remembering the pin on Sharon’s collar. “That’s what Kellar was trying to tell us. His mother made up the name of a fake witness in order to trap a real librarian. Sharon Haines told us a story about Harold Limetta, and then stuck close to Theodora, making sure the case got solved the way she wanted it to be solved.”
Cleo frowned. “But why would the Department of Education want to frame a librarian for arson?”
“That’s the wrong question,” Moxie said.
“Well, let’s go find out what the right one is,” I said, as we approached the row of thin, curved buildings.
“Snicket,” Moxie said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
“What’s the news?”
“I looked through the archives of The Stain’d Lighthouse, but there wasn’t a single article about the Department of Education.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Jake said. “That’s not the sort of thing most people would be interested in reading about.”
“That’s not the reason,” Moxie said. “Our newspaper wrote about boring things all the time.”
We’d reached the door of 350 Wayward Way. We all frowned at the saggy building, except Cleo, who was frowning at the cigarette.
“Then what is the reason?” I asked Moxie.
“Stain’d Secondary is this town’s only school,” she said.
“You mean it was this town’s only school,” Cleo corrected, and put the cigarette in the pocket of her coat. “It’s gone now.”
“And the students have been transferred to the Wade Academy,” I said, and walked into the building. The waiting area was waiting for us, with all of its LEARNING! and the book with the sick pony still boring on the table. The wall in front of me still looked flimsy, and there was still a half-unpeeled sticker looking like a curious cloud. Kellar was not at his desk, but I could hear the sounds of the busy office on the other side of the swinging door.
“Hello?” I called, but Moxie put her hand on my shoulder.
“Snicket,” she said, “a Department of Education is in charge of every pedagogical institution within the town limits. But if there’s only one school,
then there’s no Department of Education.”
“No Department of Education?” Jake said. “Then where are we?”
I stretched out both arms in front of me, and gave the wall a good push. I was right. It fell down, quickly, with a gust of air that sent some typed papers rippling off Kellar’s desk. I didn’t watch them fall. I was staring at a room I had seen before, large and empty, with rectangular shapes on the floor and a door in the far corner. The only difference between the room and the photograph Moxie had shown me was a small machine I did not recognize at first, a box with two wheels spinning slowly, winding a long shiny strip around and around. It was an old-fashioned tape player, and when I flicked the red switch, the sounds of the office stopped.
Moxie walked to me, her footsteps echoing in the empty room. “Look at this,” she said, and handed me one of the typed sheets the falling wall had sent fluttering. I looked.
Look busy. Look busy look busy, Look busy look busy look busy—look busy look busy—look busy, look busy look busy. “Look busy,” look busy look busy. Look busy look busy? Look busy, look busy look busy.
“Look,” busy. Look busy look busy look busy. Look busy look busy, look busy look busy look busy. Look busy look busy? Look, busy, look, busy; look busy look busy (look busy, look busy) look busy look busy look busy.
The words were typed over and over again, in tight, neat lines. I’d told Kellar he didn’t have to look busy. Kellar’d told me he was looking busy because he was busy. He’d practically dared me to look at what he was typing. Cleo and Jake peered at the page over my shoulder.
“What is all this?” Jake asked me.
“It’s the rest of Kellar’s message,” I said. “He was trying to tell me everything. There’s no Harold Limetta. There’s no Department of Education. This whole case has been nothing but deception.”
Cleo put a hand on my shoulder. “Snicket,” she said, “tell your friends what’s going on.”