“I agree with that,” I said, and headed to the shower. Theodora kept talking to me from behind the closed door, but I turned the water on and she faded to nothing. I took a long shower and got out and wiped the mirror so I could see to comb my hair. I came out wrapped in a towel and laid out the best clothes I could find. Theodora was still talking. She was talking about Bertrand, her previous apprentice. He was a saint. He never gave her any trouble whatsoever. He was a decent person who never gave anyone reason to lose any sleep. He’d end up married to a wonderful woman and have very charming children, while I languished alone and lonely. I sat in my towel and agreed that was likely. She asked me what I thought I meant by that, and she asked other things. I gave Theodora a few answers. I gave enough answers that she couldn’t say I wasn’t answering but not enough answers to answer anything. I’d learned how to do this almost as soon as I’d learned to talk. Everybody does.
“Where are you going?” she asked finally.
“I know where I should go,” I said. “I should go tell the Officers Mitchum to be on the alert for another mysterious fire tonight.”
“Is that true?” Theodora asked me. “Do the Mitchums need to be warned?”
I sighed. “Go see for yourself,” I told her. Off she went, and I sat for a minute and then I tied my shoes and buttoned my shirt and I gathered up the blanket from my bed and then I gathered up the blanket from Theodora’s bed and I held them in an awkward bundle and looked at myself in the mirror. Myself looked back. We looked at each other for a long time.
“I don’t know either,” I said finally. “I don’t know if it will work,” and I walked out of the place. Pip and Squeak were waiting for me outside the Lost Arms. The wagon was still hitched to the back of the taxi, and I laid the blankets out on top of the papery pile that lay on top of the books. The Bellerophon brothers looked like they’d cleaned up a little for the occasion of being chauffeurs for a boy taking a girl on a hayride. Their clothes looked a little less rumpled and their hair a little less ratty. I appreciated it and told them so. They told me the other fragments had gone off without a hitch. I said good. We all smiled at each other for a few seconds, and then Pip asked me the question found on the cover of this book.
I said yes.
Off we went. I didn’t ride in the backseat but climbed up to the blankets and lay on my back looking at the sky. Beneath me the bark crinkled, but it wasn’t bark. It was softer, and flakier, like something too old and too delicate to be of use. The wheel squeaked and the wagon swung from side to side as we headed down the street, and then swung wider as we reached the outskirts of town, and then wider still down the hill as the sun began to set. I swung back and forth like a ship in a storm, with the clouds swirling over me like the sea. The sky was still there. No one had drained it away.
I sat up as we approached the school. I hadn’t thought about how to sneak back into the Wade Academy and meet Ellington in the library, but as we stopped at the gate I realized she wasn’t at the library. She was on top of the wall instead, sitting elegantly with her feet dangling off the edge and her hands fiddling with her braids. She was wearing a dress that matched the color of the sunset, and she was looking down at me with her green eyes and smiling the smile that could have meant anything. Even at around thirteen years of age, I had seen many things that I couldn’t help staring at. I had quite a list of them in my head. Ellington sitting atop the brick wall, smiling down at me, was now at the top of that list. It was probably at that moment that Ellington Feint ceased to be a mysterious figure in the middle of a whirlpool of difficult questions that had surrounded me since I first set foot in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and started to become the reason I was still in Stain’d-by-the-Sea trying to answer those questions in the first place. This is very difficult to explain. It is as difficult as jumping off a wall into a wagon with scarcely enough light to see your way. But it happened anyway. Difficult things happen all the time.
She landed with a soft crinkle and the wagon rocked a little. Pip called up to ask if we were OK. We were. Ellington was close to me now, a little breathless from the stunt, and the fading rays of the sun shone on her freshly painted fingernails as she held the bag in her hands.
“Good evening,” I said.
“It’s still empty,” she said, noticing where I was looking. She unzipped it to show me the empty space. It still looked small.
“Good evening,” I said again.
She smiled. “Good evening. Thank you for inviting me on a hayride.” She lay back and I lay back next to her. The wagon swayed, and the first insects of the evening began to whir and hum.
“It’s not hay, though, is it?”
“No.”
“Bark?”
“Arf, arf,” I said.
She laughed and rolled closer to me. “This is definitely the loveliest part of my day.”
“Tell me about the rest of it.”
“I did my part,” she said. “I went up to the bell tower and sat with a book until one o’clock sharp.”
“What was the bell tower like?”
“Damp and unpleasant,” she said. “It looks like students used to hide away from class up there, when the Wade Academy was a real school. The place was covered in old candy wrappers and graffiti from the daughters of earls and the sons of counts. Q was here. Olaf loves Guess Who. The view is nice, though. You can see for miles.”
“But you didn’t see what you hoped to see,” I said.
Ellington shook her head and stared up at the sky. “I looked everywhere,” she said, “from the basement full of fish tanks to where waves used to crash on the shore. My father wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere on Offshore Island. I was wrong again. Hangfire must have taken him somewhere else.”
“We’ll find him,” I assured her. “We may even find him tonight.”
She took the music box out of her pocket. “I hope so.”
“Why didn’t you meet me at the library? We might have missed each other.”
She wound the crank and the tune began to play, tiny sounds that were still clear enough to be heard over the hum of the insects and the noises of the taxi and the squeaky wheel on the wagon. “I was wrong about that, too,” she said. “The library wasn’t a safe place. All the books had been removed. I don’t understand it.”
I shifted and the wagon creaked and crinkled under me. This meant she didn’t know, I thought. This meant she hadn’t been watching from the tower. Or it meant she wasn’t telling me the truth. It was simple. So was the music from the music box, and I listened to it. I listened, but I still didn’t know the name of the tune I was hearing.
“I’ve been wrong about so much,” Ellington said.
“So have I,” I said.
“It’s a foolish feeling,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“Nobody does,” I said. “That’s why I invited you to ride on a wagon pulled by a taxi up a rocky cliff. So we wouldn’t feel foolish.”
She laughed, but I smiled up at the sky. A star had appeared, the first star of the evening. “What’s the real reason you invited me?” she asked.
I might have been wrong once more. It might just have been the first star I could see. “Because I can’t take my eyes off you,” I said.
I felt her hand curl around mine. “I’m glad it’s getting dark,” Ellington said. “You can’t see me blush.”
I slipped my hand free. “That’s not quite what I mean,” I said. “I mean that if I don’t keep an eye on you, you’re likely to do something treacherous.”
She sat up and looked down at me. I wondered if she could see any of my bruises. “What do you mean by that, Lemony Snicket?”
“You know exactly what I mean, Ellington Feint. You’re working with Hangfire. That’s why you’ve been at the Wade Academy all this time.”
“What?” Ellington said. “That’s absurd. I disguised myself so Hangfire wouldn’t recognize me.”
“You changed your name and your hair,” I said, “but you didn’t
disguise your voice, Ellington. Hangfire can imitate anyone’s voice. He imitated yours not so long ago. He would have seen right through your disguise. You learned he was hiding out at the Wade Academy and went and found him. He said if you helped him he’d release your father. Of course, he’ll do no such thing. Not until you give him the Bombinating Beast.”
“I told you he confiscated it already.”
I shook my head. “If he had it, he wouldn’t keep you around, Ellington. You haven’t given it to him yet. It’s right there in that bag. You’re afraid to give it to him because you know what he’ll do with it.”
“This bag is empty,” Ellington said. “You saw it yourself.”
“And you saw my tattoo,” I said. “I learned about bags with secret compartments back in nursery school.”
Ellington gave me a fierce look and unzipped the bag again. Then she reached into the empty space and pulled up a smooth black panel. The bag had a false bottom, and under the false bottom was enough room to store the object she retrieved and tossed into my lap.
“Here,” she said.
The moon shone on Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea.
“It wasn’t safe to keep it in my room,” she said. “I didn’t want Hangfire to know what I was reading and learning.”
“If it’s not safe for you to have this book,” I said, “we should return it to the library.”
Ellington bit her lip. “Dashiell Qwerty is in jail, remember?”
“Remember what you told me,” I told her. “There’s more to a library than the librarian. The library has a secret—an important one that burns like a fire in the mind. Hangfire wants to destroy the library so the secret will be gone forever.”
“Snicket, you’re wrong,” she said. “Hangfire’s going to burn down Diceys Department Store tonight.”
“That’s what he’d like me to think,” I said. “I even sent my associates there so he wouldn’t know I’d guessed his real plan. You were hoping to distract me tonight. Maybe we’d sit and listen to the piano at Black Cat Coffee, while this town’s last hope burned to the ground.”
Her eyes glistened, like tiny splashes in a deep, dark pool. “He’s holding my father prisoner,” she said. “What else can I do?”
“You can volunteer to do the proper thing,” I said, with the book in my hand. Ellington did not say anything. For the rest of the ride she did not say a word, until Pip and Squeak brought the wagon to a stop in front of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only library. All was still. No one was on the steps of the library, although there were a few shadows to be seen in the lit windows of the police station, which occupied the other half of the pillared building. At the bottom of the steps was the scraggly lawn that always looked sad, and the melted remains of a statue built long ago, depicting a war hero rescuing a kite from a tree. In a way, it was the statue that had started the fuss, as I’d learned while investigating my last big case. But the fuss had long ago grown bigger than the statue had ever been, the way an answer to a simple, clear question can turn out to be complicated and mysterious.
From the stillness came a loud rattling that reminded me of Moxie’s fingers on the table, eager to type up what was going on. Then there was the whinnying of horses, and the Talkie Brothers came riding around the corner in their jalopy, raising their hands to me in a salute as it went by. They kept going. You still couldn’t tell if the horses pulling the automobile were white or gray, and then they were gone.
“You see?” Ellington said to me. “There’s no fire here.”
“The fire department couldn’t have helped,” I said. “The hydrants in Stain’d-by-the-Sea have been sabotaged with some chemical. Luckily, the Talkie Brothers were warned away by their niece and are taking the night off.”
“Let’s take the night off too,” Ellington said. “Let’s go to Diceys. Let’s go to Black Cat Coffee. Let’s go anywhere but here. You’re wrong, Snicket. You’re wrong about me and you’re wrong about what’s happening.”
“Let’s find out,” I said, and I slid down to the street holding the book. Ellington said something I didn’t hear and followed me. Together we hurried across the lawn. I shouldn’t let her stay with me, I thought. I should drag her to the Officers Mitchum. She’s still under arrest for impersonating Cleo Knight. She’s an escaped prisoner. You’re running around with an escaped prisoner, Snicket. I flung open the door of the library and raced inside.
For a moment I must have looked like a hero. It was dark and I was probably a dashing figure in the doorway. But then I took two more steps and found myself on the floor. Someone had tripped me, and I’d fallen on all of the places I was already hurt. I heard something rattle out of my pocket and I felt something yanked out of my hands, and then the lights went on and somebody laughed. I didn’t blame them. I was a foolish figure, groaning in pain. I should have been laughed at. I would have laughed at me, had I been as nasty a person as Stew Mitchum.
“You shouldn’t have told me you weren’t going to stop,” he said, with one more chuckle just to make sure I knew he was enjoying himself. “You told me you weren’t going to stop no matter what I did, so I knew I could trip you the moment you ran in the door.”
“You didn’t have to hurt him,” Ellington said. She was unmasked, I thought. We all were. Why hadn’t the bell rung, to make it easier to skulk around town?
“What are you doing here?” Stew asked her.
“Never mind that and never mind him,” Ellington said. “The jig is up. Snicket’s figured out the plot.”
“The jig’s up for Snicket,” Stew sneered. “The boss told me to make sure he suffered. Hangfire has a particular revulsion for members of V.F.D.”
I sighed. “Revulsion” is a word which means “a vivid and violent dislike.” “Members of V.F.D.” was a phrase which meant Hangfire knew all along what it meant when I said I was in a kind of special program, in answer to the question on the cover of this book. Who had told him? I asked myself, but Stew leaned down and waved Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea back and forth in front of my face so I couldn’t think.
“Thank you for returning this book so promptly,” he said. “I think I’ll use it as kindling for the first match. When the Talkie Brothers get here, the chemical Hangfire put in the hydrant will destroy this place once and for all.”
“The Talkie Brothers won’t get here,” Ellington said. “Snicket warned them away.”
Stew cackled in a way that made my head hurt all over again. “You got the fire department to stay away?” he asked. “What kind of volunteer firefighter are you, Snicket?”
“Not a very good one,” I said. “I’m part of an invincible army, but not a victorious one.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Stew said.
“That’s not surprising,” I said. I looked around the library for the last time. “It’s not the sort of thing you learn at a top-drawer school. It means that our plans often get shattered, no matter how brilliant they are. But our purpose remains intact. We may ask the wrong questions, but we know the right answers. We might not always have an actual compass”—and here I stole a look at Ellington and then a look at the floor—“but we have a moral compass, something inside ourselves that tells us the proper thing to do.”
“That’s a very pretty speech,” Stew sneered.
“Thank you,” I told him.
“I was being sarcastic, Snicket.”
“So was I, Mitchum.”
“I knew that.”
“Did I say you didn’t?”
It was another thing you do not learn at a top-drawer school. Bickering is like baldness or lousy birthday gifts. It runs in families. Stew Mitchum was a bickerer at heart, and I was able to make him bicker while Ellington moved stealthily behind me. It was supposed to be her part, I thought. She was supposed to ring the bell tonight, but now she had another part to do. I watched her pick up the object that had fallen from my pocket and consult it, and then I watched her hurry to a certain corner of the room. If
Dashiell Qwerty had told me, I thought, surely he’d told Ellington Feint about the northeast corner.
“If you don’t want to argue,” I was saying to Stew, “then why do you keep disagreeing with me?”
Stew cut short our bickering, something that did not run in his family. He reached into his pocket and drew out a long match. There are good fires, of course. You can’t make a Hangtown fry or a porcini mushroom soup or a decent cup of coffee without fire. But the experiences I am chronicling here have left me with a permanent mark, like a bruise that never healed. You can’t see it on me, but hidden in the depths of my life is the permanent opinion that a match is a wicked thing. This is wrong, of course. It’s nonsense. A match is only as wicked as the person who is using it. Stew Mitchum gave me a terrible smile and lit the match by striking it against the spine of the book he had taken from me. Then he opened the book and let it drop onto its pages.
I heard the sound of a match falling onto paper. It should have been a faint crackling, a familiar noise from my school days. But this sound was different. It filled the air with a loud, shrill ringing, and then a great hiss from overhead. It was the fire alarm, and the turning on of the library’s brand-new sprinkler system. Water poured down like a cloudburst. I was soaked in an instant. Everything was. Stew was soaked and the match was soaked and Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea collapsed forever into a soaked mess. Every book in the place was soaked and ruined. It was wrong to have a sprinkler system in a library. There’s more to a library than the librarian, but not much more than its books. I did not know if Dashiell Qwerty had thought about the terrible effects of water when he had the sprinkler system installed, or if Ellington Feint had thought about it when she sounded the alarm. Perhaps she wanted to stop Hangfire’s plan to destroy the library. Perhaps she wanted to help the plan along. I didn’t get a chance to ask her.