“Good morning, Mr. Snicket,” she said. She had retrieved an orange from her purse and was peeling it with her fingernails, making a long, continuous strip of peel. I yawned and stood up. Ellington had draped her coat over my shoulders like a blanket, and I gave it back to her, although it felt warm when it was around me. Various parts of my body told me that in the future they would appreciate it if I slept lying down on a bed instead of sitting at the counter of Black Cat Coffee. I quietly reassured them that this was an unusual situation, and had the machinery make me some bread as a breakfast. Ellington passed me the orange and broke off a few bites of bread and munched on them.
“I was thinking while you were sleeping,” she said.
“What were you thinking, Ms. Feint?”
“I was thinking that you were right. I can’t trust Hangfire. I shouldn’t give him the Bombinating Beast.”
“So you’ll help me return it to the Mallahans?” I said. “You promise?”
“If you promise to help me find my father,” she said. “Shake on it.”
We shook on it, hard. We finished our breakfast and left Black Cat Coffee, Ellington hoisting the zippered tube over her long coat and smiling at the piano on the way out. The sun was just beginning to rise, and Stain’d-by-the-Sea didn’t feel eerie and empty, as it usually did. It felt peaceful. Normally at this time of day, I was sneaking a few minutes of reading before the morning began, and I wondered if Hangfire had those three library books that I’d wrapped in newspaper. We didn’t talk as we walked the streets, just let the dim noises of early morning talk for us. A few birds, a few insects. Our own footsteps. Before long we were walking by the strange, unreadable statue and up the steps to the library. We went in the door as Dashiell Qwerty was shooing moths out of it.
“I was wondering who might come in at this hour,” he said, looking first at Ellington and then at me. His face was blank as usual, but his eyes were curious.
“We just wanted to look something up,” I told him.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, but I was already leading Ellington toward the last place I had seen the statue. My heart beat faster as we rounded a corner of shelves, a loud pulse like that machinery at Black Cat Coffee. The Bombinating Beast had slipped through my fingers before. I scanned quickly for the location of An Analysis of Brown, Black, and Beige and pulled the book from the shelf. Maybe, Snicket, I said to myself. Maybe the statue is gone.
But there it was.
“Why did you hide it here?” Ellington asked in a whisper.
“A library is usually a safe place,” I replied, “and this book looked so dull I thought no one would ever check it out.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Snicket,” she replied. “This is the first book I would have checked out.” The way she looked at the book made me remember what Qwerty had said. In every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind. It was not a book on color, I noticed. It was not filed in that section. It was filed under music. I was wrong, though. I was wrong about which book answered Ellington’s questions.
As she had in Handkerchief Heights, Ellington did little more than glance at the Bombinating Beast, and instead looked at her long, green purse, which she unzipped and held open for me.
“We can’t go around town with the Bombinating Beast out in the open,” she said. “We can hide it in here.”
I looked at her, and she looked back. “OK,” I said, “but I’m holding the bag.”
I waited for her to say something like “Don’t you trust me, Mr. Snicket?” but instead she reached into the bag and pulled out a small roll of papers, which she slipped into the pocket of her coat. Then she handed me the tube without a word, and I put the Bombinating Beast inside. I didn’t say a word either, and neither of us said a word as we walked out of the library, down the stairs, and across the scraggly lawn. The statue was still lighter than it looked, but it was still heavier than anything I wanted to carry.
“If we take it back to the Mallahans,” Ellington said, “won’t Hangfire go after them?”
“Not if he doesn’t know they have it,” I said.
Ellington stared out across the lawn, although there was nothing much to look at. “I’m reminded of a book my father used to read me,” she said. “A bunch of elves and things get into a huge war over a piece of jewelry that everybody wants but nobody can wear.”
“I never liked that kind of book,” I replied. “There’s always a wizard who’s very powerful but not very helpful.”
“Oh, I disagree,” Ellington said, and perhaps we would have had a good-natured argument then, which would have firmed up our friendship. We might have talked about books just a little while longer, and then perhaps my account would be very different. But we were interrupted by the arrival of a dented station wagon, with a red flashlight shining on top and the sound of an odd siren. As it pulled to a stop, I could see that the sound was not a proper siren but just someone imitating one—Stew Mitchum, leaning out of the back window behind his parents. Next to him was S. Theodora Markson, who was the first to get out of the car.
“Snicket!” she said. “I was worried about you!”
“Theodora told us you didn’t come home last night,” Harvey Mitchum said.
“Our darling boy would never do something like that,” said his wife.
“We’ve had just about enough of this kind of behavior,” said the male Mitchum. “We’re not fools, Lemony Snicket, and we’re not fooling.”
“It’s still too early to make assumptions,” said his wife, “but it wouldn’t be surprising if you were responsible for all the trouble around town lately.”
“The burglary, for instance.”
“And the vandalism.”
“And the stealing things.”
“I already said stealing things, Harvey.”
“No, Mimi. You said burglary.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It’s slightly different.”
“Slightly different means almost the same.”
“But not exactly.”
“But almost. Almost is almost exactly.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t, and you have bad breath.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“I’ll tell you the point.”
“Why do you always insist that you know the point and I don’t?”
“That’s not the point.”
“There you go again.”
I hurried to the car with the point, holding up the zippered bag to stop their bickering. “I have the stolen item right here,” I said. “There were some complications, but Ellington and I managed to get the item back.”
Theodora looked at me in relief. “Is this true, Snicket? You really have the—”
“Yes,” I said quickly. It was not wise, I thought, to say the name of the item aloud, even in front of officers of the law. If Hangfire knew where we were taking it, he would most certainly try to steal it once more. I was not certain who I could trust and who I could not. Stew Mitchum smirked at me from behind his parents’ backs. I also did not think it was wise to unzip the bag to show Theodora the strange, dark statue that had caused all this trouble. I was wrong again. Or perhaps it did not matter.
“Well, we should return it to the Sallis family at once,” Theodora said with a firm nod of her helmet.
“The Sallis family?” Harvey Mitchum said with a frown. “They left town some time ago. There’s nobody in that mansion.”
“Except maybe mice,” his wife added.
“Mimi, mice aren’t people.”
“I know that, Harvey. Do you think I don’t know that?”
“The rightful owners are the Mallahan family,” I said to Theodora. “They’ve had it for generations. You can check for yourself in the library.”
It was hard to say what displeased Theodora more, the fact th
at she was wrong or that she would have to go to the library to find out. “You may be right,” she said, a phrase which here meant “I’m wrong, but I don’t have the courage to say so.”
“We can take you to the Mallahans,” Mimi Mitchum offered. Her husband told Stew to move into the front seat, and Theodora, Ellington, and I piled into the back, with the bag scrunched between us. We didn’t talk much on the way to the lighthouse, but the Officers Mitchum were more than happy to fill the silence with brags about their darling son. I would rather have read more about the silversmith with the burned hand, or the family making butter in the woods, or even the wizard who was of much less help than expected. Finally, the station wagon pulled up in front of the lighthouse, and Theodora opened the door and got out.
“You are no longer on probation,” she told me, “so you can return it yourself.”
She held out her gloved hand. For a moment I thought she was going to strike me, as she almost had the previous night, at the Lost Arms. But I was wrong again. Her hand hovered empty in front of me for a second, and then I looked Theodora in the eye and shook her hand as firmly as I could. Theodora winced slightly, and I turned around so that she could not see me smile.
“It’s good to see this end well,” Officer Mitchum said, waving his chubby hand in a happy salute.
“I was going to say that,” his wife said to him sternly.
“Good luck, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said to me with a warm smile.
“Thank you, Ellington,” I said. “I won’t forget my promise.”
“I won’t forget my promise,” Stew mimicked, and began to chant a tiresome rhyme about Ellington and myself sitting in a tree. I walked up to the lighthouse door and knocked, and the door opened before Stew could spell out what we were doing in such an unlikely place.
“What’s the news, Moxie?” I said when she answered the door.
“Lemony Snicket,” she said with a smile, stepping aside to let me in. “What are you doing here? Who’s that with you? When are you going to tell me what’s going on? What’s in that bag?”
“This is something that belongs to your family,” I said, “that I’m returning to you.”
She ushered me in and shut the door behind us. Her typewriter was parked about halfway up the stairs, and I knew that Moxie had been typing her notes in her usual perch.
“So?” Moxie said.
“This old gimcrack is part of a long story that I’m finally ready to tell you,” I said. “I promised I would answer your questions when this was all through, so ask anything you want.”
“Good,” she said with a happy nod. Her hat nodded with her as she continued up the stairs, thinking of her first question. “Why did you steal that statue, and why are you bringing it back?”
“I promised to deliver it to its rightful owner,” I said, “and that’s your family.”
“But I told you that on the first day we met,” Moxie said, leading me to the newsroom. “My family collected that stuff for years while the newspaper was in operation, but nobody ever cared about it except whoever wrote that telegram.”
I took the sheet off the table and put the bag down among all the other paraphernalia of the legendary beast. “The same person who wrote that telegram,” I said, “called my chaperone and pretended to be your father.”
“And called me,” Moxie said thoughtfully, “and pretended to be you.”
“And called me and pretended to be Ellington Feint,” I said, unzipping the tube.
“I guess he’s good at imitating people’s voices,” Moxie said.
I stared out the window for a second, past the grassy cliff to the strange sight of the lawless Clusterous Forest. The forest was a lawless place, I remembered, but Hangfire would need to be someplace closer, where he could keep an eye on the people who were helping him. “Not just voices,” I said. “I’ve also heard him imitate the cries of birds.”
Moxie gasped and so did I, but we were gasping for different reasons, because we were looking at different things. Moxie was looking into the bag, which I had unzipped completely, and instead of staring at the strange, hollow eyes of the Bombinating Beast, she was looking at a bag of coffee stenciled with a black cat. But I was still looking out the window. The Officers Mitchum were standing around chatting with Theodora, and Stewie was looking into one of the trees with a wicked smile on his face and his slingshot in his hands. But some distance away, darting through the trees, was the running figure of a tall girl in a long coat. It was Ellington Feint, and she had something dark in her hands.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“So the butler did it?” asked Hector. It was his twelfth birthday. If there are any readers of this account, and I have no reason to believe there are, I hope you do not spend your twelfth birthday eating dusty peanuts in the lobby of the Lost Arms with Prosper Lost across the room, keeping watch. Most people deserve a party.
“Hangfire wasn’t really a butler,” I told my associate, “and he didn’t really commit the crime. When his telegram to the Mallahans went unanswered, he hired Dame Sally Murphy to pretend to be Mrs. Murphy Sallis. He pretended to be her butler to keep an eye on her while she hired us to steal the Bombinating Beast.”
Hector frowned thoughtfully. “And Hangfire convinced that girl to try to steal it, too?”
“Yes. He told Ellington Feint that she would never see her father again if she didn’t help him. She broke into Handkerchief Heights and tried to think of a way to steal the statue, but she got lucky when I fell into her life holding it. When the police knocked on the door, she wrapped up the statue and a bag of coffee to fool me into thinking I was mailing the Bombinating Beast to Theodora at the Lost Arms. Ellington had the real statue and mailed it to herself at Black Cat Coffee, but I learned of the trickery and got there before she did. Then she switched it again, probably when I was sitting next to her in the Mitchums’ station wagon, and ran off with it. And now we can’t find her.”
“Do you think she gave the statue to Hangfire?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”
“It seems like an awful lot of work just to get a little statue,” he said, “particularly one nobody else was interested in. What does he want it for, anyway?”
I looked around the lobby of the Lost Arms. Three days had passed, and they hadn’t passed easily. I had spent my time asking these same questions myself while I read in the library or sat at the counter of Black Cat Coffee, listening to the player piano and hoping Ellington Feint might walk in the door. A mystery is solved with a story, and the story starts with a clue. I had thought the clue was the Bombinating Beast, but lately I had been thinking that the clue was something else. I thought perhaps it was the young girl looking for her father with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes and an old-fashioned record player with some tunes that wouldn’t leave my head. I had no one to share any of these tunes or thoughts, at least until Hector dropped into town for the afternoon. “I don’t know,” I told him. “There’s a mystery to the Bombinating Beast, and to Hangfire, that I haven’t solved yet.”
“And how much of this is going into your official report?” he asked me.
“Practically none of it,” I replied. “As far as my chaperone is concerned, the case is closed. I simply wrote that our client hired us to discreetly find a stolen item and that both the item and the client have disappeared.”
“That’s not going to look good on your permanent record, Snicket.”
“I don’t care about my permanent record,” I said. “I have a job to do.”
Hector sighed and leaned back against the dirty sofa. “You’re worrying everyone, Snicket. Monty’s worried. Haruki’s worried. This plan to choose the worst chaperone so you can secretly—”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” I said stiffly.
“Did you know that two other chaperones were thinking of drugging you so you’d miss your appointment?”
“They tried,” I told him. The Hemlock Tearoom and St
ationery Shop seemed years ago.
“I bet you wish they’d succeeded. Then you’d be someone else’s apprentice instead. Is Theodora as bad as they say?”
“She’s upstairs taking a nap,” I said, and Hector looked at his watch and shook his head. He was quiet for a moment, and then, with a quick and careful glance at Prosper Lost, took off his jacket and handed it to me.
“Sewn into the lining is the map of the city’s waterworks,” he said. “Don’t lose it. It was very difficult to get hold of.”
“Thank you, Hector. I appreciate it.”
“I can’t see it doing you any good way out here,” Hector said. “It took me all day to get here from the city. This is a strange place, Snicket. Those strange inkwells, that shimmering forest of seaweed, the masks you need to wear if that bell rings—something seems very wrong in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I bet there’s not a single decent Mexican restaurant.”
“There’s a good library,” I said, “and a fine journalist, and several interesting people. That’s more than most places have.”
“Don’t get interested in that Ellington person,” Hector said. “She’s a liar and a thief.”
“She’s just trying to help her father,” I said, “and I promised to help her.”
Hector sighed and stood up to leave. “You’re in a real fix, Snicket. Good luck.”
“Will you be able to make your way back?” I said. “I know of a good taxi service.”
“Thank you, but I have my own transportation.”
“Another ballooning project?” I asked him.
Hector nodded. “My chaperone has given me an assignment to take some aerial photographs of a distant part of the sea. Something suspicious has been spotted.”
“So you’re not going back to the city?”
“Not for months,” Hector said. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders. I felt the packet inside my own jacket. I had spent the better part of the morning sewing it into the lining. Sewing is a prickly and boring business. Ellington Feint, with her long, careful fingers, would have done a better job of it. But it would be some time before I saw her again, and right now there was no use in giving my jacket to Hector, who would not return to the city in time.