I stood stewing about it for a minute, until I heard the sound of the sliding doors opening and some heavy, unpleasant footsteps. You haven’t heard the footsteps of a bully until you’ve heard them coming for you.
“You ought to change your name to Necktie,” Stew Mitchum said. “You’re always hanging around.”
“Your parents aren’t going to solve this crime,” I said, “so why shouldn’t I keep investigating?”
“Because I said so,” Stew said.
“‘Because I said so’ is the worst reason on Earth,” I said, and I turned to face him. He looked steadily at me and then moved all ten of his fingers, like he was making sure he had two fists if he needed them.
“Listen up, Lemonade,” he said, using an insulting nickname I was tired of when I was four. “This is one of those violent threats you’ve read about. You’re going to stop your investigation and retire to your compartment to play with your little pals. I’m going to give you to the count of Get Out of Here Right Now.”
“That’s not a number.”
“You want a number?” Stew showed me what his fist looked like. “I’ll do a number on you.”
“I’m not a stroller,” I said. “You can’t push me around. I’m going to find out the truth about Dashiell Qwerty’s murder.”
“We’ll see what you find out,” Stew said. “You’ll find out what it feels like to be thrown from a speeding train to the rocky bottom of a drained sea. Except you won’t really find out, because you’ll be dead. Get it? What I mean is, it’ll kill you when I throw you from this train, so you’ll be in no state to find out what it feels like. Get it? Due to your death by falling from a train.”
“I get it, I get it,” I said. Violent threats are less effective when they need serious editing.
Stew offered me a triumphant smirk, the way you’d offer someone a poisoned muffin. I didn’t want it. Then he turned and stomped off, quickly and carelessly, which is probably why he didn’t notice the small object I saw on the floor. I noticed it, though. I was the person who was supposed to notice it. With a quick glance at Stew’s departing figure, I leaned down to pluck it off the carpet, like it was a delicate creature I was trying to capture and study, and slipped it into my pocket. My mind felt like soil must feel when a tiny sprout starts pushing its way through. Don’t look at it here, I told myself. It’s not safe here. This train is loaded with treachery and deceit, and rattling with deception and murder. Moxie doesn’t even know, I realized, as I retraced my steps. You’re going to have to tell her that Dashiell Qwerty is dead, and that S. Theodora has been railroaded. You’re going to have to bring her all the bad news. I trudged my way back to Moxie’s compartment and opened the door with a heavy heart and a weary head. But when I stepped inside, my heart and head only got heavier and wearier. Moxie Mallahan and Kellar Haines were both there, huddled over Moxie’s typewriter, and they both looked up at me as I entered. The Thistle of the Valley hummed underneath my feet like an escalator or an earthquake, a dark buzzing sound. Through the window I could see the dim silhouette of the Clusterous Forest as we approached, the great mass of seaweed that had somehow survived the draining of the sea and now lived to shiver in the breeze. But on the table beneath the window was a more troubling sight. Two black statues, with sharp teeth and empty eyes, sat staring at me with identical malevolence. “Malevolence” is a word for the sort of evil that is dark and shiny, as dark and shiny as the Bombinating Beast.
“Lemony Snicket,” Moxie said, “I’m afraid we have some bad news.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What’s the news?” I asked, and sat down on one of the compartment’s wooden benches. I was talking to my associates, but I was still looking at the two Bombinating Beasts on the table. I stared and stared, unsteady from the rattling train and from the eerie sight. What are you, I asked them silently. What do you want with me? Since I’d arrived in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the questions about a mysterious item had hovered in my mind like stars, bright and cold and impossible to get ahold of. Now there were two of them, right in front of me, but I felt no closer to understanding what was really going on.
“We’ve stumbled into quicksand,” Moxie said with a sigh. “Remember when we all agreed to work quietly, so Hangfire wouldn’t learn of our plot to defeat him? Well, Haines and I both worked quietly on the same scheme.”
Kellar kicked at the bad carpet. “I asked Ornette if she could make a copy of the Bombinating Beast,” he said, “and then I got a message to Hangfire arranging to trade the statue for the safe return of my sister.”
“The jig is up,” Moxie said glumly. “Hangfire received both of our messages, so he knew we were tricking him.”
“But the train made its unscheduled stop,” Kellar said.
“That was to trick us,” Moxie replied. “There’s no way he came aboard.”
“Do you think so, Snicket?” Kellar asked. “Do you think the jig is really up?”
I thought so and I told him so. He took it as well as he could, a phrase which here means he looked defeated and sad. Moxie put her hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Haines,” she said.
Kellar patted her hand. “It’s not your fault,” he said, “but I thought for a moment we could defeat Hangfire.”
“If he’d come aboard, he’d be caught like a rat in a trap,” Moxie said.
Kellar looked out the window of the train. It was not too dark to see the seaweed of the Clusterous Forest, billowing like smoke and coming closer and closer as the train rattled along. “If he’d come aboard,” he said quietly, “I might have rescued my sister.”
“Ornette must have realized what was going on,” I said, and took the folded train out of my pocket. “She knew there’d be trouble on The Thistle of the Valley.”
“I caught a glimpse of you at Stain’d Station, Snicket,” Kellar said, “but just when I was about to approach you, I was spotted.”
Moxie put a fresh piece of paper in her typewriter, and began typing this up. “Who spotted you?” she asked.
“My mother,” Kellar said darkly. “I guess a mother can’t miss her own child in a crowd.”
That made me think of something, but it was Moxie who asked the question. “What was she doing at the station?”
“Trying to stop me from coming aboard,” Kellar said grimly. “I can’t believe she’s still working with the Inhumane Society.”
“Mothers do all sorts of things nobody can believe,” I said. “We’re in the middle of a quagmire, a word which here means ‘heap of trouble.’”
Moxie gave me a small smile. “Why do you always say that—which here means?”
“I’ll probably outgrow it,” I said.
Her smile stopped. “What is it, Snicket? Where have you been all this time? What happened when you were listening to the prisoners’ car?”
“Something’s happened,” Kellar said. “I knew it the minute you found me on board. What is it?”
What it was then was a knock on the door, and Moxie looked frantically at the two statues on the table. I went to the door and reached for the latch, while Kellar stood in front of the table with his arms out wide to block the view as best he could, as if the Bombinating Beasts were a birthday present no one had bothered to wrap yet.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Kenneth Grahame,” came the reply, and of course when I opened the door it was not one Scottish author but one chemist and one cook who were sweethearts of each other’s and associates of mine. My spirits rose a little. With Jake Hix and Cleo Knight aboard, we had a full team of volunteers, honest and brave and with a fierce enthusiasm for literature. It might not be enough to defeat the evil aboard The Thistle of the Valley, I thought, but it is better to fail among friends.
“We came as soon as we got the message,” Jake said, and took out a folded paper train identical to mine. “Cleo drove the Dilemma at top speed.”
The Dilemma was an automobile, powerfully handsome and handsomely power
ful, that had gotten us out of a few troublesome situations and was very fun to ride around in when there were no troublesome situations to be found. “I thought I saw your headlights out the window,” I said.
Cleo nodded. “I thought we were going to have to pull some crazy stunt to get on board The Thistle of the Valley. I wanted to leap onto the train and use the railings to climb aboard, but Jake said it was too dangerous.”
“Those railings would never hold,” Jake said.
“Not for long, anyway,” I agreed, with a still-sore knee.
“But then the train stopped at Offshore Island,” Cleo said, “and we managed to sneak aboard. We practically had to canvass the train to find you. What’s the plan? What’s with those statues? How are we going to defeat Hangfire? How did you get him to come aboard?”
“Hangfire’s not here,” Kellar said. “He saw through our scheme like it was a fishbowl. Moxie and I both tried to lure him onto The Thistle of the Valley, but it’s no dice.”
“No dice” is an expression which means “That is not going to happen,” but Jake shook his head as if there were plenty of dice after all. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Cleo and I saw a masked figure climb aboard, just as the train pulled to a stop.”
“Hangfire?” Moxie said.
“Who else could it be?” Jake asked.
“Stew Mitchum opened the door for him,” Cleo said, her mouth curled down the way any of our mouths did when we talked about Stew, “in the very back of the very last car.”
“The Officers’ Lounge,” I remembered, “in the very back of the prisoners’ car.”
“The car where Qwerty was locked up,” Moxie said thoughtfully.
“And Ellington Feint,” I said.
“Never mind Ellington Feint,” Moxie said with a frown.
“If Hangfire’s here,” Kellar said hopefully, “maybe our messages fooled him after all.”
I shook my head. “Hangfire knew it was a trick,” I said, “but he came aboard anyway. He’s the one who’s set a trap, and all of us are the rats in it.”
“Don’t call us rats, Snicket,” Jake said. “Hangfire boarded alone. There are more of us than there are of him. Whatever treachery he’s planning, we can stop it before it starts.”
“It started already,” I said. “It started before The Thistle of the Valley left Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It started before my early bedtime. It started before I read a single book Dashiell Qwerty recommended.”
This was the sort of thing that Moxie would normally type up, but she wasn’t even looking at her typewriter. She was looking at me.
“What is it, Snicket?” she said.
“Sit down,” Cleo said to me gently. “You’re looking pale.”
She helped me onto a bench, and Moxie reached over to put a hand on my cheek. It was something my sister used to do to me, when I was very young, to show me she was listening. Dear Kit, I thought. I very much hate to deliver bad news.
“Snicket?” Moxie asked. “What happened?”
“I have some bad news” is what managed to come out of my mouth, as shaky as the train.
Moxie kept one hand on me, but she put the other on the typewriter. “I knew it,” she said. “What happened in the prison car?”
“Something awful,” Kellar said. “I can tell.”
“Tell us, Snicket,” Moxie said, and I told them.
The Thistle of the Valley shook and clattered, but nobody else said anything. Bad news can hit you like a train. It will knock you over and leave you flat, but everybody else keeps rushing along.
“It’s not true,” Moxie said. “It can’t be true.”
I stayed where I was. There was no need to say it was true.
Jake rubbed at both his eyes with both his fists. “I wouldn’t know who Eleanor Estes was if it weren’t for Qwerty,” he said. “I wouldn’t know Lowry. I wouldn’t know Snyder. Dashiell Qwerty was a great, great librarian.”
“One of the greatest,” I agreed.
Cleo shivered. “And they really think Theodora killed him?”
“Well, they locked her in a cell,” I said.
Moxie reached toward her typewriter, but I watched her fingers tremble on the keys. “A real journalist knows that a murder is a big story,” she said. “She’d type up her notes and cry about it later.”
“There’s nothing wrong with mourning the death of a librarian,” I said.
Moxie looked at me. “Then why aren’t you crying, Snicket?”
“I planned on doing it later,” I said, but I cried a little right then. Everyone joined me. There is no point in delaying crying. Sadness is like having a vicious alligator around. You can ignore it for only so long before it begins devouring things and you have to pay attention. I cried and then cried a little more and thought. Poor Qwerty, is what I thought. Poor sub-librarian. He keeps watch over Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s library for ten years, and then it ends on a rattly train. Lemony Snicket comes into town, I thought, and everything gets worse for you, Qwerty. Snicket’s a nice enough kid, but when you allow him into a library, you might as well flood the place and kill the brave and careful man who runs it. All of us cried in the rattling room, and the beasts watched over us and said nothing.
“How could she do it, Snicket?” Moxie said finally, wiping her eyes. “How could she kill him?”
“Take some notes,” I told her, and then I told her about what I’d heard when I eavesdropped on Theodora and Qwerty. I told her about my canvassing of The Thistle of the Valley, and I told her about the three so-called witnesses who helped my chaperone get railroaded. Moxie was still shaky at first, but by the time I described the shattering of glass, the typewriter was going lickety-split.
“It sounds like Qwerty was in V.F.D., too,” Jake said, “and we didn’t even know it.”
“I thought he might be,” I said. “Most librarians are, of course.”
Kellar scratched the spike in his hair. “Why didn’t you ask him if he was one of us?”
“You don’t ask if someone has integrity and pluck and has read a great many books in the hope of repairing the world,” I said. “You just watch them, and figure it out for yourself.”
“Why would Theodora,” Cleo said, “kill someone who has integrity and pluck and has read a great many books in the hope of repairing the world?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure, Snicket?” Kellar asked me. “Not so long ago, she wanted to leave town and abandon Stain’d-by-the-Sea to Hangfire’s treachery.”
“I have many complaints about my chaperone,” I said, “but that doesn’t make her a murderer.”
“She’s not a murderer,” Jake said, with a disgusted wave of his hand, “just like Dashiell Qwerty was no arsonist. It couldn’t have happened like those witnesses said.”
“I know it didn’t,” I agreed. “I stood in that cell myself. It was full of broken glass. If Theodora had thrown the weapon out the window, like the witnesses told me, the glass would have fallen outside.”
“But how do you explain Theodora stealing that uniform?” Cleo asked.
“She wanted to talk to a prisoner,” I said. “Conductors are the only ones who would be allowed into the cells in the prison car. She argued with Qwerty, but he was killed by somebody else.”
“I can’t imagine Dashiell Qwerty having too many enemies,” Jake said.
“Anyone who finds a crucial secret ends up with enemies,” I said. “Qwerty had information that could stop Hangfire, and now he’s dead.”
“Do you think Hangfire snuck aboard this train and killed him?” Moxie asked.
I looked at the cardboard beasts and then at the dark, fast view out the window. “Hangfire doesn’t do all of his treachery himself,” I said. “He has plenty of people to help him.”
“You’re thinking of Ellington Feint again,” Moxie said, with a severe frown.
“I’m thinking of everyone,” I said. “Sally Murphy, Gifford and Ghede, Stew Mitchum—there are countless suspi
cious people on board The Thistle of the Valley, and those are just the ones we know about.”
“Why not go to the Mitchums again,” Cleo asked, “and tell them everything?”
“Because I don’t know everything,” I said. “Not yet. According to the law from the outskirts of town in the hinterlands to the boundary of the Clusterous Forest, the case is closed. But I can’t seem to get the case open. Wherever I go on this train, there’s a piece of a sinister plot, but I can’t put the pieces in order.”
“Dashiell Qwerty was murdered in his cell,” Jake said. “That’s the biggest piece.”
“And there’s Theodora, wrongly accused,” Cleo said.
Moxie looked at her notes. “There are three librarians,” she said, “dishonest and scared.”
Kellar looked at the table. “There are two Bombinating Beasts, both decoys.”
“There’s Gifford and Ghede,” I said, “disguised as conductors. And there’s Sally Murphy, preparing for the role of a lifetime.”
“And there are all those children at Wade Academy,” Moxie said, with a shudder, “in the clutches of the Inhumane Society, stealing honeydews and preparing for goodness knows what.”
“It’s all a big question mark,” Jake said, with a grim grin, and I gave him a fraught frown to match. Question marks made me think of Ellington Feint’s curved eyebrows, and the smile she always gave me, that could have meant anything. It made me unsteady to think of all of it, and the train rattling made me feel unsteadier still.
“What are we going to do about it?” Moxie asked. “We have to try something. There’s too much at stake. Like Theodora’s freedom.”