"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) (15 page)

“And what is that? Are you looking for your father, too?”

“My father is alive and well,” I said, thinking with a shudder of the man in the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Store. “What I need to do is dig a tunnel to the basement of a museum.”

“Whatever for?”

“There’s something there,” I said. “Something on display that needs to be in the right hands.”

“But why do you have to be the one to do it?” Ellington asked me. “It sounds like a job for
an adult. Why aren’t your parents helping you?”

I thought of my parents, and then of the people who pretended to be my parents, and the eerie cloud that rose from the alley when Theodora poured out the laudanum that had been in my tea. I felt a complicated worry in my chest, like a tangle of wires or weeds, and when Ellington put her hand on my shoulder, I imagined that her long fingers would be good at untangling things. “My parents can’t help me,” I said. “They’re helpless.”

“Like my father,” Ellington said quietly, and I allowed myself a few seconds to miss my parents very much. I thought of my father’s face first, and then my mother’s, and both of them were smiling. Just a few seconds, Snicket, I told myself, blinking very fast, because in a few seconds Ellington will ask you another question.

“But who are these other people?” she asked. “Some kind of club?”

“It’s a secret,” I said. “In fact, this whole story is a secret.”

“If it’s a secret, why are you telling me?”

“Because I like you, Ms. Feint,” I admitted. “I thought you might find it interesting.”

Ellington Feint gave me a slow, sympathetic nod, and we
clang
ed down the staircase together. Ellington pressed the
A
button to close up the attic and then rested her green purse on the counter while the machinery made her a coffee. I turned my eyes from Ellington Feint to the steam rising out of the top of the elaborate device. It was a nice thing to watch. The piano kept playing, and eventually I laid my head down on the counter. The last thing I saw before I fell asleep was Ellington’s smile, and it was the first thing I saw when I woke up.

“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 that 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.