I said the first name that came to mind.
“There’s no one here by that name either.”
“I wouldn’t think so. It’s the name of an author from Sweden.”
I heard the hands around the lock again, but slower this time.
“She wrote a book about a girl with a long name and long braids who has adventures with her neighbors. It’s more interesting to have adventures with other people, don’t you think?”
The voice didn’t say anything.
“I mean, you wouldn’t want to be alone if you were in dangerous circumstances.”
The voice saw no reason to break its silence.
“There are other books about her, too. There’s one where she goes to the South Seas. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
“Go away,” the voice said, very quietly.
“You’re not very good at disguising your voice.”
“Neither are you.”
“This is asinine,” I said. “Open the door.”
“Asinine” is a word that sounds like you shouldn’t say it, so when you do say it, people often gasp. This makes it a delicious way of saying “not very smart,” which is all it means. There was no gasp from the other side of the door, but the lock clicked and the door opened and I walked inside.
It was a shabby apartment. There was a badly leaning lamp and a long wooden table someone had pounded with something. Now it was covered in bowls and glasses, with a stack of books at one end, and a great number of lemons, all cut in half. There was a large pile of papers on a rickety chair, and there was a sofa piled with lumpy pillows and ugly blankets, for someone to sleep, or try to sleep. The only handsome thing in the room was a small box with a crank on its side and a funnel on top, with music coming out of it. And there was a girl standing in front of me. Her green eyes were the same, but her hair wasn’t black, not now. It was blond instead, so blond it looked white. Her fingers were still slender, with long black nails again, and over her eyes were strange eyebrows curved like question marks. She was using the same smile, too. It was a smile I liked. It was a smile that might have meant anything.
Now you can be sure, I told myself. Now you have found her and now you can say her name.
“Ellington Feint.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Lemony Snicket,” she said right back to me. We stood and faced each other. I hadn’t known Ellington Feint very long, and you couldn’t quite say that we were friends. We both found ourselves in Stain’d-by-the-Sea on mysterious errands. We had both stolen the same statue, and we were both searching for the same villain, and now the Cleo Knight case had thrown us together again. But the Bombinating Beast, fashioned after Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s legendary monster, and Hangfire, who was holding Ellington’s father prisoner, and even the disappearance of a brilliant chemist didn’t make us friends. We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us parts of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can’t quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we cannot solve it alone.
“What are you doing here, Ms. Feint?” I said.
“I might ask you the same question, Mr. Snicket.”
“I’m looking for Cleo Knight,” I said.
Ellington moved now, and quickly shut the door. “As far as everyone here is concerned,” she said in a whisper, “I am Cleo Knight.”
I sat down at the table with all the kitchen equipment and the lemons sliced in half. I had most of the story, but not all of it. “That’s quite a stunt,” I said. “How did you do it?”
Ellington walked to the sofa and reached underneath it to pull out a suitcase. It was the one she’d carried with her from Killdeer Fields, the nearby town where she had grown up. It was filled with all sorts of clothing—everything she needed to wear on her journey to find her father. She held up a new coat with black and white stripes, and a hat the color of a raspberry.
“The hat I remember,” I said. “I saw it when you were living in Handkerchief Heights. Where did you get the coat?”
“Cleo Knight bought it for me,” she said, “at Diceys Department Store.”
“That’s a generous gift. You must be very good friends.”
“I wouldn’t call us friends,” Ellington said. “I only met her a few weeks ago, at Black Cat Coffee. She was trying to get the machine to make her a cup of tea to help her think. I convinced her to try coffee instead, and we started to talk. She told me that her parents were abandoning the ink business and moving to the city, but she has been working on an important experiment that could save the town.”
“Invisible ink,” I said.
Ellington smiled. “I should have known you would know. Cleo Knight really is a brilliant chemist. Usually, invisible ink is just some nonsense with lemon juice, but she’s almost perfected a new formula, with a secret ingredient she discovered herself. There will be invisible inkwells everywhere, she told me, just as soon as the formula is finished. People will go back to work. Stain’d-by-the-Sea will thrive again. The octopi will no longer be endangered. They could even put the sea back where it belongs, all because of Cleo Knight’s formula. Can you imagine? Invisible ink that actually works.”
“There are certain people I know who would be very interested in that,” I said.
“S. Theodora Markson, your chaperone, for instance?”
“Any number of people would be interested in invisible ink that actually works.”
“That’s exactly what Cleo Knight was worried about. She didn’t want her formula to fall into the wrong hands.”
“She was right to worry,” I said, thinking of Dr. Flammarion.
“And she was right to disappear. She knew danger was nearby. Her parents had been very supportive of her experiments, but then suddenly they began acting strangely and insisted on leaving town. It was a desperate situation, Snicket. The fate of the entire town was in the hands of Cleo Knight. So we made a deal.”
“You gave her your extra hat,” I said, “and she bought you an extra coat.”
“She even found me the right chemical to make my hair blond.”
“So now there were two Cleo Knights.”
“The real Cleo Knight found a safe place to hide, left a note for her parents, and drove off in her fancy car with her special equipment. And I’m supposed to pop up around town dressed like her, talking about joining the circus, so if anyone goes looking for her, they’ll be on the wrong track.”
“And then?”
Ellington smiled, but she wasn’t looking at me. “And then nothing,” she said. “That’s the whole story. Cleo Knight is somewhere safe, working on her experiments, and I’m confusing her enemies until she’s done.”
“That’s not the whole story,” I said, “not by a long shot. First of all, her family never found a note, and Cleo Knight and her Dilemma never made it to any safe place. Someone changed the plan, Ms. Feint. Someone destroyed the note and kept Mr. and Mrs. Knight in a state of unhurried delirium, thanks to regular injections of laudanum. And someone gave the Dilemma a flat tire with a hypodermic needle and then offered Cleo Knight a ride. Someone she trusted—the family’s private apothecary, Dr. Flammarion.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Maybe not, Ms. Feint. But the woman in the apartment above this one—the woman taking care of you—is Dr. Flammarion’s nurse.”
Ellington looked up at the apartment’s flickering chandelier, as if she expected the woman to drop through the ceiling. “How did you know?”
“I followed her from the library,” I said. “She returned some books that I hadn’t seen in some time—books that were in the possession of Hangfire. That villain is controlling everything, Ellington. Remember when he forced Dame Sally Murphy to impersonate Mrs. Murphy Sallis? Now Hangfire has Dr. Flammarion doing his dirty work. He has Nurse Dander helping him. And he has you too, Ms. Feint.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nurse Dander said you were here
on your honor. She said you needed to uphold your promise. You’re doing something for them, Ms. Feint. You’re helping Hangfire with his treachery, and you don’t even know it!”
Now she looked at me. Her eyes seemed greener, or perhaps the green was just more angry than I had seen green before. She pointed one furious finger at me, her fingernails as black as the nights in the Far East Suite, when it was very, very late and I still couldn’t fall asleep. “Of course I know it, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “Do you think I came to this place by accident? When I was in the attic of Black Cat Coffee, I found a package. It was addressed to my father, in care of an organization I had never heard of.”
She reached into a pocket and pulled out a badly wrinkled label, which she spread out on the table. Together we frowned at it.
ARMSTRONG FEINT C/O THE INHUMANE SOCIETY
There was no more to the address. There had been quite a few packages the last time I was in that attic. I hadn’t thought of them as clues. “What’s the Inhumane Society?” I said.
Ellington’s eyebrows gave me their best curl. “You don’t know?” she said. “I thought you were a member, Mr. Snicket.”
“No,” I said carefully. “My organization is different.”
For a second neither of us said anything, although our secrets were arguing in the air above us. “I stayed in that attic for two days,” she said finally. “I came out of hiding only to eat bread and drink coffee.”
“Where did you hide?” I asked.
“There’s a cupboard,” she said, “that’s larger than it looks.”
“I looked for you over and over.”
“I know you did, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “I kept thinking you were going to pick up the package.”
“You think I know where your father is?”
Ellington did not smile, but she looked like she had thought of smiling. “We’re not exactly friends, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “You just dropped into a tree one evening, and ever since, I’ve had the feeling that we’re part of the same mystery.”
I did not like to think about my ridiculous fall into a tree, though I often thought about Ellington finding me there and bringing me down. “I promised I would help you find him,” I reminded her. “If I knew where he was, I would tell you.”
She gave me a small nod. “In any case, it wasn’t you who picked up the package. It was Nurse Dander. I followed her here, but I was afraid to go further. The abandoned aquarium looked so eerie, and I didn’t know what I would find inside. But when I met Cleo Knight and we cooked up our plan, I knew I had my chance. Instead of popping up all over town, I made just one appearance, at Partial Foods. Then I took a taxi here and knocked on the door. Nurse Dander answered, and I introduced myself as Cleo Knight. I promised a formula for invisible ink that actually worked, in exchange for a meeting with Hangfire. It’s a good plan, Mr. Snicket.”
“Oh sure,” I said, “like juggling dynamite, or kicking a polar bear.”
“Don’t be asinine.”
“What’s asinine is trying to trick a villain like that.”
“It’s the only way,” Ellington said. “I went to all that trouble of getting the Bombinating Beast, but when I left him a message telling him I had it, he never answered. I need to rescue my father, Mr. Snicket. Pleasing Hangfire is the only way.”
I did not mention that the one who had gone to all that trouble to get the statue was me. I did not ask her how she left a message for Hangfire. When I sit and think of this incident in my life, beginning with the phone call from my sister and ending in the basement of the Colophon Clinic, the list of things I did wrong stretches out in front of me and I cannot see the end of it. “You can’t make invisible ink, can you?”
“Of course not,” Ellington said, with a helpless gesture at everything on the table. “I don’t even know what the secret additive is. When Nurse Dander is here, I putter around pretending to be a scientist. And when she goes out, I search the building for my father.”
“What have you found?”
“Nothing. Nurse Dander’s apartment is ordinary, and the rest of the apartments are empty. It’s a mystery why there’s furniture in this one. I haven’t seen Hangfire, but I think he’s been here.”
“How could you know? You’ve never seen him.”
“It’s just a feeling I have,” she said, looking across the shabby room.
“Someone else will get a feeling too, Ms. Feint. Someone will get a feeling that you’re tricking them.”
“But everyone thinks I’m Cleo Knight, the brilliant scientist. Everyone trusts her.”
“But the real Cleo Knight is in Hangfire’s clutches,” I said. “He will tell Dr. Flammarion, and Dr. Flammarion will tell his nurse. And his nurse is good with a knife.”
Ellington looked at me now. Her eyes widened beneath her eyebrows, and her fingers curled up like talons on the table. We both stared up at the chandelier, listening for any sound from Nurse Dander’s apartment. But all we heard was the record Ellington was playing. It wasn’t a tune I knew. I could hear a trumpet and a trombone, with a piano and some drums tapping along. It sounded carefree. Everyone was having fun, wherever they were where the music was happening. “What do I do?” she asked me quietly.
“Don’t get scared now,” I said. “You are a marvel of a girl, Ms. Feint. You follow people in the street and disguise yourself as a brilliant chemist. You knock on the doors of villains and trick them. If you were in that Swedish book, it would say you could whip your weight in wildcats.”
“Actually, wildcats frighten me. My father and I saw one once on a hike, and it still gives me nightmares.”
“I tell stories too,” I said, “when I’m nervous. We need to get out of here, Ms. Feint. Leave everything behind, particularly the library books on chemistry. They’re boring.”
“How can I leave?” Ellington said. “Nurse Dander will hear me.”
“She can hear you,” I said, “but she can’t know you’re you.”
“She’s seen all these clothes,” Ellington said. “She searched my suitcase when I got here.”
I took off my coat. “She hasn’t searched me,” I said. “Take this.”
“The sun is going down,” she said. “It’s cold outside, Mr. Snicket.”
“So I’ll shiver,” I said. “I’ve shivered before.”
She looked down at the table and traced her father’s name with a black fingernail. “So have I,” she said, and put on my coat. She rummaged in the suitcase for a few hairpins and in moments had her long hair pinned up on top of her head. It felt private to watch her do that. I had never seen my sister or my mother when they did whatever they did to their hair. It was a secret.
“What do you think, Mr. Snicket? Do I look like a boy?”
“No. From a distance, maybe.”
“How is this going to work?”
“It’s easy,” I said. “I learned how to do it.”
“From your organization.”
“Yes,” I said.
Ellington looked around the room. “I don’t like leaving these things behind.”
“Which things do you mean?”
“My phonograph. My papers. And…”
The music kept at it.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Feint,” I said, when the pause was over. “I’ll bring it to you. We can’t be seen leaving together, and you shouldn’t have it with you, in case you’re caught. But I’ll take it out of here, and I’ll meet you.”
“Where?”
“You know where. Corner of Caravan and Parfait.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. But you’d better show me where it is.”
I liked that Ellington didn’t even pretend not to know what I meant. She walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. It was the sort that had a few drawers, called crispers. She opened one, and inside nothing was very crisp. It looked like lettuce, or something that had been lettuce during a happier time. Now it was slimy and watery and looked like nothing you’d wa
nt to touch, which I suppose was the idea. Ellington brushed the old lettuce aside and withdrew something large and black. It looked something like a sea horse, with small holes for eyes, and a nasty, hollow smile. I didn’t know what it was before, and I didn’t know what it was then. The statue gave me a look like it wasn’t going to tell me. I held it in my hands and turned it over for a minute to feel the patch of crinkly paper that was pasted over a small slit. Spend some time with me, I thought. Sit with me, you terrible beast. Tell me all your secrets. But there wasn’t time, not then. I took the smallest blanket from the sofa, light blue with silly fringes on the edges, and wrapped up the beast so no one would see what I was carrying.
“Take good care of that,” she said.
“What is it, exactly?” I asked her.
She gave me a tiny shrug. “It’s my only hope,” she said, and I walked her to the door. I looked at her and wanted to tell her to take good care of something, too. But I wasn’t quite sure what it was, so I opened the door very quietly and then knocked on it very loudly.
“Delivery,” I said, in my “delivery” voice. “Delivery for Miss Cleo Knight.”
Ellington caught on at once. “Sir,” she said sternly, “I told you there is no one here by that name or any other name either.”
“My mistake,” I said. “See you later.”
“See you later,” she replied, and with one last look at me, she hurried down the stairs just as I heard from overhead the sound of another door opening.
“Miss Knight?” Nurse Dander called down to me. “Who was that? Was someone looking for you?”
I didn’t answer, of course. I couldn’t imitate voices. I was no Hangfire. But neither did I want Nurse Dander to think there was no one in the apartment. I walked quickly to the record player and turned up the volume. The musicians sounded even happier. Ellington was right. It was a shame to leave something like that behind.
“Miss Knight?” the nurse called again.
I looked around quickly. The bathroom, I thought. Even the shabbiest of apartments has a bathroom. I walked through the only doorway I could see, and found myself in a very tiny bathroom, made tinier by a sink so large there was room for a goldfish bowl on the rim. The bowl had nothing but a small black tadpole, like the one I had seen in the aquarium, with another chunk of food and another chunk of wood in case it was in a climbing mood. It didn’t appear to be. The faucet was dripping steadily, but I wasn’t going to fix it. I drew back the shower curtain and saw a small window, open just a crack. The air whistled through the crack and reminded me of something. It was not big enough to climb out of.
When Did You See Her Last Page 7
