“Miss Knight, answer me!”
I put the statue, still wrapped in a blanket, down on the dirty tiles of the floor. A distraction, I thought. A loud noise. Out the window. Enough time for Ellington to escape and for you to get out, too. Yes, I must find a weight or some other heavy object. Something in the kitchen. But Nurse Dander was already walking down the stairs, and then I heard her step into the apartment. She had a slight wheeze I had not noticed before. I could hear it now, because she was so close to me.
“Miss Knight?” she said.
I listened to her wheezing and put the stopper in the sink. The faucet kept dripping. I stepped into the shower and slowly, slowly opened the window all the way.
“Miss Knight?” Nurse Dander said one more time, like a warning, and then I heard that high-pitched sound again, of metal scraping against metal. Good with a knife means nothing, I said to myself. It’s just an expression. Think of another expression. The cat’s pajamas, that’s a funny one. Why should it mean something wonderful, what a cat wears to bed? Get scared later.
There was enough water in the sink now. I leaned over the fishbowl. There was a sweet smell, the smell of something I didn’t like. Forget it, Snicket. You do not see the point of honeydew melons. I reached in and quickly cupped the tadpole in my hand. I lifted it out and dropped it into the sink, but my finger hurt just as I did, a sharp and angry pain, like I’d been stuck with a piece of glass. But it isn’t broken yet, Snicket.
“Where are you, Knight?”
I looked at my finger. It was bleeding, just a tiny bit. Bit. I had been bitten. I glared down at the tadpole. I was trying to save you, and you bite me, you ungrateful tiny thing? It ignored me. It was busy circling its new surroundings. I picked up the fishbowl and stepped back into the shower. Now the voice was at the door.
“Knight?”
I heaved the fishbowl out the window and for a second listened to nothing. Then I listened to a terrific crash of glass. It was very loud. It made me grin. Everyone in the neighborhood could hear it, but I only cared about one person. It worked. I heard Nurse Dander gasp and then hurry out of the apartment and down the stairs to see if all the ruckus was the girl she was looking for. I picked up the statue and made sure the blanket was holding tight, and then I hurried down myself. I walked through the abandoned aquarium with my bitten finger in my mouth. “I don’t like your cousin,” I muttered to all the tadpoles on the counter. In silent tadpole language they said who cares. The floor was still dirty and the door was hanging open, so I didn’t have to risk the noise. I stepped out into the street and saw the careful, suspicious figure of Nurse Dander standing by the café, looking this way and that. When she was looking this way, I went that way, and when she was looking that way, I was around the corner.
Ellington was right. It was cold with the sun setting. I wished the blanket were around me instead of the Bombinating Beast. I had it in my hands, and I could have gone anywhere. I could have gone back to the Lost Arms to check in with my chaperone. I could have checked on the Officers Mitchum to see if they had cracked the case. I could have gone back to the library to get Moxie or to Hungry’s to see Jake Hix, or walked around until I found Pip and Squeak and had them drive around town looking for Cleo Knight. These are all things you could do, Snicket. I shivered against the side of the building and thought it again. You could do any of these things. You should do them. You don’t have to meet her. She’s a liar and a thief. She’s desperate. She’s trouble. She stole from you. Nobody knows what you promised. You could keep it to yourself.
But you can tell yourself anything. A wildcat is just one of the wonders of nature, and it’s not going to give you nightmares. It was just once on a hike, years ago, and you should forget about it. But then you’re sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, heart pounding from the chase, and it doesn’t matter what you tell yourself. Your sister is older now. A branch of a tree would no longer hurt her. You don’t need to be in the city helping her. You can be here, in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Nobody is in any danger, I told myself. I clutched the beast to my chest and started walking quickly. You know where, I told myself. Corner of Caravan and Parfait. Black Cat Coffee is where she is waiting.
CHAPTER NINE
If this account can be called a mystery, then Black Cat Coffee is a mystery inside a mystery. There were certainly mysterious things in the establishment. The shiny machinery in the center of the room—which produced bread or coffee, depending on which button you pressed—always worked perfectly, but I never saw anyone attending to it. The attic was a place where you could retrieve packages, but I never saw anyone delivering them. The player piano played tunes I couldn’t identify.
But these aren’t what I mean. I don’t care who oiled the machinery of Black Cat Coffee and made sure the bins were full of flour and roasted beans, or who delivered the boxes of books filled with blank pages or gears used in botanical extraction. The music doesn’t matter to me. The real mystery of Black Cat Coffee is the girl with the curved eyebrows and the unreadable smile, who was there at the counter when I arrived, an empty cup and saucer in front of her and another one steaming in front of the neighboring stool. Her hair was still pinned up, but my coat lay folded on the counter.
“I told myself that if you weren’t here by the time this coffee cooled,” she said, “then you wouldn’t be here at all.”
“I told you I would meet you,” I said.
“You didn’t even hide that,” she said, and pointed at the Bombinating Beast.
“True,” I said, although I kept it tucked underneath my arm.
“Are you going to give it back to me?”
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“It’s a statue of an imaginary beast.”
“It’s more than that, and you know it.”
“I only know that Hangfire wants it.”
“Then why hasn’t he gotten it from you?”
Ellington shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Have a seat, Mr. Snicket. Have some coffee.”
She patted the neighboring stool, and I sat down but pushed the coffee away. “You know I’m a teetotaler when it comes to coffee.”
“You would like it if you tried it.”
“I prefer root beer.”
“I’ve looked all over this town for root beer for you,” she said. “I even checked for it yesterday, when I was fooling the woman at Partial Foods. They don’t carry it.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s one of the many drawbacks of this town.”
She sipped my coffee. “What are the others?”
The disappointments of Stain’d-by-the-Sea seemed too numerous to list. “This town is far from people I would prefer to be closer to,” I said, “and it’s in the shadow of the treachery of a terrible villain.”
“I suppose that’s what brought us both here,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m here because my chaperone is here.”
“But why is she here?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “It’s like a story so long that you end up getting lost in it. Do you know that one about the big fight over an apple and a pretty woman?”
“The one that ends with a hollow statue and a ghost who likes to bury things? My father was reading me that when he disappeared.” She finished the coffee and turned the cup upside down on the saucer. It was a nice gesture to watch. “Every night, my father would get home from his fieldwork and leave his boots on the porch. It was during the floods, and his boots got so muddy there was no use washing them. He’d cook dinner in his socks, and then I’d do the dishes, and he’d pour himself a glass of wine and read me a chapter of something before we put the lights out.”
“It sounds like a cozy life,” I said.
“It was.” Ellington’s voice was far away, and I could scarcely hear her over the sounds of the player piano. “My father is a naturalist, so our house was always filled with wildflowers from nearby meadows, or baby animals he had rescued, recuper
ating in old shoe boxes until they were healthy enough to be set free. And he was a lover of music, so he would wind up the record player first thing in the morning so we’d have music with our breakfast. Then one night I didn’t hear his boots on the porch, and now that music is all I have.”
I thought of the record player, still playing music in that shabby apartment. “I’m sorry you had to leave that behind,” I said, “but you might be able to get it back.”
“I still have this.” Ellington reached into her pocket and laid a small object between the two coffee cups. It looked like the old-fashioned record player, except it was the size of a deck of cards. She wound the tiny crank, and we both leaned forward to hear the little, tinkly music. “My father always carried this music box,” she said, “so he could have music with him no matter how far into the wilderness he went. He left it behind on the day he disappeared, so I’ve been taking care of it.”
“I recognize the tune,” I said, remembering the first night Ellington and I met. The same music had been playing out of the record player at Handkerchief Heights. It was a tune that was sad but not weepy, as if it were trying to say there was no point in bursting into tears when there was so much work to be done. “What’s it called?”
Ellington just shook her head. There are some secrets you want to keep to yourself, even if they don’t matter. They might only matter if you keep them secret.
“I saw the rescued tadpole,” I said, “in the bowl on the bathroom sink. Do you think your father was there?”
“I don’t know. But rescuing a little animal like that is definitely something he would do.”
“It might be little, but it’s fierce.” I held up my finger and showed her the tiny scab where I had been bitten.
“That looks like it hurts.”
“It hurts as much as it looks.”
“If my father were here, he could fix that,” Ellington said. “He would pluck the right herbs growing from cracks in the sidewalk and concoct something that would work in no time. He’s a brilliant scientist.”
“Stain’d-by-the-Sea needs brilliant scientists,” I said. “Perhaps soon your father and Cleo Knight will be working side by side to stop this town from disappearing completely.”
“In the meantime,” Ellington said with a sigh, “we’re alone. We’re alone and it’s difficult. Don’t you find it difficult to be alone, Mr. Snicket?”
I put down the bundle I was holding, the mysterious statue covered in a blanket. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was taught not to mind.”
“Who would teach you a thing like that? S. Theodora Markson?”
“No, no, I learned it long before she became my chaperone.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “You told me you had an unusual education, but you didn’t tell me the details.”
“I don’t like thinking about the details.”
“Digging a tunnel, you told me once. Digging a tunnel to the basement of a museum.”
“That’s right.”
“There are no more museums in Stain’d-by-the-Sea.”
“No,” I said. “There aren’t.”
“So you’re not doing the digging. Someone else is.”
“Yes.”
“Someone you would prefer to be closer to, like you said.”
“Yes.”
“So I guess you mind being alone after all.”
“I told you, they taught us not to mind,” I said. “They can teach you anything. That doesn’t mean you learn it. It doesn’t mean you believe it.”
“Then can’t you go and help whoever is digging that tunnel?”
“No,” I said. “I need to stay here.”
“Why? Because of Theodora?”
“Because of you,” I said. “I promised to help you. Don’t you remember, Ms. Feint?”
Ellington looked at me, and her green eyes filled with water. “Yes,” she said. “Mr. Snicket, my father is such a gentle man. He must be very frightened, wherever he is. How can we find him?”
“If we find Cleo Knight,” I said, “I think we’ll find your father. Cleo is a brilliant chemist, and your father is a brilliant naturalist. Hangfire is collecting brilliant people and forcing them to do terrible things.”
“My father would never do anything terrible.”
I did not answer. I did not know the man. It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or later. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult. I did not like to think this, so I listened instead to the sounds of the player piano tangling with the sounds of Armstrong Feint’s music box. I listened until a new sound joined in, a sound I was sad to recognize. It was the sound of a boy about my age, leaning out the window of a station wagon pretending to be a siren. In moments the Officers Mitchum were striding into Black Cat Coffee, followed by their sneering son and a great heap of wild yarn. I had to blink three times before realizing that the yarn was actually S. Theodora Markson, with her hair looking even crazier than it normally did.
“Snicket!” she cried. “There you are!”
“S!” I couldn’t resist answering. “Here I am.”
“These officers were looking for you, Snicket. They interrupted me in the middle of a shampoo. I told them that you like to waste your days here, mooning over your cupidity for Elaine.”
“Her name is Ellington Feint,” I said, “and she is sitting right here.”
“We’re not interested in where your friends are sitting,” Harvey Mitchum told me. “We’re interested in what you’re up to.”
“My chaperone told me to make myself scarce until dinnertime,” I said.
“Did she also tell you to send the police on a wild-goose chase?” demanded Mimi Mitchum. “You wasted the time of the law, and of the law’s son, who could have been doing something more constructive with his time.”
“It’s true,” Stew said to me with a phoniness the adults had no ear to catch. “I was going to give myself a spelling test, but instead you wasted my afternoon.”
It was useless to argue that Stew Mitchum was more likely going to continue his antics with his slingshot, which was sticking prominently out of his pocket.
“You told us to go see the Knight family,” Harvey Mitchum said. “You told us silly things about Dr. Flammarion. But instead—”
“Let me tell it, Harvey,” Mimi said. “I’m better at telling stories.”
“You are not!”
“I am so! Remember that time I told a story at that tea party that our friends’ mother held at that restaurant that used to be on the corner near the dry cleaner’s where that man used to—”
“You see?” Harvey Mitchum crowed in triumph. “That story is boring already, and you haven’t even told it!”
“If I haven’t told it, how could it be boring?”
“You could make anything boring, Mimi! You’re like a magic wand of boring!”
“Well, you’re like a magic wand of bad breath!”
“I get bad breath because I eat what you cook!”
“That’s right! You never do the cooking!”
Ellington Feint hadn’t spent much time with the Officers Mitchum, but she instinctively knew that the only way to stop them from arguing was to interrupt. “Excuse me,” she said, “but what happened when you went to see the Knights?”
Harvey Mitchum gave her an irritated frown. “Nothing happened,” he said. “The Knights have left Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The entire Ink Inc. building is boarded up, like almost every other building in town.”
I thought of what Zada and Zora had said. What could they do, if Mr. and Mrs. Knight gave the word to leave? They were only the servants. “Are the housekeepers gone?”
“Everyone’s gone. You led us to an empty building, Snicket, and we went to your chaperone to find out why.”
“I’ll tell you why,” I said. “Because I’m trying to solve the Cleo Knight case.”
“There is no Cleo Knight case,” Theodora said firmly. “As I told the officers, no crime has
been committed. We know that the Knight girl ran away to join the circus, and we know that her parents moved out of the city.”
“We know no such thing,” I said. I turned to the officers. “Did you find Dr. Flammarion? Did you talk to him?”
Mimi Mitchum shook her head at me in that way that no one likes to have a head shaken at them. “In the first place,” she said, “Dr. Flammarion is a respected apothecary. And in the second place, well, there’s not really a second place. The case is closed.”
“But Miss Knight’s car is still parked in front of Partial Foods.”
“Be sensible, Snicket. Miss Knight was seen leaving Partial Foods and getting into a cab.”
“That wasn’t Miss Knight,” Ellington said calmly. “That was me.”
“You?” Harvey Mitchum said sternly.
“Yes. I was playing a trick on that grocer.”
“So you and the Snicket lad were fooling us together?”
“Mr. Snicket knew nothing of this,” Ellington said, “until he ran into me here.”
I once had a pair of pants that fit me like Ellington’s story fit the truth. They fell down as soon as I took a few steps.
“Then I’m afraid you’re under arrest,” Mimi Mitchum said sternly, and grabbed Ellington’s arm. “Playing tricks is called fraud, and fraud is a crime.”
“This isn’t right,” I said. “You should be looking for Miss Knight, not arresting Ms. Feint.”
“Don’t tell us our business,” Harvey Mitchum said sternly. “This girl was involved in robbery not long ago, and now is guilty of fraud. It’s still too early to make assumptions, but it wouldn’t be surprising if she were involved in all of the other suspicious shenanigans around town.”
When Did You See Her Last Page 8
