Shouldn't You Be in School?

by Lemony Snicket

  The alarm summoned the Officers Mitchum from next door, and they hurried into the library and sputtered in the sprinklers. Theodora was next through the door. It might help you to take a moment to imagine what an onslaught of water from above did to the vast hairstyle of S. Theodora Markson.

  “What’s going on?” Harvey Mitchum demanded, pointing a soaked finger at me.

  “Daddy!” Stew called out in his best little-boy voice. “That mean girl over there has destroyed the liberry!”

  “Liberry” was a good move, I thought. It was cute enough to melt the Mitchums’ heart so they didn’t think to ask what their son was doing there. Instead they stomped through the stormy room and grabbed Ellington by one arm each.

  “First fraud,” Mimi Mitchum said to her, “and now destruction of property. You’re in real trouble, miss. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Ellington stood between the police officers with her sunset dress sagged and ruined. One hand clutched her green bag, and the other clutched the compass that she held up as she looked me in the eye. It was the last I saw her for quite some time. “I was wrong,” she said to me.

  “So was I,” I said.

  The Mitchums led her out. The water kept pouring, so when we left the library it was like coming in from the rain. Theodora still looked ridiculous. She told Stew he was a hero, and he said he loved liberries more than anything else in the whole wide world. I reminded him that the library was still ruined. Every book in the place had been destroyed. Theodora said that seemed more like my fault. The Mitchums agreed but said they wouldn’t arrest me. Ellington said nothing, and I said nothing to her. They took her away, and I walked down the steps. I kept my mind on looking disappointed. Hangfire was surely someplace watching. Maybe someone had given him a pair of binoculars to do it. I had to look like I had failed as I trudged to the taxi and told the Bellerophon brothers what had happened. I leaned against the wagon and sighed. I’d had a long day, rich with events, and I was in the mood to read a good book to relax. I was thinking of a particular book while I was trying to look beaten and miserable. The book is about two people who are thinking about doing something wicked. They meet on a locomotive, these strangers, and decide to trade wicked deeds. Nobody else knows what they’re going to do. It’s a fragmentary plot. I couldn’t remember what happened next, but I knew there was a good copy of the book hidden under the hay, in the wagon I was leaning against. I thought about that and listened to the water soaking all of the blank books from the Wade Academy library. I tried to look beaten and I tried to look miserable, for anyone who was watching. It wasn’t much of a disguise. I had a big smile on my face.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “So,” Cleo said to me, “you knew all along that Hangfire planned to destroy the library.”

  I was having dinner with my associates at Handkerchief Heights. It was not a victory party, but still Jake had fixed the artichoke-lemon soup, with spring onions from the garden fried up as crisp as potato chips and sprinkled on top. We’d eaten the brook trout, each wrapped in grape leaves and poached with olives and rosemary, and we’d polished off the blueberry cobbler with homemade hazelnut ice cream. I’d cleared the table and Jake had made a big pot of peppermint tea—just a few springs of peppermint, also from the garden, floating in a pot of hot water—and told us, help yourself. We all helped ourselves while we talked about how we’d helped each other.

  “I couldn’t be sure,” I said, “but I suspected as much. It wasn’t enough to set those first fires and frame Dashiell Qwerty. The library had a secret—some crucial piece of information—and that had to be destroyed too, so nothing could interfere with the Inhumane Society and their treachery. And then Kellar gave me the compass, so I knew he had learned about Hangfire’s plan.”

  “I should have told everyone sooner,” Kellar said, looking around the table, “but I wasn’t sure we could trust Ellington—not when Snicket said she’d been talking with my mother.”

  “Meanwhile, Hangfire realized that some of us were onto him,” Pip said, “so he spread the false rumor that he was planning to burn down Diceys instead.”

  “You had us wait at Diceys that night, Snicket,” Jake said, “so Hangfire would think you believed the rumor. You didn’t even tell us that we were waiting at the wrong place.”

  “He told me,” Ornette said, “and I told my uncles and my uncles told the horses not to respond to any alarm.”

  Cleo sipped her tea. “That way, Hangfire’s chemical sabotage couldn’t destroy the library.”

  “But Dashiell Qwerty’s sprinkler system would have,” Kellar said. “A soaked book is as useless as a burned one. But you guys switched the blank books from the Wade Academy with the real books from the library.”

  “And,” Squeak squeaked, “you hid the books in plain sight, as part of a hayride you took with Ellington Feint.”

  The sound of typing stopped. Moxie had been working furiously on the typewriter Kellar had fetched her from 350 Wayward Way, but now she stretched her fingers and gave me a familiar look. “So your evening with Ellington was just a ruse?” she asked doubtfully.

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” I said again. I’d tried to explain Ellington Feint to Moxie Mallahan several times, and each time she gave me the same skeptical look. “Skeptical” is a word which here meant she didn’t believe me. She thought I had other reasons for wanting to spend the evening with Ellington, and I’d been unable to convince her she was wrong. “I didn’t know whose side she was on,” I said. “I might never know. The Mitchums won’t let me see her in jail, and before long she’ll be on the train to the city for her trial.”

  “And Qwerty will be on the same train,” Cleo said sadly. “We saved the library, but the librarian got a raw deal.”

  “You’ll never convince the Mitchums of that,” I said. “My chaperone tells me they received a reward for a job well done—a fruit basket from Harold Limetta.”

  Everyone groaned. “There are no Italian lime trees,” Jake remembered, with a smile at Kellar. “Hangfire must have sent that.”

  “And I bet I know what kind of melon was included,” Ornette said grimly. She looked tired from staying up late, nursing her uncles’ wounds with the medicine Cleo had concocted, while her father worried alone in the lobby of the Lost Arms. But even tired she could fold a small piece of paper into a tiny replica of a honeydew melon.

  Moxie started typing again. “Those children at Wade Academy are in the clutches of a dangerous chemical and a fiendish plot,” she said, as her fingers clattered on the keys, “and too many wicked people haven’t been brought to justice. The Mitchums think Stew is an innocent little boy. Hangfire is still at large. And even Sharon Haines is still helping him.”

  “It’s true,” Kellar said quietly. “I couldn’t get her to leave Wade Academy with me, even when we went into town again for more honeydews.”

  “You can stay at the lighthouse for as long as you want,” Moxie told him, “or at least until my mother sends for me in the city. Father and I are grateful for the company.”

  Moxie smiled and moved over so Kellar could take over at the typewriter. It was a good friendship. It made me happy to see. The whole table was smiling, except for the girl sitting at the end. She’d always been a careful girl, so it was surprising that she had taken the risk to come and visit me. It was even riskier than it used to be. With the library soaked and closed, it was impossible to tape an article to the underside of a table. Now they had to be delivered in person.

  “What’s bothering you, Josephine?” I asked her.

  “The same thing that’s bothering you,” she told me. “You might be smiling, Snicket, but your eyes are Mayday! Mayday!”

  “What’s ‘Mayday’ mean?” Pip asked.

  “It’s what people say when there’s an emergency,” Squeak told his brother. “It has a French origin.”

  “It is an emergency,” Cleo said. “While we eat a fancy meal, Hangfire’s still skulking around, and
all those children are still on Offshore Island, dazed and obedient from all that laudanum.”

  “With something wicked going on in the basement,” Jake said, with a shudder. “We still don’t know the skinny on what’s going on there.”

  Josephine was still looking at me. “You know, don’t you, Snicket?” she said. “You know what the Inhumane Society is doing with all those children?”

  I thought of Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea, the only real library book wrecked by the sprinkler system. It was my fault. I had brought it back to the library. Qwerty had tried to keep it safe. Qwerty—and maybe Ellington. Now I’d never finish reading it. I could read all of the other rescued books, but that secret might be gone forever. “I don’t know,” I said finally, but even that felt wrong.

  “You’ll never drag it out of him,” Moxie told Josephine. “Snicket still won’t tell us where he’s hidden all the books we managed to save.”

  “It’s a fragmentary plot, Moxie,” Pip said, without meeting my eye. He and his brother had spent a long time with me, hiding those books in an attic only reachable by a mechanized staircase, in a cupboard that was larger than it looked. Black Cat Coffee wasn’t the safest place I could think of, but it was the safest place I could keep an eye on. I’d been there a number of times in the weeks since the case was closed, to sit at the counter and watch the sun rise.

  “It’s the wrong question,” I said, “to ask what Hangfire is doing with those children.”

  “What’s the right question?” Ornette asked, still busy with the paper. The melon flattened out and then it was a tube and then, like a miracle, it was a little statue of a lighthouse. I could almost feel it shine a light on my thoughts.

  “The right question is,” I said, “can we save this town?”

  “Cleo’s experiments are going well,” Jake said quickly. “If she invents a workable invisible ink, Stain’d-by-the-Sea might rise again.”

  “Until that happens,” Cleo said, “what can V.F.D. do about Hangfire and the Inhumane Society?”

  “As far as this town is concerned,” I said, “we are V.F.D.”

  Moxie nodded and brought out a paper sack, which she plunked down on the table. Inside the sack were some small cardboard boxes, and inside the boxes were business cards, one set for each of my associates. “If we’re an organization,” she explained, “we ought to get organized. I printed these up at The Stain’d Lighthouse for us to use in our official communications.”

  I looked at mine: LEMONY SNICKET, it said. And below it: APPRENTICE.

  “These are keen, Moxie,” Jake said admiringly. “What does ‘victuals’ mean?”

  “Good food,” Cleo said, and smiled at the word “chemist” on hers. “Thanks for this, Moxie.”

  “They’re perfect for discreet communication,” I said. “We can’t have Hangfire catching on to what we’re doing. After this dinner, we’d better keep quiet. We shouldn’t be seen together very often, and we should communicate as secretly as possible.”

  “Working together without being seen together or communicating clearly,” Kellar said. “That’ll be quite a trick.”

  “A fragmentary plot,” Moxie said, stopping Kellar from typing any further. “But now how about a few rounds of Beethoven, before we go our separate ways?”

  “Desperate haze?” Kellar said. “There hasn’t been a fire in weeks, Moxie. We’re not desperate and the sky’s not hazy.”

  “This guy’s lazy?” Pip said. “How dare you call my brother lazy! Do you know how hard it is to work the brakes?”

  “He lurks with snakes?” Cleo said. “That sounds like a dangerous occupation.”

  Josephine caught my eye and gave me a signal we’d used for years to indicate that one of us had to leave. The signal was mouthing the words “I have to leave” and pointing to the door. I followed her out of Handkerchief Heights and into the night.

  “I’ll walk you to your helicopter,” I said.

  She nodded, and we walked away from the cottage. The rainy season was packing its bags to leave, and the wind was hurrying it along. “Tell them I said good-bye,” Josephine said, with a nod to my associates inside. “They’re a fine group, Snicket. They wouldn’t let me in the door until I said ‘Kenneth Grahame.’ Tell them they seem like valuable additions to our organization. You know, I didn’t even realize that apprentices were allowed to recruit volunteers.”

  “Volunteer means volunteer,” I reminded her. “Anyone can join V.F.D.”

  “Not anyone,” Josephine said gently. “You’ve let that Ellington Feint get too close to you.”

  “She’s not close to me,” I said. “She’s across town, in jail.”

  “You know what I mean, Snicket. She’s dangerous.”

  “Anyone can be dangerous,” I said, thinking of Stew Mitchum. “They just have to end up in the wrong circumstances.”

  “She almost destroyed the library, Snicket.”

  I thought of the ruined book again. It burned like a fire in my mind. “But she almost saved the secret.”

  “Did she know? Did she know that was what she was doing?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “It’s a simple question, Snicket.”

  “Simple,” I said, “but not easy. Ellington Feint is just trying to rescue a member of her family. She would do anything and everything. I would do the same if I were in her position.”

  Josephine stopped walking. “No, you wouldn’t,” she said, and reached her hand into my coat pocket. The latest newspaper article she’d brought me was folded up inside. She unfolded it, and I looked once more at the story. I hadn’t read the article yet, but I didn’t need to. The headline shouted THIEF! The rest of the article would just be words. The moon shone on the photograph of Kit they had printed beneath the headline. She was trying to smile but she looked grim. She was in handcuffs. Josephine’s finger tapped the space behind Kit, where I recognized the two other people in the photograph for the first time.

  “Gifford and Ghede,” she told me, with a bitter frown. “They’re two of the worst volunteers I’ve ever seen. They were supposed to help Kit, but they ended up making things worse.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “They tried to drug me with laudanum some time ago at the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Shop.”

  “So there’s no help for your sister.”

  “My sister might not need help. She’s very good with a skeleton key.”

  “If you’d gone to the city, you probably could have gotten your sister out of trouble, but you stayed here.”

  “My job is here,” I said, looking at one of my cards.

  There was a faint burst of laughter from Handkerchief Heights. “Do they know that?” Josephine asked me quietly. “Do they know what you’ve sacrificed to try and save this town?”

  “It’s a fragmentary plot,” I said. “Everybody doesn’t need to know.”

  We’d reached a large pile of crinkly material that looked like peeled bark from nearby shrubs. I’d brought it to Handkerchief Heights so we could study it further. It should be examined by a scientist, I thought. A naturalist if I could find him, but a chemist would do.

  I pushed the material aside to reveal the small helicopter I’d helped Josephine hide there. I watched as she put on her helmet and checked the mechanisms one by one. She had to fly back over the Clusterous Forest, and if something went wrong she would tumble into that eerie and lawless place. Who knows what would happen to her then, I thought. And then I thought: Who knows what will happen to anyone?

  “It must be lonely work,” she said, strapping herself into the helicopter’s only seat, “asking so many questions without anyone helping you.”

  “I’ve been a little lonely all my life,” I said. “I see no reason why it should stop at age thirteen.”

  Josephine gave me a smile and she said something else, but I couldn’t hear it over the skitter-skitter-skitter as she started the helicopter. I watched her rise from the grass and m
utter away across the sky. Below her the strands of the Clusterous Forest waved and wriggled like it wanted to rise up after her and bring her down. I didn’t like it. I felt like I was standing on the edge of the fire pond again, on the grounds of the Wade Academy. That thing I had heard there would be bigger now, I thought, looking at the crinkly mess on the ground. It would be fiercer, if it were real.

  My associate was right. The word “Mayday” does have a French origin. It comes from the term “M’aider,” which in French means “help me.” You could probably see it in my eyes as I stared out at the seaweed that lived when the sea was drained away, for no reason anyone could explain, and that moved in ways so mysterious no one could imagine them. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Help me, I thought, but I only let myself think it for a moment. Then I turned back and walked toward town. You are unsupervised, Snicket, I thought. You won’t get any help. You’ll have to help yourself.

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  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  WELCOME

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright

  Text copyright © 2014 by Lemony Snicket

  Art copyright © 2014 by Seth

  Cover art © 2014 by Seth

  Cover design by Gail Doobinin

  Cover © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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