"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) (10 page)

“I thought it would be suspicious if I were mailing a package to someone who was standing right next to me,” she replied.

“Is the mail delivery reliable here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You should have it by tomorrow morning. Surprisingly, delivery around here is very fast.”

I tucked the wrapped statue under my arm. I had been told that if I found someone suitable during my apprenticeship, I could recommend them to our organization as a new member. It was too soon to make that decision, but it didn’t feel too soon to smile at Ellington as the Mitchums muttered to themselves inside the cottage until they gave up.

“We give up,” Harvey Mitchum said. “There’s no statue in this cottage.”

I took one step so I was standing outside.
“That’s definitely true,” I said. “Well, thanks for stopping by.”

“Not so fast,” Mimi Mitchum said. “We’re driving you both to the mailbox and then home. I don’t know what you ruffians are up to, but it’s over for tonight. Get in the car and say hello to our adorable son.”

Ellington and I followed the Officers Mitchum to their run-down station wagon and piled into the backseat, where Stew was waiting for us with a sleepy yawn and a cruel smile. “Lemony!” he said in the friendly voice he used to fool his parents. “It’s so wonderful to see you again!”

I nodded at him, and he reached out his hand and gave me a hard pinch on the arm that the Officers Mitchum did not see. Ellington saw it, though, and reached forward herself and grabbed his wrist. Stew frowned, and I saw her fingernails digging into his skin. “It’s lovely to
meet you, Stew,” she said. “I just know you and I are going to be lifelong friends.”

Stew made a high-pitched sound certain boys find embarrassing, and we rode the rest of the way in silence. When we arrived in town, Mimi Mitchum brought the car to a squeaky halt and watched as Ellington and I dropped our packages into a lonely, scratched-up mailbox. The hinges of the mailbox door made a rough, unpleasant noise, and I was reluctant to drop my package in. So you’re reluctant, I said to myself. Many, many people are reluctant. It’s like having feet. It’s nothing to brag about. The package made a muffled
clunk
as it landed, and then we got back into the station wagon and drove the short, empty distance to the Lost Arms. I thanked the officers for the ride and gave Ellington a secret smile and a wave and Stew nothing at all. The lobby of the Lost Arms was empty except for Prosper Lost,
who was murmuring something into the telephone. I stopped for a moment by the plaster statue of the woman without arms or clothes and suddenly felt how tired I was.

“Yes,” I said to her. “I suppose I’m in trouble,” and I headed up the stairs to see.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Scolding must be very, very fun, otherwise
children would be allowed to do it. It is not because children don’t have what it takes to scold. You need only three things, really. You need time, to think up scolding things to say. You need effort, to put these scolding things in a good order, so that the scolding can be more and more insulting to the person being scolded. And you need chutzpah, which is a word for the sort of show-offy courage it takes to stand in
front of someone and give them a good scolding, particularly if they are exhausted and sore and not in the mood to hear it.

S. Theodora Markson had all these things, plus a flowered nightcap over her wide, unrestrained hair, and when I opened the door of the Far East Suite, she gave me a scolding I’m sure I don’t have to describe. You have doubtless been scolded about being more careful with valuable objects, or not wandering off by yourself, or causing someone to be worried sick about you, even if they appear to have taken time out from being worried sick to take a bath and change into a nightgown. Your valuable object may not have been a statue of the Bombinating Beast, and your wandering off may not have been dropping from a hawser into the trees below in the middle of a burglary, but otherwise Theodora’s scolding of me was very much like all of the many scoldings all over the world. I stood in front of
her and tried to make my face look like I was listening carefully and waited for the question that indicates a scolding is over.

“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” she asked me.

“What happened when you arrived at the Sallis mansion?” I asked.

“Mrs. Sallis was not at home,” she said, “and someone had told the Officers Mitchum that we were burglars. If I’d been foolish enough to have been holding the statue, I likely would have been arrested and put on the train to prison.”

“I saw the red light from the Mitchums’ car,” I said. “That’s why I dropped into the trees, so that we wouldn’t be caught. After the police questioned you, they found me, but with some help I managed to hide the Bombinating Beast from them and drop it into the mailbox. We should receive it by morning.”

Theodora blinked back at me. “You promise?”

I sighed. Every new promise was like something heavy I had to carry, with no place to put anything down. “Yes.”

“You’re still on probation,” she said. “Get in bed. It’s late.”

I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. It is good to brush your teeth when you are angry, because you brush harder and do a better job. I did not expect Theodora to understand what I had done, but I did expect her to be happier that I had gotten us out of trouble. But it didn’t matter who was right and who was wrong, I told myself. You’re still sharing a dreary hotel room with an unreliable chaperone, Snicket. Get some shut-eye. It’s a word which here means sleep. The sheets had spiky wrinkles, and the pillow felt like a bag of marbles, and I had a very lonely feeling, thinking of how few people knew where I was or could come to me if I were in trouble. But I was too tired to be sad about it.

The next morning I learned why our room
was called the Far East Suite. It was located in the corner of the Lost Arms that was the farthest east, and so the very first rays of the sunlight came through the shutters and poked me in the eye. “Go play,” I told the sunlight. “I’ll catch up with you later.” The sunlight insisted that I wake up right this very minute, so I sat up in bed and went into the bathroom to wash my face and change my clothes. Then I quietly let myself out of the Far East Suite and went down to the lobby, where Prosper Lost was standing behind the desk practicing his slippery smile. Rather than telling me that a package had arrived, he made me ask if a package had arrived, and then brought it out from underneath the desk. When I held it in my hands, my mood improved. I sat in the lobby for a few minutes to see if a woman with bad earrings would stop talking on the phone, but then gave up and decided to walk over to the library.

Dashiell Qwerty was chasing a couple of
moths out the front door. “Welcome,” he said to me, his voice as deep as ever. “Can I help you?”

“Good morning,” I said. “I don’t think I need any help, thank you. I’m just looking for something to read.”

“Be my guest,” he said. “If you can’t find something you like, I’ll be unpacking a new shipment of zoological books in a little while.”

“That reminds me,” I said, as if I needed to be reminded. “Have you heard back from the Fourier Branch about that book I ordered?”

“
But I Cannot Meet You at the Fountain
, by that Belgian author?” he said. “No, nothing yet, I’m afraid. Although I did receive a somewhat mysterious request from that very branch. Someone is looking for a book I’ve never heard of before.”

“What’s it called?”

Qwerty reached into a pocket of his jangly leather jacket and pulled out a card. “The author
is Don T. Worry,” he read out loud, “and the title is
I’ll Measure It Myself
. Sounds like a math textbook of some kind.”

“Could be,” I said. “Say, can I request another title?”

“Of course,” he said. “From the Fourier Branch again?”

“Yes,” I said.

Qwerty took a pencil from behind his ear while I reminded myself for a moment that his ragged hairstyle was probably very attractive to somebody. “And the author of the book you’re looking for?”

“Please.”

“Please?”

“Another Belgian,” I said, “and the title is
Be Very, Very Careful
.”

“Please,
Be Very, Very Careful
,” the sub-librarian repeated. “Sounds like a scary story.”

“I hope it isn’t,” I said, and excused myself
to find a book. I was in the mood for something I had read already, and for an hour I sat in my usual spot and read about someone who was a true friend and a good writer who lived on a bloodthirsty farm where nearly everyone was in danger of some sort. It was a good book, and I was sorry to put it back on the shelf. On my way out I found Qwerty leaning over an open cardboard box, fiddling with a stack of books.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Checking the jackets,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how often one book is slipped into the cover of another.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes,” the sub-librarian said with his usual blank look. “Very often you expect one thing from looking at the outside of it, but when you open it, there’s something else entirely.”

My stomach walked down a few stairs. “Thank you,” I said, and quickly got out of the library and sat on the steps in the morning sun. I looked
at Ellington Feint’s handwriting on the label of the parcel, which had a faint scent I couldn’t quite place. It was something from her cottage. I looked out at the tall metal sculpture in the middle of the lawn, its shape still unreadable to me. And then I tore open all the newspaper and held the object in my lap.

It was a bag of coffee, with a strong, earthy smell and a black cat stenciled on it. I looked at it for a long moment and even opened the bag to see if the Bombinating Beast was inside. Of course it wasn’t. A car pulled up to the lawn, and I looked up to see Pip’s smiling face behind the wheel of Bellerophon Taxi.

“Good morning, friend,” he called to me. “I have a couple of extra doughnuts from Hungry’s. Want one with your coffee?”

He was grinning at my bag, but I was in no mood to grin back. “Yes,” I said. “And a ride?”

“Got a tip?”

“
The Long Secret
is a better book than the one
that comes before it,” I said, opening the back door. “How’s that?”

“That’ll do,” Pip said, “although Squeak and I have always preferred the one about the tap dancer and the lawyer.”

“They’re all good,” Squeak squeaked from the floor of the car. “Where are you going? The lighthouse again?”

“That cottage near it,” I said, “as quickly as you can.”

“Handkerchief Heights?” Pip said, handing me a doughnut. “There’s nobody there, friend.”

“Let’s hope you’re wrong,” I said, and the taxi hurried down the quiet street. I looked out the window and chewed and tried to think. I like a doughnut, particularly glazed. It had been some time since I had read the one about the tap dancer and the lawyer. Ellington Feint had hardly glanced at the statue when it was right there on her table. I smoothed out the newspapers that
had been wrapped around the bag of coffee and saw they were old pages of
The Stain’d Lighthouse
. There was an advertisement for a play performed by the Stain’d Players at the Stain’d Playhouse some years earlier, starring an actress smiling in a faded photograph. The actress was playing the part of the heroine, Leslie Crosbie. Her name was Dame Sally Murphy. She didn’t look happy to see me either.

By the time the taxi passed the Sallis mansion, I was wiping the sugar off my fingers, but that was about all I knew about what I was doing. I thanked the Bellerophon brothers and told them I hoped their father got better soon, and then I ran through the trees until I was standing at the door of the cottage. I knew at once that Ellington Feint was gone. Her suitcase was gone and her music was gone. But Pip and Squeak were wrong. There was somebody there. The door was open, and Moxie Mallahan
was standing in the middle of the room.

“Lemony Snicket,” she said to me, and stepped toward her typewriter. It lay ready on the table where I’d been offered coffee just the night before.

“What’s the news, Moxie?” I asked.

“You tell me,” Moxie said. “You’re the one who called and told me to meet you here.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Snicket, stop fooling. I talked to you myself just a few minutes ago. You told me that you had the solution to the mystery of the Bombinating Beast, and to hurry down to Handkerchief Heights with my father.”

“Is he here, too?”

“I couldn’t wake him. What’s going on?”

“That wasn’t me on the phone,” I said, and tried to think. My first thought was that Stew had phoned, pretending to be me, because he seemed just like that sort of person. No, Snicket, I thought to myself. Whoever called is interested in the Bombinating Beast. But the only
people interested in it are Theodora and Mrs. Sallis—or, in other words, the woman who is going to help you steal it, and the woman who wants us to steal it in the first place. You’re stuck. It makes no sense.

“Do you think someone was trying to lure us here?” Moxie asked, looking around the cottage.