ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“Who Could That Be at This Hour? ”

“When Did You See Her Last? ”

“Shouldn’t You Be in School? ”

ADDITIONAL REPORTS

File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents

Shouldn’t You Be in School? First published in Great Britain 2014 by Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building 1 Nicholas Road London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2014 Lemony Snicket

Art copyright © 2014 Seth

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: Shouldn’t You Be in School?

by Lemony Snicket reprinted by arrangement with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

Illustrations published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company,

New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted

First e-book edition 2014

978 1 4052 5623 0

eISBN 978 1 7803 1232 3

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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TO: Eratosthenes

FROM: LS

FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; arson,

investigations of; Hangfire; pedagogy; Haines family,

suspicions concerning; et cetera

3/4

cc: VFDhq

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

About the Author

There was a town, and there was a librarian, and there was a fire. While I was in town I was hired to investigate this fire, and I thought the librarian could help me bring a villain to justice. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “Why would someone destroy one building when they really wanted to destroy another?” Instead, I asked the wrong questions—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the third.

I was spending a bad morning in a good library. What was bad was the weather, which was unforgivably hot. The sun was having a tantrum so fierce that all the shade had been scared away, and the sidewalks of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the town in which I had been spending my time, were no place for a decent person to walk. The library, with its calm and cooling silence, was the only comfortable place to spend the early hours of the day.

The weather wasn’t the only thing that made the morning bad. There was a man, a vicious villain who went by the name of Hangfire. Every morning that found Hangfire still at large was a bad morning. He was hiding somewhere in town, biding his sinister time and planning his troublesome plans, and hiding and planning with him were his associates in an organization called the Inhumane Society. Recently they had set up shop in the Colophon Clinic, if the phrase “set up shop” can mean “turn an empty hospital into a place where many children could be kept prisoner for some sinister purpose.” Although the Colophon Clinic had been destroyed, I was certain Hangfire was looking for a new location for whatever plot he was cooking up.

For this reason I’d taken to spending my afternoons watching over the town’s only remaining school. I guess I was watching to see if any children were being abducted. They weren’t, not by Hangfire or anyone else. Most of them were already gone. The ink industry, which had once been the pride of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, had faded away, and most of the town had faded along with it. Stain’d Secondary had a large campus, a phrase which here meant that there was a tall, wide building that curved slightly like a seashell—the auditorium perhaps, or the gymnasium—with a grouping of small buildings in its shadow. Once the campus must have been a loud and busy place when the buzzer signaled the end of the day. Now it was much too large for the handful of students who walked quietly out into the gray afternoon. Some of them looked familiar from my time in town. Some of them didn’t. All of them looked tired and none of them met my eyes. It was lonely work to watch over them, but I didn’t learn anything about Hangfire’s dark scheme.

I hoped I’d have better luck in the library, and on that bad morning I was reading two things I hoped would help. The first was a book on caviar, and I didn’t care who knew it. Caviar is the eggs of a fish, usually a sturgeon, black and shiny and served on small pieces of toast at parties to which you are not invited. As of that morning, at thirteen years of age, I’d never eaten any. I was not interested in eating any. I was reading Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea in the hopes of learning something, but as I finished a paragraph about the special tanks they use when the sturgeon are young, I wondered if I was wrong once more.

The other thing I was reading was a secret. It had taken ten days to reach me, through the hard work of a number of people close to my heart but far away on the map. We’d learned together, in what most people would call a history class, that one good way to hide things is in plain sight. People often forget to look at something right in front of them, and as promised I had found something taped to the underside of the table where I always sat. It had been tricky to peel away the tape without anyone noticing, and once it was removed from its hiding place and smoothed out so it would be easier to read, I kept sliding it under the book on caviar whenever I feared I was being watched.

It was silly to hide it. It was just a small newspaper article from the city. Nobody in Stain’d-by-the-Sea cared about it. Nobody but me.

I hid it anyway, when the librarian approached. You cannot have a really terrific library without at least one terrific librarian, the way you cannot have a really terrific bedroom unless you can lock the door. Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only librarian—or, as he called himself, sub-librarian—was terrific because he was kind and helpful without being irritating or bossy. This sort of person is an endangered species, almost extinct. Spending time in his library was like seeing a rare and strange beast that I might not ever see again, and sure enough, in a few short days this library, the only one in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, would be gone forever.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Snicket,” the librarian said, in his very deep voice. His name was Dashiell Qwerty, a tidy and proper name that didn’t match his appearance. As usual, he was wearing a leather jacket decorated with small scraps of metal, a garment so dangerous-looking that Qwerty’s hair always seemed to be scurrying away from it. I don’t know what a matching name might have been. Wildhairy Oddjacket comes to mind.

“That’s quite all right,” I said, and heard the newspaper rustle underneath my book. The article told the story of a young woman who had been arrested in the city for the crime of breaking and entering. Breaking and entering wasn’t the right term, I thought. My sister didn’t break in, not really. She had simply entered the Museum of Items when the museum was closed. It didn’t seem like a good reason to put someone in prison, but according to the article that was likely to happen.

“I was just checking to see if you had found everything you need,” Qwerty said, either not noticing or pretending not to notice what I was hiding. “There are some new Italian dictionaries that I thought you might find interesting.”

“Maybe another time,” I said. “Right now I have just the book I’m looking for. I’m glad to see that the shelves are in order again.”

“Yes, it was a bother to reorganize everything,” Qwerty said, “but now the sprinkler and alarm system is finally installed. The controls are right over there in the northeast corner of the room, so I feel much less nervous about the threats that have been made.”

“You’ve mentioned those threats before,” I said, “but you’ve never said anything more about them.”

“Yes, I have,” Qwerty agreed, with a glance at the article in my lap, “and no, I haven’t.”

He looked at me and I looked at him. We both wanted to know each other’s secrets, and we both wanted the other person to go first. This is something that happens quite a bit, which is why you so often see children and adults staring at one another in nervous silence. We might have stayed there for quite a long time, but a moth flew into Qwerty’s line of sight and he swatted at it with a checkered handkerchief. Qwerty was a predator of the moth known as the Farnsworth Pulpeater, as the Farnsworth Pulpeater is a predator of paper. It appeared to be a battle that was to go on for quite some time without Qwerty or the moths giving up.

“Well, if you’re content,” Qwerty said, as a moth escaped his attack, “I’ll excuse myself and let you be. That young woman looks like she might need my help.”

I stood up too quickly. Even when reading two things at once, I had been thinking of something else entirely. The something else was a girl, taller than I was or older than I was or both. She had curious eyebrows, curved and coiled like question marks, and she had a smile that might have meant anything. Her eyes were green and her hair so black it made caviar look beige, and in her possession was a statue that was blacker still. The statue was of a mythical creature called the Bombinating Beast, and it gazed out through hollow, wicked eyes at all the trouble gathered around it. The girl’s father was in trouble, captured by Hangfire, and she had tried to save him by doing favors for the Inhumane Society, so now she was in trouble too. I had promised to help her, but I hadn’t seen the girl or the statue in quite some time. The girl, and the promise I’d made, hovered in my head no matter what I was reading, and her name hovered in my ears like the song she played on an old-fashioned phonograph, and on a music box that her father had left behind. I didn’t know what the song was, but I liked it.

Ellington Feint. Ellington Feint. Ellington Feint.

It’s probably not her, I told myself, as I hurried to the entrance of the library, and it wasn’t. It was Moxie Mallahan, a fine journalist and a good friend, with a hat that looked like a lowercase a and a typewriter in its own folding case that could type a and all the other letters. She put the case down with a small frown of pain. Her arm was still bandaged from a recent encounter with someone good with a knife.

“What’s the news, Moxie?” I said.

“It’s good to see you, Snicket,” she replied. “You’re not too busy doing whatever it is you’re doing?”

“I always have time for an associate,” I said. I led her back to my table, carrying her typewriter case. Her injury was partially my fault, as you can read in an account of mine. You don’t have to read about it. I’m sure you have your own troubles.

“I’ve been looking through the archives of The Stain’d Lighthouse, like you asked me to,” Moxie said, sitting down across from me. “It was boring work, Snicket.”

“I’m sure it was,” I said. The Stain’d Lighthouse was a newspaper that had once been at the breakfast table of every resident of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, thanks to the hard work of Moxie’s family. But now the newspaper had folded, a term Moxie had explained to me. It did not mean folded the way you can fold a newspaper into a hat or a boat or a man with a sword riding on a swan. It meant that it had surrendered to the ink shortages that had scared so many of the town’s citizens away. Moxie was the only journalist left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and the only thing left of the newspaper was vast piles of past editions, strewn around the rooms of the Mallahan lighthouse. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to do that,” I said, “but I couldn’t find anything in the library about Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s fishing industry.”

“I looked at the business section of the newspaper,” Moxie said, “all the way back to before I was born. My mother used to say that the business section had all of the really exciting secrets hidden there in plain sight, but I’m not sure I found any. I wish she were still in town, so she would have been able to help me.”

“I’m sure you’ll hear from her soon,” I said quickly, although I wasn’t sure at all.

Moxie nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me. She opened her typewriter case and looked at the page of notes she’d been typing. “The business section might have exciting secrets, but it’s very boring to read.”

“That’s probably why they hide the secrets there.”

“Maybe so. It was difficult to stay awake while I was reading it.”

“Maybe you should have had some coffee.”

“Not I, Snicket. I don’t drink coffee. You’re thinking of that girl who caused all the trouble with that statue.”

“I guess I am thinking of her,” I admitted. Ellington liked to sit at the counter of an establishment called Black Cat Coffee, on the corner of Caravan and Parfait. She often had her coffee very late at night and stayed there to watch the sun rise.

“Well, I wish you’d stop,” Moxie said sourly. “Anyway, I found something that I thought you might think was helpful. It’s from an article published when the town was arguing about draining the sea: ‘Porter Roeman, who runs the Roe House, told reporters that he opposed the draining, as it would adversely affect local marine life.’ What’s ‘adversely’ mean?”

“Badly,” I said, and we gave each other one grim nod each. Some years ago, the town had decided to drain the sea so the last few octopi could be found and harvested for ink. The idea was to save Ink Inc, which was Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s largest and most important company. It was the wrong idea. The draining of the sea had drained the town along with it. The town’s stores and restaurants had folded as quickly as The Stain’d Lighthouse. A fancy, top-drawer school on an island was now nothing but empty buildings on a pile of craggy rocks, connected by a bridge that was no longer necessary. Where once had been countless fish and swirling waves, there was now the Clusterous Forest, a vast, lawless landscape of shivering seaweed. And Ink Inc had been affected as adversely as the rest of town, and had recently shut its doors for good. A young woman of my acquaintance, a brilliant chemist named Cleo Knight, was in a small cottage working on a solution to the ink problem, but I didn’t know if she’d finish her work before the town disappeared completely. Nobody knew.

Moxie continued to read from her notes. “A successful fish business requires loyal workers and a steady supply of food. Mr Roeman said that without a local source of plankton, Roe House would likely go out of business. And it did, Snicket. Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s fishing industry is gone, just like everything else.” She reached into her typewriter case and took out a photograph. “I developed this photograph myself, in the basement darkroom. It’s Roe House on its last day of business. Feast your eyes, Snicket.”

My eyes tried to feast but they nearly starved. The photograph showed a large, empty room, with small rectangular marks on the scuffed floor. In the far corner of the room was a small door, the only thing to look at. I looked at it. It could have led anywhere. A back room, I thought. An exit someplace. “It’s a big room,” I said finally.

Moxie looked at me. “Big enough to be Hangfire’s new headquarters?”

“It doesn’t look big enough to hold a large group of kidnapped children,” I said, “but perhaps Hangfire has given up on that part of his plan.”

“But what’s the rest of his plan, Snicket?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The Inhumane Society had all that aquatic equipment at the Colophon Clinic, so I thought the fishing industry might be involved somehow. But it doesn’t seem like your search through the archives has turned up much.”

“That’s what I thought,” Moxie said, and scratched at the bandage on her arm. She had told me to stop asking her if it still hurt. “But then I thought maybe we should go see for ourselves.”

“Good idea.”

“Come on, then. The address is 350 Wayward Way.”

“350 Wayward Way? I don’t know where that is.”

“Good thing you have an associate who grew up in this town,” Moxie said with a smile. “Come on, Snicket. Stop lollygagging.”

It is true that I was moving slowly, trying to figure out how to stand up and keep the newspaper article hidden at the same time. “I’ll be with you in a moment,” I said, using a phrase that rarely works.

Moxie cocked her head at me. “What is roe, anyway, Snicket?”

“Fish eggs,” I said. “Caviar.”

Moxie looked down at my reading. “So all this has to do with that book?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Because I thought it might have to do with that newspaper article you’re hiding under it.”

“What newspaper article?”

“I’m a journalist, Snicket. You’ll have to do better than that. Take out that newspaper article nice and slow, and don’t use any cheap tricks to try and distract me.”

“Fire! Fire! ” The sudden cry almost made me drop the newspaper. I looked quickly around the library, as I’d been trained to do in such emergencies. Sprinkler system, I thought. Northeast corner. But without a compass, the phrase “northeast corner” might as well have been “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Help has arrived,” I called. “Where is the fire? ”

“There isn’t one, Snicket,” said the voice, familiar now. “I was just looking for you.”

Moxie and I sighed, like we were both balloons pricked by the same needle, and down the aisle came the person who had deflated us. Part of my education required each apprentice to have a chaperone, and S. Theodora Markson was mine. The function of a chaperone is to serve as an example of the adult you might become, and Theodora served as a bad example. Her hair, for instance, was always a frightful mess, particularly when it was struggling against the leather helmet she seemed to enjoy wearing. She refused to tell me what the S stood for in her name, no matter how many times I asked her. But neither her hair nor her first name was the main problem with Theodora. I don’t need to tell you what the problem is. You have met impossible people, and you know when you are stuck with them. They are of no more use than a heap of old boxes left in the middle of the sidewalk, but you end up tripping on them anyway.

“You’re not supposed to scream fire in a library,” I said, “unless you mean it.”

“I wouldn’t have had to scream,” Theodora said, “if you’d left me a note saying where you were, as I specifically instructed.”

“I did leave a note. It said I’d be at the library.”

“Well, I didn’t have time to read it all. We’re in a hurry, Snicket. We have to stop screaming fire and investigate a case of arson.”

“Arson?” Moxie said, rolling a new page into her typewriter. A suspicious fire was just the sort of thing that Moxie liked to write about.

My chaperone looked down at her and frowned. “Who are you?”

Moxie reached into the brim of her hat, which was where she kept printed cards stating her name and occupation. “We’ve met on a number of occasions,” Moxie said, handing her one. “It’s lovely to see you, Ms. Markson. Your apprentice was just returning a scrap of newspaper I lent him.”

I frowned at Moxie while Theodora frowned at the card. “I believe this is my scrap of newspaper,” I said, trying to sound dignified. “You must have left your scrap someplace else.”

“Be sensible, Snicket,” Theodora said. “We don’t have time to fight over scraps. Give it to your playmate and let’s go.”

Moxie gave me a sly smile and held out her hand. I didn’t want to give her the newspaper article, and I certainly didn’t want to think of her as my playmate. But under Theodora’s supervision I could not think what else to do. I surrendered the article, and in no time at all my sister’s dilemma was folded up into a neat square and tucked into Moxie’s hat.

“Maybe later,” Moxie said to me, “you and I can take that trip we were discussing.”

I thought of 350 Wayward Way, and the large, empty room in the photograph with the door in the corner and the rectangles on the floor. Secrets, I thought. Hidden in plain sight. “Maybe later,” I agreed.

Theodora frowned. “Whatever playdate you two had planned,” she said, “it will have to wait. Come along, Snicket. We’ve got to go to 350 Wayward Way.”

350 Wayward Way turned out to be in a particularly deserted part of town. Theodora steered her shaky roadster past Diceys Department Store and then onto a street full of dead buildings with boarded-up doors and broken windows. It was like a garden that someone had stopped watering. Those gardens always look slightly sinister. You never know what’s hiding amongst all the wild and ragged weeds.

“You know what I like about neighborhoods like this?” Theodora asked, as the brakes squeaked us to a halt. “There’s plenty of parking.”

“There’s plenty of parking because nobody wants to come here,” I said.

“Not sensible, Snicket,” my chaperone said, with a shake of her helmet. “Not proper. We want to be here. There are questions that S. Theodora Markson needs to have answered.”

“What does the S stand for?” I asked.

Theodora glared at me. “Smart,” she said. “You’re a smart boy, Snicket, but you need to apply yourself.”

“I’ve never really understood what that means,” I said.

“It means your predecessor never gave me such problems.”

“You must miss having him as an apprentice.”

“I do.”

“Maybe you should send him a bunch of heart-shaped helium balloons just to let him know you’re thinking about him.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Snicket. I am not a puppet show. We’re very lucky to get such a prestigious client as the Department of Education. You’ll have to adjust your attitude accordingly. For instance, we are not to reveal anything about this case, or who has hired us to solve it. I expect my apprentice not to say a word about the whole thing.”

“What is the whole thing?”

“I told you, we shouldn’t say a word about it.”

“How can I say a word about something I don’t know about?”

She did not answer but got out of the car and slammed the door unnecessarily hard. I did the same. “Prestigious” is a word which here means “important or having great influence,” although the Department of Education didn’t look prestigious as we approached the door. It was a tall, thin building, sagging against another tall, thin building to its right, and being sagged on by a tall, thin building to its left. The tall, thin buildings kept going, saggy and shabby, all the way down the block, like grass curved over in the wind. Just over the door was a cardboard sign reading DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION that I wanted to remove, just so I could see the words ROE HOUSE that were probably carved into the stone beneath it.

Before we could get to the door, it opened and a man walked out, putting on his hat and taking out a cigarette. Theodora nodded to him as he held the door open, and he turned briefly to her and said something she had to ask him to repeat.

“Do you have any fire?” he repeated.

“We are in fact here to investigate a case of arson,” Theodora said, “but that is a secret I am not to reveal.”

The man frowned impatiently and pointed to his cigarette to show what he meant. The cigarette sat tucked in his mouth, hanging over his beard, unlit.

“Oh!” Theodora said. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any matches.”

The man turned his eyes to me and I shook my head. I did in fact have a box of matches in my pocket, but I don’t think adults should be encouraged to smoke. He frowned again and started to walk away before turning around and asking me a question.

It is not a question anyone enjoys hearing, especially people my age. It is the question printed on the cover of this book.

“I’m in a special program,” I said, as Theodora stepped inside the building.

“Are you indeed,” the man said. It didn’t sound like it was news to him, or perhaps he just didn’t care much. He reached up and took the cigarette out of his mouth and turned around and walked away. I watched him, but I didn’t know why. He looked like nothing to watch. He was just a man, moving quickly down the block. At the corner he tossed his cigarette into a dented trash can with a noise louder than it should have been. Most of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s trash cans were as empty as its sidewalks. I stopped watching and followed Theodora in.

I’d expected to be in the large, empty room Moxie had shown me in the photograph. Instead I found myself in a small waiting area, separated from the large room by a wall that looked like it would fall over if you gave it one good push. In the middle of the wall was a swinging door, not swinging, and tacked to the door was a sign that said WELCOME TO THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, WHERE LEARNING IS FUN! LEARNING IS IMPORTANT! said another sign, on another wall. There was one that said BOOKS ARE FOR LEARNING! that hung over a bookshelf, and one that said TAKE TIME FOR LEARNING! hanging over a table. On a table were a stack of stickers reading LEARNING! that you could affix to the bumper of your car or boat, and a bowl of badges reading LEARNING! that you could pin to your shirt or jacket or lampshade. They’d pinned a few of them to the lamp’s lampshade, was how I knew, along with a small sign that read LEARNING! It seemed like a lot of learning.

There was a boy about my age going clickety-clack into a typewriter at a large wooden desk. His hair had been trimmed into a sort of tilted spike, like the fuse on a stick of dynamite, and his eyes were wide and not looking at us. When he was done typing the page, he took it out of the typewriter and put it on a large pile of other pages. Then he started up on another sheet of paper. He typed faster than I’d ever seen Moxie type, much faster. His hands hardly moved around the keyboard, as if he were typing the same thing over and over again. There had been a sign pasted onto the side of the desk, and the sign had probably said LEARNING!, but somebody had tried to unpeel it and now it was just a scratchy white mess, like a cloud you might stare at after a picnic. Through the flimsy wall I could hear more typewriters, plus the shuffle of papers and the other muttery noises of a busy office, but the boy behind the desk was the only person from the Department of Education to be seen.

“S. Theodora Markson,” announced S. Theodora Markson, “and her associate. We have an appointment.”

“Please wait,” the boy said, without looking up from his typing.

Theodora sat in one chair and I sat in another, near the bookshelf. I took down a book that had been recommended to me by several people I didn’t like.

The swinging door swung, and a tall, neatly dressed woman strode to the desk where the boy was typing and took a few papers from the tall pile. Pinned to her collar was a very shiny gold badge shaped like a lime, and pinned to her face was a smile that shone much less brightly. Theodora stood, but the woman did not look at us or say anything, just retreated back into the busy office. Theodora sat. I tried the book. A man gave his son Jody a pony, and Jody had to promise to take care of it. Then the pony got sick. I could see where this was going and put the book down. It was more pleasant to sit and think what the cloud looked like.

We waited awhile. The boy kept typing and typing and typing and then finally stopped but he was just scratching his elbow and then he was typing again. The tall woman made several trips through the swinging door and back again without looking at us. Theodora took up the book and seemed quite interested in it. I stood up. He might not talk to me, but I would talk to him, so I asked him if it would be much longer.

“I don’t know,” he said, and typed and typed and typed.

“You don’t have to look busy on my account,” I said.

Now he stopped. “I look busy because I am busy.”

“So you say,” I said.

“You don’t have to take my word for it,” the boy said, and pointed to the pile he was making. “Look at what I’m typing if you don’t believe me.”

“I’m not a math tutor,” I said. “I don’t feel the need to check your work.”

“The Department of Education is a very busy office. We’re in charge of every pedagogical institution in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Read about us in the newspaper if you don’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

“All right then, Snicket.”

I sat down and then stood up again. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours. That doesn’t seem fair.”

“It’s Kellar,” the boy said. “Kellar Haines.”

“Well, Kellar Haines,” I said, “shouldn’t you be in school?”

Kellar had been ready to start typing again, but now he blinked and looked down at his fingers. They were trembling a little bit. “Yes,” he said, and there was something about the way he said it, quiet and sad, that made me see the two of us a little differently.

The door swung open again, and the woman with the lime pin came out and looked at us at last. Then she looked at Kellar Haines. Then she looked behind her and then she smiled nervously and then she began to speak.

“Good morning” is what she said. “I’m Sharon Haines. I work here, which is the Department of Education. Yes, that is what it is.”

“I’m S. Theodora Markson,” said S. Theodora Markson, “and never mind who this is.”

“Lemony Snicket,” I said.

“This is my son Kellar,” Sharon said, “and never mind him, either.”

Sharon gave a little nod to indicate Kellar, and Theodora gave a little nod in my direction. Then they both smiled, Theodora first and Sharon after a few seconds, like a mirror running late.

“Perhaps we should talk in your office,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” Sharon said, leading us to the swinging door, and then she gave a sort of gasp. “No, let’s just sit here, shall we? The Department of Education is very busy today. Very busy. And my desk gives me some kind of medical condition. My tongue swells up if I sit there too long, and I end up talking like my mouth is full of baby mice.”

She sat down between us, and I watched Theodora nodding seriously at Sharon the way one adult has nodded at the nonsense of another adult since the first adult walked on the earth. “I think I have a medical condition, too,” Theodora said. “Lately when I’m driving my roadster I have the peculiar sensation of everything being quieter than it should be.”

“That could be because your helmet covers your ears,” I said.

The two women looked at me the way you look at a leaky pen. I looked down at the floor. There was an ugly rug with ugly triangles on it in an ugly pattern. Underneath, I thought, were the rectangular marks I’d seen in the photograph. I wondered what was covering the floor in the office, on the other side of the flimsy wall. Desks, chairs. Whatever all those muttering people kept in their office.

“Perhaps I’d better tell you about the case,” Sharon said, and she went to her son’s desk and took something out of a drawer. It was a photograph, but we couldn’t see it. It was facedown, and she left it that way in her lap when she sat back down. She sighed and looked behind her. Behind her was a wall. “There is a villain,” she said, “who is putting every schoolchild in town in terrible danger.”

I knew it, I thought.

Sharon gave us a long look. Kellar went type-type-type. “We have had some dealings with such a villain,” I said. “It would probably be best not to say his name.”

“It’s Hangfire,” Theodora explained.

Type-type-stop.

“Hangfire,” Sharon repeated with a frown. “What do you know about him?”

“Not much,” Theodora said. “He’s violent and treacherous. You know the kind of man I mean.”

“Yes, I do,” Sharon said, with a nervous smile. Kellar started typing again. “I had a boyfriend like that in eighth grade.”

“Me too!” Theodora was using a tone of voice I hadn’t heard from her before. I regret to say that I’d have to describe it as a squeal. “He was always saying impolite things about my hair.”

“Well,” Sharon said, “I think it looks nice.”

“Well,” Theodora said, “I think you’re nice.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, spoiling the party, “we’re here to talk about Hangfire.”

Sharon sighed again and rattled her fingers on the photograph. “Recently a local business was burned to the ground,” she said. “Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn caught fire in the middle of the night, and there was scarcely enough time to evacuate the sheep. The fire was not an accident. It was a crime.”

Theodora turned to me. “She means arson,” she explained, unnecessarily. You could not become an apprentice without knowing what arson is. You could not even start to study for an apprenticeship without knowing “arson.” I even knew the original Latin term from which the word “arson” was derived.

“We’ll assign this case extra-crucial status,” Theodora said to Sharon, using an expression that meant absolutely nothing.

“I appreciate that,” Sharon said. “As luck would have it, there was a witness to the fire, and I’m hoping you and your apprentice will go interview this man and see if he can tell you anything.”

“A witness!” Theodora cried. “Aha! ”

“For instance,” Sharon continued, “he might say the arsonist had an unusual jacket, so it would help you find him and capture him.”

“Unusual jacket! Aha! ”

Theodora looked at me triumphantly, but I saw nothing triumphant about an imaginary jacket mentioned by a witness we hadn’t met yet.

“Who is this witness?” I asked.

Sharon’s eyes widened and she moved her hands up and down, over and over, like she couldn’t decide whether or not to remove her ears. She looked over at her son and then down at her collar, and then she cleared her throat and answered my question at last. “Harold Limetta is his name.”

“Harold Limetta?”

“Yes, Harold Limetta. I believe his name is Italian, although he lives here in town at 421 Ballpoint Avenue, walking distance from the library.”

“We’ll take my car,” Theodora said. “Thank you for meeting with us, Ms. Haines.”

“Call me Sharon,” Sharon said, “and call me the minute you have an update.”

“Of course I will,” Theodora said. “After all, our progress is being evaluated.”

Kellar stopped typing for a second and shared a look with his mother I didn’t quite understand, but every family has a look they give each other that makes no sense to anybody else. “Yes,” Sharon agreed, when the look was over. “Our progress is being evaluated. Do you have any more questions?”

“Yes,” Theodora said. “How can I reach you outside of office hours?”

“I’ll give you my number,” Sharon promised. “I must say, I didn’t expect so much kindness and understanding from such a prestigious investigator.”

“It is you who are prestigious,” Theodora said. “Come along, Snicket. We’re done here. Let’s head on over to Harold Limetta’s house.”

I was still staring at the photograph turned upside down on the desk. “I have a question,” I said. “Why are schoolchildren in danger because a barn burned down?”

Sharon sat up in her chair and straightened the creases on the coat she was wearing. I didn’t like the coat and I didn’t like its creases. “The Department of Education takes its mission very seriously,” she said to me. “Even one schoolchild in danger is a terrible thing. Children are the future of the world, and we must keep them safe from harm. Every night I tremble thinking about how I’d feel if something terrible happened, even if it happened to somebody I did not know.”

I made myself nod. I’d heard every word the woman had said, but I didn’t mistake it for something that made sense. Her fingers slipped under the edge of the photograph, and she slowly began to turn it over. “If this jacketed villain burned down a barn,” she said, “it stands to reason that he’d burn down a school.” She leaned forward and looked very sternly at me. “I can guarantee you, young man, that it will probably happen. If you don’t believe me, take a good, long look at this!”

With a flick of her wrist, like a magician at a birthday party, she turned the photograph over and I took a look. It was not a good, long look because there was nothing much to look at. It was a photograph of a barn, or at least it had been a barn, before it burned down. Now it was a great deal of ashes and a few lonely sticks of burned wood. The remains of a fire are not a nice thing to look at, but they are not a great danger to schoolchildren. I looked at the photograph and then I looked around the room I was in. There was no sign of the fishing industry. There was none of the necessary equipment described in Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea. Still, there was something fishy about the whole place. You might as well play along, I said to myself. Hangfire might be involved, and you might find Ellington Feint again and be able to keep your promise, and in any case Theodora is in charge, so you don’t have much choice, do you, Snicket? No, Snicket, I don’t. I looked at the photograph again, and then I looked at Sharon and thanked her for answering my question. We all stood up and said the usual things and Sharon led Theodora and me out of the Department of Education. I let the adults go out ahead of me and then stepped quickly back to Kellar’s desk.

“You know that restaurant Hungry’s?” I said. “You can find me there, when I’m not at the library or the Lost Arms.”

Kellar looked up at me and spoke very, very carefully, as if he were walking through shattered glass. “I’ll look up the address,” he said, “just like you’ll look up Harold Limetta.”

“Your mother already told us Harold Limetta’s address,” I said, and then Sharon walked back in. Kellar went back to his typing and I went out. Theodora was already in the roadster, pushing her head into her helmet. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, wondering about both of the people I had met inside. It was hard to figure them out, but that is true of almost everything when it is very hot outside.

“That went very well, Snicket,” Theodora said. “I’m glad Sharon gave me her phone number. I’m going to call her this evening and give her a full report.”

“I think it’s nice you’re making friends your own age,” I said.

Her smile faded and she started the motor. “You should have listened to what she said, Snicket. She said our progress is being evaluated.”

“You’re the one who said that.”

“Well, Sharon agreed with me, and it’s true. If you were a better apprentice, you’d remember I told you that someone from our organization was keeping an eye on us.”

I remembered. Theodora was quite nervous about this person, whoever it was. I didn’t think it was likely that it was Sharon Haines of the Department of Education. I had my own ideas. “I did listen to what she said,” I said. “She thinks all of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s schoolchildren are in danger because someone burned down a sheep barn. That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“Well, I’m sure Harold Limetta will be able to tell us more.”

I looked down the empty block. The man who had asked for matches was long gone, of course. The dented trash can sulked on the corner. “Why would the Department of Education know about a witness to a fire?”

“It wasn’t just a fire, Snicket. It was arson. Any apprentice of S. Theodora Markson should know what that means.”

“What does the S stand for?”

She opened the passenger door. “Slide in, Snicket.”

I slid in and squinted out the window of the roadster. The sun told me that it was about noon. It also told me that it was going to continue to beat down on Stain’d-by-the-Sea and make it blazing hot and that there was no point in arguing with it, because it was the sun and I was a boy of about thirteen. The sun was right. There was no point in arguing. The roadster puttered us through Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and I didn’t say anything more to Theodora. She called herself an intrepid personage and said that was an expression which there meant an excellent investigator, and I didn’t correct her. She called me ungrateful and I didn’t disagree. I just sat in the heat and wished for an ice cream cone. Nobody brought me one. Maybe Harold Limetta has a freezer full of the stuff, I told myself. Peppermint ice cream in particular would really hit the spot.

But there was no freezer at 421 Ballpoint Avenue. I could tell that in a minute, when Theodora brought her automobile to a stop. A freezer is almost always made of metal, so when a house has been burned to the ground it usually remains there in the ashes, along with the oven, the wall safe, and any anvils lying around, each item a blackened gravestone for the home that has been destroyed. At 421 Ballpoint Avenue I could see a metal bench, which looked like it might have been by the front door, for taking off your boots. I could see a large set of small metal rectangles, each one about the size of a book, stacked up in several rows and surrounded by broken glass. I could see a metal picture frame, which might have held photographs of the Limetta children or grandchildren. But the rest of the house was nothing but ashes and smoke—thick gray smoke that was rising into the sky. I didn’t know if it would block the sun and make it cooler. I didn’t know whose pictures had been in the frames. I didn’t know what it meant that Harold Limetta’s house had burned down, just when we’d been sent to it. Fires were of grave importance to the organization of which I was a part. It would be a black mark on my record, I knew, to have suspicious fires occur and go unsolved and unpunished right under my eyes. Hangfire, I thought, I will find you and stop you. But I didn’t know how to find him. I didn’t know how to stop him. I didn’t even know for certain that this fire was his handiwork.

Ardere is the Latin, I thought. That’s what they said in ancient Rome when they were talking about fire. But that was all I knew as I stood and waited for the smoke to clear.

When the smoke cleared, there was something to see in the rubble of 421 Ballpoint Avenue, but it was the Officers Mitchum. I preferred smoke. Harvey and Mimi Mitchum were the only police officers in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but they spent less time enforcing the law and more time bickering over just about anything that struck their fancy.

“And let me tell you,” Harvey Mitchum was saying to his wife, “that it was Agnes who had the idea, and Harry just played along, so by the time Philip had him cornered the crime had already been committed.”

“You’re a half-wit,” Mimi Mitchum said. “Carmen is the mastermind behind the crime, and if you can’t figure that out for yourself you might as well toss your badge into the ashes.”

“Carmen’s no mastermind,” Harvey said. “She’s even more dimwitted than you are.”

“How dare you call me dimwitted?”

“How dare you call me a half-wit?”

“It’s crueler to say that wits are dim than that they’re chopped in half !”

“Mimi, you’re only proving yourself dimwitted when you say things like that.”

“If I’m so dimwitted, how did I manage to solve the crime?”

One of the first things I’d learned upon arriving in Stain’d-by-the-Sea was that the only way to get the Mitchums to stop arguing was to interrupt them. “Excuse me, Officers,” I said, and the officers turned to look at me the way they always did. It is the way you look at a squeaky door when you are trying to be quiet.

“What are you doing here, lad?” Harvey Mitchum asked me.

“Did I hear you say you’ve managed to solve this crime?” I asked. It is always better to ask a question than to answer one.

“Harvey was just arguing with me about a movie we saw,” Mimi said. Her eyes moved suspiciously through the smoke from me to Theodora and back again. “How is it you happen to be here?”

Theodora put a gloved hand on my shoulder. “My associate and I were going to talk to Harold Limetta, the owner of this house, as part of an investigation.”

Harvey frowned and kicked at the ashes on the ground. “And who, precisely, has asked you to investigate?”

“I’d rather not say,” Theodora said.

“Well, I’d rather not have you poking through the scene of a crime,” Mimi said.

“And I’d rather not have that kid around here either,” her husband added.

“I’d rather not have you call me a kid,” I said.

“I’d rather not have my apprentice talk like that to the police,” Theodora said.

“I’d rather not have to listen to you discipline a child,” Harvey Mitchum said.

“I’d rather not listen to my husband boss people around,” Mimi Mitchum said.

“Sorry,” I said, “is it my turn? I have a long list of things I’d rather not do.”

It is not pleasant to have a number of people glaring and sighing at you at the same time, even if you meant for them to do it. As I’d planned, once they were done glaring and sighing, the Mitchums forgot all about asking us why we were there or who had sent us, and so the four of us were soon picking through the wreckage together as if we had never argued at all.

In one of my favorite books, a sad young man stumbling around outside finds a tiny strange man with a sack of magic crystals that change his life. My hopes weren’t that high, but I kept my eyes open. Almost anything would do. Any kind of clue would be better than what I had now. What I had now was bupkes, a word which here means “The Department of Education told us to go interview someone about a sheep barn burning down, only to find that the man’s house had burned down.” The metal bench was still there, and the metal picture frame with the photographs burned out of it. The metal rectangles were still there too, stacked up like the books you were planning on reading next. My shoes crunched on the shattered glass. They’re tanks, I realized. Tanks for fish or small animals. They’re tanks and they’d probably be clues, I thought, if you knew what the mystery was.

“What do you know about Harold Limetta?” I asked the Mitchums.

“Not a lot,” Harvey Mitchum admitted. “He’s new in town.”

“He moved into this house only days ago,” Mimi said. “All anybody knows about him is that he is a leper.”

“He’s sick?” I said.

“No,” Harvey said. “He studies moths.”

“Then he’s a lepidopterist,” I said. “A leper is someone with a terrible skin disease.”

“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” Mimi said.

“He called us and said his house was on fire,” Harvey Mitchum said, “but when we arrived there was no sign of him, although it looks like his moths were burned to a crisp.”

Mimi pointed to some tiny black specks near the shattered glass of the tanks. They might have been moths, once. And it might have been Harold Limetta on the phone. “We were going to ask for him at Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn,” she said. “The barn supplied wool for Mr Limetta’s moths to eat.”

“Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn has also burned down,” Theodora said, sitting on the bench before immediately getting up again and brushing the ashes off the back of her pants. It took her a long time.

“What do you know about these fires?” Harvey Mitchum demanded. “It’s still too early to make assumptions, but I’d say both of you have something to do with all this. Lately, whenever there’s a crime in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, we seem to find you and your whippersnapper poking around.”

“We’re here as professionals,” Theodora said stiffly, finishing up with her pants.

“We’ll do anything we can to help you solve this case,” said the whippersnapper.

“You can help by butting out,” Mimi Mitchum said. “And the same goes for you about butting, Harvey.”

Harvey gave his wife an exasperated frown. “Mimi, I’ll remind you that I’m an officer of the law, just like you are.”

“You’re not just like I am,” Mimi said. “I’m a brave and capable law enforcement official, and you’re a nincompoop!”

“If I’m such a nincompoop, why are you the one who forgot to put the milk back in the refrigerator, so it stayed on the counter all night?”

“Well, you’re the one who left the window open, so mosquitoes swarmed our bedroom!”

“Well, you’re the one who didn’t hang up your towel after your bath, so it stayed wet and clammy!”

Imagining the Mitchums getting out of the shower in clammy towels with the windows open and the air smelling of warm milk was a new item on my list of things I would rather not do. “Excuse me, Officers,” I said, “my associate and I are leaving now. Please send my regards to Stewart.”

Stewart Mitchum was the officers’ son, and I did not really want to send him my regards. I could not think of anything I wanted to send him that would be accepted for delivery. “Stew’s at school,” Harvey Mitchum said. “He insisted that he stop working for us by making a siren noise out of the back of our car, and focus on getting a top-drawer education.”

“How nice for him,” I lied. A top-drawer education is a very high-quality one, but the highest-quality anything in the world wouldn’t fix Stew.

“I’d suggest you do the same, Snicket,” Mimi said, and gave me a stern look. “We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

“And the milk,” Harvey added, glaring at his wife. As a good-bye, I gave them a nod I had practiced for quite some time in the mirror. It was polite enough that no one could complain but not so polite that the person receiving the nod would think you liked them. I trudged through the ashes, trying to think. I had been taught to spend longer than a few minutes at the scene of an investigation, but I was not quite sure what it was that I was investigating. Start from the beginning, I told myself. The Department of Education was concerned about a suspicious fire, and pointed us toward a witness to the fire. Upon arriving at his home, we found it too was burned to the ground. There were moths, there were sheep. The Department of Education had a child working there and was convinced that schoolchildren were in danger. The whole thing was gibberish. Only a babbling buffoon would think it made any sense.

“This is starting to make sense,” Theodora said, when we reached the roadster. “There’s an arsonist who is putting the schoolchildren of Stain’d-by-the-Sea in danger. We’ve got to find him and stop him, unless it’s a woman, in which case it is she who must be found and stopped.”

“Two buildings have been burned,” I agreed, “but why are schoolchildren in danger?”

“The Department of Education said they were in danger,” Theodora said. “Do you think my friend Sharon is lying?”

“She wouldn’t have to be lying to be wrong,” I said.

“Don’t simper nonsense at me, Snicket. I am not a baby. Our progress is being evaluated, and the case has been assigned extra-crucial status. We’ve got to speed up the investigation. I’m counting on your hard work and cooperation.”

I took a last look at the ashes as Theodora started up the roadster. Hangfire, I thought. Is this your handiwork? No one answered.

“Snicket, don’t be a Trappist monk. Answer my question.

“You didn’t ask anything.”

“Well, I meant to ask something.”

“What is it?”

“It’s what are your suggestions? ”

“Let’s go to Hungry’s.”

“Be sensible. You just want to have lunch with your friends.”

“I work better on a full stomach.”

“Well, two can play at that game, Snicket. I’m going to go see Sharon Haines, and we’ll see who comes closer to solving the case.”

The roadster took us back through town. It was hot, and the sun kept glaring at me. It reminded me of Stewart Mitchum, who also liked to glare but was nowhere near as bright. Why would Stew tell his parents he wanted to focus on his education, I asked myself. And then I asked Theodora to drop me at the corner. If too many people see you getting rides everyplace, they get the impression you belong in a car seat. The corner was hot, too. Peppermint ice cream. Maybe Jake Hix will have some in his freezer for dessert.

From the outside Hungry’s didn’t look like anything special, and inside it didn’t either. Certainly there wasn’t anything special about the owner, Hungry Hix, a bitter woman with little patience for young people. What was special about the place was Jake Hix. He was a young man, but old enough to have a sweetheart and a job. The sweetheart was Cleo Knight, the brilliant chemist, and the job was cooking up the food at Hungry’s. It is possible that his genius was more impressive than Cleo’s, and in my case he gave away the food for free, as my funds were limited, a phrase which here means that Theodora didn’t give me an allowance. When I walked into the room, he was standing at a blender that was whirring and crackling away at something the color of bricks. Watching him was Moxie Mallahan, sitting at the counter with her typewriter case hoisted up beside her. I almost didn’t see who was sitting next to her until I was already inside. Nobody noticed me for a second—Moxie because she was watching Jake, Jake because he had his nose in a book, and Kellar Haines because he was pretending not to notice me as I sat at the counter with everybody else.

Jake looked up and turned the blender off. “How are you, Snicket?”

“Hot and starving,” I said, nodding to Moxie.

“I have just the thing,” he said, “but I’m going to make you taste it before I tell you what it is.”

“Finally,” I said, “a mystery I might solve. How’s the book?”

Jake marked his place and tossed it to me. “Has anybody made you read this?”

“No,” I said, looking it over. “I can never remember if that word in the title has one A or two.”

“I have the same trouble,” Moxie said sympathetically.

Jake cut big slices of homemade bread and tossed them into the oven to toast. Jake’s bread was delicious. It took days to make and started with a small bowl of milk rotting on the windowsill. He should tell the Mitchums the recipe, I thought. They have some warm milk at their house. But Jake was telling me the book’s story. “Two guys are friends, supposedly, and then one of them tricks the other one and he falls out of a tree and breaks his leg. The moral of the story seems to be, some boys are mean at school. I don’t need a book to tell me that.”

“If you want a good school story,” I said, “try The Children’s Hour.”

“I’m not sure I want a good school story,” Jake said. He took the blender and poured the brick-colored liquid into three bowls. “I like a story that could never happen to me. If I want real life I’ll read a newspaper.”

“But the newspaper folded,” Moxie said sadly.

At last Kellar Haines spoke up from his stool next to Moxie’s. “But you don’t go to school, do you, Jake? It sounds to me like a school story is something that could never happen to you.”

Jake whisked the bread out of the oven and opened a jar of something orange. It looked like jam maybe. He spread it on the bread. “I can’t go to school,” Jake said. “My aunt counts on me to run this place.”

Kellar looked around the diner and nodded. “What about you, typist?”

“I’m a journalist, not a typist,” Moxie said firmly, handing him one of her cards. “My father counts on me, too.”

“Doesn’t anyone in this town go to school?”

“Lots of kids go to school in this town,” Jake said.

“I hope so,” Kellar said, running a hand through the spike in his hair. “Where would we be without a top-drawer education? Where would all the children be?” He turned to me and met my eyes. My eyes met him back, but I still felt there was something I wasn’t seeing clearly. “And you, Snicket?” he said. “You’re in a special program, if I’m not mistaken. That’s why you were hired to investigate.”

“You’re not mistaken,” I said.

“How’s your investigation going?”

“I’m stopping for lunch.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “The food’s delicious. You know what it needs, though? Lime. Lime from an Italian tree. My mother speaks Italian and loves limes, so maybe that’s what gave me the idea. Of course, there aren’t any Italian lime trees, not in this town. None at all. Still, some people waste their afternoons chasing after an Italian lime. There’s a word for that. Can you think of the word, Snicket?”

I knew how I looked when I looked at Kellar. I’ve seen how people look at me when they have no idea what I’m talking about. “Many words come to mind,” I told him finally. “Confused. Perplexed. Puzzled.”

“Those aren’t Italian words,” he said, and wiped his mouth and looked around at all of us. Then he slid off the stool and left the place. We all looked after him.

“Odd kid,” Moxie said, opening her typewriter. “Do you know him, Snicket?”

“His name is Kellar Haines,” I said. “All I know about him is that he’s a fast typist.”

Moxie raised her eyebrows so high they almost disappeared into her hat. “Faster than I am?”

“I wonder what he was doing here,” I said, instead of disappointing her.

“He came in about an hour ago,” Jake said. “I made him a Reuben with extra Russian dressing, and he talked my ear off asking about you. He’d looked for you at the library and at the Lost Arms, so he could deliver a message.”

“But he didn’t deliver a message,” I said. “You saw him walk right out the door.”

We all looked at the door. It had a small square window toward the top, made from that kind of glass that you can’t quite see through. You couldn’t see the street or anything that was happening, just a few vague shapes. My whole day had been like that.

“Look,” Moxie said. “He left my business card behind.”

“I guess he thinks he doesn’t need it,” Jake said.

“Or,” I said, “he doesn’t want it to be found in his possession.”

Moxie gave me a curious look and typed a few lines while Jake put the toasted bread in a pile on a plate and served up lunch.

“Here,” he said, “eat up and tell me what you think.”

It was soup, ice cold, a shock and a delight on such a hot day. The taste was sweet and crunchy and smooth and satisfying. Then I took a bite of the bread and something in the jam made me feel sparks on my tongue. It was a lunch of adventure. I felt my mouth grinning around the spoon.

“What do you think, Snicket?” Jake asked. “Does that cut the mustard?”

What he meant was, “Is this a successful soup?” and I told him it certainly was. “I don’t taste mustard,” I said, “but I do taste tomato and spring onion.”

“And lime,” Moxie said.

“But not from an Italian tree,” Jake said with a smile.

I tasted again. “Maybe a little black pepper?”

“You’re not getting the secret ingredient.”

“Give us a hint,” Moxie said.

Jake thought for a second. “Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.”

“That’s water,” I said.

Moxie tasted again and smiled. “Watermelon.”

Jake nodded. “Tomato-watermelon gazpacho. It’s what they serve in Spain when it gets too hot. And the stuff on the bread is a habanero pepper jam I made myself.”

“I wish all mysteries were that easy,” I said.

“And this delicious,” Moxie said.

Jake told us thank you and we kept eating. The food made me feel better. Good food always does. For a few minutes I stopped worrying about Hangfire and schoolchildren and arson and the Department of Education. I wasn’t even worrying about Ellington Feint. I was just enjoying lunch, and my only worry was who was going to get the last piece of toast.

I should have kept worrying, though, because when I stopped worrying about the case, somebody else solved it. They solved it incorrectly and dimwittedly and disastrously, which is to say they didn’t solve it at all. But solving a mystery is like naming a dog. If enough people call it one thing, that’s the name that tends to stick. I was savoring my last sip of soup when Hungry’s door swung open and the wrong solution to the mystery hurried in. It was S. Theodora Markson and she had a huge grin on her face, which was never good news. Sharon Haines was right behind her with a grin just as wide, and when Theodora waved to me, I saw that both women had matching freshly painted nails. The nails were wrong too. They were bright, bright yellow, brighter than anybody likes.

“There you are!” Theodora sang out to me, in a voice as bright as the fingernails. I’d never heard her use that voice, and I didn’t like it.

“Tell him the good news,” Sharon said, in a matching voice.

“We have good news, Snicket,” Theodora said. “We’ve solved the case.”

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