When Did You See Her Last? First published in Great Britain 2013 by Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building 1 Nicholas Road London W11 4AN www.egmont.co.uk

Text copyright © 2013 Lemony Snicket

Art copyright © 2013 Seth

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: When Did You See Her Last? 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 2013

978 1 4052 5622 3

eISBN 978 1 7803 1231 6

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ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”

“When Did You See Her Last?”

CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Front series promotional page

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

TO: Pocket

FROM: LS

FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; kidnapping, investigations of; Hangfire; skip tracing; laudanum; doppelgängers; et cetera

2/4

cc: VFDhq

There was a town, and there was a statue, and there was a person who had been kidnapped. While I was in the town, I was hired to rescue this person, and I thought the statue was gone forever. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “How could someone who was missing be in two places at once?” Instead, I asked the wrong question—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the second.

It was cold and it was morning and I needed a haircut. I didn’t like it. When you need a haircut, it looks like you have no one to take care of you. In my case it was true. There was no one taking care of me at the Lost Arms, the hotel in which I found myself living. My room was called the Far East Suite, although it was not a suite, and I shared it with a woman who was called S. Theodora Markson, although I did not know what the S stood for. It was not a nice room, and I tried not to spend too much time in it, except when I was sleeping, trying to sleep, pretending to sleep, or eating a meal. Theodora cooked most of our meals herself, although “cooking” is too fancy a word for what she did. What she did was purchase groceries from a half-empty store a few blocks away and then warm them up on a small, heated plate that plugged into the wall. That morning breakfast was a fried egg, which Theodora had served to me on a towel from the bathroom. She kept forgetting to buy plates, although she occasionally remembered to blame me for letting her forget. Most of the egg stuck to the towel, so I didn’t eat much of it, but I had managed to find an apple that wasn’t too bruised and now I sat in the lobby of the Lost Arms with its sticky core in my hand. There wasn’t much else in the lobby. There was a man named Prosper Lost, who ran the place with a smile that made me step back as if it were something crawling out of a drawer, and there was a phone in a small booth in the corner that was nearly always in use, and there was a plaster statue of a woman without clothes or arms. She needed a sweater, a long one without sleeves. I liked to sit beneath her on a dirty sofa and think. If you want to know the truth, I was thinking about Ellington Feint, a girl with strange, curved eyebrows like question marks, and green eyes, and a smile that might have meant anything. I had not seen that smile for some time. Ellington Feint had run off, clutching a statue in the shape of the Bombinating Beast. The beast was a very terrible creature in very old myths, whom sailors and citizens were worried about encountering. All I was worried about was encountering Ellington. I did not know where she was or when I might see her again. The phone rang right on schedule.

“Hello?” I said.

There was a careful pause before she said “Good morning.” “Good morning,” she said. “I’m conducting a voluntary survey. ‘A survey’ means you’ll be answering questions, and ‘voluntary’ means—”

“I know what voluntary means,” I interrupted, as planned. “It means I’ll be volunteering.”

“Exactly, sir,” she said. It was funny to hear my sister call me sir. “Is now a good time to answer some questions?”

“Yes, I have a few minutes,” I said.

“The first question is, how many people are currently in your household?”

I looked at Prosper Lost, who was across the room, standing at his desk and looking at his fingernails. Soon he would notice I was on the phone and find some reason to stand where he might eavesdrop better. “I live alone,” I said, “but only for the time being.”

“I know just what you mean.” I knew from my sister’s reply that she was also in a place without privacy. Lately it had not been safe to talk on the phone, and not only because of eavesdroppers. There was a man named Hangfire, a villain who had become the focus of my investigations. Hangfire had the unnerving ability to imitate anyone’s voice, which meant you could not always be sure whom you were talking to on the telephone. You also couldn’t be sure when Hangfire would turn up again, or what his scheme might be. It was entirely too many things to be unsure about.

“In fact,” my sister continued, “things in my own household have become so complicated that I am unsure I can get to the library anymore.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, which was code for being sorry to hear that. Recently my sister and I had been communicating through the library system. Now she seemed to be telling me that it would no longer be possible.

“My second question is, do you prefer visiting a museum alone or with a companion?”

“With a companion,” I said quickly. “Nobody should go to a museum alone.”

“What if you could not find your usual companion,” she asked, “because he was very far away?”

I wasted a few seconds staring at the receiver in my hand, as if I could peer through the little holes and see all the way to the city, where my sister was, like me, working as an apprentice. “Then you should find another companion,” I said, “rather than visiting a museum by yourself.”

“What if there were no other suitable companions?” she asked, and then her voice changed, as if someone had walked into the room. “That’s my third question, sir.”

“Then you should not go to the museum at all,” I said, but then I, too, was interrupted, by the figure of S. Theodora Markson coming down the stairs. Her hair came first, a wild tangle as if several heads of hair were having a wrestling match, and the rest of her followed, frowning and tall. There are many mysteries I have never solved, and the hair of my chaperone is perhaps my most curious unsolved case.

“But sir—” my sister was saying, but I had to interrupt her again.

“Give Jacques my regards,” I said, which was a phrase which here meant two things. One was “I must get off the phone.” The other thing the phrase meant was exactly what it said.

“There you are, Snicket,” Theodora said to me. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It’s a missing-persons case.”

“It’s not a missing-persons case,” I said patiently. “I told you I was going to be in the lobby.”

“Be sensible,” Theodora told me. “You know I don’t listen to you very well in the morning, and so you should make the proper adjustments. If you’re going to be someplace in the morning, tell me in the afternoon. But where you are is neither here nor there. As of this morning, Snicket, we’re skip tracers.”

“Skip tracers?”

“‘Skip tracer’ is a term which here means ‘a person who finds missing persons and brings them back.’ Come on, Snicket, we’re in a great hurry.”

Theodora had an impressive vocabulary, which can be charming if it is used at a convenient time. But if you are in a great hurry and someone uses something like “skip tracer,” which you are unlikely to understand, then an impressive vocabulary is quite irritating. Another way of saying this is that it is vexing. Another way of saying this is that it is annoying. Another way of saying this is that it is bothersome. Another way of saying this is that it is exasperating. Another way of saying this is that it is troublesome. Another way of saying this is that it is chafing. Another way of saying this is that it is nettling. Another way of saying this is that it is ruffling. Another way of saying this is that it is infuriating or enraging or aggravating or embittering or envenoming, or that it gets one’s goat or raises one’s dander or makes one’s blood boil or gets one hot under the collar or blue in the face or mad as a wet hen or on the warpath or in a huff or up in arms or in high dudgeon, and as you can see, it also wastes time when there isn’t any time to waste. I followed Theodora out of the Lost Arms to where her dilapidated roadster was parked badly at the curb. She slid into the driver’s seat and put on the leather helmet she always wore when driving, which was the primary suspect in the mystery of why her hair always looked so odd.

We were in a town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea, which was no longer by the sea and was hardly a town anymore. The streets were quiet and many buildings were empty, but here and there I could see signs of life. We passed Hungry’s, a diner I had yet to try, and I saw through the window the shapes of several people having breakfast. We passed Partial Foods, where we purchased our groceries, and I saw a shopper or two walking among the half-empty shelves. Black Cat Coffee had a solitary figure at the counter, pressing one of the three automated buttons that gave customers coffee, bread, or access to the attic, which had served as a good hiding place. On this drive I also noticed something new in town—something pasted up on the sides of lampposts, and on the wood that barricaded the doors and windows of abandoned houses. Even the mailboxes had the posters on them, although from the hurrying roadster I could only read one word on them.

“This is a very crucial matter,” Theodora was saying. “We were given this important case because of our earlier success with the theft of the statue of the Bombinating Beast.”

“I would not call it success,” I said.

“I don’t care what you would call it,” Theodora said. “Try to be more like your predecessor, Snicket.”

I was tired of hearing about the apprentice before me. Theodora had liked him better, which made me think he was worse. “We were hired to return that statue to its rightful owners,” I reminded her, “but that turned out to be one of Hangfire’s tricks, and now both the item and the villain could be anywhere.”

“I think you’re just mooning over that girl Eleanor,” Theodora said. “Cupidity is not an attractive quality in an apprentice, Snicket.”

I was not sure what “cupidity” meant, but it began with the word “Cupid,” the winged god of love, and Theodora was using the tone of voice everyone uses to tease boys who have friends who are girls. I felt myself blushing and did not want to say her name, which wasn’t Eleanor. “She is in danger,” I said instead, “and I promised to help her.”

“You’re not concentrating on the right person,” Theodora said, and tossed a large envelope into my lap. The envelope had a black seal on it that had been broken. Inside was nothing but a piece of paper with a photograph of a girl several years older than I was. She had hair so blond it looked white and glasses that made her eyes look very small. The glasses were shiny, or maybe just reflecting the light of the camera’s flash. Her clothes looked brand-new, with brand-new black-and-white stripes like a zebra that had been recently polished. She was standing in what I guessed to be her bedroom, which also looked brand-new. I could see the edge of a shiny bed and a shiny dresser stacked with trophies that looked as if they had been awarded yesterday. Most trophies I’d seen had figures of athletes at the top of them. These had shapes that were bright and strange. They reminded me of illustrations in a science book, explaining the very small things that supposedly make up the world. The only things in the photograph that did not look brand-new were the hat she was wearing, which was round and the color of a raspberry, and the frown on her face. She looked displeased at having her photograph taken, and also like she used her displeased expression quite frequently. Printed underneath the frowning girl was her name, MISS CLEO KNIGHT, and at the top of the poster was printed another word, in much bigger type. It was the same word I had read on the copies of the same flyer all over town.

MISSING.

The word applied to the girl, but it could have applied to anything in town. Ellington Feint had vanished. Theodora’s roadster sped down whole blocks that had been emptied of businesses and people. I realized we were heading toward the town’s tallest building, a tower shaped like an enormous pen. Once this town had been known for producing the world’s darkest ink, from frightened octopi shivering in deep wells that were once underwater. But the sea had been drained away, leaving behind an eerie, lawless expanse of seaweed that somehow still lived even when the water had disappeared. Nowadays there were few octopi left, and eventually there would be nothing at all but the shimmering seaweed of the Clusterous Forest. Soon everything will go missing, Snicket, I thought to myself. Your chaperone is right. You are in a great hurry. If you do not hurry to find what has gone missing, there will be nothing left.

The pen-shaped tower had a surprisingly small door printed with letters that were far too large. The letters said INK INC., and the doorbell was in the shape of a small, dark ink stain. It was the name of the largest business in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Theodora stuck out a gloved finger and rang the doorbell six times in a row. There was not a doorbell in the world that Theodora did not ring six times when she encountered it.

“Why do you do that?”

My chaperone drew herself up to her full height and took off her helmet so her hair could make her even taller. “S. Theodora Markson does not need to explain anything to anybody,” she said.

“What does the S stand for?” I asked.

“Silence,” she hissed, and the door opened to reveal two identical faces and a familiar scent. The faces belonged to two worried-looking women in black clothes almost completely covered in enormous white aprons, but I could not quite place the smell. It was sweet but wrong, like an evil bunch of flowers.

“Are you S. Theodora Markson?” one of the women said.

“No,” Theodora said, “I am.”

“We meant you,” said the other woman.

“Oh,” Theodora said. “In that case, yes. And this is my apprentice. You don’t need to know his name.”

I told them anyway.

“I’m Zada and this is Zora,” said one of the women. “We’re the Knight family servants. Don’t worry about telling us apart. Miss Knight is the only one who can. You’ll find her, won’t you, Ms Markson?”

“Please call me Theodora.”

“We’ve known Miss Knight since she was a baby. We’re the ones who took her home from the hospital when she was born. You’ll find her, won’t you, Theodora?”

“Unless you would prefer to call me Ms Markson. It really doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”

“But you’ll find her?”

“I promise to try my best,” Theodora replied, but Zada looked at Zora—or perhaps Zora looked at Zada—and they both frowned. Nobody wants to hear that you will try your best. It is the wrong thing to say. It is like saying “I probably won’t hit you with a shovel.” Suddenly everyone is afraid you will do the opposite.

“You must be worried sick” is what I said instead. “We would like to know all of the details of this case, so we can help you as quickly as possible.”

“Come in,” Zada or Zora said, and ushered us inside a room that at first seemed hopelessly tiny and quite dark. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that what had first appeared to be walls were large cardboard boxes stacked up in every available place, making the room seem smaller than it really was. The dark was real, though. It almost always is. The smell was stronger once the door was shut—so strong that my eyes watered.

“Excuse the mess,” said one of the aproned women. “The Knights were just packing up to move when this dreadful thing happened. Mr and Mrs Knight are beside themselves with worry.”

Zada’s and Zora’s eyes were watering too, or perhaps they were crying, but they led us through the gap between the boxes and down a dark hallway to a sitting room that appeared to have been entirely packed up and then unpacked for the occasion. A tall lamp sat in its box with its cord snaking out of it to the plug. A sofa sat half out of a box shaped like a sofa, and in two more open boxes sat two chairs holding the only things in the room that weren’t ready to be carried into a truck: Mr and Mrs Knight. Mr Knight’s chair was bright white and his clothes dark black, and for Mrs Knight it was the other way. They were sitting beside each other, but they did not appear to be beside themselves with worry. They looked very tired and very confused, as if we had woken them up from a dream.

“Good evening,” said Mrs Knight.

“It’s morning, madam,” said either Zada or Zora.

“It does feel cold,” Mr Knight said, as if agreeing with what someone had said, and he looked down at his own hands.

“This is S. Theodora Markson,” continued one of the aproned women, “and her apprentice. They’re here about your daughter’s disappearance.”

“Your daughter’s disappearance,” Mrs Knight repeated calmly.

Her husband turned to her. “Doretta,” he said, “Miss Knight has disappeared?”

“Are you sure, Ignatius dear? I don’t think Miss Knight would disappear without leaving a note.”

Mr Knight continued to stare at his hands, and then blinked and looked up at us. “Oh!” he said. “I didn’t realize we had visitors.”

“Good evening,” said Mrs Knight.

“It’s morning, madam,” said either Zada or Zora, and I was afraid the whole strange conversation was about to start up all over again.

“We’ve come about Miss Knight,” I said quickly. “We understand she’s gone missing, and we’d like to help.”

But Mr Knight was looking at his hands again, and Mrs Knight’s eyes had wandered off too, toward a doorway at the back of the room, where a round little man was gazing at all of us through round little glasses. He had a small beard on his chin that looked like it was trying to escape from his nasty smile. He looked like the sort of person who would tell you that he did not have an umbrella to lend you when he actually had several and simply wanted to see you get soaked.

“Mr and Mrs Knight are in no state for visitors,” he said. “Zada or Zora, please take them away so I can attend to my patients.”

“Yes, Dr Flammarion,” one of the aproned women said with a little bow, and motioned us out of the room. I looked back and saw Dr Flammarion drawing a long needle out of his pocket, the kind of needle doctors like to stick you with. I recognized the smell and hurried to follow the others out of the room. We made our way through a skinny hallway made skinnier by rows of boxes, and then suddenly we were in a kitchen that made me feel much better. It was not dark. The sunlight streamed in through some big, clean windows. It smelled of cinnamon, a much better scent than what I had been smelling, and either Zada or Zora hurried to the oven and pulled out a tray of cinnamon rolls that made me ache for a proper breakfast. One of the aproned women put one on a plate for me while it was still steaming. Anyone who gives you a cinnamon roll fresh from the oven is a friend for life.

“What’s wrong with the Knights?” I asked after I had thanked them. “Why are they acting so strangely?”

“They must be in shock from their daughter’s disappearance,” Theodora said. “People sometimes act very strangely when something terrible has happened.”

One of the aproned women handed Theodora a cinnamon roll and shook her head. “They’ve been like this for quite some time,” she said. “Dr Flammarion has been serving as their private apothecary for a few weeks now.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Flammarion is a tall pink bird,” Theodora said.

“An apothecary,” continued the woman, more helpfully, “is something like a doctor and something like a pharmacist. For years Dr Flammarion worked at the Colophon Clinic, just outside town, before coming here to treat the Knights. He’s been using a special medicine, but they just keep getting worse.”

“That must have been very upsetting for Miss Knight,” I said.

Zada and Zora looked very sad. “It made Miss Knight very lonely,” one of them said. “It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.”

“So Miss Knight has no one caring for her,” Theodora said thoughtfully. The cinnamon rolls were the sort that is all curled up like a snail in its shell, and my chaperone had unraveled the roll before starting to eat it, so both of her hands were covered in icing and cinnamon. It was the wrong way to do it. She was also wrong about no one caring for Miss Knight. Zada and Zora were the ones who were beside themselves with worry. I leaned forward and looked first at Zada and then at Zora, or perhaps the other way around. And then, while my chaperone licked her fingers, I asked the question that is printed on the cover of this book.

It was the wrong question, both when I asked it and later, when I asked the question to a man wrapped in bandages. The right question in this case was “Why was she wearing an article of clothing she did not own?” but this is not an account of times when I asked the right questions, much as I wish it were.

“Miss Knight was with us yesterday morning,” one of the women said, using her apron to dab at her eyes. “She was sitting right where you are sitting now, having her usual breakfast of Schoenberg Cereal. Then she spent some time in her room before going out to meet a friend.”

“Who was this friend?” I asked.

“She didn’t say. She just drove off, and she hasn’t come back.”

“She’s old enough to drive?”

“Yes, she got her license a few months ago, and her parents bought her a shiny new Dilemma.”

“That’s a nice automobile,” I said. The Dilemma was one of the fanciest automobiles manufactured. It was claimed that you could drive a Dilemma through the wall of a building and emerge without a dent or scratch, although the building might collapse.

“Mr and Mrs Knight give their daughter whatever she wants,” the aproned woman said. “New clothes, a new car, and all sorts of equipment for her experiments.”

“Experiments?”

“Miss Knight is a brilliant chemist,” Zada or Zora said proudly. “She often stays up all night working on experiments in her bedroom.”

“I imagine she learned that from watching you cook,” I said. “This cinnamon roll is the best I have ever tasted.”

Complimenting someone in an exaggerated way is known as flattery, and flattery will generally get you anything you want, but Zada and Zora were too worried to offer me a second pastry. “She probably inherited her abilities from her grandmother,” the woman said. “Ingrid Nummet Knight founded Ink Inc. when she was a young scientist, after years of experimenting with many different inks from many different creatures. Before long Ink Inc. made the Knights the wealthiest family in town. But those days are over. Ink Inc. is almost finished, and so is the town. That’s why we’re leaving Stain’d-by-the-Sea.”

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“Whenever the Knights give the word.”

“Even if Miss Knight doesn’t come back?”

“What can we do?” asked the other woman sadly. “We’re only the servants.”

“Then make me some tea,” said an eager voice from the doorway. The bright kitchen seemed to grow darker as Dr Flammarion strolled into the room, took a cinnamon roll without asking, and sat down loudly.

“We were talking about Miss Knight,” one woman said quietly.

“Very worrisome,” the apothecary agreed, with his mouth full. “But at least her parents are resting comfortably. They were shocked to hear of the disappearance. I gave them an extra injection of medicine so that they might pass the afternoon in a comfortable state of unhurried delirium.”

“What medicine is it, Doctor?” I asked.

Dr Flammarion frowned at me. “You’re a curious young man,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Dr Flammarion,” Theodora said. She had finished her cinnamon roll and was wiping her fingers on the photograph of the missing girl. “My apprentice has forgotten his manners.”

“It’s quite all right,” Dr Flammarion said. “Curiosity tends to get little boys into trouble, but he’ll learn that soon enough for himself.” He offered me his nasty smile like a bad gift, and then said quickly, “The medicine I gave them is called Beekabackabooka.”

I have never been to medical school and am never quite sure how to spell the word “aspirin,” but I still knew that Beekabackabooka is not a medicine of any kind. It didn’t matter. Even without his revealing himself to be a liar, I knew there was something suspicious about Dr Flammarion, and even without his telling me, I knew the medicine he was giving the Knights was laudanum. I recognized the smell from an incident some weeks earlier, when people had tried to sneak some into my tea. This incident is described in my account of the first wrong question, on the rare chance you have access to, or interest in, such a report.

“It must be difficult to care for Mr and Mrs Knight all by yourself,” I said, and looked him in the eye. He blinked behind his glasses, and his beard tried harder to flee from his nasty smile.

“I’m not quite all by myself, young man,” he told me. “I have a nurse who is good with a knife.”

Theodora stood up. “I want to conduct a thorough search of the scene of the crime,” she said.

“What crime?” Dr Flammarion said.

“What scene?” I asked.

“It seems likely a terrible crime has been committed,” Theodora said firmly, with no thought to how much that would upset the two women who cared for Miss Knight.

“As the Knight family’s private apothecary, I must say that I’m not sure a crime has been committed at all. Miss Knight likely just ran away, as young girls often do.”

The two servants looked at each other in frustration. “She wouldn’t have run away,” one of them said, “not without leaving a note.”

“Who knows what a wealthy young girl will do?” Dr Flammarion said with a smooth shrug. “In any case, I told Zada it was not worth alarming the police.”

“Zora,” she corrected him sharply.

“I’m sorry, Zora,” Dr Flammarion said with a little bow that indicated he was not sorry at all.

“I’m Zada,” she corrected him again, “but it’s true. Dr Flammarion stopped Zora from calling the police and suggested we call you instead.”

“The good doctor made a good choice,” Theodora said in a tone of voice she probably thought was reassuring, and then stood up and made a dramatic gesture. “Nevertheless, I would like to search the place Miss Knight was last seen. Take me to her bedroom!”

There was no arguing with S. Theodora Markson when she began to gesture dramatically, so I followed my chaperone as she followed Zada and Zora through the packed-up house, with Dr Flammarion close behind me, his breath as unpleasant as the rest of him. Soon we were in a room I recognized from the photograph, which Theodora put down on a brand-new desk in order to rifle through the clothing in the closet. There was no sense in it. This was not the place Miss Knight was last seen. It was simply the place Zada and Zora had seen her last. The girl had driven off in a fancy automobile. It was likely someone else had seen her afterward.

“This room isn’t packed up,” I said.

“Miss Knight wants to do it herself,” one of the women said, “but she hasn’t packed up anything but a few items of clothing.”

That made me ask a question that was closer to the right question than I knew. “What was she wearing when she left?”

Zada or Zora pointed to the photograph. “See for yourself,” she said. “We took that photograph yesterday morning, at her request. It was a lucky thing. Now that photograph is all over town.”

I looked at the picture again. Nothing seemed familiar, but the pink hat looked out of place. “That’s an unusual cap,” I said. “Do you know where she got it?”

“Snicket,” Theodora said sternly. “A young man should not take an interest in fashion. We have a crime to solve.”

Dr Flammarion smiled at me again, and I looked down at the desk rather than look at either my chaperone or this suspicious doctor. In the middle of the tidy desk was a plain white sheet of paper with nothing on it. No, Snicket, I thought. That’s not right. Here and there were tiny indentations, as if something had scratched at it. I leaned down to the desk and inhaled, and for the second time since I entered the tall pen-shaped tower, I smelled a familiar scent, or really two familiar scents mixed together. The first was the scent of the sea, a strong and briny smell that still came from the seaweed of the Clusterous Forest when the wind was blowing in the direction of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The second scent took me a moment to identify. It smelled in a certain way that was on the tip of my tongue until I breathed it in one more time.

“Lemony,” I said, but I was not saying my name out loud. I took the piece of paper over to the bed stand, turned on the reading light, and waited a minute or two for the lightbulb to get good and hot. While I waited I looked around the room, and it occurred to me that Zada and Zora were wrong. The Knight girl had started packing. She often stayed up all night in her bedroom working on scientific experiments, but there was not one piece of scientific equipment to be seen. At last the bulb was warm enough.

There are three things to know about invisible ink. The first is that most recipes for it involve lemon juice. The second is that the invisible ink becomes visible when the paper is exposed to something hot, such as a candle or a lightbulb that has been on for a few minutes. I held the paper up, very close to the lightbulb, and watched. Zada and Zora saw what I was doing and walked over to get a look. Dr Flammarion also stepped closer. Only Theodora did not watch the paper as it warmed up, and instead took a blouse from the closet and held it up to her own body to look at herself in the mirror.

No matter how many slow and complicated mysteries I encounter in my life, I still hope that one day a slow and complicated mystery will be solved quickly and simply. An associate of mine calls this feeling “the triumph of hope over experience,” which simply means that it’s never going to happen, and that is what happened then. The third thing to know about invisible ink is that it hardly ever works. After several minutes of exposing the paper to heat, I looked at it and read what it had to say:

In other words, nothing. But the curious thing was that the nothingness was finally a clue I could use.

“This is a fortunate day,” Theodora said to me. With one gloved hand she was steering the green roadster back toward the Lost Arms, and with her other glove she was tapping me firmly on the knee. Nobody likes to be tapped on the knee. Practically nobody likes to be tapped anywhere. She kept doing it. “‘Fortunate’ is a word which here means fortuitous, and it’s particularly fortuitous for you. It’s auspicious. It’s opportune. It’s kismet. It’s as lucky as can be. Lucky you, Snicket! With this new case, I will reveal my routine and my methods for skip tracing.”

Outside it looked like it might rain again. Inside I had the photograph of the girl in my lap. The promising young chemist looked even more annoyed, perhaps because Theodora had left sugary fingerprints all over the picture. “What shall we do first?” I asked.

“Don’t talk, Snicket,” Theodora said. “Fools talk while wise people listen, so listen up and I’ll tell you how we will solve this case sensibly and properly. We will do six things, and for each thing, I will hold up a finger of my hand, so at the end I will be holding up six fingers and you will not be confused.”

I stopped listening, of course. Theodora’s sensible and proper methods of solving our previous case had led to our dangling unnecessarily from a hawser, which is a cable suspended up in the air, not a sensible or proper thing to do. I nodded solemnly at thing number one, and when she lifted a second gloved finger, I stared out the window and thought. It was surprising to me that so much of the mystery had been solved already. Dr Flammarion was giving Ignatius and Doretta Knight heavy doses of laudanum with his hypodermic needle, leaving them mumbling and half conscious. It was not difficult to think of reasons why an apothecary would want to control the wealthiest family in town, even if they were not as wealthy as they once had been and the town was fading away to nothing. But Dr Flammarion would have a more difficult time with a promising young chemist, who would know all about laudanum and its sleepy, dangerous ways. And so she had vanished.

The part of the story that confused me was the note. Zada and Zora had insisted that Miss Knight would have left a note if she had run away, but Dr Flammarion had said there was no note. But I had found a sort of half note—a message written in invisible ink that hadn’t worked. Miss Knight was a chemist. She would know that invisible ink hardly ever works. She also seemed to like brand-new clothes but was wearing an old hat in the picture. There’s a connection, my brain said to me, between the hat and the disappearance, but I told my brain that if there was a connection, it had to think of it itself, because my eyes had spotted a bigger clue on the street outside.

“Stop the car,” I said.

“Be sensible,” Theodora said. “I haven’t even gotten to thing number four.”

“Stop the car, please.”

She stopped the car, perhaps because I had said “please.” I stepped out onto the curb of a quiet street, although practically all of the streets in Stain’d-by-the-Sea were quiet. They were so quiet that if you drove through them on a regular basis, you would notice anything new, such as the flyers of Miss Knight printed with the word MISSING. You would also notice an enormous automobile, particularly if it was one of the fanciest automobiles manufactured.

I was standing in front of a Dilemma. There are people in the world who care about automobiles, and there are people who couldn’t care less, and then there are the people who are impressed by the Dilemma, and those people are everyone. The Dilemma is such a tremendous thing to look at that I stared at it for a good ten seconds before reminding myself that I should think of it as a clue to a mystery rather than as a wonder of modern engineering. It was one of the newer models, with a small, old-fashioned horn perched just outside each front window, and a shiny crank on the side so you could roll down the roof if Stain’d-by-the-Sea ever offered pleasant weather, and it was the color of someone buying you an ice cream cone for no reason at all.

Theodora had gotten out of the roadster and stared at the Dilemma for as long as I had. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Snicket,” she said, when she had remembered to be a chaperone. “You’re supposed to be looking for Miss Knight, not getting distracted by automobiles, no matter how beautiful they are and how interesting to behold and no matter how long you want to stand here staring at it because it’s very beautiful and interesting to behold and so you find yourself staring at it for quite some time because it is so beautiful and interesting—”

“This car probably belongs to Miss Knight,” I said before she could continue. “Not many people can afford a new Dilemma.”

“Then she must be nearby,” Theodora said, turning quickly all the way around to look in every direction down the empty street.

“I read once,” I said, “about a person who parked their car and then went someplace else.”

“Don’t be impertinent.” Theodora frowned. “Where could she have gone?”

I looked down the block. “Impertinent” is a word which actually means “not suitable to the circumstances,” but most people use it to mean “I am using a complicated word in the hopes that it will make you stop talking,” so I merely pointed at the only remaining grocery store in town.

Partial Foods must have once been a grand grocery store. It was not a grand grocery store for the duration of my stay in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It looked like a grand grocery store that someone had thrown down the stairs. To enter the store, you walked through a pair of enormous glass doors with brass handles carved with images of fresh fruit and vegetables, but the doors were badly cracked and difficult to open. There were wide shelves and deep bins ready to hold enormous mountains of delicious food, but at least half of them were empty, and the rest held food that was unripe or stale, mushy or brittle, bruised or encased in too many layers of plastic, or something I didn’t like. The place was almost enormous and almost deserted, so it took some time wandering through the big, meager aisles until we found someone to talk to. The owner of Partial Foods was a woman who could look both very angry and very bored at the same time and in fact was doing so when we found her. On a stained smock, she was wearing a peeled name tag that read POLLY PARTIAL.

“Good day,” Theodora said to her.

“Who are you?” Polly Partial asked. She was standing next to a basket of honeydew melons. I do not like honeydew melons. I do not see the point of them.

“My name is S. Theodora Markson, and this is my apprentice,” Theodora said, and took the flyer from my hand. “We’re looking for this person.”

Polly Partial peered at the frowning girl. “That’s Cleo Knight,” she said, pointing to the words printed above the photograph.

“Yes, we know,” Theodora said. “I was wondering if you had seen her recently.”

“Hard to say,” Polly Partial said. “She looks like any other runaway girl, even if she is from a wealthy family. Is there a reward? With enough money, I could retire and devote myself to raising minks.”

The Knights had not said anything about a reward, but Theodora did not say anything about there not being one. “Only if you help us,” she said. “Have you seen this girl?”

The shopkeeper squinted at the flyer. “Yesterday morning,” she said, “about ten thirty. She hurried in here to buy that silly breakfast food she likes.” She led us down an aisle and pulled down a box for us to see. It was Schoenberg Cereal, the brand Zada and Zora had mentioned. TWELVE WHOLESOME GRAINS COMBINED IN A STRICT SEQUENCE, the label read. I could not imagine who would eat such a thing in a kitchen where fresh-baked cinnamon rolls could be had.

“The Knights are the only ones who buy it,” Polly Partial said, “although usually it’s one of those twin servants who does the shopping.”

“Did she say anything?” Theodora asked.

“She said thanks,” Polly said, “and then she said she was running away to join the circus.”

My chaperone scratched her hair. “The circus?”

“That’s what she said,” said Polly Partial.

“Aha! ” Theodora cried.

“Then she walked outside and got into a taxicab and went off.”

“Aha!”

I didn’t see anything to aha! about, but I’ve never been an aha! sort of person. “What was she wearing?” I asked.

Theodora gave me an exasperated sigh. “What did I tell you about your interest in fashion?” she said. “A young man who asks too much about clothing will find himself the subject of unflattering rumors.”

“You can see for yourself what she was wearing,” Polly Partial said, and handed me back the flyer. “The Knight family always wears black and white, to honor the family business and the paper it’s scrawled on. I remember the hat surprised me. It wasn’t black and it wasn’t white. It looked French.

“You’ve been very helpful, Ms Partial,” Theodora said. “I’m sure the Knights will thank you.”

“Of course, everything looks French when you stop to think about it.”

“You’re a very reliable witness,” I couldn’t help saying, and Polly Partial looked at me like she had never seen me before.

“Off with you,” she said. “I have canned smelt to stack.”

We left the store and stood in the street. Overhead the clouds talked with the wind about whether or not it should rain again. “Well, I’d say the case is solved,” Theodora said, and her hair ruffled in agreement. “Dr Flammarion was right. There is no crime. The Knight girl ran away from home. She drove into town, bought the supplies she needed, and took a taxi to join the circus. Do you have any questions?”

I had so many questions that they fought for a minute in my head over which one got to ask itself first. “Why didn’t she need more than cereal?” was the winner. “Why didn’t she leave a note?” was in second place, followed by “Why wouldn’t she run away in her car?”

Theodora waved her gloved hand at me like I was a bad smell. “Be sensible,” she said. “There is no indication of a crime. I’m going to write the report myself so I get full credit for solving the case.”

“We should investigate further,” I said.

“That’s what you said last time,” Theodora reminded me, putting on her helmet and opening the door of the roadster, “and the only thing you investigated was that silly girl. Girls and fashion, Snicket. You are too easily distracted.”

I felt myself blush. It is not a feeling I like. My ears get hot, and my face gets red, and it is no way to win an argument. “I’m going to walk back to the Lost Arms if you don’t mind,” I said. “It’s only a couple of blocks.”

“By all means,” Theodora said. “You’d only be a fifth wheel if you hung around our headquarters while I wrote my report. In fact, Snicket, why don’t you make yourself scarce until dinnertime?”

She shut the door of the roadster and drove off. I waited for the sound of the engine to fade, and then spent another minute looking once more at the Dilemma. I even put out a hand and rested my palm on one of the horns. “A fifth wheel” is an expression meaning someone who is of no help at all, the way a fifth wheel on an automobile doesn’t make it go any faster. It made no sense that Miss Knight would drive to Partial Foods and then take a taxi someplace else. She would never need a taxi at all, with an automobile like that. But she did. But she wouldn’t. But she did. Stop arguing with yourself, Snicket. You can’t win. I looked down at the ground and wished I’d looked there earlier. One of the tires of the Dilemma was deflated, so instead of looking round, it looked like an old potato. You couldn’t drive far like that. A Dilemma with a flat tire was a reminder that no matter how splendid and shiny the world might be, it could be spoiled by something you didn’t notice until the damage had been done.

I leaned down to get a closer look and found myself staring at a needle. It was the kind of needle doctors like to stick you with, and it was sticking out of the flattened tire.

“Hello,” I said to the needle.

The needle didn’t say anything, and neither did anybody else. I slipped the needle out of the tire. It didn’t smell like anything, but you wouldn’t have to inject a tire with laudanum. Flattening it would be enough. Carefully, so I wouldn’t get punctured, I put the needle in my pocket and stood up and looked this way and that. No one was around. Like most blocks in town, this block was nothing but boarded-up shops and homes and flyers with Cleo Knight staring back at me. But there was also someplace I’d been meaning to visit since my arrival in town. Why not now? I thought.

Hungry’s was a small and narrow place, and a large and wide woman was standing just inside the doors, polishing the counter with a rag. “Good afternoon,” she said.

I said the same thing.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“Well, you’re probably in the right place.”

She gave me a frown and a menu. “No, I mean I’m Hungry. It’s my name. Hungry Hix. I own this place. Are you hungry?”

“No,” I said. “You are.”

“Don’t be a smart aleck,” Hungry said.

“But it cheers me up,” I said.

“Sit anywhere you want,” she said. “A waiter will be right with you.”

There were a few booths alongside one wall, but I always like sitting at the counter. There was a boy a few years older than I was, leaning against a sink full of dirty dishes with a book in his hand and shaggy red hair in his eyes. I had not heard of the book, but I liked the author.

“How’s that book?”

“Good,” he said, without looking up. “A guy named Johnny takes the wrong train and ends up in Constantinople in 1453. This guy’s books are always good.”

“That’s true,” I said, “but there’s a bunch of books that he didn’t really write. They put his name on them anyway. You have to check carefully to make sure you don’t get one of those.”

“Is that so?” he said, and put down the book and poured me a glass of water and shook my hand. “I’m Jake Hix,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in here before.”

“I’m Lemony Snicket and I’ve never been in here,” I said. “Are you Hungry’s son?”

“Hungry’s my aunt,” Jake said. “I work for her in exchange for room and board.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “I’m an apprentice myself.”

“An apprentice what?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I have time.”

“No you don’t,” Hungry grumbled, squeezing by Jake and swatting him with a towel. “Take his order and do the dishes.”

“Never mind her,” Jake said, when his aunt was out of earshot. “She’s cranky because business is bad. Few people come in here anymore. This town is draining like somebody pulled the plug. You’re the first paying customer we’ve had all day.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

Jake shrugged. “If you’re hungry, I’ll make you something,” he said. “It’s better than doing dishes. You like soup?”

Never say you’re hungry until you learn what they’re fixing. “I like good soup,” I said.

“Good soup it is,” Jake said with a smile. “With dumplings.”

Jake busied himself at the stove, and I put the flyer down on the counter. “Have you seen this person?” I asked.

Jake looked quickly at the photograph and then looked away. “Of course,” he said. “That’s the Knight girl. Those flyers are all over town.”

“I’m looking for her,” I said.

“Everybody is, it looks like.”

“You said few people come in here,” I told him. “Was she one of them?”

Jake turned away from me and chopped something very hard and very quickly before throwing it into a pan to sizzle. “I don’t talk about my customers,” he said.

“If she’s in trouble,” I said, “I can help.”

Jake turned around then and gave me a look like I was a fifth wheel after all. It didn’t look like he really meant it, but I still didn’t like getting it. “You?” he asked. “Some stranger who just wandered into the diner?”

“I’m not a stranger,” I said, and pointed to his book. “I read the same authors you do.”

Jake thought about this for a minute, and the food started to smell good. “Miss Knight was in here yesterday morning,” he said, “about ten thirty.”

“Ten thirty?” I asked. “Are you sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure,” he said.

“Did she have breakfast?”

“Tea,” he said. “It helps her think.”

“Did she say anything?”

Jake gave me a curious look. “She said thanks.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, Snicket, but Miss Knight’s not a friend of mine. She’s just a customer.”

“What was she wearing?”

“The same as in the picture.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Then she got into a taxi.”

“A taxi?” Jake repeated with a laugh. “You really are a stranger. Cleo in a taxi! Miss Knight’s got a brand-new Dilemma that’s way better than any taxi.”

“There’s no need to insult us, Jake,” said a voice from the door.

Two boys had walked into Hungry’s, and they were two boys I knew. Their names were Bouvard Bellerophon and Pecuchet Bellerophon, which explains why everyone called them Pip and Squeak. They worked as taxi drivers when their father was sick, and it looked like he was sick today. I said hello and they said hello and Jake said hello and we figured out we all knew one another.

“I’m making Snicket here some soup,” Jake said. “You two want some?”

“Absolutely,” Pip said. “Business is slow today.”

“Then can you give me a ride after lunch?” I asked them.

“Sure,” said Squeak in the voice that matched his nickname. “We’re parked right outside. Going to see your friend again, in Handkerchief Heights?”

“She doesn’t live there anymore,” I said, not wanting to say Ellington’s name, “and I don’t know if I’d call her a friend, exactly.”

“That’s too bad,” Pip said. “She seemed nice enough to me.”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” I said. “How’s your father?”

“We’d rather not talk about that,” Squeak said.

“Well, then what should we talk about?”

“Books,” Jake said, and served up soup. After one bite I knew where I’d be eating for the duration. The dumplings had the flavor of paradise, and the broth spread through my veins like a secret that’s fun to keep. I wanted to tell the secret to my sister, who would have enjoyed the soup, but she was back in the city, doing the wrong things while I was asking the wrong questions, so I couldn’t share it with her. Pip and Squeak probably wanted to share the soup with their father, and I had a feeling as to whom Jake would like to share it with. But we didn’t talk about that. We talked about the author of the book he was reading. It felt good. I finished my soup and wiped my mouth and asked if there was anything else he could think of to tell me about Miss Cleo Knight. He said there wasn’t. He wasn’t telling me the truth, but I couldn’t get sore about it. I wasn’t telling everyone my business either. I stood up, and Pip and Squeak stood up, and we walked out of Hungry’s to the cab. Squeak got in and hunched down by the brake and gas pedals, and Pip arranged some books so he could sit on them and reach the steering wheel. I got in back, moving carefully so I wouldn’t get punctured by the needle in my pocket.

“Where are we going, Snicket?” Pip asked me.

“To the lighthouse,” I said, which reminded me of a book I’d been meaning to read. “I need a haircut.”

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