ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”

“When Did You See Her Last?”

“Shouldn’t You Be in School?”

“Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?”

ADDITIONAL REPORTS

File Under: Thirteen Suspicious Incidents

Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

First published in Great Britain 2015

by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building

1 Nicholas Road

London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2015 Lemony Snicket

Art copyright © 2015 Seth

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? 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 2015

978 1 4052 5624 7

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1233 0

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.

Stay safe online. Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

TO: B., P. Bellerophon

FROM: LS

FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; murder, investigations of; Hangfire; Bombinating Beast

4/4

cc: VFDhq

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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

CHAPTER ONE

There was a town, and there was a train, and there was a murder. I was on the train, and I thought if I solved the murder I could save the town. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “Is it more beastly to be a murderer or to let one go free?” Instead, I asked the wrong question—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the last.

I was in a small room, not sleeping and not liking it. The room was called the Far East Suite, and it sat uncomfortably in the Lost Arms, the only hotel in town. It had a chest of drawers and a little table with a metal plate that was responsible for heating up a number of very bad meals. A puzzling shape on the ceiling was someone’s idea of a light fixture, and a girl on the wall, holding an injured dog, was someone else’s idea of a painting. There was one window and one shutter covering it, so the room was far too dark except in the morning. In the morning it was far too light.

But most of the room was a pair of beds, and most of what I didn’t like slept in the larger one. Her name was S. Theodora Markson. I was her apprentice and she was my chaperone and the person who had brought me to the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea in the first place. She had wild hair and a green automobile, and those are the nicest things I could think of to say about her. We’d had a fight over our last big case, which you can read about if you’re the sort of person who likes to know about other people’s fights. She was still mad at me and had informed me I was not allowed to be mad at her. We had not talked much lately, except when I occasionally asked her what the S stood for in her name and she occasionally replied, “Stop asking.” That night she had announced to me that we were both going to bed early. There is nothing wrong with an early bedtime, as long as you do not insist that everyone has to go with you. Now her wild hair lay sprawled on the pillow like a mop had jumped off a roof, and she was snoring a snore I’d never heard before. It is lonely to lie on your bed, wide awake, listening to someone snore.

I told myself I had no reason to feel lonely. It was true I had a number of companions in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, people more or less my own age, who had similar interests. Our most significant interest was in defeating a villain named Hangfire. My associates and I had formed an ad hoc branch of the organization that had sent me to this town. “Ad hoc” means we were all alone and making it up as we went along. Hangfire worked in the shadows, scheming to get his hands on a statue of a mythical creature called the Bombinating Beast, so my friends and I had also started to keep our activities quiet, so that Hangfire would not find out about us. We no longer saw each other as much as we used to, but worked in solitude, in the hopes of stopping Hangfire and saving Stain’d-by-the-Sea.

The distant whistle of a train reminded me that so far my associates and I hadn’t had much success. Stain’d-by-the-Sea was a town that had faded almost to nothing. The sea had been drained away to save the ink business, but now the ink business was draining away, and everything in town was going down the drain with it. The newspaper was gone. The only proper school had burned down, and the town’s schoolchildren were being held prisoner. Hangfire and his associates in the Inhumane Society had them hidden in Wade Academy, an abandoned school on Offshore Island, for some reason that was surely nefarious, a word which here means “wicked, and involving stolen honeydew melons and certain equipment from an abandoned aquarium.” The town’s only librarian, Dashiell Qwerty, had been framed for arson, so now the town’s only police officers would take the town’s only librarian out of his cell and put him on the town’s only train, so he could stand trial in the city.

You know who else is in the city standing trial, I told myself, but thinking about my sister didn’t make it any easier to get to sleep. Kit had been caught on a caper when I was supposed to be there helping her. I felt very bad about this, and kept writing her letters in my head. The preamble was always “Dear Kit,” but then I had trouble. Sometimes I promised her I would get her out, but that was a promise I couldn’t necessarily keep. Sometimes I told her that soon she would be free, but I didn’t know if that was true. So I told her I was thinking of her, but that felt very meager, so I kept crumpling up these imaginary letters and throwing them into a very handsome imaginary trash can.

And then there’s the one, I thought, who has stolen more sleep from you than all the rest. Ellington Feint, like me, was somewhat new in town, having come to rescue her father from Hangfire’s clutches. She’d told me that she would do “anything and everything” to rescue him, and “anything and everything” turned out to be a phrase which meant “a number of terrible crimes.” Her crimes had caught up with her, and now she was locked in Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s tiny jail. The train is coming for her too, I told myself. Soon she will be transported through the outskirts of town and down into the valley that was once the floor of the ocean. She will ride past the Clusterous Forest, a vast, lawless landscape of seaweed that has managed to survive without water, and you might never see her again.

So many people to think about, Snicket, and still you are all alone.

The whistle blew again, louder this time, or perhaps it just seemed louder because Theodora’s odd snoring had stopped. It had stopped because it wasn’t snoring. She’d been pretending to be asleep. I closed my eyes and held still so I could find out why.

“Snicket?” she whispered in the dark room. “Lemony Snicket?”

I didn’t make a sound. When pretending to be asleep, you should never fake snoring in front of people who may have heard your actual snores. You should simply breathe and keep still. There are a great number of circumstances in which this strategy is helpful.

“Snicket?”

I kept still and kept breathing.

“Snicket, I know you’re awake.”

I didn’t fall for that old trick. I listened to Theodora sigh, and then, with a great creaking, she got out of bed and pattered to the bathroom. There was a click and a small stripe of light fell across my face. I let it. Theodora rustled around in the bathroom and then the light went out and she walked across the Far East Suite with her feet sounding different than they had. She’d put on her boots, I realized. She was going out in the middle of the night, just when the train was coming to a stop.

I heard the doorknob rattle and quit. She was giving me one last look. Perhaps I should have opened my eyes, or simply said, suddenly in the dark, “Good luck.” It would have been fun to startle her like that. But I just let her walk out and shut the door.

I decided to count to ten to make sure she was really gone. When I reached fourteen, she opened the door again to check on me. Then she walked out again and knocked the door shut again and I counted again and then one more time and then I stood up and turned the light on and moved quickly. I was at a disadvantage because I was in my pajamas, and it took me a few moments to hurry into clothing. I put on a long-sleeved shirt with a stiff collar that was clean enough, and my best shoes and a jacket that matched some good thick pants with a very strong belt. I mention the belt for a reason. I walked quickly to the door and opened it and looked down the hallway to make sure she wasn’t waiting for me, but S. Theodora Markson had never been that clever.

I looked back at the room. The star-shaped fixture shone down on everything. The girl with the dog with the bandaged paw gave me her usual frown, as if she were bored and hoped I’d give her a magazine. Had I known I was leaving the Far East Suite behind forever, I might have taken a longer look. But instead I just glanced at it. The room looked like a room. I killed the lights.

In the lobby were two familiar figures, but neither of them was my chaperone. One was the statue that was always there in the middle of the room, depicting a woman with no clothes or arms, and the other was Prosper Lost, the hotel’s proprietor, who stood by the desk giving me his usual smile. It was a smile that meant he would do anything to help you, anything at all, as long as it wasn’t too much trouble.

“Good evening, Mr Snicket.”

“Good evening,” I told him back. “How’s your daughter, Lost?”

“If you hadn’t decided to go to bed early, you would have seen her,” Prosper told me. “She stopped by to visit me, and left something for you as well.”

“Is that so?” I said. Ornette Lost was one of my associates, and for reasons I didn’t quite understand, she lived with her uncles, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only remaining firefighters, instead of with her father.

“That is so,” her father said now, and reached into his desk to retrieve a small object made of folded paper. I picked it up just as the whistle blew again.

It was a train.

“Ornette’s always been good at fashioning extraordinary things out of ordinary materials,” Lost said. “I suppose it runs in the family. Her mother had a great interest in sculpture.”

“Did she?” I said, although I was not really listening. When someone leaves a folded paper train for you, you take a moment to wonder why.

“She did indeed,” Lost said. “Alice had an enormous collection of statues and a great number of her own sculptures as well. They were displayed in the Far West Wing of this very hotel. My wife hoped the glyptotheca would attract tourists, but things didn’t go as planned.”

“They hardly ever do,” I said. “Glyptotheca” is a word which here means “a place where sculpture is displayed,” but I was more interested in unfolding the train. It had been constructed out of a single business card. All my associates in Stain’d-by-the-Sea had cards nowadays, printed with their names and areas of specialty. My eyes fell on the word “sculptor.”

“Most of the statues were destroyed in a fire some time ago,” Lost said. “Ornette was the one who smelled the smoke, which runs in the family too. By the time her uncles arrived to fight the fire, my daughter had managed to rouse the entire hotel and help the guests and staff to safety. Everyone was rescued—everyone but Alice.”

I stopped looking at what was in my hands and stared into the sad eyes of Prosper Lost. I had always found the hotel where I had been living, and the man who ran it, to be shabby and uncomfortable. Not until now had I thought of either of them as damaged. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t tell you,” Lost said, with his faint smile. “I suppose we all have our troubles, don’t we, Snicket?”

“Mine are smaller than yours, Lost.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Lost said quietly. “It seems to me we’re in the same situation, both alone in the lobby.”

“So you saw my chaperone go out?”

“Yes, just a minute ago.”

“Did she tell you where she was going?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Did she say anything at all?”

Prosper Lost shifted slightly. It must have been tiring for him to stand up at the desk, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him sit. “Actually,” he said, “she told me that if she didn’t return by tomorrow, I ought to make sure you were provided for.”

“What?”

“She told me that if she didn’t return—”

“I heard you, Lost. She said she wasn’t coming back.” My chaperone had once told me she was leaving town, but our organization did not permit leaving apprentices unsupervised. I looked at the train again, fashioned out of a card that was designed for communication. But what is Ornette communicating, I asked myself. Myself couldn’t answer, so I asked somebody else something else. “How long does the train stop at the station?”

“Oh, quite a while,” Prosper said, with a glance at his watch. “The railway switches engines at Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and it takes a long time to load in all the passengers. It seems there are always more and more people who want to get out of town.”

“Listen, Lost,” I said. “If I don’t return by tomorrow, will you do something for me?”

“What is it?”

“There’s a book beside my bed,” I said. “If I’m not back, please give it to the Bellerophon brothers.”

“The taxi drivers?” he said. “All right, Snicket. If you say so. Although I’m surprised you’re not bringing the book along. It seems to me that you always have a book with you.”

“I do,” I said, “but this book belongs to the library.”

“The library was destroyed, Snicket. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” I said, “but I still shouldn’t take it with me. It’s too bad, too. I’m only partway through.”

“So it goes,” Prosper Lost said, a little sadly. “There are some stories you never get to finish.”

I nodded in agreement and I never saw him again. Outside, the night was colder than I would have guessed, but not colder than I like it. I headed toward the train station, thinking of the book. It was about a man who went to sleep one night, and when he woke up he was an insect. It was causing him a great deal of trouble. The streets were quiet and I went several blocks, all the way to the town’s last remaining department store, before I saw a single person.

Diceys was a tall building that looked like a neatly stacked pile of square windows, catching the starlight and winking it back at the sky. In each window was a mannequin dressed in Diceys clothes, posed with some item or other that the store had for sale. Diceys was closed at this time of night, but a few lights were still on inside, and the mannequins stood eerily looking down at the store’s large entrance, a fancy door chained shut with a padlock as big as a suitcase. Struggling with the lock was S. Theodora Markson. Her efforts to unlock Diceys were fierce and required both her hands and occasionally a foot, and her bushy hair waved back and forth as she tried to wrestle her way into the store. From across the street she almost looked like an insect herself, as frantic and frightened as the man in the book. What happens next, I thought.

Finally, Theodora persuaded the door to open and slipped inside Diceys. I waited just a few seconds before slipping after her. I didn’t move too carefully. Anyone who struggles endlessly with a lock on a public street is not worried about being followed. There was a large, spiky metal object stuck in the lock. It was a skeleton key, but not a good one. A good skeleton key can open any lock at any time. A bad one can open some locks, some of the time, after much struggle. I looked at it, but only for a second, because I had seen it before. It was likely the only one in town. I left it where it was. I had no skeleton key as I stepped inside Diceys. I had only the clothes on my back, and a small folded paper train in my hand. My chaperone had something better. She had a secret.

CHAPTER TWO

Diceys was dark. I entered where perfume was sold, with glass bottles waiting on shelves like a laboratory with the mad scientist on vacation. I scanned the large room I was in. Nothing moved in it but a small light on a far wall. I made my way. The bottles watched me. I never have liked perfume. It always smells like someone’s been hit by a truck full of flowers.

The light on the wall was over the elevator doors, indicating that the elevator was moving. The light marked 4 turned on, and then the one marked 5. Theodora was going up. There was another elevator, but I couldn’t risk taking it. I waited to see where it stopped. Then I’d take the stairs. I hoped it would stop soon. It stopped at 11.

The staircase was a fancy one, very wide, with banisters that were probably brass and carpeting that was probably red when the lights were on. With the lights off, the banister was just smudgy and the carpeting was dotted with light lint and dark stains. At each turn of the staircase was a sign telling me what they sold on the floor. The second floor sold shoes for men. The third floor sold shoes for women. The fourth floor also sold shoes for women. The fifth floor sold housewares, with radios and mixing bowls casting shapely shadows on the walls. The sixth floor sold toys, and I thought of a book for small children as I paused to catch my breath. A bear wanders a department store at night, looking for a button he has lost. He’s caught by the night watchman. Diceys probably doesn’t have a night watchman, I told myself. If they can’t afford to polish the banisters, they can’t afford to pay a man to watch over the place. They just lock the door and go home. In any case, you’re not the one who broke in. Theodora broke in. You’re just following her. So stop leaning against the banister and follow her.

The seventh floor sold formal clothing. The eighth sold casual clothing. The ninth sold children’s clothing, and I remembered Theodora taking me there some weeks back, to be measured for new pants. It is embarrassing to be measured for new pants. The tenth floor sold the bright, shiny clothing people apparently enjoy wearing to play sports.

The eleventh floor sold uniforms. One of the advantages of the organization to which Theodora and I belonged was that there were no uniforms, unless you count a small tattoo on the ankle. I walked quietly between the racks of matching clothing hung up like flattened women and men, and wondered what Theodora was doing there. But she didn’t seem to be there at all. Aisle after aisle of uniforms was empty. I looked this way and that. The uniforms shrugged back at me. Finally I reached the far end of the eleventh floor, where the windows looked down on the street. There was a mannequin dressed like a police officer in one window, and one dressed as a firefighter in the next. Then there was a uniformed nurse, and a cook, and a sailor, and then, standing in a window, there was a mannequin wearing nothing at all. At its feet were a pile of clothes I recognized as Theodora’s. She had stood right there and changed her clothing, putting on whatever uniform had been worn by the mannequin. I did not like to think about it. I was at least relieved that Theodora’s underwear was not in the pile, so she had not been completely naked in the window of a department store.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar light moving on a distant wall. The elevator was heading back down. “Why not?” I said to the bare mannequin. “She’s gotten what she wanted.”

The mannequin didn’t say anything. I didn’t want her job and she didn’t want mine.

It was easier to go down the stairs, as it always is. In no time at all I was hurrying back past the perfume and out Diceys’s front door. My chaperone hadn’t thought to lock it back up again, but the skeleton key was gone. I could hear Theodora’s footsteps and caught her distant silhouette as she rounded a corner, although I couldn’t tell what she was wearing. She didn’t look around. Why should she? She was in disguise and I was asleep in the Far East Suite.

Theodora took me past a diner called Hungry’s, where my associate Jake Hix still occasionally slipped me a free meal, and Partial Foods, a grocery store where Hangfire had orchestrated some recent treachery. She walked quickly through the neighborhood and then past an enormous pen-shaped building, now abandoned, that once had been the home of my associate Cleo Knight, who was working on a formula for invisible ink that was Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s best hope. I silently wished Cleo luck, and then found myself walking past Black Cat Coffee, a favorite haunt of Ellington Feint. I’d sat at the counter many times and watched the shiny machinery make small cups of strong coffee and loaves of fresh, warm bread. Had I known I’d never see it again, I might have taken a closer look. As it was, I hardly glanced inside the place. I knew Ellington Feint wasn’t at Black Cat Coffee. The Officers Mitchum were putting her aboard the train. Soon she’d be in prison in the city, I thought, along with my sister. We walked a little farther, Theodora ahead and me following, until we were both where she wanted to be.

Stain’d Station was the busiest place I’d ever seen in town. The enormous room was thronging with people, and the noise of the crowd echoed up to the ceiling, which was lined with curved iron bars, like a black rainbow hanging in the loud air. Someone had lit torches that lined the walls, and by the flickering light I could see the train, twenty or thirty cars in length, at rest on one of the station’s many tracks. Most of the train’s cars were cargo cars, with INK INC. stamped on the sides and the tops open, to hold the ink extracted from octopi by enormous mechanized needles. But Ink Inc. was no longer a thriving business, and the octopi were scarcer and scarcer, so the cargo cars sat empty, ready to rattle through the fading town on tracks hardly used anymore. Behind the cargo cars were some passenger cars, decorated with wooden curlicues over the windows and old-fashioned railings bolted below and brightly painted designs everywhere else, and up front was a huge, tired engine, where people in black aprons hurried about with shovels and wheelbarrows, loading coal into the train’s tender. Porters in bright blue jackets helped the passengers push their way through the crowd, and conductors in gray suits punched people’s tickets with silver punchers clipped to their belts. Something was pinned to the lapels of their suits and jackets. I couldn’t see what it was, but I could hear the echo of each puncher’s click as it bounced off the ceilings, over and over again. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to leave town.

Somewhere, I thought, is the car where they lock all of Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s prisoners on their journey into the city. Somewhere there is Dashiell Qwerty and somewhere there is Ellington Feint, but you don’t see them, do you, Snicket? You can’t even find S. Theodora Markson, and you were supposed to be following her. With the black aprons, the blue jackets, and the gray suits, you don’t even know what uniform to look for.

I found a ticket booth where a woman sat behind a window, reading a book I didn’t like. I didn’t like the woman either. She was wearing an unfortunate smock with a little rip near the shoulder, right near a name tag printed with her name. I didn’t need it. I remembered her well enough.

“Polly Partial,” I said, and the owner of Partial Foods looked up and frowned at me.

“Total Stranger,” she greeted me in return.

“We’ve met a number of times,” I said, remembering that Ms. Partial had never been a reliable witness. “Why are you working here, instead of at your grocery store?”

“I have no more grocery store,” she said sourly. “The place was closed due to lack of interest. Some thieves took all my honeydew melons, which really affected employee spirit.”

“Well, at least your new job gives you time to read,” I said, pointing at the book. “How are you enjoying that?”

“Not so well,” she said.

“I’ve never liked that book.”

“Oh, I think the book is very good,” she said. “It’s just that I was interrupted while I was reading it by some boy who keeps asking me questions.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was a liar. “Is there room for one more passenger on that train?”

“The Thistle of the Valley ?”

“Is that what the train is called?”

“Yes.”

“When does it leave? Where does it stop?”

Polly Partial handed me a piece of paper printed on all sides with confusing times and locations. It looked like a herd of numbers having a square dance. I would rather have reread her book than Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s confusing train schedule, but just barely. “I can’t make head nor tail of this,” I said.

She pointed to one of the squares on one of the charts. “The Thistle of the Valley leaves in two minutes from Track One,” she said. “It winds through town, with brief stops at the post office, the museum, the library, and various downtown businesses, including Partial Foods and Ink Inc.”

“Those places scarcely exist in this town anymore,” I said.

“As you can see,” she said, pointing to different squares, “all those stops have been canceled indefinitely.”

“So then why did you mention them?” I asked her.

“It’s standard policy,” Polly Partial said, using a phrase which never means anything. “Unless there are special requests, The Thistle of the Valley makes no scheduled stops in town but travels across the sea and finally reaches the city before continuing on to various villages and tourist attractions.”

“The sea doesn’t exist anymore either,” I reminded her. “There’s only Offshore Island, a few remaining inkwells, and the Clusterous Forest.”

“Don’t tell me about the Clusterous Forest,” Polly Partial said. “That area used to provide my store with fresh fish, before it became empty and lawless.”

“I’m sorry about your business,” I said.

“So am I,” she replied, “but I’m not paid to listen to sympathetic comments. Do you want a ticket or not?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “If possible I’d like to sit close to the prison car.”

She blinked suspiciously at me. “We don’t tell passengers if there are prisoners on board a train,” she said. “That’s standard policy.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I already know there are prisoners on board. I just want to sit close to them.”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “There are only two compartments per train car, and the rear compartments have all been reserved.”

“So the prison car is at the back of the train,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

Partial scowled and snatched back the schedule. “Do you want a ticket or not?”

“I don’t have any money,” I admitted.

“Then I suggest you scram and let me finish my book.”

My hand was in my pocket, and I could feel the message Ornette had left for me, crinkly in my hand. “I need to get on that train,” I said.

“No one gets aboard that train without a ticket identifying them as a passenger, or a thistle identifying them as an employee.”

I pointed to the rip on her smock. “Where’s your thistle?”

She quickly and badly tried to cover the rip with her hand. “A bird took it,” she said. “I mean, it fell off.”

“You’re not a very good liar,” I said.

“I never learned how,” she said. “The grocery business is mostly an honest one.”

“It can’t be standard policy to give away thistles,” I said. “Perhaps I should report you to the railway company.”

“They won’t believe a child, a pest, and a nuisance.”

I pointed at the book. “Give me a ticket or I’ll give away the ending.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Polly Partial snarled. “Now scram. There’s no ticket for you here.”

“They find him guilty,” I said. “The lawyer does his best at the trial, but the town finds Tom guilty just the same.”

“You dirty rat,” she sputtered. “I only had a few chapters to go.”

I shrugged and walked away from the booth. I felt bad. It wasn’t Polly Partial’s fault that I didn’t have money for a ticket, so I didn’t really have a good reason to spoil the ending of the book. But I decided not to apologize for two reasons. The first was that I didn’t feel like it. And the second was that someone had spotted me, someone who was striding toward me with a scowl that I’m sure matched my own.

It is not difficult to describe Sharon Haines, because we’ve all seen the likes of her plenty of times. Bad mothers are like old newspapers. No one has need of them, but they’re everywhere, blowing around town. Sharon Haines was the mother of two children—a daughter named Lizzie, who had been kidnapped by Hangfire, and a son named Kellar, who had joined us to fight him. Sharon, on the other hand, had joined the Inhumane Society in a misguided effort to please the villain holding Lizzie captive. “Misguided” is a word which here means that it wasn’t going to work, but even with her treachery revealed she continued to stride toward young people, barking orders and questions.

“Come over here, Snicket!” she barked. “What are you doing at Stain’d Station?”

“Being a child, a pest, and a nuisance,” I said. “What are you doing here, Mrs Haines?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” she said haughtily.

“You already did,” I said, and she gave me another scowl, although her heart wasn’t in it. Her fingers fiddled nervously at her sides, one hand more nervously than the other, and her eyes were scanning the enormous room, back and forth like anxious pendulums. “I’m looking for someone too,” I told her. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we were both looking for the same person?”

Sharon gave me one more scowl and a gasp and then yet another scowl for good measure.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re not. You’ve already found the person I’m looking for. That’s how you got your skeleton key back.”

Sharon’s hands raced to their pockets, but one pocket wasn’t big enough. The skeleton key stuck out like a feather in a bad hat. It would be an easy caper to steal it like that. “You’d better get it back to Hangfire,” I said. “I’m sure he has no idea you lent it to a friend.”

“I’ll thank you,” she said sternly, “to stop interfering.”

“Oh, you don’t have to thank me, Mrs Haines.”

“Get out of here, young man. You have no idea what is going on.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, but she gave me a little growl of frustration and stalked off. She came over to you, I told myself, and now she can’t wait to walk away. A rude buzzer was ringing from someplace, and the station grew louder and busier. There were calls of “All aboard!” from the conductors, and passengers raced past me like I was nothing but an obstacle. A young woman stepped on my toe without apologizing, and my elbow got walloped by a suitcase carried by a man I probably should have looked at. The train was leaving shortly, and I wasn’t on it. Think, Snicket. This is the train’s only scheduled stop in town, and your only chance. How can you make your way onto that train?

“We have to get on that train!” exclaimed a voice near me, and a tall woman hurried through the crowd, followed by a porter who looked about my height and about my age. But it was the woman I recognized. Sally Murphy was once Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s most celebrated actress and more recently had been among those who had fallen under the power of the Inhumane Society. Some time ago Ms. Murphy had put on a very convincing performance as the original owner of the statue of the Bombinating Beast, and at the moment appeared to be doing a very good imitation of someone very nervous.

“You,” she said, very nervously.

I stood in her way and wouldn’t budge. “Me,” I agreed.

“I suppose you want me to thank you for your actions when we saw each other last.”

“It is traditional to thank the person who rescues you from drowning in the basement of an abandoned mansion,” I agreed. “In fact, it might be said that you owe me a favor.”

She tried to step around me this way and that. “Maybe I can buy you an ice cream cone sometime,” she said quickly.

I kept on not budging. “That’s not what I want.”

“All children want ice cream.”

“What I want is to get aboard that train,” I told her.

“It’s a very popular night to leave town.”

“So I’ve noticed,” I said, watching Sharon Haines disappear into the crowd. “Can you tell me why you’re leaving?”

Sally Murphy took a quick look at her porter. “Please don’t ask me that.”

“If you’re doing more work for the Inhumane Society,” I said, “then you’ll need to explain yourself to the police.”

The actress looked wildly around her, like a field mouse in the shadow of a hawk. Even Sally Murphy’s porter looked a bit frightened. “Not so loud!” Sally hissed to me. “I’ll thank you to stop interfering.”

“Why does everyone keep wanting to thank me for the same thing?” I asked, but the porter stopped the actress from answering my question.

“We’d best be getting on, ma’am,” the porter said. “We don’t want to miss the train.”

“I don’t want to miss it,” Sally Murphy corrected, and I took a better look at the person she was speaking to. The porter had wide eyes and a mustache that quivered. It was a striking mustache, I noticed—so perfectly square that it looked more like a piece of paper. Of course, I thought, a person my age with a mustache was already striking. The porter’s hair was striking too, with hairpins poking out here and there all porcupiney, and the uniform was the right one—a bright blue jacket with a thistle on the lapel—but fit all wrong. Uniform, I thought. Disguise. But it certainly wasn’t my chaperone I was looking at. There weren’t enough hairpins in the world to tame the mane of S. Theodora Markson.

“Tell me,” I said to the actress, “are you helping Hangfire or escaping him?”

Sally Murphy looked down at me, and I saw one tear in her eye, slow and bright, looking down at me too. “I’ll never escape from Hangfire,” she said quietly, “but perhaps an actress can manage the most important performance of her life. Come now, porter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the porter said, and then finally I budged. I budged to the left and Ms. Murphy and the porter budged over to where a conductor was standing. Ornette’s folded sculpture crinkled in my pocket again. A paper train, I thought. Sharon Haines. Sally Murphy. S. Theodora Markson. I knew there was a mystery here, but the mystery mystified me.

With a click!, the conductor punched the actress’s ticket, and Sally Murphy and the porter walked toward The Thistle of the Valley. “Excuse me,” I said to the conductor, quickly and desperately. “I need to get on that train, but I’m afraid I don’t have a ticket.”

“Then you’re out of luck,” the conductor said. “That’s standard policy.”

“Pretty please?” I asked, which never works, and sure enough the conductor shook his head.

“Another train will come along before too long, sonny boy,” he said.

“I need to be on tonight’s train,” said sonny boy.

“Why tonight?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, and he gave me the look adults give to children they call sonny boy. I frowned back at him, but it didn’t help. Sally Murphy disappeared into the train, and I watched her porter follow with the bags. He’s right, Snicket. The conductor is right. You’re out of luck.

The buzzer buzzed again, and the conductors began to shut the doors of the train. The Thistle of the Valley blew its whistle, loud and bright like an adventure was starting. The heavy wheels began to move, a clackety racket that echoed everywhere, first slowly and then quicker and quicker. The engine grumbled its way out of view, then the tender and then the cargo cars, one by one, lonely without the ink that ought to have been in them. Next came the passenger cars, with silhouettes of passengers here and there in the windows, too quick and distant to recognize. I tried to recognize them anyway as they went past, actors or chaperones, friends or foes, strangers or people pretending to be strangers. But by now the train was moving too quickly for me to see anything more than a few pale faces behind the blank glass, as if The Thistle of the Valley were full of ghosts. I could see the last car approaching, and then I saw it pass, locked tight so the prisoners couldn’t escape, although it felt like they were escaping anyway, out of my sight and out of my reach. The last of the train left Stain’d Station like sand through my fingers, and I just stood there watching, helpless and useless. The mystery is leaving, Snicket. Your investigation is escaping, and now you’re all alone.

The station took a while to settle down, and I stood for a moment with my hands in my pockets, one clenching a paper train and the other clenching nothing. I didn’t want to give up, so I tried to guess what to do next. I guessed and then I kept guessing and then I couldn’t guess and then I gave up. Trudging out of the station, however, turned out to be the right guess after all, because a solution was stopped just at the curb, honking its horn and calling my name.

“Is that you, Snicket?”

I smiled. “Is that you, Pip and Squeak?”

The boy at the wheel smiled, and his brother crawled up from his position at the brake pedal so they could both hand me cards through the taxi’s open window. The cards told me what I already knew. Bouvard and Pecuchet Bellerophon, better known as Pip and Squeak, provided discreet transportation, a phrase which meant they drove the only taxi left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea whenever their father was sick or couldn’t do it for some other reason, which was almost all the time and always. They weren’t quite tall enough to drive by themselves, but with Pip steering and Squeak on the pedals, they’d gotten me out of a few tight spots after getting me into them more or less on time.

I hurried into the back of the cab. “I need you two on a tail job.”

“Neat,” Squeak said, in the voice that gave him his nickname. “Since we started driving this taxi, I’ve been waiting for someone to say ‘follow that car.’ ”

“It’s not a car I want you to follow,” I said. “It’s a train.”

“Follow a train?” Pip repeated with a laugh. “That’s hardly a tail job. It runs on tracks, doesn’t it? Why do we need to follow a train when we already know where it goes?”

“I need you to take me to where it goes before it gets there,” I said.

“So instead of ‘follow that car’ it’s ‘precede that train’?” Squeak asked, sliding down to his pedal spot. He sounded a little disappointed.

“I need to get onto The Thistle of the Valley,” I said, “but I couldn’t manage it here.”

Pip frowned. “But there’s nowhere else you can get on board. They canceled all the old stops in town.”

“That’s why I need you to take me to Partial Foods,” I said. “The back entrance, off the alley, where the train tracks are.”

“Didn’t you hear us, Snicket?” Pip asked. “The Thistle of the Valley doesn’t stop there or anyplace else.”

“I heard you.”

Pip put the car in gear. “I hope you’re not going to do anything foolish.”

“I hope you’re not hoping too hard,” I said. Squeak hit the gas and we pulled away from Stain’d Station and took a shortcut toward our destination. I heard the train whistle blow again, and thought of Theodora’s phony snores. Breathe and keep still, I told myself, thinking of the foolish thing in my immediate future.

“It’s been a busy night,” Squeak said, as we rounded the corner.

“I was supposed to be in bed early,” I said.

Pip grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? The most interesting things happen when we’re supposed to be in bed. What were you doing at Stain’d Station, anyway?”

“Official business,” I said.

“I guess we should keep all our actions quiet,” Squeak said. “That way Hangfire won’t catch on.”

“We hope,” Pip said.

“We hope,” I agreed, but I didn’t feel agreeable. I wondered what the Bellerophons were up to. And Ornette, I thought. And Theodora, and Sally Murphy and her strange porter. And my sister, and a thousand other people I might not see again. Not after what I was about to do. I looked out at the night, and the taxi turned left and swung into the shadow of Ink Inc., the pen-shaped tower making the dark even darker just where we were.

“Snicket,” Squeak said, braking and breaking the silence, “how about you give us a tip like you do?”

I had a system with the Bellerophon brothers, recommending books in exchange for their services. It’s a system I wish were used more widely in the world. “Have you read a book called The Turn of the Screw ?” I asked.

Pip pointed his thumb at the hood of the taxi. “We get enough hardware in our ordinary lives,” he said.

“It’s not about hardware,” I told him. “It’s about a babysitter and some ghosts. It’s difficult but it’s spooky, and speaking of which, stop here, will you?”

The Bellerophons stopped their taxi, and I peered out at the loading dock of Partial Foods. It was empty and eerie, with a crumbling cement ramp and the back door of the grocery store, locked now and probably forever. I could see a discarded apple core, sad and mushy in a clump of weeds, and the torn wrapper of a long-gone candy bar, balled up and forgotten near the train tracks.

“You never told us the whole story of what happened here, with all those stolen honeydew melons,” Pip reminded me, referring to recent events chronicled in a report that is not recommended for the general public.

“True,” I admitted.

“The train won’t stop here,” Squeak said to me. “It’ll just race on by.”

“I know it,” I replied.

Pip turned around to look at me. “Do we have to ask again about doing something foolish?”

“No,” I said. “You definitely don’t have to ask.”

“Maybe that’s the wrong question,” Squeak said, looking at the strange, bare place where he and his brother had taken me. “Maybe the right question is, do you really want to be here?”

I thought of all the places I wanted to be, not as difficult and not as spooky. I stepped out of the car and deeper into a mystery of which I couldn’t make head nor tail, and I answered the question the best I could.

“No,” I said, “I don’t want to be here,” and I thanked them for taking me there and sent them on their way.

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