CHAPTER FOUR
I had never really understood the phrase “like a bat out of hell” until I saw the Mitchums departing from the ex-museum that day. Their short legs rattled on the floorboards like ninepins as they scuttled out of the house, bundled themselves into the station wagon they called a police car like someone stuffing stolen goods in a bag, and screeched off down the road, back towards their police station. It wouldn’t be long until I’d be headed in that direction myself, but for now I took the time to bid Carr farewell.
“If I need to talk to you in relation to this business, where will I find you?” I asked her.
She gestured at the house. “I’ll be staying right here,” she said. “Somebody should put Mr. Van Dyke’s affairs in order, now that he’s gone. There’s nobody else left to manage the museum’s collection of traditional art, but it would be a shame to leave it here to simply gather dust.”
“Won’t you be scared, alone in that house with a body?” I asked.
“My employer’s body can’t hurt me, and I think the murderer got what he came for,” she said. “It’ll be creepy, but I’ll manage. It’s better than home.”
I nodded. Stain’d-by-the-Sea was no place to call home, but you had to find a place for yourself if you wanted to live in that town. Carr Carter wouldn’t be the first person there to take over an adult’s business because there were no adults left.
I was about to leave here with some friendly words when my ear was rudely grabbed by a mysterious attacker. It was Theodora, and it hurt. It hurt almost as badly to be embarrassed in front of a new acquaintance as to be grabbed by the ear and tugged out of the house.
“Hurry up,” she snapped, though I could go no faster or slower than the speed at which she pulled me along like a lion to a bath. “Don’t you want to get out of this death trap?”
I pulled free outside the front door, and saw Theodora feign a cheerful smile at Carr before pulling the door shut behind her. She massaged her eyes as she trudged to the roadster like a sloth out of the gym.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Theodora looked at me like I was a baby out of a nursery. “Back to the Lost Arms, Snicket,” she said.
“To research who might have threatened Mr. Van Dyke’s life and then taken it?” I asked.
“You’ll never graduate if you keep going on wild goose chases like that,” Theodora said. “I told you, there is no case and no client. It’s time to put this awful business out of our minds, which I intend to achieve with a swift nap. I didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night.”
She had gone to bed early, and napped throughout the previous day. Theodora needed a lot of sleep, or maybe she needed to actually do some work on her cases rather than always taking the easy way out. “Whoever threatened Lansbury Van Dyke was successful,” I argued. “Why wouldn’t we have a case?”
“You’re always asking the wrong questions, Snicket,” she said. “The right question is, ‘Why would we have a case?’ After all, we were never even hired. We came over here this morning to officially take the case, but since the client never got that far, then this is officially none of our business.
Officially, Snicket.”
That got me angry. “Officially has nothing to do with it,” I said. “We’re interested in whatever is interesting, not to mention important. Don’t you want to know how Lansbury Van Dyke was killed?”
“I don’t need to scour that room with a fine-toothed comb to know that,” Theodora sneered. It was a good thing she didn’t need to. I doubt she possessed any combs at all. “These closed door mysteries are always resolved through some cheap trick or other, so it scarcely matters which was used. Besides, the case was meant to be to find out who was threatening Van Dyke, and we know that now.”
“Really?” I couldn’t help but ask, even though I was sure it was wrong to ask Theodora something she probably didn’t know. “Who?”
“The person who killed him,” she said, and that was as far as her answer went. While she’d been talking, she had clambered into the roadster and pulled her driving helmet on. “Are you coming, or are you just going to stand there?” she demanded.
“I think I’ll just stand here for a minute,” I said.
She didn’t reply. She just slammed the door, jammed her foot on the accelerator, and roared off, pausing only briefly to restart the car when it stalled a few feet away.
I watched her go, and a little less than a minute later, another car pulled up on the curb, right where Theodora had just been.
“Pip,” I nodded to the boy who was driving, and then leaned in the cab to nod “Squeak” to the boy who was on the pedals. Those weren’t their names, but it was what they were called, and they were the best you would find if you called a taxi in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Bellerophon Taxi was down to one taxi and one man, but the man was sick, and so his sons were handling the job, or so they said. They drove well enough to save me a lot of walking, which was good enough for me.
“It looked like trouble around here,” Pip said, “so we thought we’d come along. Where there’s trouble, there’s a fare.”
“Or at least, a tip,” Squeak squeaked.
“Or more accurately, just me,” I said. “But it’s true that I want a ride.”
“Hop in,” Pip said, leaning out of the window to open the back door. “The usual place?”
“The usual,” I answered, which was to the home of a friend of mine who I visited most days. “I’ll tip you when we get there.”
Being driven around Stain’d-by-the-Sea by Pip and Squeak was always an interesting experience. It felt like being on one of those amusement parks that is never very amusing, watching the fading, rotting relics of people’s livelihoods pass by alternately quickly and slowly as Squeak got the hang of the brakes and the accelerator. It was a depressing town, but a better taxi ride than some I’ve had, and some of the best conversation, too, although I wasn’t in the best mood that day.
“What’s the story, then, Snicket?” Pip asked. “The Mitchums and your friend with the hair drove off like the old museum was haunted.”
“If it wasn’t before, it might be now,” I said. “Moxie will be mad not to be the first to hear, but the ex-curator is now an ex-ex-curator. He’s been murdered.”
“Murdered?!” exclaimed Squeak, in his highest and squeakiest voice. “We knew the town was going bad, but that’s dreadful.”
“Any suspects?” asked Pip, looking around like he was glad he was in a moving vehicle.
“None as yet,” I said. “The only associates of the victim were either talking in the next room, or already dead.”
“Is this anything to do with all the other shady events going on in town?” he continued.
“Probably,” I admitted, “but I’ve nothing concrete yet. I don’t even know how the murder was committed. But I do have a theory, and a potential witness.”
“Anything we can do to help?” Squeak asked, and I considered this. Pip and Squeak had stepped up to help recently when I tried to rescue a girl who had been kidnapped, and if they hadn’t been there, I might have been visiting a grave rather than a lighthouse.
“Thanks, but the most I can ask from you right now is to keep the taxi running,” I said. “And keep an eye out for anything suspicious happening around town, too. I’m hoping to have this case wrapped up by lunchtime, but in the meantime anything could happen.”
“We’ll watch the streets,” Pip said. “As much as we can on what little fuel there is left in town, anyway. With the town running dry of ink, it’s running dry of everything else, too. This is where we stop, Snicket.”
He stopped, but I didn’t get out yet. I still needed to give them a tip.
“There’s this one book I’ve read,” I began, “about a Transylvanian castle.”
“Blood-sucking monsters aren’t really our sort of thing, Snicket,” Pip said.
“Especially just now,” Squeak added.
“Not that one,” I said. “This one’s by that the author who sent his characters to the bottom of the ocean and the centre of the planet.”
“No fooling, Snicket?” Pip asked, looking me in the eye.
“No fooling, and no monsters.”
“We’ll ask Qwerty if he has it,” Squeak said. “Thanks, Snicket.”
“Don’t wait,” I said. “I’ll walk back into town.”
I got out, and they drove off. Back to town was a little easier. It was downhill. Right now I was at the top of a hill that overlooked the town and the valley beyond it. The valley was the place where the sea had once been, but with the sea gone, all that I could see see see was the bottom of the deep grey valley, miles of sandy rock littered with the shells of forgotten creatures and ships, pierced by the enormous glass syringes Ink Inc. used to suck up the last of the ink from the octopi, and an immense and unnavigable forest of living seaweed that writhed and curled in the wind as if it were still underwater. I looked at the Clusterous Forest, and at the last derelict syringes that Ink Inc. had kept running, and I thought about blood-sucking monsters. Then I looked up at the lighthouse before me, and I thought about something different. The lighthouse leaned ever so slightly towards the valley, and I wondered if in many years’ time it would tumble right over and roll away down the hill. It had once been home to a newspaper and a mysterious statue, and was now home to a good friend and her father. The latter wasn’t a journalist any more, but Moxie Mallahan had taken up the reins, a phrase which here means “taken over the job from someone who can’t do it anymore,” and spent all of her time typing up notes on local news on her portable typewriter. I tended to get involved with whatever was the local news in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, so we got on very well together.
Moxie must have gotten up early to spend the morning looking out of the window, as I didn’t even have time to ring the doorbell before she opened it. She was wearing her usual small brown hat, which I liked, and a scowl, which I didn’t like, but which was explained by the white sling her right arm hung moodily in. Moxie had been injured rescuing the kidnapped girl I mentioned, and the kidnapped girl, who knew a thing or two about healing people, had patched her up and advised her not to type for a few days. Moxie had had a lot to type about, and didn’t like it, but after getting a second opinion from a vet who lived nearby, she had reluctantly set her typewriter aside to convalesce, a word which here means “get better, grudgingly.”
“Lemony Snicket,” she said, and she sounded a little pleased through her grouch. “Are you here with news, or to play Parcheesi?”
“I’m never here to play Parcheesi,” I said. “I have a pretty big scoop for you, Moxie, if you’ll help me work it out.”
The grouch faded almost completely when she heard this, and she gave me an only slightly pained smile. “Then stop standing there like a doorstep or a salesman, Snicket,” she said. “Come on in.”
I went on in. Moxie, I noticed, was very careful not to step outside of the house, though she hovered on the lintel as long as she could. Standing in an open door is no substitute for going outside, but she wasn’t allowed to do so at present, as she didn’t hesitate to remind me. “I’m bored silly stuck inside like this,” she said. “My father has grounded me until I get better. He’s a tyrant.”
“Didn’t Cleo tell you to stay home until your cut had healed?” I reminded her.
She didn’t answer. She never did. We’d had this conversation every day since she’d been injured. Instead she took me through to the round-walled kitchen and pointed to a shelf with two boxes of cereal on it. I guess she’d noticed the time. As I dug out a bowl and wondered if there was any cinnamon in the fridge, she walked out and then walked back in carrying a small metal case with a handle, which she set on the table and pressed a button to convert into its typewriter form. She caught my frown in mid-air and threw it back to me. “I still have one unhurt arm, Snicket,” she said. “I can type slowly, but I’ll just skip the vowels to speed it up. It will conserve ink, too.”
“You can’t just skip the vowels. People couldn’t tell a book from a beak.”
“Vowels aren’t the news here, Snicket. You are,” Moxie reminded me, and her unhurt arm hovered over the typewriter keys. “So tell me your story, and I’ll give you my journalistic opinion.”
“Alright,” I said, and began to explain. “Lansbury Van Dyke, an ex-curator of the town’s shuttered museum of traditional art, sent a letter to my chaperone last night telling her that he had been receiving threats against his life, and that he was to visit her at dawn. We did, and he shooed the both of us out of the office. The next time we saw him, he was dead.”
Moxie’s eyebrows rose at that last part. I was reminded of the eyebrows of another friend of mine in town, whose eyebrows would arch and curl, sometimes independently, and who had a habit of looking more intrigued than surprised, which takes a lot of practice. She was a friend who Moxie wasn’t so fond of, though, so out of respect for Moxie I stopped thinking about eyebrows and started thinking about what she was saying. “That’s alarming, Snicket,” she said. “Lansbury Van Dyke was once pretty newsworthy, but he’s been a harmless old coot for years. But I get the feeling that that’s not the real problem. You’re holding something back, I can tell.”
“The problem is this,” I said, and I tapped my bowl of cereal.
Moxie frowned. “It may not be up to Jake’s standards over at Hungry’s, but it’s the best I can offer. I’m not allowed to leave the lighthouse to do any shopping, and my father’s gone one step further by forbidding himself to leave his bed.”
“Not the cereal,” I said, though I have always found cereal uniformly bland. Cinnamon is an improvement, in that it makes it taste like cinnamon rather than like cardboard. “I’m talking about what’s painted on this bowl.”
Moxie’s family had a long history with a certain black and shiny local myth, which had once been the mascot of
The Stain’d Lighthouse, the town’s newspaper and Moxie’s family business, and the lighthouse was stuffed with unwanted merchandise with the monster’s angry face darkening one’s day. Now she raised one eyebrow. “The Bombinating Beast?” she asked.
I was eating from the bowl, so at least I didn’t have to look it in the eye. “That’s what the police think, and admittedly, they have a case,” I confessed. “The murder took place in a room in which every entrance was locked from the inside, and every one of those entrances couldn’t have been used for some reason or another. The police think the Bombinating Beast could pull it off, and a buzzing sound was heard inside the room before and after a loud scream.”
Moxie’s other eyebrow joined the first, but she didn’t stop typing until I’d filled her in on the whole story and me in on the whole bowl of cereal. The fanged maw of the Bombinating Beast opened wide at the bottom of the bowl. It was disgusting, so I dropped it in the sink and let it have a drink instead, while Moxie finished her typing and then leaned her chair back onto only two legs to think.
“I’ve heard a lot of incredible stories since you turned up, but this takes the biscuit, not that we have any in the house,” Moxie finally said. “Who’s the murderer? How did he get in? How did he get out? What did he want? Did he get it? What’s this about a green band?”
“Just a clue that there was a witness,” I said, answering the last question only and carefully.
“Who is this witness, then?” Moxie asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at me. I suspect that she had already guessed. “And where were they when you opened the room?”
“They had a hiding-place,” I said. “I think the murderer must have used it too. I don’t know exactly where it was yet, but I can take a good guess.”
“Are you going to make me guess, Snicket?”
“You should be able to work it out,” I said. “A map might make it easier. Hand me a sheet of your typewriter paper, and I’ll find a pen somewhere.”
“It’ll have to be a pencil,” Moxie said, handing over the paper. “There should be one in that drawer. Not many people in town use pens now. The last time I went to the market, they were selling empty pens and you had to buy the ink somewhere else.”
The town’s ink shortage had clearly accelerated in just the last few days, probably due to the closure of Ink Inc. during my previous investigation. The town would close with it soon enough, if some new way to survive couldn’t be found. That wasn’t my job, though; a skilled chemist was presently trying to solve that problem. I only had to solve the town’s crime problem, and I’m not sure which of us had it worse. I sketched a quick map of the wing of Van Dyke’s house where the crime took place.
“You’re no artist, Snicket,” Moxie said, as she looked it over. I ignored that remark. I leave art to the professionals.
“You’re Lansbury Van Dyke,” I told Moxie. She was missing two important criteria, which were a missing finger and a missing head, but I preferred her with them. “You want to create a hiding-place in this office that nobody will notice. Where do you put it?”
She stared at it for long enough that I felt uncomfortable. “It’s not a trick question,” I said.
She tried to hold up her hands in exasperation, but one of them got stuck in her sling, which didn’t improve her mood. “I’m guessing you’ve been trained to notice this sort of thing, Snicket,” she sighed. “Well, I’ve had some training in investigating other people’s secrets, but nobody ever taught me to see hiding-places in perfectly ordinary rooms.”
“I don’t think this was a perfectly ordinary room,” I said. “If I point to where I think it was, though, you’ll probably know why.”
I pointed at a certain place on the map. Moxie stared at the map again, but this time with a frown that I knew meant she was thinking. Then she looked up at me with a clear expression. “You win this round, Snicket, as sure as if it were Parcheesi. It’s the only place you wouldn’t immediately notice.”
“I’ll try and check it personally later,” I said, “but I suspect that this is how both the murderer and the witness got in and out. I don’t see how else either of them could have entered or left the room.”
Moxie looked at the map again, and I didn’t like the way her eyes flicked around it. “You’re making the assumption,” she said, “that that hiding-place contained a way in and out of the room.”
“It had to,” I said. “One person couldn’t have gotten in otherwise, let alone two people.”
“I can think of a way,” Moxie said. “A witness makes things a lot easier if it’s not actually a witness, but an accomplice.”
My cereal felt like I’d stuffed a cardboard box in my stomach. “What would it serve the murderer to have an accomplice?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, but it serves any explanation. Try this out for size, Snicket: Lansbury Van Dyke himself let the murderer in by unlocking his office door and opening the fire escape for a previously arranged meeting. The accomplice comes in with him, or maybe was hiding there earlier in the place you showed me. The murderer then does something that makes a buzzing noise to kill Van Dyke, and then runs off, back out the office door and down the fire escape. Meanwhile, the accomplice goes to the office door, locks it from the inside, then goes and hides again. And there you have it.” She looked expectantly at me.
“You don’t actually expect me to believe that,” I said.
“No, because it’s never the easy explanation when you’re involved.”
“You make it sound like I’m the one committing the crimes,” I said. “But fine, let’s think about it. I’ll brush over the fact that I think I’d have heard anyone using those doors, because I haven’t tested it. That leaves me with four questions, more or less: Why would Van Dyke be secretly meeting someone else at the same time he was meant to be meeting Theodora? Why would the murderer leave his accomplice behind? How did the room get ransacked? And why did the murderer take Van Dyke’s head?”
Moxie started tugging at the edge of her sling. I could tell it was annoying her, as it was getting quite frayed. “The first question isn’t any of my business, Snicket. I can’t leave the lighthouse right now, so it’s for you to find out if Van Dyke had anyone he’d want to meet in secret. Sometimes
The Stain’d Lighthouse would meet privately with sources in Ink Inc. to talk about how the company did its business, and our journalists would have to pull them up the hawser at the dead of night to avoid being seen.”
“Lansbury Van Dyke used to be friends with Colonel Colophon, until the latter was injured in mysterious circumstances – and then murdered recently in rather less mysterious circumstances,” I recalled. “Maybe Van Dyke wanted to meet with a friend of Colophon’s or someone else who knew something about what happened all those years ago. Alright, that’s a possibility – and not just for the question of opportunity. Someone involved in Van Dyke’s past might want to get rid of the autobiography he’d been so secretive about, and used a secret meeting as an opportunity to get rid of the man and the memoirs. Could you look into that in the newspaper archives?”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Moxie said. “I’ve seen his name a lot in the archives, though it’s mostly before my time. What about your next question, then? I’m sure there must be plenty of reasons why a criminal might want to leave an accomplice behind to clean up.”
“Any sneaky act is usually easier to undertake with an accomplice,” I said, though the words nearly caught in my throat. My sister hadn’t had an accomplice, and look where it got her. “They might have wanted to delay discovery of the body while the murderer escaped, in this instance. Or they might have needed extra time to conceal something else.”
“Like a head?” Moxie suggested.
“Or a device that makes a buzzing sound,” I suggested. “But a theory like that raises a lot of new questions. If we accept that the murderer needed an accomplice, then why did the accomplice need the murderer? They were both in the same room at the same time, and both secretly. Couldn’t one person have done the job?”
“Maybe it needed two people. Maybe there was something only two people together could do – or each of them had something one could do but the other couldn’t.”
“Granted. If my witness can identify either the murderer or any accomplice they might have had, the identity of one could tell us something about the identity of the other. Or we might be able to identify both straight away and wrap this case up then.” As if it would be that easy, I thought. But it is reassuring to say such things, even when you do not believe them, like complimenting a bad chef on a good meal. It is even worse to think that you wasted your time and your taste buds.
“You’re probably going to want me to explain how the room was ransacked, then,” Moxie said. “I’m not sure I see what the problem is, though. There was plenty of time between you leaving Van Dyke’s office and then returning when you heard the scream.”
“The scream is the problem,” I said. “Lansbury Van Dyke probably wouldn’t stand around letting intruders destroy his office, and only scream when they actually attacked him.”
“They could have threatened him,” Moxie insisted. “And he only cried out when he realised he had nothing to lose.”
That was pretty reasonable, and I liked it. But there wasn’t any evidence for it yet. “Why didn’t I hear anything, then? The walls of Van Dyke’s office were thin enough for me to hear the buzzing and the scream. So why did nobody hear furniture being overturned and objects tossed across the room?”
Moxie looked critically at me. “Are you sure you’re completely reliable as a witness, Snicket? You had Carter and Markson talking loudly a few feet away. The scream could have been a lot louder than the ransacking. You simply didn’t hear it.”
I thought back to that corridor and that scene. I thought I was right, but proving it would be difficult. But then I pictured that room and that ransacked scene, and an answer came to me. Maybe it was because I was thinking of that green band I’d seen, and later not seen, and who it reminded me of. “There’s something else. The room was torn apart, but nothing was actually broken. There was an upturned but unbroken coffee cup on the floor. A few books had been tossed from the shelves but the bookshelves hadn’t actually been tipped over, which would throw them all out at once. Whoever ransacked the room was definitely avoiding anything that could have created a noise.”
Moxie tapped absent-mindedly on the keys of her typewriter. “That holds up, you’re right,” she agreed. “You know, you should really have put it that way from the start. You could have asked, ‘If the struggle was so terrible, why wasn’t anything broken?’”
“I’ll add it to my list,” I said, “of all the other right questions I didn’t think to ask at the time. But you accept that it is the right question, don’t you.”
Moxie nodded. “Let’s take that into consideration, then. The ransackers were ransacking carefully. It’s obvious why – they didn’t want anyone else in the building to know that something was wrong, and they couldn’t just ask Van Dyke where he’d hidden the memoirs because – because maybe he’d been gagged to keep him quiet.”
“They threatened him to keep quiet, and gagged him, but they also wanted him to spill the beans on wherever he’d hidden what they were looking for. That sounds convincing.”
“And that sounds sarcastic. Don’t take that tone with me, Snicket.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Moxie. Sarcasm is like mud on your shoe. You don’t know where you got it and it’s hard to get rid of it. I’ll give you this one. There’s a strong possibility that Lansbury Van Dyke could have been hushed until he was murdered. But that leaves the fourth of my questions: Why did the murderer steal Lansbury Van Dyke’s head?”
We sat in our chairs and we stared at each other and we tried to think. Or at least, I think I was thinking, but my mind was so clear of any ideas that I might have been meditating instead.
“I suppose you’ve already made sure that it really was Van Dyke who got killed?” Moxie asked.
“He has a finger missing from the war,” I said. “There’s no faking it.”
“Ah,” Moxie said, and nodded slowly.
We continued to stare at each other silently. I still didn’t have any fresh ideas. Neither did Moxie, from the looks of things.
“This is a pointless waste of time,” I said, after several minutes. “We can’t just sit around for hours trying to come up with a plan based on the information we have. We need some more information.”
“I’ll start looking through the archives for details on Van Dyke’s past,” Moxie said. “Carr Carter might know a few things, but
The Stain’d Lighthouse will have everything we need, if I look for long enough.”
I looked at a Beast-faced clock on the wall for long enough to know that I had a while to wait before the time I’d tried to arrange with my witness. Still, there were one or two other places I wanted to visit first. “I’d help you, but I should be making my way back into town,” I said. “I’ve got some leads to follow up. I’m hoping to have time to come back later, but if things get any more tangled, I might have to persuade someone to let me use their phone.”
Moxie paused as she was walking out, and gave me a quiet look from the doorway. “How will I know it’s really you?” she asked.
She was right to ask. It wasn’t always safe to use the telephones in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It was usually okay to make calls, but a lot more dangerous to receive them. You never knew who you were talking to.
“It shouldn’t be too hard to tell,” I said. “I’ll know all about this conversation, for a start. And I’ll have some new information of my own by then, too. Maybe even a few book recommendations.”
Moxie rolled her eyes then. “I thought you said you were following leads, Snicket.”
“I am,” I said. “But there are always a few leading right out of the library.”
She sighed. “See if Qwerty will let you bring a few books back for me,” she said. “And – be more careful this time, won’t you, Snicket? There’s a killer on the loose.”
I’d opened the door of the lighthouse by that time. The road dipped before me, and led down into Stain’d-by-the-Sea. A maze of grey and empty streets, buildings where nobody lived, businesses nobody cared about. Anyone could be hiding anywhere. Anyone could be hiding anything, too. I’d only lived there for a short time, but I already had a maze of feelings about Stain’d-by-the-Sea in my heart. I didn’t know if it was a good place, even if the people in it were good friends, and I didn’t know if it deserved saving, even if I’d do anything to save the people. But even with all the grey in the middle, I knew right and wrong when I saw them in their true colours. Somewhere out there was a person stained with blood rather than ink. I wasn’t the best person to stop them, but I was what there was – me and Moxie, Pip and Squeak, Carr Carter and Qwerty and maybe even Theodora and the Mitchums. Maybe there were better people out there for this job, but that was the trouble. They were out there when we needed them here, and so we could only do this ourselves.