CHAPTER TWO
Parents were in short supply the entire time I was in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, from beginning to bitter end, and so somehow it had never occurred to me that Kellar Haines might have a father, especially not one likely to march up and make a dramatic scene. What few parents my friends had to offer didn’t even seem especially interested in spending time with their children. It had been quite some time since I had seen my own parents, even including two impostors who had recently posed as them, and for just a moment it felt as if a large hand, like that of Mr. Haines, had reached out and crumpled up the inside of my chest like a sheet of paper. I no longer saw him as a man who looked like a large sack stuffed full of bricks, but as a parent genuinely concerned at finding his son arrested in bizarre circumstances. The moment passed when I learned that he was a friend of the Officers Mitchum.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t James Haines,” Harvey Mitchum said, in that tone of voice they sometimes use when they’re only joking about sounding angry. “You sly dog.”
“We haven’t seen you in years,” Mimi said. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”
“That’s because it just happened a minute ago,” James Haines said, swinging his bulging suitcase wildly to gesture at the train. “Moving to the city for work didn’t work out. So, I figured I’d come back here to join my wife and kid on their visit home. Now, I find Kellar here handcuffed and mumbling like an idiot. What’s happened to this town since I left?”
The Mitchums opened their mouths to answer, and, for the first time I had ever noticed, they hesitated. Their eyes crept slowly around the people on the scene – from the baffled expression of James Haines, to the irritated faces of the train passengers and staff waiting to take their train back to the city, to Kellar and Ornette as they swayed gently where they sat, and finally to my own face, shaded by my hat, which made the two police officers squint extra-hard. Then, they glanced at each other, and I was surprised to see that it looked like they understood each other a little better than I could usually expect. Finally, they looked back at James.
“We’ll explain everything down at the station,” Harvey Mitchum said, looking pleased with himself. “The people we’re looking for clearly aren’t here, so there’s no more reason for us to stay.”
“None of those people are Ellington Feint or Dashiell Qwerty, anyway,” Mimi said, indicating the assembled individuals waiting to board the train as if they she thought even less of them than of two supposed criminals. The all-clear bell had rung a short time before, and they had all removed their masks, so I could see that she was right, though there seemed to be something else missing from the scene that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “Move along now, there’s nothing to see here! Shoo!” she called over to the disgruntled group. “Get on out of town, if that’s what you insist on doing! Stain’d-by-the-Sea is too good for you, anyway!”
“Now, that’s what I like to hear! If only more people understood that!” James Haines laughed, giving Mimi Mitchum an enormous slap on the back that would probably have knocked me flat on my face. He bent down to his son and tugged him to his feet with a hand that looked like a rack of lamb. “Alright, up you get, Kellar! Rise and shine! Time to tell your ol’ pop what games you’ve been playing over here. You too, girly,” he said to Ornette, as an afterthought.
Harvey and Mimi pulled Ornette Lost to her feet, and the three adults escorted the two children heavy-handedly out of the station, hurrying right past me without pause. Kellar and Ornette had something on their necks, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and then they were gone. Meanwhile, the trainfarers were grumbling their way back onto the train. There was something wrong with the picture I was seeing, but there were two lines of inquiry I could take in this mystery, and one of them involved friends of mine who had been hurt. With a last look back at the train, beginning once again to fume as it prepared to depart the town, I hurried after Ornette and Kellar as James Haines and the Mitchums hustled them out of the station.
“Excuse me, officers,” I said, as the five of them, Kellar and Ornette with some coaxing, were squeezing into the station wagon.
Harvey Mitchum was unusually quick off the mark today. “No, Snicket,” he said, without even turning to look at me. He didn’t even ask what I wanted, which was to travel with Kellar and Ornette to see that they recovered, and had a friendly face with them when they did so. A part of me thought it would serve the Mitchums right if I had actually been reporting that their son had been kidnapped, or that the bridge out of town had been blown up, or something more important to them than the welfare of two of the town’s children. But I tried to set my frustration aside. After all, my taxi had waited for me.
“Tell me,” I said, lining up a customary tip as I swung into the back seat of the taxi, “have you ever heard of the one with the lion, the witch, and the magical wooden object?”
“I liked the first one well enough,” Pip replied, “but I was never so sure about all the sequels. I didn’t know if I liked how weird they got.”
“I liked them that way,” Squeak interrupted, popping up to give his brother a poke. “But I don’t know if it’s the way the author wanted them to be liked.”
“I know the feeling, but maybe you’d be interested in some more books of his, that are completely different and also very similar,” I said, “about a friend of the author’s who travels to Mars and Venus. I’ll tell you about them on the way.”
“On the way where?” asked Pip, as Squeak dived back down to the pedals.
I said something that I’d always wondered if I’d one day say. “Follow that car!” I said, pointing at the Mitchums’ station wagon as it chugged away down the road.
One of the many principles my organisation had drilled into my head over the many years of my education was one that was unusually simple and easy to remember: “Always avoid making a scene.” There were a number of reasons for this, one of which was that the organisation now spent a lot of time trying not to draw attention to itself, and was now more properly a secret organisation as a result. Another reason for this, though one not so openly spoken of, had to do with fate. I wasn’t sure if I believed in such things as fate, luck, or any other impersonal force that could make you fortunate or unfortunate for no reason, but there was a general consideration among my elders and peers that, if you were an unfortunate person, making a scene, whether romantic, melodramatic, or farcical, was likely to backfire. So it was with the Bellerophons’ taxi. As Pip started it up, there was a loud explosion that shook the car from back to front, followed by silence. It had backfired, and now we were going nowhere.
“Looks like that’s it, then,” a squeaky voice from the front said, and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t Squeak who had spoken. His brother has spoken in a small voice, a different one, the kind you hear from people who aren’t quite in control of themselves. Squeak pulled himself out of the footwell and sat beside Pip, and both of them stared quietly at the dashboard for a few moments. It felt rude to interrupt their grief, even if it was just for a taxi, but I had to ask what had happened.
“We’re all out, Snicket,” Squeak said. “Out of fuel. We’ve been running on fumes for a while, and now even those have evaporated.”
“Can’t you get more?” I asked.
“Not with the town the way it is,” Pip said. “The last gas station closed up shop a while back, and what they left behind didn’t keep all the town’s cars filled up for long. Nearly everyone drove their cars all the way into the city to refuel, and most of them didn’t come back.”
“Jackie over at Moray Wheels got gas in for us for a while,” Squeak explained, “but Jackie’s disappeared – probably to Wade Academy with everyone else. I guess you’ll have to keep that last tip, Snicket.”
We got out of the taxi, and stared at it on the roadside for a little while. It looked sad, but it didn’t look wrong. It was already fading into part of the background decay of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Nobody would blink twice at a dented taxi abandoned on the kerb in a town like this. Soon, nobody would even notice.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t give you that ride, Snicket,” Pip said, as his eyes traced over the “Bellerophon Taxi Co.” lettering. “If I’m honest, I don’t really know what to do now.”
“Maybe you could go to your father?” I suggested.
Pip blinked at me. “Huh?”
“I know your father is sick,” I said, which is what they had always told me, “but even if he can’t drive a taxi himself, maybe he can give you some advice. I’ve heard of bootleg car fuel that people can brew up at home, though I don’t know if I’d try it at home myself.”
“Maybe,” Pip muttered, and turned to his brother. “Let’s go home for a little while, and see what we can think of there. Maybe one of us will have a brainwave.”
Squeak was standing very close to his brother, and nodded. Even outside the taxi, they seemed to be joined at the hip, a phrase which here means “so close that they appear to be physically connected, without the inconvenience of being conjoined twins.” “I hope you can get where you’re going on foot, too, Snicket.”
I’d almost forgotten. The Mitchums’ police wagon was long gone, of course, but I knew exactly where it was going. “It shouldn’t be too bad a walk, just a slow one,” I said. “I’ll have to get used to that.”
“You get used to a lot of things in this town,” Squeak said, and then we waved our goodbyes and set off walking in different directions. I knew more or less where I was going. It was the place I spent most of my time in the town at, at least until recently. It wasn’t my home, the place where I lived with my chaperone, though if home is where the heart is, then perhaps it really was home after all. The place was a library, or had been, and the police station was next door – literally the next door, as both were situated in the former Town Hall, before the town’s government had dissolved. As it happened, both were just down the road from my official home, or my base of operations, as my chaperone called it. I should have called her, but she spent a lot of the time we spent together lecturing me, so I thought I would save time for both of us by avoiding her until she was asleep. There was somebody else I needed to see.
I didn’t have the advantage of a car, so the walk back to the Lost Arms took long enough that I was worried that the Mitchums’ investigation would be over, a flood of wrong questions and worse answers later, by the time I reached the police station, but the stop I had to make, quite apart from being on my way, was also the decent thing to do, and I wanted to do it. As I finally reached the inn, or boarding house, or whatever word or phrase made it sound least impressive, it was looking just as prone to collapse as it had when I left it, like the kind of antique that is worthless to all but its owner. Inside, the situation was much the same. The furniture, floor, and walls were shabby and in desperate need of several coats of paint, or a powerful hose. Somebody had added insult to the injury of the statue stood in the centre of the lobby, as quite apart from having neither arms nor clothes, she was now tilted over, as though she’d had too much to drink and then been frozen in a blizzard. And Prosper Lost was busy reminding me why I preferred to think of him as a member of the local fire department than as a hotelier, a word which here means “a man who stands at a counter in a faded suit, looking through a pile of unpaid bills.” With the skill of a magician, or perhaps long practice, he slid the bills underneath his desk almost before I had noticed them, and greeted me with one of his most unconvincing smiles. “Mr. Snicket,” he said, addressing me in a way I only liked to hear when I thought someone meant it, “what a pleasure it is to see you. What can I do for you this fine day?”
It wasn’t a fine day, and I was sure he’d soon agree. “That’s the wrong question,” I answered. “The right question is, what can I do for you?”
Prosper frowned, and looked as if he was about to point out that that was the same question, so I hurried on. “Ornette has been picked up by the police for apparently helping two prisoners to escape. I think she’s been drugged. Last I saw, the Mitchums were taking her down to the station.”
Ornette, in addition to being one of my associates, was Prosper’s daughter, and to his credit, Prosper had a habit of becoming far more brave and decisive when someone important to him was in danger. I had barely finished speaking when he stepped out from behind the counter and, in a rapid stride that looked awkward on his long legs, had moved past me without a word, only a grateful nod of acknowledgement. I caught a glimpse of his eyes behind his round glasses, and concern had made them just as round and wide. “I’ll come with you,” I said, but he was already gone, and a moment later, I was following.
I emerged into the street, and looked around. It was deserted. Only a few stray pieces of litter moved, shuffling along in the wind like they were being sent somewhere they didn’t want to be. I couldn’t see Prosper at all, and I wondered if he’d vanished into thin air too – whether it was some hidden talent of the people of Stain’d-by-the-Sea that nobody had thought it worth mentioning to me. The silence was eerie, like a pearl dredged up from the sea, and then it was shattered by an appalling noise. It was a sputtering and banging from somewhere behind the Lost Arms that reminded me distinctly of the backfiring of the Bellerophons’ taxi, and sure enough, a few moments later a car, or “roadster” even more battered and bruised than my chaperone’s crawled out into the road and began to turn in a wide circle to roll towards the police station at the end. I watched Prosper as he hunched over the wheel, like a reluctant spider. He hadn’t asked me if I wanted a lift, so once again, I was stuck walking the rest of the way to the police station. As I reached the patchy lawn in front of it, Prosper’s car coughed to a halt beside me.
“You got here quickly, Snicket,” Prosper said, blinking with surprise at me as he unfolded himself from the front seat.
“I can’t stand still when my friends are in trouble,” I said, preferring not to disillusion him – a word which here means “make him feel bad” – about his car.
Prosper gave me a strange look, one which reminded me of the one I had seen in James Haines’s eyes not so long ago. I had never seen Prosper in his daughter’s company. It was hard to think of him as a father, but not in that moment. “Thank you, Snicket,” he said at last, and then the two of us walked up the lawn, past a crumpled and melted statue of an alleged war hero that had provoked a great deal of trouble in the town’s past and present, and we pushed our way into the police station.
In my worst imaginings, Kellar and Ornette had been thrown in the cells, while the Mitchums lorded over them – or worse, their awful son, Stew, lorded over them instead. But Stew was presently lording it over entirely different children, those trapped at Wade Academy and under Hangfire’s thumb, and Kellar and Ornette were slumped on seats in the middle of the room. They looked tired, but a little less absent, and their handcuffs had been removed – courtesy, most likely, of James Haines, with whom the Mitchums were discussing their case with far more pleasure than they had ever revealed police business to me. They looked over as Prosper and I barged in, and rolled their eyes.
“Ornette, are you alright?” Prosper said, as he rushed to his daughter’s side. Next to each other, I saw what I hadn’t seen before, which was that they did, after all, look like father and daughter; both had the same gangly build and flattened hair. Ornette blinked and muttered some exhausted and unlikely protestation of being fine, but her father was busy fussing over her. “You’ve lost your hat, Ornette; this won’t do,” he was saying, looking all over her as if he expected to find it behind her back or under her fingernails. “And you look terribly tired, my dear. You must come home at once.”
James Haines had been eyeing the two of them, and here broke into one of his booming comments. “So, this is your little girl Lost, eh, Prosper?” he laughed, giving Prosper a friendly elbow in the ribs that looked quite painful. “I can just see her hanging onto your coattails and running around the Lost Arms dusting the floorboards! Like father, like daughter!”
Prosper cringed up at James Haines, looking much shorter than him despite being around the same height. “Delightful to see you returned to town, James,” he said, in a reedy voice that he reserved for his most blatant lies. He turned right over to the Mitchums and said, with more sincerity, “Officers, I don’t pretend to know what has happened, but Ornette has clearly suffered a terrible ordeal. Please let me take her home, and we can sort this all out in the morning.”
Harvey and Mimi Mitchum looked at each other, and shrugged. “You might as well,” Mimi replied. “We aren’t getting anything out of these two. They’ve clammed up tighter than a… um…”
“A barnacle, Mimi,” muttered Harvey. It was the loudest mutter I had ever heard, and I wasn’t sure if it was intended for everyone, or just for Mimi, or just for him.
Mimi scowled ferociously at him. “Barnacles don’t clam, Harvey. They stick to rocks. You never hear of anyone barnacling up.”
“It’s the same principle, Mimi!” Harvey Mitchum groaned.
“We’ll just be going now,” Prosper quietly interrupted, helping Ornette from her chair. “Come, Ornette. I’ve brought the car, so I can take you straight home… er, whichever home you prefer.”
I had been standing in the doorway during this scene. It seemed rude to interrupt – or not rude, exactly, but like there was no good time to intervene, not until the two of them were right in my face. Ornette noticed me, and gave a thin smile. We didn’t know each other very well, but we’d helped each other out in a frightening situation before, and become allies. It looked like that wouldn’t be the case this time, however.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to sit this one out, Snicket,” she said, in a shaky voice. “I’m sorry. But I’m so tired…”
“What happened?” I asked. Close up, I could see what I hadn’t been able to make out before, something strange on her neck. It was a bruise, very dark, partway up the right side of her neck.
She shook her head, and then winced, and reached for the bruise. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “One minute I was walking to Partial Foods, and then there was this pain in my neck… and the next thing I remember, barely, is lots of shouting and being dragged off that train.”
“Don’t worry about it, my dear,” Prosper urged her. “Everything will be just fine, believe me. Snicket, if you will excuse us…”
I did, but I was sorry to see Ornette go, sorry that she had been hurt – and mystified, too, as to what had happened. It was obvious enough why she had been brought to that train, of course – but how? I had no idea, but I hoped that Kellar could help, and I thought it was best to stay. He had suffered just the same, but he hadn’t been whisked away yet, and in any case, I was a little bit intrigued by his father. I had recently developed certain suspicions about the Haines family, and thought I had better keep the pair of them under close observation – Kellar to make sure he didn’t get hurt, and James… James, I didn’t know. I tried not to rely on first impressions – I had a tendency to make bad first impressions myself, and was embarrassed to remember a time when I had been so keen to talk to somebody that I had interrupted her in the middle of a conversation with all of her friends – but James Haines’s second, third, and all subsequent impressions had been more or less the same as the first, which wasn’t promising.
I walked over to Kellar. He also had a bruise in just the same place as Ornette’s, but looked far more lucid, a word which here means “as if he knew where he was and who he was rather than being in a dream,” than he had done at the station. “So it’s you, Snicket,” he said, giving me a familiar nod and then putting a hand to his head, as if the movement made his brain throb.
“Don’t get excited,” Harvey Mitchum said. “Aside from it probably not being good for you, Snicket won’t be around long. I’m tired of him poking his nose into all the trouble in town.”
“Excuse me for pointing it out,” I said, “but I also tracked down a kidnapped girl” – referring to the second wrong question that I had asked in town – “and explained how two of your prisoners escaped from a doubly-locked room,” referring to one more question that I had also asked. “It seems to me that I’ve been some help.”
“That’s true,” Mimi admitted. “But don’t think I’ve forgotten all that time you’ve spent flirting with the Feint girl. I’ll bet you know exactly where she is, not to mention how she got out of that train.”
I did have some thoughts on both problems, but since I did not, as Mimi believed, know for sure, I kept my mouth shut. One man in the room, on the other hand, was incapable of keeping his thoughts to himself.
“Hold the line, Mimi,” James Haines said, with a calculating look coming into his eyes. It was like watching an abacus at work. “This kid’s good at finding people who’ve disappeared from somewhere impossible, right? And one of the people you’re looking for is his girlfriend, right?”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, quietly and trying to avoid the look Kellar was giving me.
“Or the librarian’s your boyfriend, whichever,” James Haines said, brushing my denial away. “Either way, seems to me this kid’s the best person to ask to help figure this thing out. Why don’t we get his theory?”
Harvey shrugged. “Well, you’re the boss,” he said, incorrectly. “Your boy needs some time to wake up, anyway. Snicket, come take a look at this.”
He gestured towards his desk, which had a large piece of paper unrolled over it. Examining the paper, I saw that it was rough diagram of the train carriage, with a few individuals and their movements marked on.
“This is a sketch of the crime scene, Snicket,” Harvey Mitchum explained. “By documenting the positions and movements of the two prisoners, as well as everyone who got off the train, we should be able to figure out where they went, and therefore how Lost and Kellar Haines got switched on in their place.”
“You’re sure that Ellington and Qwerty ever boarded the train in the first place?” I asked, more to keep the Mitchums busy than anything else.
“We had a hand on each of them from before they put on their masks right up until they went through the carriage door,” Mimi sniffed. “They couldn’t possibly have been switched before then.”
“Yeah, but they couldn’t possibly have been switched after, right?” James Haines interjected. “Here, kiddo. See, our problem is how to turn the picture from this…”
“…into this!”
“See, I went out through that door on the left,” James Haines said, leaning over me like a mountain to draw a line curving through the left-hand side of the train corridor. “I passed the guard, and later he came out after me. There was nobody else other than us and that policeman on the carriage when it pulled in, and you can be sure either me or the guard would’ve seen some tomfoolery over that side if it had happened. So that’s out.”
“Then it seems simple,” I said. “These are doors on the opposite side of the carriage, the side facing the station wall, aren’t they? Qwerty and Ellington could simply have hopped out of those, and had Kellar and Ornette waiting to go on in their place.”
Mimi Mitchum scowled at me. “Do you think we’re stupid, Snicket? We’re Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s police force. We’ve seen all kinds of criminal incidents in our many years of service. We can come up with a simple theory like that in our sleep.”
“Then why do you need my help?”
“Because it’s wrong,” Mimi replied. “The police escort from the city got up and went into the corridor right before we shoved Feint and Qwerty onto the train. He was watching that end of the corridor and nobody could’ve used that door without him seeing it, and nobody did. The librarian and the Feint girl came round the corner like they were meant to and never touched that opposite door.”
“And besides, nobody saw the Haines and Lost kids huddled on the tracks before the train came in,” Harvey said. “Of course they didn’t. You didn’t see them get squashed flat as pancakes on the rails, right? So they couldn’t have slipped on from outside the train – and for the same reason, there’s nowhere Feint and Qwerty could’ve gone even if they’d managed to get off the train, either!”
I’d seen the situation with my own eyes, but I hadn’t realised it was that bad. I saw the Mitchums’ problem now. The situation seemed watertight – there was no way Qwerty and Ellington could have been switched with Kellar and Ornette – but still, they had. I frowned over the diagrams, as if squinting hard at them would bring the solution swimming into focus.
“Impossible, isn’t it?” laughed James Haines. It was a hard laugh, but still, he seemed to be enjoying the situation well enough. “It’s like they transmogrified into my kid and Prosper’s the moment they walked onto the train, like through teleportation or something!” His mirth subsided as he said this, and a much thinner, cooler smile spread across his lips. “Of course, I don’t believe in any of that goofy science stuff. I have a better idea.”
When somebody loud and brash suddenly begins talking in a low voice, almost a whisper, the whole temperature of a room seems to plummet. You can only suppose that they are about to share some kind of terrible secret – something even someone as bold and unabashed as they are afraid to speak of openly. The Mitchums’ lips were sealed. I glanced at Kellar, and saw that his face was pale, and his eyes were fixed upon his father. I looked back at James Haines, who spread his arms as if welcoming us to a storytelling.
“If the prisoners weren’t seen getting off the train, and their doubles weren’t seen getting on the train,” James Haines began, his eyes sliding from one face to another from beneath his low brow, “it can only mean that they did it
unseen. That means… that somebody must have turned them invisible.”
Invisible. There it was again, that idea – that outlandish idea that explained everything. But it couldn’t explain anything. In the real world, nothing can truly turn invisible. Chameleons can change to the colour of whatever they rest upon, but they aren’t invisible, and lions can blend in with the sandy-coloured grasses of the Savannah, but they aren’t invisible, and moths, a little voice whispered in my ear, can conceal themselves against dark walls and dark wood, but they aren’t invisible. There are inks that can turn invisible, but they don’t work properly. They can’t reliably be turned visible again. But somebody in town was researching invisible ink that was reliable. Cleo Knight had been engaged in this research for some time, and Hangfire had shown that he was interested in this research by capturing her quite some time before. But ink couldn’t turn a person invisible. It just turned them wet.
My thoughts were interrupted by a low chuckling. I looked up to see James Haines staring right into my eyes, and what he saw there clearly amused him a great deal. “I can see from the way you’re turning it over in your head that you’re almost convinced, boy!” he said. “Only almost, though, but that’s alright. From what I hear, you’re an out-of-towner. But those of us born and raised in this town know all about things like this, don’t we?”
Harvey and Mimi didn’t answer. They looked unusually pale, as if they might be about to turn invisible themselves, and their lips were thin and drawn. It looked like they didn’t like one bit what James Haines had been saying, and I thought it was probably because they really did believe it. I’d seen that kind of expression on their faces before. It was in a previous, more obscure case of mine in the city, where a man had been murdered in a room that was seemingly impossible for a murderer to enter or leave. They thought that a mythical monster must have killed Lansbury Van Dyke, a once-prominent figure in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but it had been no mythical monster – rather, it had been a monster in human form. Hangfire. He was invisible, but he was everywhere.
“Well, that’s that settled, anyway!” cried James Haines, his voice rattling me and the windows. “I’m satisfied that the mystery’s been solved, and I sure don’t want to pry any farther. So if you don’t mind, Harvey, Mimi, I’ll be taking my boy along home now. He’s not like his sisters. Needs his beauty sleep, ha ha ha!”
“That’s okay with me,” Harvey said quickly. “It’s getting late, so we should be closing up and getting home ourselves.”
“It won’t be long before it gets dark,” Mimi added. “I need to check that Harvey remembered to lock all the doors and windows properly.”
“Well, sleep tight, you two,” James laughed. “I hope this doesn’t give you nightmares! Up you get, Kellar, come on now.”
With slightly more gentleness than normal, James Haines nudged his son onto his feet, and began to usher him along towards the door like he was the last spot of pudding in the bowl. As Harvey and Mimi began to clatter around behind me, getting ready to shut up the station, I hurried to join James and Kellar before they left.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked James Haines, as he nudged Kellar along. “Do you know where he and his mother are staying?” It was an important question. Until recently, both Kellar and his mother, Sharon Haines, had been living at the Wade Academy at Hangfire’s beck and call. Sharon Haines was still there, and I couldn’t entirely blame her. Hangfire had Lizzie Haines, Kellar’s sister, imprisoned somewhere, and the price of her freedom was Kellar and Sharon’s obedience. Kellar, on the other hand, had defected and was presently staying with a mutual friend. James Haines had to take him to the right place.
“Well, Sharon told me they were lodging up with their new employers, up at the old Wade Academy,” James said. “I was surprised to hear that that old place had opened again. I’d have come back to town with them, but I guess the job offer was just for Sharon, and I had a job at the time anyway.
Had,” he muttered, resentfully.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to take Kellar back to Wade right now,” I said, and Kellar caught my drift and nodded fervidly. “We have a friend who’d be happy to let him sleep over –”
“Ah, that won’t be necessary,” James Haines said. He’d stopped in the doorway of the police station, and though he’d shoved open the door ahead of us, his huge frame was blocking all the light, so once again he was putting me and Kellar in the shade. “Not when there’s somewhere in town where we’ll always be welcome. Don’t know why Sharon and Kellar didn’t go there in the first place.”
I didn’t know where he was talking about, but it wasn’t my family. Kellar understood, though, and looked way up at his father. “You mean the lodge?” he asked, and he sounded more worried than happy.
“That’s right, Kellar! The old family home!” James Haines roared in his menacingly cheerful way. “Haines Lodge. It’s high time you paid your grandmother a visit.”