Theodora put a gloved hand on my shoulder. “My associate and I were going to talk to Harold Limetta, the owner of this house, as part of an investigation.”
Harvey frowned and kicked at the ashes on the ground. “And who, precisely, has asked you to investigate?”
“I’d rather not say,” Theodora said.
“Well, I’d rather not have you poking through the scene of a crime,” Mimi said.
“And I’d rather not have that kid around here either,” her husband added.
“I’d rather not have you call me a kid,” I said.
“I’d rather not have my apprentice talk like that to the police,” Theodora said.
“I’d rather not have to listen to you discipline a child,” Harvey Mitchum said.
“I’d rather not listen to my husband boss people around,” Mimi Mitchum said.
“Sorry,” I said, “is it my turn? I have a long list of things I’d rather not do.”
It is not pleasant to have a number of people glaring and sighing at you at the same time, even if you meant for them to do it. As I’d planned, once they were done glaring and sighing, the Mitchums forgot all about asking us why we were there or who had sent us, and so the four of us were soon picking through the wreckage together as if we had never argued at all.
In one of my favorite books, a sad young man stumbling around outside finds a tiny strange man with a sack of magic crystals that change his life. My hopes weren’t that high, but I kept my eyes open. Almost anything would do. Any kind of clue would be better than what I had now. What I had now was bupkes, a word which here means “The Department of Education told us to go interview someone about a sheep barn burning down, only to find that the man’s house had burned down.” The metal bench was still there, and the metal picture frame with the photographs burned out of it. The metal rectangles were still there too, stacked up like the books you were planning on reading next. My shoes crunched on the shattered glass. They’re tanks, I realized. Tanks for fish or small animals. They’re tanks and they’d probably be clues, I thought, if you knew what the mystery was.
“What do you know about Harold Limetta?” I asked the Mitchums.
“Not a lot,” Harvey Mitchum admitted. “He’s new in town.”
“He moved into this house only days ago,” Mimi said. “All anybody knows about him is that he is a leper.”
“He’s sick?” I said.
“No,” Harvey said. “He studies moths.”
“Then he’s a lepidopterist,” I said. “A leper is someone with a terrible skin disease.”
“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” Mimi said.
“He called us and said his house was on fire,” Harvey Mitchum said, “but when we arrived there was no sign of him, although it looks like his moths were burned to a crisp.”
Mimi pointed to some tiny black specks near the shattered glass of the tanks. They might have been moths, once. And it might have been Harold Limetta on the phone. “We were going to ask for him at Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn,” she said. “The barn supplied wool for Mr Limetta’s moths to eat.”
“Birnbaum’s Sheep Barn has also burned down,” Theodora said, sitting on the bench before immediately getting up again and brushing the ashes off the back of her pants. It took her a long time.
“What do you know about these fires?” Harvey Mitchum demanded. “It’s still too early to make assumptions, but I’d say both of you have something to do with all this. Lately, whenever there’s a crime in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, we seem to find you and your whippersnapper poking around.”
“We’re here as professionals,” Theodora said stiffly, finishing up with her pants.
“We’ll do anything we can to help you solve this case,” said the whippersnapper.
“You can help by butting out,” Mimi Mitchum said. “And the same goes for you about butting, Harvey.”
Harvey gave his wife an exasperated frown. “Mimi, I’ll remind you that I’m an officer of the law, just like you are.”
“You’re not just like I am,” Mimi said. “I’m a brave and capable law enforcement official, and you’re a nincompoop!”
“If I’m such a nincompoop, why are you the one who forgot to put the milk back in the refrigerator, so it stayed on the counter all night?”
“Well, you’re the one who left the window open, so mosquitoes swarmed our bedroom!”
“Well, you’re the one who didn’t hang up your towel after your bath, so it stayed wet and clammy!”
Imagining the Mitchums getting out of the shower in clammy towels with the windows open and the air smelling of warm milk was a new item on my list of things I would rather not do. “Excuse me, Officers,” I said, “my associate and I are leaving now. Please send my regards to Stewart.”
Stewart Mitchum was the officers’ son, and I did not really want to send him my regards. I could not think of anything I wanted to send him that would be accepted for delivery. “Stew’s at school,” Harvey Mitchum said. “He insisted that he stop working for us by making a siren noise out of the back of our car, and focus on getting a top-drawer education.”
“How nice for him,” I lied. A top-drawer education is a very high-quality one, but the highest-quality anything in the world wouldn’t fix Stew.
“I’d suggest you do the same, Snicket,” Mimi said, and gave me a stern look. “We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
“And the milk,” Harvey added, glaring at his wife. As a good-bye, I gave them a nod I had practiced for quite some time in the mirror. It was polite enough that no one could complain but not so polite that the person receiving the nod would think you liked them. I trudged through the ashes, trying to think. I had been taught to spend longer than a few minutes at the scene of an investigation, but I was not quite sure what it was that I was investigating. Start from the beginning, I told myself. The Department of Education was concerned about a suspicious fire, and pointed us toward a witness to the fire. Upon arriving at his home, we found it too was burned to the ground. There were moths, there were sheep. The Department of Education had a child working there and was convinced that schoolchildren were in danger. The whole thing was gibberish. Only a babbling buffoon would think it made any sense.
“This is starting to make sense,” Theodora said, when we reached the roadster. “There’s an arsonist who is putting the schoolchildren of Stain’d-by-the-Sea in danger. We’ve got to find him and stop him, unless it’s a woman, in which case it is she who must be found and stopped.”
“Two buildings have been burned,” I agreed, “but why are schoolchildren in danger?”
“The Department of Education said they were in danger,” Theodora said. “Do you think my friend Sharon is lying?”
“She wouldn’t have to be lying to be wrong,” I said.
“Don’t simper nonsense at me, Snicket. I am not a baby. Our progress is being evaluated, and the case has been assigned extra-crucial status. We’ve got to speed up the investigation. I’m counting on your hard work and cooperation.”
I took a last look at the ashes as Theodora started up the roadster. Hangfire, I thought. Is this your handiwork? No one answered.
“Snicket, don’t be a Trappist monk. Answer my question.
“You didn’t ask anything.”
“Well,