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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”
as if someone had walked into the room. “That’s my third question, sir.”
“Then you should not go to the museum at all,” I said, but then I, too, was interrupted, by the figure of S. Theodora Markson com-ing down the stairs. Her hair came first, a wild tangle as if several heads of hair were having a wrestling match, and the rest of her followed, frowning and tall. There are many mysteries I have never solved, and the hair of my chaperone is perhaps my most curious unsolved case.
“But sir—” my sister was saying, but I had to interrupt her again.
“Give Jacques my regards,” I said, which was a phrase which here meant two things. One was “I must get off the phone.” The other thing the phrase meant was exactly what it said.
“There you are, Snicket,” Theodora said to me. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. It’s a missing-persons case.”
“It’s not a missing-persons case,” I said
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patiently. “I told you I was going to be in the lobby.”
“Be sensible,” Theodora told me. “You know I don’t listen to you very well in the morning, and so you should make the proper adjustments. If you’re going to be someplace in the morn-ing, tell me in the afternoon. But where you are is neither here nor there. As of this morning, Snicket, we’re skip tracers.”
“Skip tracers?”
“‘Skip tracer’ is a term which here means ‘a person who finds missing persons and brings them back.’ Come on, Snicket, we’re in a great hurry.”
Theodora had an impressive vocabulary, which can be charming if it is used at a con-venient time. But if you are in a great hurry and someone uses something like “skip tracer,” which you are unlikely to understand, then an impressive vocabulary is quite irritating.
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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”
Another way of saying this is that it is vex-ing. Another way of saying this is that it is annoying. Another way of saying this is that it is bothersome. Another way of saying this is that it is exasperating. Another way of saying this is that it is troublesome. Another way of saying this is that it is chafing. Another way of saying this is that it is nettling. Another way of saying this is that it is ruffling. Another way of saying this is that it is infuriating or enrag-ing or aggravating or embittering or enven-oming, or that it gets one’s goat or raises one’s dander or makes one’s blood boil or gets one hot under the collar or blue in the face or mad as a wet hen or on the warpath or in a huff or up in arms or in high dudgeon, and as you can see, it also wastes time when there isn’t any time to waste. I followed Theodora out of the Lost Arms to where her dilapidated roadster was parked badly at the curb. She slid into the
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driver’s seat and put on the leather helmet she always wore when driving, which was the pri-mary suspect in the mystery of why her hair always looked so odd.
We were in a town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea, which was no longer by the sea and was hardly a town anymore. The streets were quiet and many buildings were empty, but here and there I could see signs of life. We passed Hungry’s, a diner I had yet to try, and I saw through the window the shapes of several people having breakfast. We passed Partial Foods, where we purchased our groceries, and I saw a shopper or two walking among the half-empty shelves. Black Cat Coffee had a solitary figure at the counter, pressing one of the three automated buttons that gave customers coffee, bread, or access to the attic, which had served as a good hiding place. On this drive I also noticed something new in town— something pasted up on the sides of lampposts,
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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”
and on the wood that barricaded the doors and windows of abandoned houses. Even the mail-boxes had the posters on them, although from the hurrying roadster I could only read one word on them.
“This is a very crucial matter,” Theodora was saying. “We were given this important case because of our earlier success with the theft of the statue of the Bombinating Beast.”
“I would not call it success,” I said.
“I don’t care what you would call it,” Theodora said. “Try to be more like your prede-cessor, Snicket.”
I was tired of hearing about the appren-tice before me. Theodora had liked him better, which made me think he was worse. “We were hired to return that statue to its rightful own-ers,” I reminded her, “but that turned out to be one of Hangfire’s tricks, and now both the item and the villain could be anywhere.”
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ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS
“I think you’re just mooning over that girl Eleanor,” Theodora said. “Cupidity is not an attractive quality in an apprentice, Snicket.”
I was not sure what “cupidity” meant, but it began with the word “Cupid,” the winged god of love, and Theodora was using the tone of voice everyone uses to tease boys who have friends who are girls. I felt myself blushing and did not want to say her name, which wasn’t Eleanor. “She is in danger,” I said instead, “and I promised to help her.”
“You’re not concentrating on the right per-son,” Theodora said, and tossed a large envelope into my lap. The envelope had a black seal on it that had been broken. Inside was nothing but a piece of paper with a photograph of a girl several years older than I was. She had hair so blond it looked white and glasses that made her eyes look very small. The glasses were shiny, or maybe just reflecting the light of the camera’s
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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”
flash. Her clothes looked brand-new, with brand-new black-and-white stripes like a zebra that had been recently polished. She was stand-ing in what I guessed to be her bedroom, which also looked brand-new. I could see the edge of a shiny bed and a shiny dresser stacked with tro-phies that looked as if they had been awarded yesterday. Most trophies I’d seen had figures of athletes at the top of them. These had shapes that were bright and strange. They reminded me of illustrations in a science book, explain-ing the very small things that supposedly make up the world. The only things in the photo-graph that did not look brand-new were the hat she was wearing, which was round and the color of a raspberry, and the frown on her face. She looked displeased at having her pho-tograph taken, and also like she used her dis-pleased expression quite frequently. Printed underneath the frowning girl was her name,
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MISS CLEO KNIGHT, and at the top of the poster was printed another word, in much bigger type. It was the same word I had read on the copies of the same flyer all over town.
MISSING.
The word applied to the girl, but it could have applied to anything in town. Ellington Feint had vanished. Theodora’s roadster sped down whole blocks that had been emptied of businesses and people. I realized we were heading toward the town’s tallest building, a tower shaped like an enormous pen. Once this town had been known for producing the world’s darkest ink, from frightened octopi shivering in deep wells that were once under-water. But the sea had been drained away, leaving behind an eerie, lawless expanse of sea-weed that somehow still lived even when the water had disappeared. Nowadays there were few octopi left, and eventually there would
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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”
be nothing at all but the shimmering seaweed of the Clusterous Forest. Soon everything will go missing, Snicket, I thought to myself. Your chaperone is right. You are in a great hurry.