There was no arguing with S. Theodora Markson when she began to gesture dramati-cally, so I followed my chaperone as she followed Zada and Zora through the packed-up house, with Dr. Flammarion close behind me, his breath as unpleasant as the rest of him. Soon we were in a room I recognized from the photograph,
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which Theodora put down on a brand-new desk in order to rifle through the clothing in the closet. There was no sense in it. This was not the place Miss Knight was last seen. It was simply the place Zada and Zora had seen her last. The girl had driven off in a fancy auto-mobile. It was likely someone else had seen her afterward.
“This room isn’t packed up,” I said.
“Miss Knight wants to do it herself,” one of the women said, “but she hasn’t packed up anything but a few items of clothing.”
That made me ask a question that was closer to the right question than I knew. “What was she wearing when she left?”
Zada or Zora pointed to the photograph. “See for yourself,” she said. “We took that pho-tograph yesterday morning, at her request. It was a lucky thing. Now that photograph is all over town.”
I looked at the picture again. Nothing seemed
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familiar, but the pink hat looked out of place. “That’s an unusual cap,” I said. “Do you know where she got it?”
“Snicket,” Theodora said sternly. “A young man should not take an interest in fashion. We have a crime to solve.”
Dr. Flammarion smiled at me again, and I looked down at the desk rather than look at either my chaperone or this suspicious doctor. In the middle of the tidy desk was a plain white sheet of paper with nothing on it. No, Snicket, I thought. That’s not right. Here and there were tiny indentations, as if something had scratched at it. I leaned down to the desk and inhaled, and for the second time since I entered the tall pen-shaped tower, I smelled a familiar scent, or really two familiar scents mixed together. The first was the scent of the sea, a strong and briny smell that still came from the seaweed of the Clusterous Forest when the wind was blowing in the direction of Stain’d-by-the-Sea.
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The second scent took me a moment to identify. It smelled in a certain way that was on the tip of my tongue until I breathed it in one more time.
“Lemony,” I said, but I was not saying my name out loud. I took the piece of paper over to the bed stand, turned on the reading light, and waited a minute or two for the lightbulb to get good and hot. While I waited I looked around the room, and it occurred to me that Zada and Zora were wrong. The Knight girl had started packing. She often stayed up all night in her bedroom working on scientific experiments, but there was not one piece of sci-entific equipment to be seen. At last the bulb was warm enough.
There are three things to know about invisi-ble ink. The first is that most recipes for it involve lemon juice. The second is that the invisible ink becomes visible when the paper is exposed to
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something hot, such as a candle or a lightbulb that has been on for a few minutes. I held the paper up, very close to the lightbulb, and watched. Zada and Zora saw what I was doing and walked over to get a look. Dr. Flammarion also stepped closer. Only Theodora did not watch the paper as it warmed up, and instead took a blouse from the closet and held it up to her own body to look at herself in the mirror.
No matter how many slow and complicated mysteries I encounter in my life, I still hope that one day a slow and complicated mystery will be solved quickly and simply. An associate of mine calls this feeling “the triumph of hope over experience,” which simply means that it’s never going to happen, and that is what happened then. The third thing to know about invisible ink is that it hardly ever works. After several minutes of exposing the paper to heat, I looked at it and read what it had to say:
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In other words, nothing. But the curious thing was that the nothingness was finally a clue I could use.
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CHAPTER THREE
“This is a fortunate day,” Theodora said to me. With one gloved hand she was steering the green roadster back toward the Lost Arms, and with her other glove she was tapping me firmly on the knee. Nobody likes to be tapped on the knee. Practically nobody likes to be tapped any-where. She kept doing it. “‘Fortunate’ is a word which here means fortuitous, and it’s particularly fortuitous for you. It’s auspicious. It’s opportune. It’s kismet. It’s as lucky as can be. Lucky you,
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Snicket! With this new case, I will reveal my routine and my methods for skip tracing.”
Outside it looked like it might rain again. Inside I had the photograph of the girl in my lap. The promising young chemist looked even more annoyed, perhaps because Theodora had left sugary fingerprints all over the picture. “What shall we do first?” I asked.
“Don’t talk, Snicket,” Theodora said. “Fools talk while wise people listen, so listen up and I’ll tell you how we will solve this case sensibly and properly. We will do six things, and for each thing, I will hold up a finger of my hand, so at the end I will be holding up six fingers and you will not be confused.”
I stopped listening, of course. Theodora’s sensible and proper methods of solving our pre-vious case had led to our dangling unnecessarily from a hawser, which is a cable suspended up in the air, not a sensible or proper thing to do. I nodded solemnly at thing number one, and
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when she lifted a second gloved finger, I stared out the window and thought. It was surprising to me that so much of the mystery had been solved already. Dr. Flammarion was giving Ignatius and Doretta Knight heavy doses of laudanum with his hypodermic needle, leaving them mumbling and half conscious. It was not difficult to think of reasons why an apothecary would want to control the wealthiest family in town, even if they were not as wealthy as they once had been and the town was fading away to nothing. But Dr. Flammarion would have a more difficult time with a promising young chemist, who would know all about laudanum and its sleepy, dangerous ways. And so she had vanished.
The part of the story that confused me was the note. Zada and Zora had insisted that Miss Knight would have left a note if she had run away, but Dr. Flammarion had said there was no note. But I had found a sort of half note—a
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message written in invisible ink that hadn’t worked. Miss Knight was a chemist. She would know that invisible ink hardly ever works. She also seemed to like brand-new clothes but was wearing an old hat in the picture. There’s a connection, my brain said to me, between the hat and the disappearance, but I told my brain that if there was a connection, it had to think of it itself, because my eyes had spotted a bigger clue on the street outside.
“Stop the car,” I said.
“Be sensible,” Theodora said. “I haven’t even gotten to thing number four.”
“Stop the car, please.”