A library tends to look like the problem you’re using it to solve. The library of Stain’d-by-the-Sea had never looked so big and confusing to me. The books and shelves seemed to be in the middle of an argument nobody was winning.
“Apologies for the mess.” It was the deep voice of Dashiell Qwerty, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. His desk was towered with books, with a few of his eternal enemies—a phrase which here means “moths”—fluttering just out of the reach of his checkered handkerchief. “We’ve had some recent concerns, so the library is taking some precautionary measures.”
“What concerns?” Moxie asked, already opening her typewriter. “What measures?”
Qwerty moved a few books aside so he could face us. He called himself a sub-librarian, but I considered him to be not only a proper librarian but a good and proper librarian. He was dressed in his usual leather jacket decorated with pieces of metal, and his hair as usual looked frightened of it. “A few books have gone missing,” he said, “and there have been some threats.”
“Who made the threats?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. “In any case, I’m completely reorganizing the shelves, and in a few days a sprinkler system will be installed so we don’t have to worry about fire. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a good book to read, allow me to recommend a book I like called Despair. The plot concerns two people who do not look at all alike but nevertheless hatch a nefarious plan.”
“It sounds interesting,” I said, “although my associate and I have a number of things to research.”
Qwerty gave me a familiar smile and made a wide gesture with his hand and the sleeve of his leather jacket. I liked the gesture. It was not like Theodora’s dramatic gestures, which seemed designed to make you look at her. This was a gesture designed to make you look around the library, and I liked what he always said when the gesture was through. “Make yourself at home,” he said, and Moxie and I shared a smile and thanked him and headed off down the crowded aisles.
“So?” she said, when we were out of earshot.
“So this is where I do my research.”
“Yes, but what are we researching?”
“Dr. Flammarion is obviously up to something,” I said, “and we need to find out what it is.”
“There’s not going to be a book on Dr. Flammarion,” Moxie said.
“No,” I said, “but there might be one about Colonel Colophon.”
“What does he have to do with all this?”
“I wish I knew,” I admitted. “He was Ingrid Nummet Knight’s business partner, and Dr. Flammarion works at the clinic where the colonel lives. I also want to do some research on chemistry. Dr. Flammarion works with laudanum, and Cleo Knight was working with invisible ink. Maybe there’s another connection there.”
“I’ll tackle Colonel Colophon, and you take chemistry. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“And Snicket?”
“Yes, Moxie?”
“Do you really consider me an associate?”
“Certainly.”
She smiled the way people smile when they are trying to stop smiling. “So we’re solving this case together?”
“I told you before I don’t want to lead you into danger,” I said. “We don’t know what happened to Cleo Knight.”
“If it’s safe enough for you, it’s safe enough for me,” Moxie said firmly.
“I was trained for this sort of thing,” I said. “It was part of my education.”
“Is Theodora part of this education?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s my associate, too.”
“The same Theodora who made you steal the Bombinating Beast from me? The same Theodora who thinks that no crime was committed in this case?” The journalist put down her typewriter on one of the library’s desks. “I might be a better associate than your associate.”
Moxie Mallahan was reminding me of me. I was known for arguing with my teachers until they became so flustered they could think of only one thing to say to me. It was an unfair thing, the thing they said, but I was almost thirteen. I was used to unfair things. “Let’s get to work,” I told her.
Moxie sighed and walked away from me, toward the section of the library dedicated to military history. I headed toward Science, hoping that the books I was looking for would be on the shelves and not in the messy stacks that clogged the aisles. To get to the Science Section, I had to walk through Fiction, where there was a gap, three books wide, blank and obvious like a missing tooth. It was my fault. I had found it necessary to remove three books from the library without checking them out, and now the books were in Hangfire’s possession. They were good books, and now nobody could check them out. Don’t mope about it, Snicket. There’s nothing you can do.
The Science Section was in no order whatsoever, so chemistry books were piled with biology books stacked with botany books leaned up against endocrinology. I sighed, but it didn’t get any better. The room was quiet. I knelt on the ground and began to look through everything. There wasn’t a book called Laudanum or a book called Invisible Ink or a book called Laudanum and Invisible Ink or a book called The Case of Cleo Knight’s Disappearance Solved in a Book So Lemony Snicket Doesn’t Have to Do It Himself. I did find a book about chemistry, but I didn’t want to read it. It was as big as a cake and it was called Chemistry. It had no index, so there was no way to look in the back of the book to see where the sections on laudanum were. You had to stumble on them. I wanted to stumble on whoever had made the decision not to put an index in the back of Chemistry. I lugged it to a table and started reading.
Chemistry is a branch of science dealing with the basic elementary substances of which all bodies and matter are composed, and the laws that regulate the combination of these elements when forming compounds, and the phenomena that occur when such bodies are exposed to differing physical conditions and environments. I closed the book. I had read enough. Cleo Knight would die peacefully in her sleep at age 102, surrounded by her great-grandchildren, before this book would help me with the case.
I allowed myself a moment of melancholy instead. It was late afternoon. Just a moment, I told myself. Just one moment of melancholy. I thought of my sister, in a tunnel underneath the city. It would be dark there, although she would likely have a lantern or a torch. She would frown in the way she does when she is concentrating very hard. She is measuring her steps, making sure that she ends up directly under the Museum of Items. Then I thought of my parents. I thought of how they looked in the shade of a tall tree, one long-ago afternoon. The wind was blowing hard, and we were foolishly hiking. The wind caught a heavy branch of a tree and sent it tumbling down. You could hear it coming, thrashing through the leaves, for what seemed like a long time. My mother leapt—a great, long, surprising leap—and blocked the branch with her arms, sending it rolling into the underbrush. I remembered the sound. She had been just in time. “We take care of our own,” my mother said, while my sister and my brother and I all stood gaping at the branch that would have ruined our day. “We Snickets take care of our own.”
I was not taking care of our own. My sister was alone, and I was in a library indulging in melancholy. Indulging means doing something that is really not necessary. I stood up and found Moxie.
“What does ‘teetotaler’ mean?” she asked me.
“A person who doesn’t drink alcohol,” I said.
“Colonel Colophon is a teetotaler,” she said, “although I can’t imagine that will help us any more than anything else. He fought bravely in the war, but I got sidetracked a little reading about that. I thought the war was a simple matter, with one side good and the other evil. But the more I read, the less clear it was.”
“I think that’s true of all wars.”
“Maybe. In any case, the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea honored him with that statue. Here they are at the groundbreaking ceremony.”
She turned the book around on the desk, and I looked at a large photograph of a crowd. The caption told me that politicians, artists, scientists, tycoons, naturalists, veterans, and other citizens were gathering in front of City Hall for the first day of work on the statue honoring Colonel Colophon. The place looked a lot better in the photograph than it did now. The pillars were smooth and the lawn well tended, and there was a tall, broad tree, about to be cut down, where they were going to erect the statue. Stop thinking about trees, Snicket. Stop thinking about your family. There were several men and women in firefighter uniforms, and there was a small brass band from the Wade Academy, which was once a top-drawer school but now sat empty and abandoned just outside town on Offshore Island. I thought I saw the Officers Mitchum in the crowd, looking much younger, and there was Prosper Lost, rubbing his hands together. There was a young woman who looked like she might have been Polly Partial, some years ago, and there was a man who looked like he might have been Dr. Flammarion, beardless and laughing with a group of other men and women. Of course, most people in the crowd were unknown to me. Some of them looked happy, and some of them didn’t. I didn’t know why I was looking at them.
“Is there anything about what happened later?” I asked. “What about the explosion?”
“There’s not much,” Moxie said. “As far as I can tell, Colonel Colophon spends all his time in the Colophon Clinic, holed up in his special attic hospital room or wandering the grounds. See, here’s a photograph of him sitting by the clinic’s swimming pool.”
“He really does look like a mummy.”
“A mummy on the back of a monster. Take a good look at that bench.”
I took a good look at the bench where the colonel was sitting. The Bombinating Beast, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s legendary monster, stared back at me from the photograph.
“It looks like that bench is made from the same wood as the statue Hangfire’s after,” Moxie said.
“Same wood, same beast. There must be a connection.”
“If there is, I can’t find it. Or there might be something, but I missed it because the library is in such disarray.”
“Do you think the newsroom in the lighthouse might have some old articles about all this?”
“It’s possible,” Moxie said, “but The Stain’d Lighthouse is in disarray, too. Many issues of the newspaper have gone missing. My mother took some when she left town, and I’m afraid my father doesn’t do a very good job of looking after things.”
“You must miss her.”
“Every minute, Snicket, of every hour of every day. What about you? What did you find?”
“Chemistry is a branch of science dealing with the basic elementary substances of which all bodies and matter are composed, and the laws that regulate—”
Moxie held up her hands. “Boredom is not black licorice, Snicket,” she said. “There’s no reason to share it with me.”
“I think I’ll ask the librarian for help,” I said. “He’s busy, but he’s good.”
“I’ll type up a few more notes,” Moxie said, and I nodded and headed toward the librarian’s desk. At first I thought that Dashiell Qwerty had left the library, as I thought I caught a shadow across the door, but then I saw him brushing the spine of a fancy-looking book on oysters, using a soft, thick brush and fierce concentration.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
“A common complaint.”
“I need information on laudanum, or other sleeping draughts, or a history of chemical espionage, and anything on Colonel Colophon and the explosion that wounded him and the clinic founded in his honor.”
“You would do well to be less particular,” Qwerty said, waving away a moth. “With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.”
“Serendipity?”
“Serendipity is a happy accident,” Qwerty said. “In a library, that could mean finding something you didn’t know you were looking for. In any case, I’m afraid most of the books covering the subjects you mentioned have been checked out. A cardholder reserved them some time ago and picked them up just now.”
I blinked, and then hurried to the door. The shadow I had seen was no longer a shadow. Now it was a woman, walking down the steps toward the lawn where once there had been a tall, broad tree. Then there had been a statue. Now there were the remains of a statue. The woman was wearing a white coat that looked official and made me nervous. I didn’t recognize her. She was carrying a load of books under one arm and a bag of groceries in the other. I could see into the top of the bag. It looked like she’d bought some milk, a loaf of bread, and perhaps a dozen lemons. And then there was a tall box of something you might have for breakfast, if you liked twelve wholesome grains combined in strict sequence.
“Who is that?” I asked Qwerty, trying to keep my voice quiet. “Who checked out those books?”
“A librarian doesn’t reveal information like that,” Qwerty replied. “Who you are and what you read is private in a library. The world—”
“I tell you, I must know who that is,” I said.
Qwerty put a hand on my shoulder. The metal decorations jangled on the sleeves of his jacket. “And I tell you,” he said gently, “that you will not get that information from me.”
I looked again at the departing woman, and then at Qwerty, and then all around the library, with its wild stacks of books. There were three new ones now, stacked right on the desk. The woman had returned three books to the library, three books that fit perfectly into a gap in Fiction. I had slipped those books out of the library, and now they were back again. It shouldn’t have been surprising. Of course Hangfire was involved in some way.
The three books were all by the same author, and I recommend all three of them. There is one about a girl who spies on her neighbors and one about creepy notes that ruin people’s summer and one about a family that does not change even though the children want it to. They had been in Hangfire’s possession, which meant that the woman who returned them was one of his associates. I could not get any information about her by asking a librarian, but there was another way. I took one last look around the library and hurried after her.