The woman walking through the streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, carrying a bag of groceries and a stack of books, had her hair coiled up on her head like a cobra in a basket. You could tell her feet hurt. You could tell that when she was angry, she knew just the thing to say to make you squirm. She passed Diceys Department Store, with its quiet, sad mannequins in the windows. She passed Ink Inc., with its little closed door. I kept behind her. She didn’t look back once. The trick to following someone without getting caught is to follow somebody who doesn’t think they’re being followed. This is how I learned to follow people, and over the course of an entire school year, I learned fascinating secrets about complete strangers I followed for hours on end. It made me wonder who knew my secrets, on the days I thought I was walking with no one behind me.
She turned the corner and I waited a little before following her onto a quiet block. There was not even a single business, no Hungry’s or Lost Arms or Black Cat Coffee. Once upon a time it must have been a pretty block, I thought. There would have been shops, instead of smashed windows and chained doors, and above the shops were rows of apartments that would have been occupied. Each apartment had tall windows and balconies that were broken and deserted. It was easy to imagine how they might have looked on a hot day, with the windows flung open and people on the balconies sipping cool drinks and staring down at a parade that might be going by—a parade for a military hero, for instance. I thought of Colonel Colophon, and the statue in front of the library. It was like a tune I couldn’t stop humming but couldn’t name either. It fit somehow. I should have taken a better look at the photograph Moxie showed me. Moxie will be as mad as a paper cut, I thought, when she notices I’ve left the library without her. Stop it, Snicket. Focus on the woman in front of you, frowning into each doorway. Her shoes look like she stepped in something wet and dirty. The doorways are all boarded up. She won’t find anything there.
She rounded another corner. I had to wait. The street was so quiet, but when I peeked around the corner, it was quieter still.
The woman was gone.
I forced myself to calm down. If someone disappears around a corner, it means they’ve gone into one of the buildings or a giant bird has carried them away. The skies were clear, so I checked doorways. There was an abandoned restaurant, with round tables that were too small to eat at comfortably. I peered through the cracked window and read some words on a chalkboard—LES GOMMES, which was French for who knew what—but the door was nailed shut, tight as a coffin. Before long all doors in town would be that way, with the Knights abandoning their ink business and moving to the city.
Across the street was another closed business. The broken sign read UARIU, which didn’t look like French. The windows were covered in black cloth, like someone had drawn curtains. The door was shut, but there was something fluttering under it, stuck in the crack where the door tried to meet the ground. It was white, a single piece of paper. I walked over and tugged on the corner of it. It slid out of the door.
MISSING, it read. It was one of the posters for Cleo Knight. If it was stuck in the door, that meant the door had been opened recently. Perhaps just moments before.
I dropped the flyer and it flew, the wind carrying it down the street in a hurry. I reminded myself of a lesson I’d learned in my training: Do the scary thing first, and get scared later.
I pushed at the door and it creaked slightly. I would have to open it very slowly. A little creak here, a little creak there. Probably no one would hear it. Because probably no one would be anywhere near the door. They would be far, far from the door, whoever they were. And they would be happy to see me if I happened to pop in. So why are you waiting outside, I asked myself. Get scared later.
I pushed the door open, slow as long division. The door creaked, but I was the only one listening. The floor was wet and dirty, but there was nobody there. I was inside the shop, or what had been a shop. I was right. “UARIU” wasn’t French. It was most of the word “AQUARIUM.” Once the people of Stain’d-by-the-Sea had come here to buy fish and bowls and all of the equipment to care for them. Perhaps some of the fish had come from just off the shores of the town, when it was still sea rather than the lawless landscape of the Clusterous Forest. But now the fish were gone. A few cracked tanks sat dirty on shelves, but most had been taken away. Containers of food, and little plastic castles that people enjoy thinking fish enjoy, were forgotten in piles. The only sign of life was a solitary bowl placed on the dusty counter next to a dusty cash register and an empty coffee mug. Inside were a handful of what looked like tiny black tadpoles, swimming in murky water. There was a chunk of something pale green for them to nibble on, and a large chunk of wood that rose up at an angle, as if to give the tadpoles something to climb. I peered at the tadpoles, but they showed no interest.
There was a trail of footprints across the muddy floor and through an open door in the back to a dark staircase leading up. But I already knew where the woman had gone. I could hear her footsteps overhead. I thought for a minute and grabbed the mug before going quietly up the stairs. The tadpoles didn’t watch me go. They had other thoughts.
The stairs stopped at the door to an apartment, as I thought they would, and then curved on upstairs to another apartment. There wasn’t a welcome mat, but I wouldn’t have felt welcome anyway. I held the mug up to the door, with the open side next to the wood, and then pressed my ear to the other side. An empty glass works better, or a stethoscope if you have one handy, but nobody has a stethoscope handy.
“I bought all the lemons at the supermarket,” the woman was saying, and I heard her thunk down her bag, a loud sound over another, fainter one.
“Thank you,” said another voice. It was the voice of a girl. “You can put the lemons in the refrigerator, along with the milk. I’ll chop them up later.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” the woman said, and I heard the lemons roll out onto a table.
“Well, at least let me help you,” the girl said. “You’re doing so much work, Nurse Dander.”
“And you’re not doing any,” Nurse Dander said sourly. I heard the high-pitched sound of metal scraping against metal, and then a sequence of noises in a strict row: Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! “I thought you’d need all sorts of scientific equipment,” she said. Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! “But you’ve just set up a bunch of bowls and glasses from the kitchen. It looks like cooking, not chemistry.”
“Cooking is a lot like chemistry,” the girl said. The voice felt a bit wrong. I couldn’t exactly say how. It was a high voice, except on certain words when it was suddenly quite low. Some of the words came out almost too clearly and some were all muttery, as if she were chewing on a marble.
“I hope so,” the nurse said. Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! “He’ll expect results. And quickly!”
“Has he been here?”
“That’s none of your business.” Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle!
“I think he has.”
“He goes wherever he wants, whenever he wants.” Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! “And the next time he’s back here, he’ll expect you to have what you promised.”
“And when will that be?” asked the girl.
“I told you, that’s none of your business.” Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! Chunk-rattle! “There, that’s the lot of them. You can squeeze the lemons yourself.”
“You’re good with a knife.”
“You remember that if you ever try to escape.”
“I won’t,” the girl promised.
“You’d better not,” Nurse Dander said. “You have everything you need now. Get to work.”
“Couldn’t we talk for a minute?”
“We have just talked for a minute.”
“But I like the company.”
“We’re not friends. You’re working for us. I’ve brought you everything you asked for. You said lemons. Many lemons, you said. Certain books, you said.”
“Well, I hope it works,” said the girl uncertainly, “but it might not. During this season the lemon juice has considerably less…”
The voice trailed off, and I could hear Nurse Dander’s fingernails rattling impatiently on something. The fainter sound, I realized, was music. “Less what?”
“Less of an important chemical.”
“What chemical?”
Beekabackabooka, I thought.
“One that’s crucial for the work I’m doing,” the voice said, even higher and lower than usual.
The woman’s footsteps moved slowly, slowly, slowly across the room. “You are here on your honor, Cleo Knight. Do not cross us. We are not a Society that tolerates treachery. We’ve given you everything you asked for. It’s time for you to uphold your promise as well.”
“Could you at least pass a message to Hangfire?”
For a second there was no sound at all, and I shivered against the mug. Then the woman spoke very quietly. “I told you never to mention his name,” she said, and there was the sound of metal against metal once more. I could not tell if the woman was putting away the knife or pointing it at the girl. “Don’t provoke me.”
The footsteps came toward me. There was nowhere to go and no time to go there, so I did the only thing I could think of, which was nothing. The door opened and pushed me to the wall. It smelled bad. My hand gripped the handle of the mug. When the door swung back I would be discovered, except the door didn’t swing back. “Provoke” means to irritate someone so much that they might not notice what is going on around them. Nurse Dander stomped up the stairs past me. I did not get a good look at her. I did not see if she had the knife. My eyes were closed. It is useless to close your eyes when you are hiding, but everyone does it anyway. I reminded myself to breathe, and myself thanked me as the door slammed shut. The girl locked it. I was alone. You cannot be sure, I told myself. You cannot know what you hope you know.
I knocked on the door.
“Yes?” The voice of the girl forgot for a moment what it should sound like, but then it remembered its wrong sound. “Who is it?”
“Delivery,” I said, also using a fake voice, “for Miss Cleo Knight.”
“There is no one here by that name,” the voice replied.
“Perhaps I should try upstairs,” I said.
“No!” I could hear the girl’s hands scurry around the lock, making sure I couldn’t get in. “There’s no one in the building named Cleo Knight!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I misread the label. It’s a different name.”
“What name?”
I said the first name that came to mind.
“There’s no one here by that name either.”
“I wouldn’t think so. It’s the name of an author from Sweden.”
I heard the hands around the lock again, but slower this time.
“She wrote a book about a girl with a long name and long braids who has adventures with her neighbors. It’s more interesting to have adventures with other people, don’t you think?”
The voice didn’t say anything.
“I mean, you wouldn’t want to be alone if you were in dangerous circumstances.”
The voice saw no reason to break its silence.
“There are other books about her, too. There’s one where she goes to the South Seas. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
“Go away,” the voice said, very quietly.
“You’re not very good at disguising your voice.”
“Neither are you.”
“This is asinine,” I said. “Open the door.”
“Asinine” is a word that sounds like you shouldn’t say it, so when you do say it, people often gasp. This makes it a delicious way of saying “not very smart,” which is all it means. There was no gasp from the other side of the door, but the lock clicked and the door opened and I walked inside.
It was a shabby apartment. There was a badly leaning lamp and a long wooden table someone had pounded with something. Now it was covered in bowls and glasses, with a stack of books at one end, and a great number of lemons, all cut in half. There was a large pile of papers on a rickety chair, and there was a sofa piled with lumpy pillows and ugly blankets, for someone to sleep, or try to sleep. The only handsome thing in the room was a small box with a crank on its side and a funnel on top, with music coming out of it. And there was a girl standing in front of me. Her green eyes were the same, but her hair wasn’t black, not now. It was blond instead, so blond it looked white. Her fingers were still slender, with long black nails again, and over her eyes were strange eyebrows curved like question marks. She was using the same smile, too. It was a smile I liked. It was a smile that might have meant anything.
Now you can be sure, I told myself. Now you have found her and now you can say her name.
“Ellington Feint.”