When Did You See Her Last

by Lemony Snicket

  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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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 spok
e 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?”