does she listen to?”
“Polkas.”
“No wonder you don’t like her.”
Marguerite smiled. “That’s not the only reason,” she said. “Dagmar doesn’t seem trustworthy. The paintings didn’t start falling until she arrived, and nobody else has been around. I keep thinking she’s after something, but nothing has been stolen.”
“Most untrustworthy people hanging around a gold mine are after the gold.”
“My father has been very careful about his stash,” she said. “When we bring gold up from the mine, he immediately takes it all to his workshop to melt it down. Then he hides it someplace in that room. Even I don’t know exactly where, and I have the only workshop key. My father gave it to me when he left town, and I keep it with me always.”
Marguerite reached into her overalls and drew out a skinny key on a thick cord around her neck.
“Have you ever let Dagmar use the key?” I asked. “She could have had a copy made.”
Marguerite shook her head. “I’m the only one who’s been in the workshop since my father left, and I can see that nothing has been touched. The problem’s not with the gold, Snicket. It’s with the pictures in my living room.”
We’d arrived at a small wooden house with a roof covered in moss, narrow windows wide open, and a large hole in the front yard with the top of a ladder jutting out from it. Various tools were scattered around the browning lawn. From the windows I could hear a particularly peppy polka. All polka music is peppy. There’s nothing wrong with feeling peppy, but a polka insists that everyone else has to be peppy too, even if they don’t feel like it.
Marguerite kicked off her boots and led me into a friendly-looking place. There was a large wooden staircase with piles of books here and there, and a carpet decorated with images of mythical beasts and smudges of dirt. Leafy plants hung in the windows, shedding leaves wherever I looked.
“I’m back, Dagmar,” Marguerite called upstairs. “I have a friend with me! I’m going to make him a poached egg!”
“Do whatever you want,” replied a cranky voice, over the sound of the polka. The music’s peppiness had clearly not spread to Dagmar.
“The kitchen’s right over here,” Marguerite said, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like to show you the living room first.”
“Of course,” I said, and she led me through an archway into a room as pleasant and rumpled as the rest of the house. The wooden floor was painted black, with the paint peeling off here and there, and the sofas and chairs were all bright yellow except where they were patched up with squares of other bright fabrics. There was a large reading lamp, made from another miner’s helmet, and on the walls were portraits of pale, thoughtful-looking people, with one portrait leaning against the wall underneath a blank space on the wall where it clearly belonged. One portrait, depicting a man with a bow tie and an elegant cane, had a large rip right across the middle, and Marguerite looked at it sadly. “Henry Parland was the first one to fall,” she said, “just a few minutes after Dagmar arrived. Luckily, it’s the only one that’s been damaged. Since then, it seems that one falls whenever I’m down in the mine. Paavo Cajander, Katri Vala, Eino Leino, Otto Manninen, and this morning Larin Paraske, who had already fallen, was found right as you see her, leaning on the wall like all the others.”
“Your father certainly likes Finnish poets,” I said.
“These portraits belonged to my mother,” Marguerite said. “They were precious to her, but they’re not particularly valuable.”
“And they haven’t particularly been taken,” I said.
“Nothing has,” Marguerite said, looking around the room. “I admit I’m suspicious of Dagmar, but I can’t say she’s committed any kind of crime. The paintings just keep falling and then we hang them back up.”
“You say they fall when you’re in the mine,” I said, glancing out the window at the hole in the yard, “but surely you can’t hear them fall from down there.”
“Dagmar tells me they’ve fallen,” Marguerite said, “or I notice myself when I come in for a snack.”
“And who puts them back up?”
“I do,” Marguerite said, with a note of pride in her voice. “I fetch a hammer and a nail from the workshop and do the job myself. And I do it right, Snicket. Don’t think it’s my fault they keep falling.”
“Maybe the first one fell,” I said, with a glance at the rip in Henry Parland, “but if the others were found leaning against the wall like this, they probably didn’t fall.”
“That’s how they were,” Marguerite said with a nod. “Leaning against the wall, nice and neat, with nothing damaged.”
“Do you leave the workshop door open while you rehang them?”
Marguerite gave me a sharp look. “Of course not. The gold is somewhere in that room, and it’s my responsibility to keep it locked up.”
I turned my eyes from the girl to Larin Paraske. The poet in the portrait looked back at me but offered nothing more than a thoughtful gaze and an unusual hat. I tilted the portrait and looked behind it at the cord stretched across so the painting would hang evenly from the nail. I looked at the blank space on the wall, and at the tiny hole in the dark wood. “Do you have a lot of nails in the workshop?” I asked.
“Jars and jars full,” Marguerite said. “My father uses these special black nails all around the house. They curve slightly, so they do less damage to the wall.”
“And what about the hammer?”
“It’s an ordinary enough hammer,” Marguerite said. “Do you want to see it?”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I’m going upstairs to talk to Dagmar.”
“What are you going to ask her?”
“First,” I said, “I’ll ask her to turn off that blasted polka music. And then I’ll demand that she return all she’s stolen from your family, before we hand her over to the police.”
* * *
The conclusion to “Inside Job” is filed under “Black Paint,” here.
I was spending the afternoon with my associate Moxie Mallahan. Moxie was Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only reporter, a job she had learned from her parents, who had run the town’s newspaper, The Stain’d Lighthouse. The newspaper was shut down, Mrs Mallahan had left town, Mr Mallahan was sleeping late, and Moxie and I were just hanging around the lighthouse, doing a little reading and talking over various incidents that had happened recently. “It’s been too long since
