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 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.”
She stopped the car, perhaps because I had said “please.” I stepped out onto the curb of a quiet street, although practically all of the streets in Stain’d-by-the-Sea were quiet. They were so quiet that if you drove through them on a regular basis, you would notice anything new, such as the flyers of Miss Knight printed with the word MISSING. You would also notice an enormous automobile, particularly if it was one of the fanciest automobiles manufactured.
I was standing in front of a Dilemma. There are people in the world who care about automobiles, and there are people who couldn’t care less, and then there are the people who are impressed by the Dilemma, and those people are everyone. The Dilemma is such a tremendous thing to look at that I stared at it for a good ten seconds before reminding myself that I should think of it as a clue to a mystery rather than as a wonder of modern engineering. It was one of the newer models, with a small, old-fashioned horn perched just outside each front window, and a shiny crank on the side so you could roll down the roof if Stain’d-by-the-Sea ever offered pleasant weather, and it was the color of someone buying you an ice cream cone for no reason at all.
Theodora had gotten out of the roadster and stared at the Dilemma for as long as I had. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Snicket,” she said, when she had remembered to be a chaperone. “You’re supposed to be looking for Miss Knight, not getting distracted by automobiles, no matter how beautiful they are and how interesting to behold and no matter how long you want to stand here staring at it because it’s very beautiful and interesting to behold and so you find yourself staring at it for quite some time because it is so beautiful and interesting—”
“This car probably belongs to Miss Knight,” I said before she could continue. “Not many people can afford a new Dilemma.”
“Then she must be nearby,” Theodora said, turning quickly all the way around to look in every direction down the empty street.
“I read once,” I said, “about a person who parked their car and then went someplace else.”
“Don’t be impertinent.” Theodora frowned. “Where could she have gone?”
I looked down the block. “Impertinent” is a word which actually means “not suitable to the circumstances,” but most people use it to mean “I am using a complicated word in the hopes that it will make you stop talking,” so I merely pointed at the only remaining grocery store in town.
Partial Foods must have once been a grand grocery store. It was not a grand grocery store for the duration of my stay in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It looked like a grand grocery store that someone had thrown down the stairs. To enter the store, you walked through a pair of enormous glass doors with brass handles carved with images of fresh fruit and vegetables, but the doors were badly cracked and difficult to open. There were wide shelves and deep bins ready to hold enormous mountains of delicious food, but at least half of them were empty, and the rest held food that was unripe or stale, mushy or brittle, bruised or encased in too many layers of plastic, or something I didn’t like. The place was almost enormous and almost deserted, so it took some time wandering through the big, meager aisles until we found someone to talk to. The owner of Partial Foods was a woman who could look both very angry and very bored at the same time and in fact was doing so when we found her. On a stained smock, she was wearing a peeled name tag that read POLLY PARTIAL.
“Good day,” Theodora said to her.
“Who are you?” Polly Partial asked. She was standing next to a basket of honeydew melons. I do not like honeydew melons. I do not see the point of them.
“My name is S. Theodora Markson, and this is my apprentice,” Theodora said, and took the flyer from my hand. “We’re looking for this person.”
Polly Partial peered at the frowning girl. “That’s Cleo Knight,” she said, pointing to the words printed above the photograph.
“Yes, we know,” Theodora said. “I was wondering if you had seen her recently.”
“Hard to say,” Polly Partial said. “She looks like any other runaway girl, even if she is from a wealthy family. Is there a reward? With enough money, I could retire and devote myself to raising minks.”
The Knights had not said anything about a reward, but Theodora did not say anything about there not being one. “Only if you help us,” she said. “Have you seen this girl?”
The shopkeeper squinted at the flyer. “Yesterday morning,” she said, “about ten thirty. She hurried in here to buy that silly breakfast food she likes.” She led us down an aisle and pulled down a box for us to see. It was Schoenberg Cereal, the brand Zada and Zora had mentioned. TWELVE WHOLESOME GRAINS COMBINED IN A STRICT SEQUENCE, the label read. I could not imagine who would eat such a thing in a kitchen where fresh-baked cinnamon rolls could be had.
“The Knights are the only ones who buy it,” Polly Partial said, “although usually it’s one of those twin servants who does the shopping.”
“Did she say anything?” Theodora asked.
“She said thanks,” Polly said, “and then she said she was running away to join the circus.”
My chaperone scratched her hair. “The circus?”
“That’s what she said,” said Polly Partial.
“Aha! ” Theodora cried.
“Then she walked outside and got into a taxicab and went off.”
“Aha!”
I didn’t see anything to aha! about, but I’ve never been an aha! sort of person. “What was she wearing?” I asked.
Theodora gave me an exasperated sigh. “What did I tell you about your interest in fashion?” she said. “A young man who asks too much about clothing will find himself the subject of unflattering rumors.”
“You can see for yourself what she was wearing,” Polly Partial said, and handed me back the flyer. “The Knight family always wears black and white, to honor the family business and the paper it’s scrawled on. I remember the hat surprised me. It wasn’t
