you’re doing more work for the Inhumane Society,” I said, “then you’ll need to explain yourself to the police.”
The actress looked wildly around her, like a field mouse in the shadow of a hawk. Even Sally Murphy’s porter looked a bit frightened. “Not so loud!” Sally hissed to me. “I’ll thank you to stop interfering.”
“Why does everyone keep wanting to thank me for the same thing?” I asked, but the porter stopped the actress from answering my question.
“We’d best be getting on, ma’am,” the porter said. “We don’t want to miss the train.”
“I don’t want to miss it,” Sally Murphy corrected, and I took a better look at the person she was speaking to. The porter had wide eyes and a mustache that quivered. It was a striking mustache, I noticed—so perfectly square that it looked more like a piece of paper. Of course, I thought, a person my age with a mustache was already striking. The porter’s hair was striking too, with hairpins poking out here and there all porcupiney, and the uniform was the right one—a bright blue jacket with a thistle on the lapel—but fit all wrong. Uniform, I thought. Disguise. But it certainly wasn’t my chaperone I was looking at. There weren’t enough hairpins in the world to tame the mane of S. Theodora Markson.
“Tell me,” I said to the actress, “are you helping Hangfire or escaping him?”
Sally Murphy looked down at me, and I saw one tear in her eye, slow and bright, looking down at me too. “I’ll never escape from Hangfire,” she said quietly, “but perhaps an actress can manage the most important performance of her life. Come now, porter.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the porter said, and then finally I budged. I budged to the left and Ms. Murphy and the porter budged over to where a conductor was standing. Ornette’s folded sculpture crinkled in my pocket again. A paper train, I thought. Sharon Haines. Sally Murphy. S. Theodora Markson. I knew there was a mystery here, but the mystery mystified me.
With a click!, the conductor punched the actress’s ticket, and Sally Murphy and the porter walked toward The Thistle of the Valley. “Excuse me,” I said to the conductor, quickly and desperately. “I need to get on that train, but I’m afraid I don’t have a ticket.”
“Then you’re out of luck,” the conductor said. “That’s standard policy.”
“Pretty please?” I asked, which never works, and sure enough the conductor shook his head.
“Another train will come along before too long, sonny boy,” he said.
“I need to be on tonight’s train,” said sonny boy.
“Why tonight?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted, and he gave me the look adults give to children they call sonny boy. I frowned back at him, but it didn’t help. Sally Murphy disappeared into the train, and I watched her porter follow with the bags. He’s right, Snicket. The conductor is right. You’re out of luck.
The buzzer buzzed again, and the conductors began to shut the doors of the train. The Thistle of the Valley blew its whistle, loud and bright like an adventure was starting. The heavy wheels began to move, a clackety racket that echoed everywhere, first slowly and then quicker and quicker. The engine grumbled its way out of view, then the tender and then the cargo cars, one by one, lonely without the ink that ought to have been in them. Next came the passenger cars, with silhouettes of passengers here and there in the windows, too quick and distant to recognize. I tried to recognize them anyway as they went past, actors or chaperones, friends or foes, strangers or people pretending to be strangers. But by now the train was moving too quickly for me to see anything more than a few pale faces behind the blank glass, as if The Thistle of the Valley were full of ghosts. I could see the last car approaching, and then I saw it pass, locked tight so the prisoners couldn’t escape, although it felt like they were escaping anyway, out of my sight and out of my reach. The last of the train left Stain’d Station like sand through my fingers, and I just stood there watching, helpless and useless. The mystery is leaving, Snicket. Your investigation is escaping, and now you’re all alone.
The station took a while to settle down, and I stood for a moment with my hands in my pockets, one clenching a paper train and the other clenching nothing. I didn’t want to give up, so I tried to guess what to do next. I guessed and then I kept guessing and then I couldn’t guess and then I gave up. Trudging out of the station, however, turned out to be the right guess after all, because a solution was stopped just at the curb, honking its horn and calling my name.
“Is that you, Snicket?”
I smiled. “Is that you, Pip and Squeak?”
The boy at the wheel smiled, and his brother crawled up from his position at the brake pedal so they could both hand me cards through the taxi’s open window. The cards told me what I already knew. Bouvard and Pecuchet Bellerophon, better known as Pip and Squeak, provided discreet transportation, a phrase which meant they drove the only taxi left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea whenever their father was sick or couldn’t do it for some other reason, which was almost all the time and always. They weren’t quite tall enough to drive by themselves, but with Pip steering and Squeak on the pedals, they’d gotten me out of a few tight spots after getting me into them more or less on time.
I hurried into the back of the cab. “I need you two on a tail job.”
“Neat,” Squeak said, in the voice that gave him his nickname. “Since we started driving this taxi, I’ve been waiting for someone to say ‘follow that car.’ ”
“It’s not a car I want you to follow,” I said. “It’s a train.”
“Follow a train?” Pip repeated with a laugh. “That’s hardly a tail job. It runs on tracks, doesn’t it? Why do we need to follow a train when we already know where it goes?”
“I need you to take me to where it goes before it gets there,” I said.
“So instead of ‘follow that car’ it’s ‘precede that train’?” Squeak asked, sliding down to his pedal spot. He sounded a little disappointed.
“I need to get onto The Thistle of the Valley,” I said, “but I couldn’t manage it here.”
Pip frowned. “But there’s nowhere else you can get on board. They canceled all the old stops in town.”
“That’s why I need you to take me to Partial Foods,” I said. “The back entrance, off the alley, where the train tracks are.”
“Didn’t you hear us, Snicket?” Pip asked. “The Thistle of the Valley doesn’t stop there or anyplace else.”
“I heard you.”
Pip put the car in gear. “I hope you’re not going to do anything foolish.”
“I hope you’re not hoping too hard,” I said. Squeak hit the gas and we pulled away from Stain’d Station and took a shortcut toward our destination. I heard the train whistle blow again, and thought of Theodora’s phony snores. Breathe and keep still, I told myself, thinking of the foolish thing in my immediate future.
“It’s been a busy night,” Squeak said, as we rounded the corner.
