of it?”
“I can’t say I have,” I said, “but I’m not from around here.”
“Well, the newspaper’s out of business,” Moxie said, “but I still try to find out everything that’s happening in this town. So?”
“So?”
“So what’s happening, Snicket? Tell me what’s going on.”
She put her fingers down on the keys, ready to type whatever I was going to say. Her fingers looked ready to work.
“Do you generally know everything that’s happening in this town?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“Really, Moxie?”
“Really, Snicket. Tell me what’s going on and maybe I can help you.”
I stopped looking at her typewriter and looked at her eyes. Their color was pretty interesting, too—a dark gray, like they’d once been black but somebody had washed them or perhaps had made her cry for a long time. “Can I tell you without you writing it down?” I asked.
“Off the record, you mean?”
“Off the record, yes.”
She reached under the typewriter and clicked something, and the whole apparatus folded into a square with a handle, like a black metal suitcase. It was a neat trick. “What is it?”
I looked back down the stairs to make sure nobody else was listening. “I’m trying to solve a mystery,” I said, “concerning the Bombinating Beast.”
“The mythical creature?”
“No, a statue of it.”
“That old gimcrack?” she said with a laugh. “Come on up.”
She stood and ran quickly up the spiral staircase, her shoes making the sort of racket that might give your mother a headache, if you have that sort of mother. I followed her up a few curves to a large room with high ceilings and piles of junk that were almost as high. There were a few large, dusty machines with cobwebbed cranks and buttons that hadn’t been pressed for years. There were tables with chairs stacked on them, and piles of paper shoved underneath desks. You could tell it had been a busy room once, but now Moxie and I were the only people in it, and all that busyness was just a ghost.
“This is the newsroom,” she said. “The Stain’d Lighthouse was here on the waterfront, typing up stories day and night, and this was the center of the whole operation. We’d develop photographs in the basement, and reporters would type up stories in the lantern room. We’d print the paper with ink made just that day, and we’d let the papers dry on the long hawser that runs right out the window.”
“Hawser?” I said, and she clomped to the window and opened it. Outside, hanging high over the trees, was a long, thick cable that ran straight down the hill toward the gleaming windows of the mansion I’d just visited.
“It looks like that goes right down to the Sallis place,” I said.
“The Mallahans and the Sallises have been friends for generations,” Moxie said. “We got our water from the well on their property, and our science and garden reporters did research on their grounds. Our copy editor rented their guest cottage, and we would turn on the lighthouse lantern for midnight badminton parties. Of course, all that’s gone now.”
“Why?”
“Not enough ink,” Moxie said. “The industry is down to its last few schools of octopi. This whole town is fading, Snicket. There’s a library, and a police station, and a few other places open for business, but more than half of the buildings in town are completely unpeopled. The Stain’d Lighthouse had to shut down publication. Most inkworkers have been fired. The train passes through about once a month. Soon Stain’d-by-the-Sea will be gone completely. My mother got a letter from the city and left for a job with another newspaper.”
“When are you joining her?” I asked.
Moxie looked quietly out the window for a moment, giving me an idea about who had made her cry. “As soon as I can,” she said with a sigh, and I realized it had been the wrong thing to say.
“The Bombinating Beast,” I reminded her.
“Oh, right,” she said, and walked over to a table covered in a sheet. “The Bombinating Beast was sort of the mascot of the newspaper. Its body made the S in Stain’d. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago Lady Mallahan slew the Bombinating Beast on one of her voyages. So my family has quite the collection of Bombinating merchandise, although no one’s ever cared about it except—”
“Snicket!” Theodora’s voice came from the bottom of the staircase. “Time to go!”
“Just one minute!” I called back.
“Right this minute, Snicket!” Theodora answered, but I didn’t leave right that minute. I stayed as Moxie drew back the sheet to reveal another table piled with items nobody wanted. The sea horse face of the Bombinating Beast wasn’t any less hideous no matter how many times I saw it. There were three stuffed Bombinating Beasts that you might give to a baby you wanted to frighten, and a deck of cards with Bombinating Beasts printed on the back. There were Bombinating Beast coffee mugs and Bombinating Beast cereal bowls stacked up with Bombinating Beast napkins on Bombinating Beast place mats. But beside this beastly meal, next to the Bombinating Beast ashtray and the Bombinating Beast candleholders, was an object very shiny and black in color. Moxie had called it a gimcrack, and Mrs. Murphy Sallis had called it a priceless item. It was about the size of a bottle of milk and said to be valued at upward of a great deal of money. It was the Bombinating Beast, the statue we were looking for, as dusty and forgotten as the rest of the items in the room.
“Snicket!” Theodora called again, but I didn’t answer her. I spoke to the statue instead. “Hello,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Moxie looked at me and smiled. “I guess your mystery is solved, Snicket,” she said, but that, too, was the wrong thing to say.
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