When Did You See Her Last? by Lemony Snicket

Author:Lemony Snicket
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

“Lemony Snicket,” she said right back to me. We stood and faced each other. I hadn’t known Ellington Feint very long, and you couldn’t quite say that we were friends. We both found ourselves in Stain’d-by-the-Sea on mysterious errands. We had both stolen the same statue, and we were both searching for the same villain, and now the Cleo Knight case had thrown us together again. But the Bombinating Beast, fashioned after Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s legendary monster, and Hangfire, who was holding Ellington’s father prisoner, and even the disappearance of a brilliant chemist didn’t make us friends. We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us parts of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can’t quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we cannot solve it alone.

“What are you doing here, Ms. Feint?” I said.

“I might ask you the same question, Mr. Snicket.”

“I’m looking for Cleo Knight,” I said.

Ellington moved now, and quickly shut the door. “As far as everyone here is concerned,” she said in a whisper, “I am Cleo Knight.”

I sat down at the table with all the kitchen equipment and the lemons sliced in half. I had most of the story, but not all of it. “That’s quite a stunt,” I said. “How did you do it?”

Ellington walked to the sofa and reached underneath it to pull out a suitcase. It was the one she’d carried with her from Killdeer Fields, the nearby town where she had grown up. It was filled with all sorts of clothing – everything she needed to wear on her journey to find her father. She held up a new coat with black and white stripes, and a hat the color of a raspberry.

“The hat I remember,” I said. “I saw it when you were living in Handkerchief Heights. Where did you get the coat?”

“Cleo Knight bought it for me,” she said, “at Diceys Department Store.”

“That’s a generous gift. You must be very good friends.”

“I wouldn’t call us friends,” Ellington said. “I only met her a few weeks ago, at Black Cat Coffee. She was trying to get the machine to make her a cup of tea to help her think. I convinced her to try coffee instead, and we started to talk. She told me that her parents were abandoning the ink business and moving to the city, but she has been working on an important experiment that could save the town.”

“Invisible ink,” I said.

Ellington smiled. “I should have known you would know. Cleo Knight really is a brilliant chemist. Usually, invisible ink is just some nonsense with lemon juice, but she’s almost perfected a new formula, with a secret ingredient she discovered herself. There will be invisible inkwells everywhere, she told me, just as soon as the formula is finished. People will go back to work. Stain’d-by-the-Sea will thrive again. The octopi will no longer be endangered. They could even put the sea back where it belongs, all because of Cleo Knight’s formula.

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