Shouldn't You Be in School?. Lemony Snicket

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      When the smoke cleared, there was something to see in the rubble of 421 Ballpoint Avenue, but it was the Officers Mitchum. I preferred smoke. Harvey and Mimi Mitchum were the only police officers in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but they spent less time enforcing the law and more time bickering over just about anything that struck their fancy.

      “And let me tell you,” Harvey Mitchum was saying to his wife, “that it was Agnes who had the idea, and Harry just played along, so by the time Philip had him cornered the crime had already been committed.”

      “You’re a half-wit,” Mimi Mitchum said. “Carmen is the mastermind behind the crime, and if you can’t figure that out for yourself you might as well toss your badge into the ashes.”

      “Carmen’s no mastermind,” Harvey said. “She’s even more dimwitted than you are.”

      “How dare you call me dimwitted?”

      “How dare you call me a half-wit?”

      “It’s crueler to say that wits are dim than that they’re chopped in half !”

      “Mimi, you’re only proving yourself dimwitted when you say things like that.”

      “If I’m so dimwitted, how did I manage to solve the crime?”

      One of the first things I’d learned upon arriving in Stain’d-by-the-Sea was that the only way to get the Mitchums to stop arguing was to interrupt them. “Excuse me, Officers,” I said, and the officers turned to look at me the way they always did. It is the way you look at a squeaky door when you are trying to be quiet.

      “What are you doing here, lad?” Harvey Mitchum asked me.

      “Did I hear you say you’ve managed to solve this crime?” I asked. It is always better to ask a question than to answer one.

      “Harvey was just arguing with me about a movie we saw,” Mimi said. Her eyes moved suspiciously through the smoke from me to Theodora and back again. “How is it you happen to be here?”

      Theodora put a gloved hand on my shoulder. “My associate and I were going to talk to Harold Limetta, the owner of this house, as part of an investigation.”

      Harvey frowned and kicked at the ashes on the ground. “And who, precisely, has asked you to investigate?”

      “I’d rather not say,” Theodora said.

      “Well, I’d rather not have you poking through the scene of a crime,” Mimi said.

      “And I’d rather not have that kid around here either,” her husband added.

      “I’d rather not have you call me a kid,” I said.

      “I’d rather not have my apprentice talk like that to the police,” Theodora said.

      “I’d rather not have to listen to you discipline a child,” Harvey Mitchum said.

      “I’d rather not listen to my husband boss people around,” Mimi Mitchum said.

      “Sorry,” I said, “is it my turn? I have a long list of things I’d rather not do.”

      It is not pleasant to have a number of people glaring and sighing at you at the same time, even if you meant for them to do it. As I’d planned, once they were done glaring and sighing, the Mitchums forgot all about asking us why we were there or who had sent us, and so the four of us were soon picking through the wreckage together as if we had never argued at all.

      In one of my favorite books, a sad young man stumbling around outside finds a tiny strange man with a sack of magic crystals that change his life. My hopes weren’t that high, but I kept my eyes open. Almost anything would do. Any kind of clue would be better than what I had now. What I had now was bupkes, a word which here means “The Department of Education told us to go interview someone about a sheep barn burning down, only to find that the man’s house had burned down.” The metal bench was still there, and the metal picture frame with the photographs burned out of it. The metal rectangles were still there too, stacked up like the books you were planning on reading next. My shoes crunched on the shattered glass. They’re tanks, I realized. Tanks for fish or small animals. They’re tanks and they’d probably be clues, I thought, if you knew what the mystery was.

      “What do you know about Harold Limetta?” I asked the Mitchums.

      “Not a lot,” Harvey Mitchum admitted. “He’s new in town.”

      “He moved into this house only days ago,” Mimi said. “All anybody knows about him is that he is a leper.”

      “He’s sick?” I said.

      “No,” Harvey said. “He studies moths.”

      “Then СКАЧАТЬ