Lemony Snicket - Shouldn't You Be in School?

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“ Who Could That Be at This Hour? ”

“ When Did You See Her Last? ”

“ Shouldn’t You Be in School? ”

ADDITIONAL REPORTS

File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents

Shouldn’t You Be in School? First published in Great Britain 2014 by Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building 1 Nicholas Road London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2014 Lemony Snicket

Art copyright © 2014 Seth

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: Shouldn’t You Be in School?

by Lemony Snicket reprinted by arrangement with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

Illustrations published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company,

New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted

First e-book edition 2014

978 1 4052 5623 0

eISBN 978 1 7803 1232 3

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

TO: Eratosthenes

FROM: LS

FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; arson,

investigations of; Hangfire; pedagogy; Haines family,

suspicions concerning; et cetera

3/4

cc: VFDhq

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Shouldn’t You Be in School? First published in Great Britain 2014 by Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building 1 Nicholas Road London W11 4AN Text copyright © 2014 Lemony Snicket Art copyright © 2014 Seth ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: Shouldn’t You Be in School? by Lemony Snicket reprinted by arrangement with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Illustrations published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company, New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved. The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted First e-book edition 2014 978 1 4052 5623 0 eISBN 978 1 7803 1232 3 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

Dedication TO: Eratosthenes FROM: LS FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; arson, investigations of; Hangfire; pedagogy; Haines family, suspicions concerning; et cetera 3/4 cc: VFDhq

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

About the Author

There was a town, and there was a librarian, and there was a fire. While I was in town I was hired to investigate this fire, and I thought the librarian could help me bring a villain to justice. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “Why would someone destroy one building when they really wanted to destroy another?” Instead, I asked the wrong questions—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the third.

I was spending a bad morning in a good library. What was bad was the weather, which was unforgivably hot. The sun was having a tantrum so fierce that all the shade had been scared away, and the sidewalks of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the town in which I had been spending my time, were no place for a decent person to walk. The library, with its calm and cooling silence, was the only comfortable place to spend the early hours of the day.

The weather wasn’t the only thing that made the morning bad. There was a man, a vicious villain who went by the name of Hangfire. Every morning that found Hangfire still at large was a bad morning. He was hiding somewhere in town, biding his sinister time and planning his troublesome plans, and hiding and planning with him were his associates in an organization called the Inhumane Society. Recently they had set up shop in the Colophon Clinic, if the phrase “set up shop” can mean “turn an empty hospital into a place where many children could be kept prisoner for some sinister purpose.” Although the Colophon Clinic had been destroyed, I was certain Hangfire was looking for a new location for whatever plot he was cooking up.

For this reason I’d taken to spending my afternoons watching over the town’s only remaining school. I guess I was watching to see if any children were being abducted. They weren’t, not by Hangfire or anyone else. Most of them were already gone. The ink industry, which had once been the pride of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, had faded away, and most of the town had faded along with it. Stain’d Secondary had a large campus, a phrase which here meant that there was a tall, wide building that curved slightly like a seashell—the auditorium perhaps, or the gymnasium—with a grouping of small buildings in its shadow. Once the campus must have been a loud and busy place when the buzzer signaled the end of the day. Now it was much too large for the handful of students who walked quietly out into the gray afternoon. Some of them looked familiar from my time in town. Some of them didn’t. All of them looked tired and none of them met my eyes. It was lonely work to watch over them, but I didn’t learn anything about Hangfire’s dark scheme.

I hoped I’d have better luck in the library, and on that bad morning I was reading two things I hoped would help. The first was a book on caviar, and I didn’t care who knew it. Caviar is the eggs of a fish, usually a sturgeon, black and shiny and served on small pieces of toast at parties to which you are not invited. As of that morning, at thirteen years of age, I’d never eaten any. I was not interested in eating any. I was reading Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea in the hopes of learning something, but as I finished a paragraph about the special tanks they use when the sturgeon are young, I wondered if I was wrong once more.

The other thing I was reading was a secret. It had taken ten days to reach me, through the hard work of a number of people close to my heart but far away on the map. We’d learned together, in what most people would call a history class, that one good way to hide things is in plain sight. People often forget to look at something right in front of them, and as promised I had found something taped to the underside of the table where I always sat. It had been tricky to peel away the tape without anyone noticing, and once it was removed from its hiding place and smoothed out so it would be easier to read, I kept sliding it under the book on caviar whenever I feared I was being watched.