CHAPTER ONE

      There was a town, and there was a train, and there was a murder. I was on the train, and I thought if I solved the murder I could save the town. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “Is it more beastly to be a murderer or to let one go free?” Instead, I asked the wrong question—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the last.

      I was in a small room, not sleeping and not liking it. The room was called the Far East Suite, and it sat uncomfortably in the Lost Arms, the only hotel in town. It had a chest of drawers and a little table with a metal plate that was responsible for heating up a number of very bad meals. A puzzling shape on the ceiling was someone’s idea of a light fixture, and a girl on the wall, holding an injured dog, was someone else’s idea of a painting. There was one window and one shutter covering it, so the room was far too dark except in the morning. In the morning it was far too light.

      But most of the room was a pair of beds, and most of what I didn’t like slept in the larger one. Her name was S. Theodora Markson. I was her apprentice and she was my chaperone and the person who had brought me to the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea in the first place. She had wild hair and a green automobile, and those are the nicest things I could think of to say about her. We’d had a fight over our last big case, which you can read about if you’re the sort of person who likes to know about other people’s fights. She was still mad at me and had informed me I was not allowed to be mad at her. We had not talked much lately, except when I occasionally asked her what the S stood for in her name and she occasionally replied, “Stop asking.” That night she had announced to me that we were both going to bed early. There is nothing wrong with an early bedtime, as long as you do not insist that everyone has to go with you. Now her wild hair lay sprawled on the pillow like a mop had jumped off a roof, and she was snoring a snore I’d never heard before. It is lonely to lie on your bed, wide awake, listening to someone snore.

      I told myself I had no reason to feel lonely. It was true I had a number of companions in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, people more or less my own age, who had similar interests. Our most significant interest was in defeating a villain named Hangfire. My associates and I had formed an ad hoc branch of the organization that had sent me to this town. “Ad hoc” means we were all alone and making it up as we went along. Hangfire worked in the shadows, scheming to get his hands on a statue of a mythical creature called the Bombinating Beast, so my friends and I had also started to keep our activities quiet, so that Hangfire