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“I never thought I would see you again,” Fiona said.
She didn’t know very much about Carmelita Spats, except for her memory of the one day they spent in each other's company six years ago. That, and the way that her brother had described her since then — as a screeching, violent child, with a vicious streak rivalled only by that of her guardians.
Carmelita’s hair was still the same memorable copper red now. Her face was still quite round, with a small, pouty mouth and a tiny nose covered in the same freckles she had as a child, big doll-like blue eyes like something almost out of a cartoon, and a vivid flush of bright pink blush on each full cheek. Her baby-face seemed somehow at odds with the cup of what smelled unmistakably like strong black coffee on the desk next to her, which she was swirling several packets of sugar into with a wooden stirrer as Fiona took a few steps inside.
“Hello Fiona,” she eventually said, and the voice went straight through her, to somewhere touching a nerve. It had changed of course, with age, but was still unmistakably the same sharp, metallic tone that screamed and sung out of tune in a reverberating submarine for hours on end. It really was hard to forget a thing like that.
“I’m out,” her brother decided gruffly from behind her, while turning right around on his heel in the doorway.
“Stop.” Fiona managed to grab him by the shoulder before he was fully out of the room. “Don’t you remember why we’re here?”
She watched, stifling her hurt, as Fernald rolled his eyes. To her, nothing could possibly have mattered more than the search for her stepfather after they became separated in the ocean all those years ago. To her, family still means something, and despite his failings, he is the only other family they have in the world. When she had first received the mysterious message asking to meet in order to pass on information about his whereabouts, in an inconsistently adapted version of an old code she had learned once, she had known that it seemed suspicious. But Fiona couldn’t have stayed away even if she tried to.
Fernald did not share her enthusiasm. After all, his relationship with their stepfather had been complicated and contentious even at its best, and over time she had learned more about why that was, and had come to understand her stepfather’s determination to keep her so much in the dark about the organisation that had nearly destroyed the two of them.
Fernald had warned her that the message would turn out to be a trick, but he had dragged himself here despite his suspicions because he didn’t want her to face the potential consequences of her blind optimism by herself. She now felt a flush of embarrassment and disappointment, now that he appeared to have been right.
“I’m here for you,” he reminded her. “Not for him. And even for you, this is becoming a tall order.”
“If it helps,” Carmelita interjected, looking down seemingly to admire her shiny red shoes rather than looking at the two of them. “I’m nervous to see you too. I was scared of you when I was younger.”
“You had a strange way of showing it.” Her brother grunted back. “And of all the things you should have been scared of, I really wasn’t one of them.”
“Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know that?” Carmelita paused to take an annoyingly loud slurp of her coffee. “You were horrible to me every chance you got. Every second Esmé wasn't watching you.”
“Carmelita, what are you even doing here?” Fiona asked quickly, even though she already knew. It seemed sensible to interrupt them while doing so was still possible — before one or other of them escalated things even further.
The teenager looked back at her with the kind of look that indicated that she was starting to wonder whether Fiona was as clever as she was meant to be. “Obviously, I was the one who sent you the message,” she explained slowly. “I just thought if you knew it was me, you might not have come.”
Fiona sighed, but nevertheless took a few further steps into the room, so that she could take a seat in one of the worn out wooden chairs in front of the desk. The room looked like it had been someone’s office once, a long time ago, but that whoever it was had left in a hurry and nobody had been using it since. Carmelita herself was half-standing, leaning back against the old desk rather than sitting down in the more comfortable spot behind it. An empathetic part of Fiona could not help but wonder whether she was making sure that she could make a quick escape, if she needed to. With Fernald still standing in the doorway, and no other exit apparent except for the fourth-story window, it appeared to Fiona that she might have miscalculated about that.
“Well, you were probably right,” Fiona admitted with a sigh. Part of her was beginning to accept that there was no information about her stepfather after all, but a bit of wretched hope still remained, a flame too stubborn to be stomped out so easily. “What do you want? Why go to all this trouble to get us here?”
“In other words, cut to the chase.” Fernald rephrased impatiently from behind her, evidently keen to demonstrate his displeasure. “What game are you playing?”
Carmelita reached into a satchel that was propped up beside her on the desk, ruffling through a few papers and producing a slim file.
“It was only half a trick,” she said, without looking at all ashamed of herself. “I kept my identity a secret, but it really is true that I worked out where your stepfather wound up. I’ve been doing some of my own research, and I happened to come across him while I was looking for — well, I guess that part probably doesn’t really matter to you.”
“Alive?” Fiona asked immediately, with her heart in her throat.
“Oh, yes. I’ve spoken to him.” Carmelita confirmed. Perhaps failing to understand how important this news was to Fiona, and maybe to Fernald as well if he would ever admit it, she huffed in irritation at the memory. “He’s an old fool, isn’t he? He wouldn’t talk to me, not even when I offered to tell him where you were. But, regardless, I had an inkling that you would be interested in finding him.”
“Thank you, Carmelita.” Fiona said seriously, packing as much genuine gratitude as she could into her words, and trying her best to ignore that last part and focus on the good. He’s alive. That’s all that matters. “Thank you so much. This is… kind. Kinder than I think you know.”
A few moments of silence passed. The file remained in Carmelita’s hands, her bitten-down pink painted nails keeping a strangely tight grip.
Fernald towers above the two of them with his arms crossed, clearly not feeling quite so thankful.
“Why would you go out of your way to give this to us?” he asked suspiciously.
“To her,” Carmelita sneered back at him rudely — almost snarling, like an animal backed into a corner. I was scared of you when I was younger, she had said earlier, and whether that was right or wrong or the best use of her childhood fear, Fiona could begin to believe it. “Not to you.”
“Well, go on then. What are you waiting for?” Fernald frowned. “Give Fiona that file, and then we’ll get out of here. Surely you weren’t expecting us to want to stay and reminisce?”
“Before I do,” she said carefully, almost as if rehearsed, her tone still steady and even despite her wide-eyed stare. “I want something from you.”
There was a long pause. And then, her brother started to laugh. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant laugh, and, Fiona knew, he wasn’t genuinely amused. It was the laugh of someone who had already learned their lesson about making deals with untrustworthy people one too many times.
“There it is!” he crowed. “I knew that was coming. Fi, it’s time for us to go.”
Eyes still on the file, Fiona leaned forward. “What do you want?”
“We are not going to do anything she says!” Fernald hissed at her, moving closer behind her and tapping one hook against her shoulder. “I’m warning you, Spats. I don't care how easy or how innocent it might sound. I’ve been playing this stupid game since before you were even born.”
Carmelita scraped her teeth across her bottom lip. It was not an attractive thing to do, and it made her lips disappear completely. It struck Fiona as a nervous habit. “All I want is to ask you some questions. I do know that I was awful when I was a child, and I understand that you don’t trust me. To be honest, I don’t trust you either. At least I was only a child — what was your excuse?”
Fernald bristled behind her, but before he could say anything, Carmelita was already speaking again.
“Anyway — I grew up. I changed.” Fernald scoffed loudly. “And all I want is to understand what happened to me. Part of that involves understanding why it all happened, and a very small part of that involves you.”
“You were beyond awful,” Fernald corrected her. Fiona found herself wishing that he would be a bit more charitable. “Pure evil more like.”
“I don’t know about that.” Carmelita shrugged. She had a slightly vindictive look about her now, despite her obvious nervousness, and Fiona began to think that while she might not be as shrill as she was as a little girl, she might be just as vicious in the right circumstances. “I think people can do some evil things without being evil people, especially when they don’t think they have any other options. Don’t you think?”
Her sly meaning was very much clear enough.
“How dare you?” Fernald barked suddenly, and all at once he seemed almost threatening, in that practiced way he sometimes still could — every bit the thug he would have once acted like, when he was part of Count Olaf’s troupe.
“Fernald,” Fiona interrupted quickly, swivelling around so that she could silently plead with him to keep his temper in check.
Sat between them, Fiona had to quietly wonder whether there was any point to this animosity. It was surely well established by now that all three of them had done some terrible things — some worse than others, some more knowingly than others, some under more or less duress than others. To her, the details didn’t seem to matter anymore; after all, like Fernald had told her, people were like chef’s salads. And yet, it was clear that he was struggling to put his own wisdom into practice, when confronted by this vicious little brat, as he had described her, who he perhaps thought didn’t have the same excuses as him to explain the reasons for her villainy. And, glaring petulantly back at him, Carmelita also failed to understand perhaps that the scary man who once worked for her kidnappers had behaved the way he did for a variety of complicated reasons that she had been too young to understand.
“Your stepfather wouldn’t tell me anything,” Carmelita continued determinedly. “But I already know about what happened at Gregor Anwhistle’s facility, and who was to blame. The thing I don’t understand is what happened after that. Someone carried on looking after what was left of Gregor’s work, enough that the fungus began to thrive down there in the caves. And I think whoever that someone else was also paid a high price for their work.”
Fiona looked back at her brother, and he glanced back at her. For some reason, the look in his eyes suddenly reminded her of the way her stepfather used to look at her, whenever she would ask a particularly difficult question, about that strange question mark in the sea or about what a schism was, or whether her mother really was attacked by a manatee.
Fernald said nothing for a couple of seconds. Then, with surprising speed, he reached out and speared the file violently with his right hook, wrenching it out of Carmelita’s grip and dropping it in Fiona’s lap.
“Some things are better left alone,” he snapped, before addressing his sister. “Come on, Fi. Now it’s really time to go.”