"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) (7 page)

I watched her go into the Lost Arms. It is true there are more important things than dinner, but it is difficult to keep those things in mind when you haven’t had dinner. I allowed enough time for Theodora to reach her room, and then I walked into the Lost Arms myself, wondering who in this small, fading town could possibly be watching us. Prosper Lost was standing under the statue of the armless woman, an eager smile on his face. I remembered the word now that had been on the tip of my tongue. It was “obsequious,” and it refers to people who behave like one’s
servants even when they aren’t. It might sound like that would be pleasant, but it is not.

“Lovely evening, Mr. Snicket,” he said to me.

“More or less,” I agreed, looking across the lobby. Theodora had said she’d called the mansion, which meant the phone had not been in use. I hoped this was the case again, but a woman with a long fur stole around her neck was talking into it. “Is there another telephone anywhere nearby?” I asked.

Prosper Lost gave a small shrug. “Regrettably, no.”

“Might you be able to give me a ride someplace?”

“Unregrettably, yes,” Prosper said, “for a small fee, of course.”

There may be a town in which lint in my pocket would count as a small fee, but I knew that Stain’d-by-the-Sea was not that town. I gave Prosper the sort of “Thank you” that does not mean “You have been very helpful” but means
“Please go away,” and he did. I walked back out of the Lost Arms and stood out on the street wondering what to do, when a car pulled around the corner and stopped right in front of me. It was the dented yellow taxi I had seen earlier. Up close its dents looked worse, with one of the doors so banged up I could scarcely read the words BELLEROPHON TAXI printed on the side.

“Need a taxi, friend?” asked the driver, and it took me a moment to see that he was a little younger than I was. He had a friendly smile and a small scab on his cheek, like someone had given him a hard poke, and he was wearing a blue cap too large for him with BELLEROPHON TAXI printed on it in less dented lettering.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any money,” I said.

“Oh, that’s OK,” the boy replied. “With the way things are going in this town, we generally work just for tips.”

“Do they let you drive at your age?” I asked.

“We’re substituting for our father tonight,” he replied. “He’s sick.”

“
We
? Who’s
we
?”

The boy beckoned me over, and I leaned into the taxi and saw that he was sitting on a small pile of books to reach the steering wheel. Below him, crouched on the floor of the car, was a boy who looked a little younger, with his hands on the car’s pedals. His smile was slightly wicked around the edges, as if he were the sort of person who occasionally poked his brother too hard.

“
We
is my brother and me,” he said in a very high voice. “I’m Pecuchet Bellerophon, and he’s my brother, Bouvard.”

I told them my name and tried to pronounce theirs. “Nothing personal, but your names make my tongue tired. What do people call you?”

“They call me Pip,” said the brother holding the steering wheel, “and him Squeak.”

“Because I work the brakes,” squeaked Squeak.

“Of course,” I said. “Well, Pip and Squeak, I need to get to the lighthouse.”

“The Mallahan place?” Pip said. “Sure, hop in.”

I looked at the books he was sitting on. They looked like they were from the library, and some of them were books I admired very much. “Are you really sure you’re old enough to drive?” I said.

“Are you old enough to go to the edge of town by yourself?” Pip replied. “Come on, get in.”

I got in, and Squeak hit the gas. Pip steered the car expertly through the crumbly, half-deserted blocks of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I spotted a grocery store, empty but open, and a department store with mannequins in the window that wanted to go home. The sun was beginning to set behind the tall tower in the shape of a pen. I tried to think about the statue of the Bombinating Beast, but my mind wandered, first to the caves I had seen, where frightened octopi were giving up
their ink, and then to a bigger, deeper hole back in the city. I told myself to stop thinking about things I couldn’t do anything about, and looked out the window as the taxi passed the Sallis mansion and continued on up the hill.

“Has your father ever driven Mrs. Sallis anyplace?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Pip replied. “When the Sallis family was in town, they had their own chauffeur.”

“Aren’t they in town now?”

“If they are, nobody told us,” Squeak said from the floor of the car.

In a few minutes we had passed the small white cottage, and Squeak brought the taxi to an expert stop in front of the lighthouse door. “Do you want us to stick around and drive you back into town later?” Pip asked me.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing,
coming out here without a way to get back,” Pip said, and reached around to open my door. “How about a tip?”

“Here’s a tip,” I said. “Next time you’re at the library, check out a book about a champion of the world.”

“By that author with all the chocolate?”

“Yes, but this one’s even better. It has some very good chapters in it.”

“That’s the kind of tip we can use,” Squeak said. “Pip reads to me between fares.”

I shut the door behind me and gave the window of the cab a knock good-bye. Pip waved, and the taxi drove off. I waited until the sound of the engine had faded, and then stood for a moment looking up at the lighthouse. I hoped the same thing the two substitute drivers of Bellerophon Taxi hoped: that I knew what I was doing. I doubted it. I heard the eerie rustle of the wind through the seaweed of the Clusterous Forest,
far below me, and then in front of me the more ordinary sound of a door opening.

“Lemony Snicket,” said a voice.

I turned to look at the girl who had spoken. “What’s the news, Moxie?”

“You tell me,” she said. “You’re the one who showed up at my door.”

I squinted into the dim sky until I could see the faint, thick line of the hawser stretched out above me and angling down the hill. Why not, I thought, and turned back to Moxie Mallahan. “I’d like to extend an invitation,” I said.

She gave me a small smile. “Oh yes? For what?”

“For a burglary taking place this evening at your home,” I said, and walked through the door.

CHAPTER SIX

“That’s a very kind invitation, Snicket,” Moxie
said to me, “but I’m not sure if it counts as a burglary if the item being stolen isn’t treasured by its owner.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

Moxie blinked at me under the brim of her hat. “You know what I mean, Snicket. You’re here to steal the Bombinating Beast, aren’t you?”

“How did you know?”

Moxie walked to her typewriter, which sat
in its usual spot on the stairway, with a sheet of paper still rolled into it. She scanned the paper to reread what she had typed earlier. “A stranger knocked on my door,” she said, “with an older woman who briefly pretended to be his wife. The stranger asked to see a particular item and was clearly surprised that I showed it to him. And here you are, talking about burglary. So?”

“You’re a very good journalist,” I told her.

“Flattery bores me, Snicket. Are you here to steal the statue or not?”

“Yes,” I decided to say. “Do you mind terribly?”

Her smile got quite a bit bigger. “Not at all,” she said, and leaned against the open door of the lighthouse. She adjusted a knob on her typewriter and then looked me straight in the eye. She wasn’t taller than I was, but I still had to look up to meet her gaze, as I had been taught never to do. “Lemony Snicket, I think it’s
time to tell me exactly what’s going on.”

“Are you really writing this up for the newspaper?” I asked. “I thought
The Stain’d Lighthouse
was out of business.”

“I’m staying in practice as a journalist,” she said. “Then when I leave this town, I’ll be ready to join a newspaper.”

“When your mother sends for you,” I said.

“Stop stalling, Snicket. What exactly is going on?”

“There’s someone who has taken an interest in the statue of the Bombinating Beast,” I said, protecting the name of my client, as I had been requested to do. “This person has said that the statue is theirs and is worth upward of a great deal of money. I don’t think that’s true. I think the statue has been in your family for a very long time, since the days of Lady Mallahan, and I think that if it were very valuable, it wouldn’t be covered in a sheet with a bunch of dusty, forgotten items. But it doesn’t matter what I
think. So I’m going to stay here until midnight, when my associate will arrive, and we will take the Bombinating Beast and escape down the hill on the hawser, and then my assignment will be over.”

Moxie had been typing at a furious pace, but now she stopped and looked at me. “This person,” she said, “who is interested in the Bombinating Beast—do they live here in Stain’d-by-the-Sea?”

“Yes,” I said, incorrectly. “Why do you ask?”

Moxie walked across the room to a small desk and, with some difficulty, pulled open a drawer stuffed with papers. There is a drawer like this in every house in the world. She sifted through the papers with an expert eye and finally found what she was looking for. “Look at this thing,” she said.

This thing
was a telegram, dated six months before my graduation. It was addressed to Moxie’s father, sent from a town I’d never heard of.
In the old code of telegram writing, the end of each sentence was marked with STOP, which made the message even more confusing than it already was.

GREETINGS SIR STOP

I AM VERY INTERESTED IN A CERTAIN

STATUE I BELIEVE IS IN YOUR

HOME STOP I BELIEVE IT IS CALLED

THE BOMBINATING BEAST STOP

IF YOU ARE WILLING TO SELL IT TO

ME I BELIEVE YOU WILL BE PLEASED

WITH THE PRICE I AM WILLING TO

PAY STOP PLEASE REPLY AT YOUR

EARLIEST CONVENIENCE STOP END

MESSAGE

“‘I believe is in your home,’” I read out loud. “‘I believe it is called the Bombinating Beast. I believe you will be pleased.’ That’s a lot
of belief. What did your father reply?”

“My father never saw this telegram,” Moxie said. “When it was sent, I’d already started handling all his correspondence.”

“Well, did you reply?”

“I couldn’t. Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only telegram dispatch closed its doors due to ink shortages, the day after this telegram arrived.”

“So for all you know, this person has tried to send you many more telegrams.”

“For all I know, yes.”

“Did you investigate this at all?”

Moxie shook her head. “There wasn’t much to investigate,” she said. “The telegram is unsigned, and that town is quite a ways away. And, frankly, six months ago I had far more pressing matters than a statue nobody cares about.”

I didn’t press her about her pressing matters. “The writer of the telegram and the person who hired me might be the same person.”

“Whoever they are,” Moxie said, “they’re welcome to that old thing. Nobody has to go to the trouble of burglary.”

“Not according to my chaperone,” I said.

“Well, in that case, what are we going to do until midnight?”

At last it was a question I could answer. “I was hoping we could have dinner,” I said. “I’ve scarcely eaten today.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have much in the house,” Moxie said. “My father said he was going to go to the market today, but he never got out of his robe. I’m afraid all we have is a great deal of wilted basil.”

“Do you have a bulb of garlic, a lemon, a cup of walnuts, Parmesan cheese, pasta of some kind, and a fair amount of olive oil?”

“I think so,” Moxie said, “although I think the cheese might be Asiago.”

“Even better,” I said, and I followed her
into the lighthouse’s small kitchen, which was piled with dirty dishes and stacks of typewritten pages. Moxie cleared away the mess, and I put the walnuts in the oven to toast along with some peeled garlic coated in olive oil. I put a pot of water on to boil while Moxie looked in the fridge for something to drink. I was hoping for root beer, but all she could find was some cranberry juice, which tasted all right, but just all right. Together we plucked the leaves of the basil from the stems, grated the cheese, and squeezed the juice from the lemon, pausing to pick out the seeds with the tines of a fork decorated with an image of the Bombinating Beast. Then I put the pasta into the boiling water and mixed the remaining ingredients together, and soon we were sitting at the small wooden table, which wobbled slightly from a chipped leg, eating big bowls of orecchiette al pesto. It was just what I needed. I finished, wiped my
mouth, and leaned back in my chair, which was just as wobbly.