"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) by Lemony Snicket Page B

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 Ithink. 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 lotof 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,”