"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) Read Online Free PDF

Beast,” I reminded her.
    “Oh, right,” she said, and walked over to a table covered in a sheet. “The Bombinating Beast was sort of the mascot of the newspaper. Its body made the S in Stain’d . Legend has it that hundreds of years ago Lady Mallahan slew the Bombinating Beast on one of her voyages. So my family has quite the collection of Bombinating merchandise, although no one’s ever cared about it except—”
    “Snicket!” Theodora’s voice came from the bottom of the staircase. “Time to go!”
    “Just one minute!” I called back.



“Right this minute, Snicket!” Theodora answered, but I didn’t leave right that minute. I stayed as Moxie drew back the sheet to reveal another table piled with items nobodywanted. The sea horse face of the Bombinating Beast wasn’t any less hideous no matter how many times I saw it. There were three stuffed Bombinating Beasts that you might give to a baby you wanted to frighten, and a deck of cards with Bombinating Beasts printed on the back. There were Bombinating Beast coffee mugs and Bombinating Beast cereal bowls stacked up with Bombinating Beast napkins on Bombinating Beast place mats. But beside this beastly meal, next to the Bombinating Beast ashtray and the Bombinating Beast candleholders, was an object very shiny and black in color. Moxie had called it a gimcrack, and Mrs. Murphy Sallis had called it a priceless item. It was about the size of a bottle of milk and said to be valued at upward of a great deal of money. It was the Bombinating Beast, the statue we were looking for, as dusty and forgotten as the rest of the items in the room.
    “Snicket!” Theodora called again, but I didn’tanswer her. I spoke to the statue instead. “Hello,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
    Moxie looked at me and smiled. “I guess your mystery is solved, Snicket,” she said, but that, too, was the wrong thing to say.



CHAPTER FOUR
    “While you were mucking about with that flatfooted girl,” Theodora said to me as she started her roadster and put on her helmet, “I managed to solve the mystery. I have reason to believe that the Bombinating Beast is in that very lighthouse.”
    “It is,” I said.
    “Then we’re in agreement,” Theodora said. “I had quite a talk with that Mr. Mallahan. He told me he used to work in the newspaperbusiness but lately has had quite the run of bad luck! Aha! ”
    My chaperone looked at me like I should aha! back, but all I could manage was a quiet “ah.” I made a note to ha later. We drove past the mansion toward the center of town. Moxie was right. It was an unpeopled place. Stain’d-by-the-Sea looked like it had been a regular town once, with shops full of items, and restaurants full of food, and citizens looking for one or the other. But now the whole place had faded to gray. Many of the buildings had windows that were broken or boarded up, and the sidewalks were uncared for, with great cracks in the concrete, and empty bottles and cans rolling around in the bored wind. Whole blocks were completely empty, with no cars except our own and not a single pedestrian on the streets. Some ways away was a building shaped like a pen that towered over the rest of the town, as if Stain’d-by-the-Sea were about tobe crossed out. I didn’t like it. It looked like anyone could move in and do anything they wanted without anyone stopping them. The Clusterous Forest almost looked friendlier.
    “No job, no wife, a man like that can get desperate,” Theodora was saying. “Desperate enough to steal a very valuable statue from one of his enemies. When I asked him if there was anything in his house that was worth upward of a great deal of money, he looked at me strangely and said something about his only daughter. I think he has it hidden away somewhere.”
    “It’s upstairs,” I said, “on a table covered in a sheet.”
    “What?” Theodora stopped at a red light. I had seen no other cars on the road. Only the stoplights were around,