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

telling nobody but us when to stop and when to go. “How did you find it?”
    “His daughter showed me,” I said. “She’snot flatfooted, by the way. She just wears heavy shoes.”
    “Be sensible,” Theodora said. “How did you get her to show it to you?”
    “I asked her,” I said.
    “She must be onto us,” Theodora said, with a frown. “We’d better act quickly if we want to steal it back.”
    “How do we even know it was stolen?” I asked.
    “Don’t be a numbskull, Snicket. Mrs. Sallis told us it was stolen right off her mantel.”
    “Moxie said the statue belonged to her family. The beast was the mascot of The Stain’d Lighthouse .”
    “That lighthouse wasn’t stained. It just needed painting.”
    “We need to investigate further,” I said.
    “No, we don’t,” Theodora said firmly. “We’re not going to call a distinguished woman a liarand believe the word of a little girl. Particularly one with a ridiculous name.”
    “That reminds me,” I said. “What does the S stand for?”
    “Silly boy,” she said with a shake of her head, and pulled the car to a stop. We were parked in front of a building with a sagging roof and a porch crowded with dying plants in cracked flowerpots. A painted wooden sign, which must have been magnificent to look at centuries ago when it was painted, read THE LOST ARMS. “This is our headquarters,” Theodora said, taking off her helmet and shaking her hair. “This is our lodgings and our nerve center and our home office and our command post. This is where we’ll be staying. Carry the suitcases, Snicket.”
    She bounded up the stairs, and I got out of the roadster and looked around the dreary street. Down the block I could see one other open business, a lonely-looking restaurant calledHungry’s, and in the other direction the street came to a dead end at a tall building with gray carved pillars on either side of the doors. There was no one about, and the only other car I could see was a dented yellow taxi parked in front of the restaurant. I was hungry again, or maybe I was still hungry. Something in me felt empty, certainly, but the more I stood there the less sure I was that it was my stomach, so I leaned into the backseat and pulled out two suitcases—the one that Theodora had said was mine and another, larger one that must have been hers. It was burdensome to carry them up the stairs, and when I entered the Lost Arms, I put them down for a minute to catch my breath in the lobby.
    The room had a complicated smell, as if many people were in it, but there were very few things in the place. There was a small sofa with a table next to it that was even smaller, and it was hard to say from this angle which was grimier.It was probably a tie. On the table was a small wooden bowl of peanuts that were either salted or dusty. There was a small booth in the corner, where a tall man with no hat was talking on the phone, which I looked at wistfully for a moment, hoping he would hang up and give me a chance to use it. There was a desk in a far corner, where Theodora was talking to a thin man who was rubbing his hands together, and right in the center of the room was a tall statue made of plaster, of a woman who wore no clothes and had no arms.
    “I guess you have it worse than I do,” I said to her.
    “Stop dawdling, Snicket,” Theodora called to me, and I trudged our suitcases to the desk. The thin man was handing two keys to Theodora, who handed me one of them.
    “Welcome to the Lost Arms,” the man said in a voice as thin as he was. His manner remindedme of a word I’d been taught and then had forgotten. It was on the tip of my tongue, as was one last cookie crumb. “I’m the owner and operator of this establishment, Prosper Lost. You can call me Prosper, and you can call me anytime you have a problem. The phone is right over there.”
    “Thank you,” I said, thinking I’d probably just walk over to the desk rather than wait for the phone.
    “As you