"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) (12 page)

Mrs. Sallis was tied to a chair, one of the chairs I had seen in the library, with large, puffy cushions that were now ruined. But Mrs. Sallis
wasn’t ruined. As soon as Moxie got her hands free, she reached up and tore off the blindfold, which I thought would calm Mrs. Sallis down. Instead she went ape, an expression I’ve always liked, although there was no ape who was ever as loud as she was.

“
Where is he?
” she cried.

“Who?” Moxie said.

“There’s nobody here,” I said, but this was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes widened further, and she looked so frightened that when she had looked frightened before, it no longer counted as looking frightened.

“
Get out of here!
” she screamed.
“Leave this house at once!”

“I was hoping for ‘Thank you for rescuing me’ instead, Mrs. Sallis,” I said.

Moxie gave me a curious look. “That’s not Mrs. Sallis,” she said.

There was still plenty of water in the basement, and I felt it soaking me from the knees on
down. If someone wanted to torture me until I told them a critical piece of information, all they would have to do is get my socks wet. It feels terrible. The water was too dirty for me to tell if the old woman was wearing socks as she limped up from her chair and drew herself up to her full height and looked at us imperiously. “Imperiously” is a word you may not know, but you’ve seen it on the faces of people who believe themselves to be much, much better than you are.

“I am Mrs. Murphy Sallis,” she said, “and I command you to get out of my home.”

“You’re not Mrs. Murphy Sallis,” Moxie insisted, and then turned to me. “In fact, there is no Mrs. Murphy Sallis. I’ve known Mrs. Sallis my entire life, and her first name is Dot.”

“This is Dame Sally Murphy,” I said, “Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s most famous actress. She’s a local legend.”

The old woman’s expression changed, like
water was also rushing out of her face. She sat back down in the chair with a squishy thud and nodded sullenly at us. “It’s always nice to meet a fan of the theater,” she said.

“I thought she looked familiar,” Moxie said. “
The Stain’d Lighthouse
put her picture on the front page a dozen times. But how did you know her, Snicket? What is going on? Why did she say she was Mrs. Sallis? When did you know she was an impostor?”

“Let’s let her answer,” I said.

“
I don’t have to tell you!
” the old woman shrieked. It was probably the sort of performance that people loved at the Stain’d Playhouse. “
Leave me alone! Have respect for your elders!
”

Respecting one’s elders is difficult enough, but when they are soaked with water and have proved themselves to be dishonest, it is nearly impossible. I leaned down to look her in the eye. “Where is Ellington?” I said. “Where is the Bombinating Beast?”

“
Leave at once!
” she shrieked, but she no longer looked imperious. She looked frightened. She had not learned to save it for later, or perhaps she had, and very frightening things had happened before I’d gotten here. Perhaps they’d even happened before I arrived in town.

“Why did you tell me the statue was yours?” I asked her. “Who put you in this basement?”

“
He
did,” she replied. “Now get out! I have my family to think of!”

I put a hand on her damp shoulder. “I think I can help you,” I said, “but you must tell me what’s going on.”

“You can’t help me,” the old woman snarled, and shook off my hand. “
He’s
the only one who can help me. You’re just a child.”

I was tempted to take off my wet socks, and not only because they were uncomfortable. “I’m part of an organization,” I said, “that I’m sure can be of service.”

Sally Murphy’s eyes widened, and I could tell
she was even more frightened than she had been. “
Get out!
” she screamed, and like many actresses she practiced this line over and over again. “
Get out! Get out! Get out!
”

“I meant to tell you,” I said. “My deafness was cured by a treatment of root beer, so you don’t have to shout at me.”

“
Get out!
” she continued to shout, and I got out. I turned away from the old woman and stalked up the stairs, almost tripping on Moxie, who was sitting on one step, furiously pounding away at her typewriter.

“So?” she asked.

“So?”

“What organization were you talking about, exactly?” she asked me, her eyes excited and careful.

“I can’t tell you,” I said, moving past her.

She snapped her typewriter closed and hurried after me up the steps and through the vacant kitchen. “Why not?” she said to me.

I continued through the mansion, my footsteps echoing in the empty rooms. The Sallis mansion had been empty for a long time, so nobody noticed when someone had snuck in. They’d used a few scraps of furniture and a few dull books to make a fake library, and hired Sally Murphy to make a fake Mrs. Sallis, and then hired Theodora and myself, who wouldn’t know the house was supposed to be empty or recognize Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s local legend. The plan was to get us to steal the Bombinating Beast and then have us caught by the Officers Mitchum. With us in jail and Sally Murphy drowned in the basement, the villain would have everything he wanted, including the statue. But I had mucked up the plan by dropping off the hawser. And then Ellington Feint had stolen the statue for her own mysterious reasons, and now she was in the middle of this treachery, too. It was just a small wooden object—
that old thing
, Moxie had called it—but it was causing danger wherever it went,
the way an octopus is generally harmless but can stain everyone with ink in an instant.

By now I was at the front door, and Moxie was still asking me questions. “Where are you going? Why won’t you talk to me? What’s going on?”

I stopped on the driveway, outside the mansion. “I don’t know what’s going on,” I said, “but it’s dangerous. We just had to rescue a woman from drowning.”

“She didn’t seem like she wanted to be rescued,” Moxie replied. “She said only
he
could help her, even though
he
put her in the basement to begin with. Who is
he
?”

“Someone who sounded like me,” I said.

“What?”

“I think,” I said, thinking out loud, “that his name is Hangfire.”

“What?” Moxie said again, and then “Who? Why? How? Tell me the story, Snicket.”

I thought about Theodora, who was probably
angry at me all over again. It was afternoon, and the statue had not arrived, as I had promised it would. I had to stop making promises. “I don’t know the story,” I told Moxie. “This whole town is a mystery. It’s something we can’t see, remember?”

“I’m a journalist,” Moxie said. “I can help you solve it.”

“Then go back to the cottage,” I said, “and look for clues. There was someone living there, a girl a little older than us. I’ve got to find her.”

“A girl?” she repeated with a frown. “What does she have to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and started to walk down the driveway.

“Come home with me,” Moxie said. “You can dry off, and we can compare notes.”

“I’ve got to get into town,” I said.

Moxie frowned again and put her hands on her hips. “Lemony Snicket, you can shoo me
off to Handkerchief Heights. But I know more about this town than you do. You can’t solve this mystery alone.”

“I know I can’t,” I admitted, but I started walking alone toward the road.

CHAPTER TEN

By the time I reached the streets of Stain’d-by-
the-Sea, the town still quiet and unpeopled and my socks still wet and squishy, I had figured out what to look for. At first it seemed like there was too much to find. I had to find whoever had broken into the Sallis mansion. I had to find whoever had tried to drown Dame Sally Murphy. I had to find Ellington Feint, and her father, and whoever had captured him. And I had to find out why all this had happened. But
halfway down a gray and empty block, I realized all these beads were strung together. Everyone was after the Bombinating Beast, and if I got my hands on that black, spooky statue, then everything else would try to find me instead. The deserted blocks of Stain’d-by-the-Sea seemed like an easier place to find one mysterious item than a bustling city full of them. I thought of all the mysterious items back in the city, and how difficult it would be for someone I knew to get her hands on one in particular, particularly without my help.

I wanted to see her. Communicating through made-up book titles was not enough. I could almost hear her saying to me, “Well, L, where was the last place you saw this statue?”

“On the table,” I imagined saying, “in Handkerchief Heights, right before the Officers Mitchum knocked on the door.”

“And what was happening while you were answering the door?” She always had a knack for
knowing the right question to ask.

“Ellington was wrapping the statue in newspaper. Then she did the same for a bag of coffee. She gave me the coffee with Theodora’s address on it and carried the other package with all the other things she was mailing.”

“And did she drop it in the mailbox?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

“And did you see the address she wrote on the newspaper?”

“No,” I said, “but she must have been mailing it to herself.”

“She could have been mailing it to an accomplice.”

“She was living in that cottage all by herself,” I said. “Besides, if Ellington had an accomplice, she never would have asked me to help her.”

“Well, she didn’t mail it to Handkerchief Heights, or the package would have been there
in the morning. You or Moxie would have found it. Think, L.”

“You know I hate it when you call me L.”

“Where did she mail it?”

I took a long sip of root beer and thought. As long as I was having an imaginary conversation, I saw no reason why I couldn’t have an imaginary root beer to help me think. “To the one reason she ventures into town,” I said finally.

“And where is that?”

“Black Cat Coffee. Corner of Caravan and Parfait.”

“Good work, L. You’re doing all right by yourself.”

“Are you?”

She didn’t answer, of course, and she didn’t talk to me the rest of the way. I still didn’t know my way around all the streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, so my steps were unsure. Normally one could ask directions of passersby, but without a soul on the streets, there was nobody to ask;
and normally one can find a map at a hotel, but I didn’t want to go to the Lost Arms. Theodora was likely there, devoting her time, effort, and chutzpah to a much better scolding than the one I had been given the previous night. So I found my own way. I headed toward the tall pen-shaped building and eventually came across Caravan, a wide street, empty as all the others, that wandered its way around town like it didn’t know where it was going either. Finally I hit Parfait, a narrow lane with a cold wind, and there was Black Cat Coffee, the sole business on a block that was otherwise boarded up. The only sign of life was a large wooden sign that didn’t even have the name of the place, just the large, stenciled cat I recognized from the bag of coffee.

When I pushed open the doors and walked in, my first thought was that there was finally somewhere in Stain’d-by-the-Sea that was bustling with life. My second thought was that there was nobody there. Black Cat Coffee was a long,
narrow room with an enormous counter in the center, but not one person was sitting on one of the stools. Behind the counter was a mass of shiny machinery of a sort I had not seen, with tubes and levers and spouts and panels all loud and busy with activity, but there was nobody there making it go. And in the corner was a piano playing music, but when I stepped closer, I saw it was a player piano, which can play all by itself. It sounded like it might have been the same music Ellington had been playing in the cottage, but perhaps that was just because I was thinking about her. I had forgotten to ask her the name of the tune. Well, there was no one to ask here, not anything. There was no one to ask if there was a package waiting for Ellington Feint. There was no one to ask if Ellington Feint had been there already to collect the package. And there was no one to ask to see a menu.

“Hello?” I asked, which is what everyone asks when they enter a room they are surprised to
find empty. I stepped closer to the counter and saw three large brass buttons, right in a row, that had been built into a place on the counter where there were no seats. The buttons were each labeled with a brass letter:
A
,
B,
and
C
.

When I pressed
C
, the machinery behind the counter whirred to life. Steam clouded out from a row of holes toward the top of the machinery, and an enormous round bulb, like a lightbulb but made of metal, began to quake noisily. A small door opened, and a funnel came out on a long metal spring, and soon something was pouring from the bulb through the funnel into something that looked like a radio. Finally, a metal claw emerged from someplace with a small white saucer holding a small white cup, which got filled to the brim with something that smelled dark and familiar. The claw deposited the cup and saucer right in front of the
C
button, where it sat steaming at me.