Read Online "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) by Lemony Snicket - Free Book Online

Moxie said, “although I think the cheese might be Asiago.”
    “Even better,” I said, and I followed herinto 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 mymouth, and leaned back in my chair, which was just as wobbly.
    Moxie finished her cranberry juice. “So?”
    “Do you know,” I asked her, “that orecchiette is Italian for ‘little ears’? I know it’s just the shape of the noodle, but some people don’t like the idea of eating a big bowl of—”
    “That’s not what I mean, and you know it, Snicket. Why does someone want a statue everyone else has forgotten?”
    “I wouldn’t know,” I said.
    She reached over and opened up her typewriter to add a few sentences to her summary. “There’s something going on that we can’t see.”
    “That’s usually the case,” I said. “The map is not the territory.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It’s an adult expression for the muddle we’re in.”
    “Adults never tell children anything.”
    “Children never tell adults anything either,” I said. “The children of this world and the adults of this world are in entirely separate boats and only drift near each other when we need a ride from someone or when someone needs us to wash our hands.”
    Moxie smiled at this and began to type. I meant to stack the dirty plates in the sink, but I liked staying at the table and watching her at work. “Do you like that?” I asked her. “Typing up what happens in the world?”
    “Yes, I do,” Moxie said. “Do you like what you do, Lemony Snicket?”
    I stared out the kitchen’s lone window. The moon had risen like a wide eye. “I do what I do,” I said, “in order to do something else.”
    I was certain she would ask more questions, but we were interrupted by the lonely and familiar clanging of the bell. Moxie frowned at a clock with a face like that of an angry seahorse. “There’s not usually an alarm at this hour,” she said.
    “When does it usually ring?”
    “It depends. For a while it seemed like it was ringing less and less frequently, but lately it’s started up again like gangbusters.”
    “Who rings it, anyway?”
    Moxie stood on her chair to reach a high shelf. “The bell tower is over on Offshore Island, where there used to be a fancy boarding school that everyone called ‘top drawer.’”
    “I always thought that was a curious expression,” I said. “After all, the most interesting things are usually in the bottom drawer.”
    Moxie smiled in agreement. “Back then the bell was rung by the student valedictorian, but Wade Academy closed some time ago. Now the bell is rung by someone from the Coast Guard, I think, or maybe it’s the Octopus Council.” She took two masks down from the shelf andhanded one to me. “Don’t worry, Snicket. We have plenty of spares. You won’t get salt lung.”
    “Salt lung?”
    “That’s what the bell is for,” she explained. “When the wind rises, it carries salt deposits left behind on the floor of the sea, which can be dangerous to breathe. The masks filter the salt out of the air.”
    “I heard the masks were for water