Lemony Snicket - When Did You See Her Last?

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”

“When Did You See Her Last?”

ART BY SETH

When Did You See Her Last?

First published in Great Britain 2013

by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building

1 Nicholas Road

London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2013 Lemony Snicket

Art copyright © 2013 Seth

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: When Did You See Her Last?

by Lemony Snicket reprinted by arrangement with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

Illustrations published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company,

New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted

978 1 4052 5622 3

eISBN: 978 1 7803 1619 2

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed and bound in Italy

47912/1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

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EGMONT LUCKY COIN

Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street.

He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

TO: Pocket

FROM: LS

FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; kidnapping, investigations of; Hangfire; skip tracing; laudanum; doppelgängers; et cetera

2/4

cc: VFDhq

CHAPTER ONE

There was a town, and there was a statue, and there was a person who had been kidnapped. While I was in the town, I was hired to rescue this person, and I thought the statue was gone forever. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “How could someone who was missing be in two places at once?” Instead, I asked the wrong question—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the second.

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

It was cold and it was morning and I needed a haircut. I didn’t like it. When you need a hair-cut, it looks like you have no one to take care of you. In my case it was true. There was no one taking care of me at the Lost Arms, the hotel in which I found myself living. My room was called the Far East Suite, although it was not a suite, and I shared it with a woman who was called S. Theodora Markson, although I did not know what the S stood for. It was not a nice room, and I tried not to spend too much time in it, except when I was sleeping, trying to sleep, pretend-ing to sleep, or eating a meal. Theodora cooked most of our meals herself, although “cooking” is too fancy a word for what she did. What she did was purchase groceries from a half-empty store a few blocks away and then warm them up on a small, heated plate that plugged into the wall. That morning breakfast was a fried egg, which Theodora had served to me on a towel from the bathroom. She kept forgetting to buy plates,

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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”

although she occasionally remembered to blame me for letting her forget. Most of the egg stuck to the towel, so I didn’t eat much of it, but I had managed to find an apple that wasn’t too bruised and now I sat in the lobby of the Lost Arms with its sticky core in my hand. There wasn’t much else in the lobby. There was a man named Prosper Lost, who ran the place with a smile that made me step back as if it were something crawling out of a drawer, and there was a phone in a small booth in the corner that was nearly always in use, and there was a plaster statue of a woman without clothes or arms. She needed a sweater, a long one without sleeves. I liked to sit beneath her on a dirty sofa and think. If you want to know the truth, I was thinking about Ellington Feint, a girl with strange, curved eye-brows like question marks, and green eyes, and a smile that might have meant anything. I had not seen that smile for some time. Ellington Feint had run off, clutching a statue in the shape of the

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ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

Bombinating Beast. The beast was a very terri-ble creature in very old myths, whom sailors and citizens were worried about encountering. All I was worried about was encountering Ellington. I did not know where she was or when I might see her again. The phone rang right on schedule.

“Hello?” I said.

There was a careful pause before she said “Good morning.” “Good morning,” she said. “I’m conducting a voluntary survey. ‘A survey’ means you’ll be answering questions, and ‘vol-untary’ means—”

“I know what voluntary means,” I interrupted, as planned. “It means I’ll be volunteering.”

“Exactly, sir,” she said. It was funny to hear my sister call me sir. “Is now a good time to answer some questions?”

“Yes, I have a few minutes,” I said.

“The first question is, how many people are currently in your household?”

I looked at Prosper Lost, who was across

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“WHEN DID YOU SEE HER LAST?”

the room, standing at his desk and looking at his fingernails. Soon he would notice I was on the phone and find some reason to stand where he might eavesdrop better. “I live alone,” I said, “but only for the time being.”

“I know just what you mean.” I knew from my sister’s reply that she was also in a place with-out privacy. Lately it had not been safe to talk on the phone, and not only because of eaves-droppers. There was a man named Hangfire, a villain who had become the focus of my inves-tigations. Hangfire had the unnerving ability to imitate anyone’s voice, which meant you could not always be sure whom you were talking to on the telephone. You also couldn’t be sure when Hangfire would turn up again, or what his scheme might be. It was entirely too many things to be unsure about.

“In fact,” my sister continued, “things in my own household have become so complicated that I am unsure I can get to the library anymore.”

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ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, which was code for being sorry to hear that. Recently my sister and I had been communicating through the library system. Now she seemed to be telling me that it would no longer be possible.

“My second question is, do you prefer visit-ing a museum alone or with a companion?”

“With a companion,” I said quickly. “Nobody should go to a museum alone.”

“What if you could not find your usual com-panion,” she asked, “because he was very far away?”

I wasted a few seconds staring at the receiver in my hand, as if I could peer through the little holes and see all the way to the city, where my sister was, like me, working as an apprentice. “Then you should find another companion,” I said, “rather than visiting a museum by your-self.”

“What if there were no other suitable com-panions?” she asked, and then her voice changed,

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as if someone had walked into the room. “That’s my third question, sir.”

“Then you should not go to the museum at all,” I said, but then I, too, was interrupted, by the figure of S. Theodora Markson com-ing down the stairs. Her hair came first, a wild tangle as if several heads of hair were having a wrestling match, and the rest of her followed, frowning and tall. There are many mysteries I have never solved, and the hair of my chaperone is perhaps my most curious unsolved case.