The phone shattered their sleep at two in the morning. A wife answered, heard a stranger’s question, and snapped back with a response so baffling that her husband could only stare into the darkness. But when he asked who had called, her explanation revealed that the entire midnight mystery hinged on whether something two hundred miles away was cle…

A married couple were sound asleep when their telephone rang at 2 a.m. The wife reached for the receiver and listened briefly,

hardly in the mood for a puzzling conversation with a stranger. “How should I know? That’s 200 miles from here!” she said, then hung up. Beside her, her husband was now awake enough to wonder what possible question could have prompted such an oddly specific answer at that hour.

“Who was that?” he asked. His wife had a perfectly straightforward explanation: “How would I know?

Some weirdo asking if the coast was clear!” To the caller, the phrase meant asking whether it was safe to proceed without being noticed. To her, it apparently sounded like a request for conditions at a distant shoreline. One familiar expression, taken completely literally, turned an irritating interruption into the punchline of a bedtime joke—with geography getting the last word.