But Violet was already tying her hair out of her eyes again, and looking around at the ruins of the V.F.D. headquarters. “I’ll need that ukulele that you took from the caravan,” she said to Klaus, “and that half-melted candelabra over there by the dining room table.”
Klaus took the ukulele from his coat pocket and handed it to his sister, and then walked over to the table to retrieve the strange, melted object. “Unless you need any further assistance,” he said, “I think I might go examine the wreckage of the library and see if any documents have survived. We might as well learn as much from this headquarters as we can.”
“Good idea,” Quigley said, and reached into his backpack. He brought out a notebook much like his own, except it had a dark blue cover. “I have a spare notebook,” he said. “You might be interested in starting a commonplace book of your own.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Klaus said. “I’ll write down anything I find. Do you want to join the search?”
“I think I’ll stay here,” Quigley said, looking at Violet. “I’ve heard quite a bit about Violet Baudelaire’s marvelous inventions, and I’d like to see her at work.”
Klaus nodded, and walked off to the iron archway marking the entrance of the ruined library, while Violet blushed and leaned down to pick up one of the forks that had survived the fire.
It is one of the great sadnesses of the Baudelaire case that Violet never got to meet a man named C. M. Kornbluth, an associate of mine who spent most of his life living and working in the Valley of Four Drafts as a mechanical instructor at the V.F.D. headquarters. Mr. Kornbluth was a quiet and secretive man, so secretive that no one ever knew who he was, where he came from, or even what the C or the M stood for, and he spent much of his time holed up in his dormitory room writing strange stories, or gazing sadly out the windows of the kitchen. The one thing that put Mr. Kornbluth in a good mood would be a particularly promising mechanical student. If a young man showed an interest in deep sea radar, Mr. Kornbluth would take off his glasses and smile. If a young woman brought him a staple gun she had built, Mr. Kornbluth would clap his hands in excitement. And if a pair of twins asked him how to properly reroute some copper wiring, he would take a paper bag out of his pocket and offer some pistachio nuts to anyone who happened to be around. So, when I think of Violet Baudelaire standing in the wreckage of the V.F.D. headquarters, carefully taking the strings off the ukulele and bending some of the forks in half, I can imagine Mr. Kornbluth, even though he and his pistachios are long gone, turning from the window, smiling at the Baudelaire inventor, and saying, “Beatrice, come over here! Look at what this girl is making!”
“What are you making?” Quigley asked.
“Something that will get us up that waterfall,” Violet replied. “I only wish that Sunny were here. Her teeth would be perfect to slice these ukulele strings into halves.”
“I might have something that could help,” Quigley said, looking through his backpack. “When I was in Dr. Orwell’s office, I found these fake fingernails. They’re a horrible shade of pink, but they’re quite sharp.”
Violet took a fingernail from Quigley and looked at it carefully. “I think Count Olaf was wearing these,” she said, “as part of his receptionist disguise. It’s so strange that you have been following in our footsteps all this time, and yet we never even knew you were alive.”
“I knew you were alive,” Quigley said. “Jacques Snicket told me all about you, Klaus, Sunny, and even your parents. He knew them quite well before you were born.”
“I thought so,” Violet said, cutting the ukulele strings. “In the photograph we found, my parents are standing with Jacques Snicket and another man.”
“He’s probably Jacques’s brother,” Quigley said. “Jacques told me that he was working closely with his two siblings on an important file.”
“The Snicket file,” Violet said. “We were hoping to find it here.”
Quigley looked up at the frozen waterfall. “Maybe whoever signaled us will know where it is,” he said.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Violet said. “Please take off your shoes.”
“My shoes?” Quigley asked.
“The waterfall will be very slippery,” Violet explained, “so I’m using the ukulele strings to tie these bent forks to the toe area, to make fork-assisted climbing shoes. We’ll hold two more forks in our hands. Tines of the forks are almost as sharp as Sunny’s teeth, so the fork-assisted climbing shoes will easily dig into the ice with each step, and enable us to keep our balance.”
“But what’s the candelabra for?” Quigley asked, unlacing his shoes.
“I’m going to use it as an ice tester,” Violet said. “A moving body of water, such as a waterfall, is rarely completely frozen. There are probably places on that slope where there is only a thin layer of ice, particularly with False Spring on its way. If we stuck our forks through the ice and hit water, we’d lose our grip and fall. So I’ll tap on the ice with the candelabra before each step, to find the solid places we should climb.”
“It sounds like a difficult journey,” Quigley said.
“No more difficult than climbing up the Vertical Flame Diversion,” Violet said, tying a fork onto Quigley’s shoe. “I’m using the Sumac knot, so it should hold tight. Now, all we need is Klaus’s shoes, and—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think this might be important,” Klaus said, and Violet turned to see that her brother had returned. He was holding the dark blue notebook in one hand and a small, burnt piece of paper in the other. “I found this scrap of paper in a pile of ashes,” he said. “It’s from some kind of code book.”
“What does it say?” Violet asked.
“‘In the e flagration resulting in the destruction of a sanc,’” Klaus read, “‘ teers should avail themselves of Verbal Fri Dialogue, which is concealed accordingly.’”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Quigley said. “Do you think it’s in code?”
“Sort of,” Klaus said. “Parts of the sentence are burned away, so you have to figure the sentence out as if it’s encoded. ‘Flagration’ is probably the last part of the word ‘conflagration,’ a fancy word for fire, and ‘sanc’ is probably the beginning of the word ‘sanctuary,’ which means a safe place. So the sentence probably began something like, ‘In the event of a conflagration resulting in the destruction of a sanctuary.’”
Violet stood up and looked over his shoulder. “‘Teers,’” she said, “is probably ‘volunteers,’ but I don’t know what ‘avail themselves’ means.”
“It means ‘to make use of,’” Klaus said, “like you’re availing yourself of the ukulele and those forks. Don’t you see? This says that in case a safe place burns down, they’ll leave some sort of message—‘Verbal Fri Dialogue.’”
“But what could ‘Verbal Fri Dialogue’ be?” Quigley asked. “Friends? Frisky?”
“Frilly?” Violet guessed. “Frightening?”
“But it says that it’s concealed accordingly,” Klaus pointed out. “That means that the dialogue is hidden in a logical way. If it were Verbal Waterfall Dialogue, it would be hidden in the waterfall. So none of those words can be right. Where would someone leave a message where fire couldn’t destroy it?”
“But fire destroys everything,” Violet said. “Look at the headquarters. Nothing is left standing except the library entrance, and…”
“…and the refrigerator,” Klaus finished. “Or, we might say, the fridge.”
“Verbal Fridge Dialogue!” Quigley said.
“The volunteers left a message,” said Klaus, who was already halfway to the refrigerator, “in the only place they knew wouldn’t be affected by the fire.”
“And the one place their enemies wouldn’t think of looking,” Quigley said. “After all, there’s never anything terribly important in the refrigerator.”
What Quigley said, of course, is not entirely true. Like an envelope, a hollow figurine, and a coffin, a refrigerator can hold all sorts of things, and they ma
y turn out to be very important depending on what kind of day you are having. A refrigerator may hold an icepack, for example, which would be important if you had been wounded. A refrigerator may hold a bottle of water, which would be important if you were dying of thirst. And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, “If you don’t give me a basket of strawberries right now, I’m going to poke you with this large stick.” But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac, or anything that looked important at all. The fridge was mostly empty, with just a few of the usual things people keep in their refrigerators and rarely use, including a jar of mustard, a container of olives, three jars of different kinds of jam, a bottle of lemon juice, and one lonely pickle in a small glass jug.
“There’s nothing here,” Violet said.
“Look in the crisper,” Quigley said, pointing to a drawer in the refrigerator traditionally used for storing fruits and vegetables. Klaus opened the drawer and pulled out a few strands of a green plant with tiny, skinny leaves.
“It smells like dill,” Klaus said, “and it’s quite crisp, as if it were picked yesterday.”
“Very Fresh Dill,” Quigley said.
“Another mystery,” Violet said, and tears filled her eyes. “We have nothing but mysteries. We don’t know where Sunny is. We don’t know where Count Olaf is. We don’t know who’s signaling to us at the top of the waterfall, or what they’re trying to say, and now there’s a mysterious message in a mysterious code in a mysterious refrigerator, and a bunch of mysterious herbs in the crisper. I’m tired of mysteries. I want someone to help us.”
“We can help each other,” Klaus said. “We have your inventions, and Quigley’s maps, and my research.”
“And we’re all very well-read,” Quigley said. “That should be enough to solve any mystery.”
Violet sighed, and kicked at something that lay on the ashen ground. It was the small shell of a pistachio nut, blackened from the fire that destroyed the headquarters. “It’s like we’re members of V.F.D. already,” she said. “We’re sending signals, and breaking codes, and finding secrets in the ruins of a fire.”
“Do you think our parents would be proud of us,” Klaus asked, “for following in their footsteps?”
“I don’t know,” Violet said. “After all, they kept V.F.D. a secret.”
“Maybe they were going to tell us later,” Klaus said.
“Or maybe they hoped we would never find out,” Violet said.
“I keep wondering the same thing,” Quigley said. “If I could travel back in time to the moment my mother showed me the secret passageway under the library, I would ask her why she was keeping these secrets.”
“That’s one more mystery,” Violet said sadly, and looked up at the slippery slope. It was getting later and later in the afternoon, and the frozen waterfall looked less and less shiny in the fading sunlight, as if time were running out to climb to the top and see who had been signaling to them. “We should each investigate the mystery we’re most likely to solve,” she said. “I’ll climb up the waterfall, and solve the mystery of the Verdant Flammable Device by learning who’s up there, and what they want. You should stay down here, Klaus, and solve the mystery of the Verbal Fridge Dialogue, by learning the code and discovering what the message is.”
“And I’ll help you both,” Quigley said, taking out his purple notebook. “I’ll leave my commonplace book with Klaus, in case it’s any help with the codes. And I’ll climb up the waterfall with you, Violet, in case you need my help.”
“Are you sure?” Violet asked. “You’ve already taken us this far, Quigley. You don’t have to risk your life any further.”
“We’ll understand,” Klaus said, “if you want to leave and search for your siblings.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Quigley said. “We’re all part of this mystery, whatever it is. Of course I’m going to help you.”
The two Baudelaires looked at one another and smiled. It is so rare in this world to meet a trustworthy person who truly wants to help you, and finding such a person can make you feel warm and safe, even if you are in the middle of a windy valley high up in the mountains. For a moment, as their friend smiled back at them, it seemed as if all the mysteries had been solved already, even with Sunny still separated from them, and Count Olaf still at large, and the abandoned V.F.D. headquarters still in ashes around them. Just knowing that they had found a person like Quigley Quagmire made Violet and Klaus feel as if every code made sense, and every signal was clear.
Violet stepped forward, her fork-assisted climbing shoes making small, determined noises on the ground, and took Quigley’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, “for volunteering.”
CHAPTER
Ten
Violet and Quigley walked carefully across the frozen pool until they reached the bottom of the waterfall. “Good luck!” Klaus called, from the archway of the ruined library. He was polishing his glasses, as he often did before embarking on serious research.
“Good luck to you!” Violet replied, shouting over the rush of the mountain winds, and as she looked back at her brother, she remembered when the two siblings were trying to stop the caravan as it hurtled down the mountain. Klaus had wanted to say something to her, in case the drag chute and the mixture of sticky substances hadn’t worked. Violet had the same feeling now, as she prepared to climb the frozen waterfall and leave her brother behind at the ashy remains of the V.F.D. headquarters. “Klaus—” she said.
Klaus put his glasses on and gave his sister his bravest smile. “Whatever you’re thinking of saying,” he said, “say it when you return.”
Violet nodded, and tapped the candelabra against a spot on the ice. She heard a deep thunk!, as if she were tapping something very solid. “We’ll start here,” she said to Quigley. “Brace yourself.”
The expression “brace yourself,” as I’m sure you know, does not mean to take some metal wiring and rivets and other orthodontic materials and apply them to your own teeth in order to straighten them. The expression simply means “get ready for something that will probably be difficult,” and it was indeed very difficult to climb a frozen waterfall in the middle of a windswept valley with nothing but a candelabra and a few well-placed forks to aid the two children in their climb. It took a few moments for Violet and Quigley to work her invention properly, and push the forks into the ice just far enough to hold them there, but not so far that they would be permanently stuck, and once both of them were in position, Violet had to reach up as far as she could and tap the candelabra on the ice above them to find the next solid place to climb. For the first few steps, it seemed like ascending the icy slope in this manner would be impossible, but as time went on, and the two volunteers grew more and more skillful with the fork-tipped climbing shoes and the candelabra ice-tester, it became clear that once again Violet’s inventing skills would carry the day, a phrase which here means “enable Violet Baudelaire and Quigley Quagmire to climb up a frozen waterfall after bracing themselves for the difficult journey.”
“Your invention is working,” Quigley called up to Violet. “These fork-assisted climbing shoes are marvelous.”
“They do seem to be working,” Violet agreed, “but let’s not celebrate just yet. We have a long way to go.”
“My sister wrote a couplet about that very thing,” Quigley said, and recited Isadora’s poem:
“Celebrate when you’re half-done,
And the finish won’t be half as fun.”
Violet smiled, and reached up to test the ice above her. “Isadora is a good poet,” Violet said, “and her poems have come in handy more than once. When we were at the Village of Fowl Devotees, she led us to her location by hiding a secret message in a series of couplets.”
“I wonder if that’s a code she learned from V.F.D.,” Quigley
said, “or if she made it up herself.”
“I don’t know,” Violet said thoughtfully. “She and Duncan were the first to tell us about V.F.D., but it never occurred to me that they might already be members. When I think about it, however, the code she used was similar to one that our Aunt Josephine used. They both hid a secret location within a note, and waited for us to discover the hidden message. Maybe they were all volunteers.” She removed her left fork-assisted climbing shoe from the ice, and kicked it back in a few inches up to further her climb. “Maybe all our guardians have been members of V.F.D., on one side or the other of the schism.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Quigley said, “that we’ve always been surrounded by people carrying out secret errands, and never known it.”
“It’s hard to believe that we’re climbing a frozen waterfall in the Mortmain Mountains,” Violet replied, “and yet, here we are. There, Quigley, do you see the ledge where my left fork is? It’s solid enough for both of us to sit for a moment and catch our breath.”
“Good,” Quigley said. “I have a small bag of carrots in my backpack we can eat to regain our energy.” The triplet climbed up to where Violet was sitting, on a small ledge scarcely the size of a sofa, and slid so he was sitting next to her. The two climbers could see that they had traveled farther than they’d thought. Far below them were the blackened ruins of the headquarters, and Klaus was only a small speck near a tiny iron archway. Quigley handed Violet a carrot, and she bit down on it thoughtfully.
“Sunny loves raw carrots,” Violet said. “I hope that she’s eating well, wherever she is.”
“I hope my siblings are eating well, too,” Quigley said. “My father always used to say that a good meal can cheer one up considerably.”
“My father always said the same thing,” Violet said, looking at Quigley curiously. “Do you think that was a code, too?”
Quigley shrugged and sighed. Small bits of ice from the waterfall fell from the ends of forks and blew away in the wind. “It’s like we never really knew our parents,” he said.
A Series of Unfortunate Events Collection: Books 1-13 with Bonus Material Page 109
