⇗ Chapter 11

"It's a Verdant Flammable Device," Sabine muttered.

"There's someone at the top of the waterfall, sending a signal," Quigley added.

"Yes," Violet said, "but who?"

"Maybe it's a volunteer, who escaped from the fire," Klaus said. "They're signaling to see if there are any other volunteers nearby."

"Or it could be a trap," Quigley said. "They could be luring volunteers up to the peak in order to ambush them. Remember, the codes of V.F.D. are used by both sides of the schism."

"It hardly seems like a code," Violet said. "We know that someone is communicating, but we don't have the faintest idea who they are, or what they're saying."

"This is what it must be like," Klaus said thoughtfully, "when Sunny talks to people who don't know her very well."

Everyone was silent for a moment as they gazed up at the odd green smoke. Something was nagging at the back of Sabine's head, and it took her a moment to figure out what it was. "What if Sunny is up there?" she finally gasped.

Violet's eyes widened. "It could be her."

"Let's signal back," Klaus said. "Do we have any Verdant Flammable Devices?"

"Of course," Quigley said, taking a box of the green tubes out of his backpack, "but Bruce saw my matches and confiscated them, because children shouldn't play with matches."

"Confiscated them?" Klaus said. "Do you think he's an enemy of V.F.D.?"

"If everyone who said that children shouldn't play with matches was an enemy of V.F.D.," Violet said with a smile, "then we wouldn't have a chance of survival."

"But how are we going to light these without matches?" Quigley asked.

Violet reached into her pocket. It was a bit tricky to tie her hair up in a ribbon, as all four drafts in the Valley of Four Drafts were blowing hard, but at last her hair was out of her eyes, and the gears and levers of her inventing mind began to move as she gazed up at the mysterious signal.

"The scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light," she finally said.

"What?" Sabine asked.

"The scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light," Violet repeated. "We can use the light from the sun that's glinting off the frozen waterfall and..." She dug through her pockets for a moment and pulled out a small hand mirror. "And this hand mirror to light the Verdant Flammable Device."

"Just like on Lake Lachrymose," Klaus nodded.

"Exactly," Violet agreed. She took one of the green tubes out of the box Quigley was holding and walked over to a spot where the sun was shining through the collapsing walls of the headquarters. She angled the mirror so it would catch the light, and in a few moments the tube in her hand caught flame and started emitting green smoke, just like the smoke at the top of the mountain. After a few moments though, the smoke on the mountain disappeared.

"Someone put out the Verdant Flammable Device," Quigley said, holding the green tube to one side so he wouldn't smell the smoke. "What do you think that means?"

"I don't know," Violet said, and sighed. "This isn't working."

"Of course it's working," Klaus said. "It's working perfectly. You noticed that the afternoon sun was reflecting off the frozen waterfall, and it gave you the idea to use the scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light – just like you did on Lake Lachrymose, when we were battling the leeches. So you used Colette's hand mirror to catch the sun's rays and reflect them onto the end of the Verdant Flammable Device, so we could light it and send a signal."

"Klaus is right," Sabine said. "It couldn't have worked better."

"Thank you," Violet said, "but that's not what I mean. I mean this code isn't working. We still don't know who's up on the peak, or why they were signaling us, and now the signal has stopped, but we still don't know what it means."

"Maybe we should extinguish our Verdant Flammable Device, too," Klaus said.

"Maybe," Violet agreed, "or maybe we should go up to the top of the waterfall and see for ourselves who is there."

Quigley frowned, and took out his commonplace book. "The only way up to the highest peak," he said, "is the path that the Snow Scouts are taking. We'd have to go back through the Vernacularly Fastened Door, back down the Vertical Flame Diversion, back into the Volunteer Feline Detective cave, rejoin the scouts and hike for a long time."

"That's not the only way up to the peak," Violet said with a smile.

"Yes, it is," Quigley insisted. "Look at the map."

"Look at the waterfall," Violet replied, and all four children looked up at the shiny slope.

"Do you mean," Klaus said, "that you think you can invent something which can get us up a frozen waterfall?"

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 a 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 more help," 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."

"Oh, thank you," Klaus said. "I'll write down anything I find. Do you want to join the search?"

"Sure," he nodded, then turned to his girlfriend. "Do you want to come too, Sabine?"

"No, thank you," Sabine smiled. "I like seeing the inventions Violet makes."

Quigley smiled back and gave her a quick kiss on her forehead before following Klaus to the charred remains of the V.F.D. library. Violet smiled at Quigley and Sabine before leaning down and picking up an ashy fork off the ground.

"So, what are you making today, Miss Baudelaire?" Sabine asked in a reporter voice, holding an imaginary microphone out to Violet. Violet laughed but went along with it.

"I am making a device so that we will be able to climb up that frozen waterfall," she said. Her smile faltered for a moment. "I just wish Sunny were here. Her teeth would be perfect for slicing these ukulele strings in half."

Sabine dropped her reporter act and frowned sympathetically at Violet with a small nod. "Well, we may not have Sunny or her sharp teeth, but will these scissors do?" she asked, picking up some only slightly melted kitchen scissors off the ground.

Violet's smile returned to her face. It was not an overjoyed smile, but it had some happiness to it. "Yes, that would work perfectly, Sabine. Would you mind cutting the strings for me?"

"Of course I don't mind. It's a thrill to help an inventing genius," Sabine smiled back, glad to be of assistance. She took the ukulele from Violet and started cutting the strings. They worked in a focused silence for a while, Violet bending some forks and Sabine cutting strings, before Violet said:

"Could I have your shoes?"

"Huh?" Sabine asked, breaking out of her inventing trance.

"I need them for the climbing device," Violet clarified.

"Oh, sure," Sabine nodded, starting to untie her shoelaces. "So, how exactly is this going to work?"

Violet held up the bent forks and said, "I'm going to tie these forks to our shoes with the ukulele strings you were cutting. The strings should be strong enough to hold the forks on, while the forks will jam into the ice on the waterfall. It will allow us to climb up."

Sabine held out her shoes to Violet, who took them and started tying the forks on. "What will you do with the candelabra?" Sabine asked.

"I'm going to use it as an ice tester," Violet said. "A moving body of water, like that 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."

"That's very smart, Violet," Sabine agreed.

"Thank you," Violet beamed.

Sabine was glad to see her friend smile again. She had been through so many horrible things in such a short amount of time and she deserved happiness just as much as anyone else, maybe even more.

Sabine sighed, remembering her own series of unfortunate events. Her parents had died when she was only eight years old. Then, she was dragged away from her sister because her grandparents were awful, racist people. Over the next few years, she was passed from home to home, and was almost always treated unfairly just because of the color of her skin. She rarely found a friend, and when she did, they would be separated from her for one reason or another.

But not everything in her life was bad. She had met the Quagmires when living with Miss Julia, and all four of those people treated her kindly. Then she met the Baudelaires, who understood what she had gone through and accepted her despite her differences. And of course, she couldn't forget how she had joined a secret organization, and learned that all of the nice people she had met along the way were a part of the organization as well, and they were working to make the world a quiet, peaceful place.

Sabine smiled softly as she pondered the best things in her life, and decided to look on the bright side instead of being gloomy. She watched quietly as Violet continued working on the climbing shoes. A few moments later, Klaus and Quigley came back into the room, looking slightly distressed.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think this might be important," Klaus said, and the two girls turned to look at him. 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.'"

"It doesn't make any sense," Quigley shook his head. "It could possibly be in code? V.F.D. seems to be quite fond of 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?" Sabine said.

"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."

"Not entirely true," Sabine rebutted. "A fridge could hold a basket of strawberries, and if someone were to come here with a very large stick and say, 'Give me a basket of strawberries or I'll poke you with my stick!' Then a fridge would indeed hold something important."

Quigley chuckled and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "You have a very active and strange imagination, my dear."

Sabine nodded and giggled. "Yes, yes I do."

But, when the eldest Baudelaire opened the fridge, they found nothing that would be helpful for fending off stick wielding, strawberry crazed lunatics. In fact, there seemed to be nothing helpful 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," he said, "and it's quite crisp, as if it were picked yesterday."

"Very Fresh Dill," Sabine muttered.

"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 here'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 and Sabine'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," Sabine 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. And, also, y'know, save her from dying, but..."

"That's just 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 we'll help you both," Quigley said as he and Sabine took out their purple notebooks.

"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," Sabine said.

"Are you sure?" Violet asked. "You've already taken us this far, you two. You don't have to risk your life any further."

"We'll understand," Klaus said, "if you want to leave and search for Duncan and Isadora."

"Don't be absurd," Quigley said.

"We're all part of this mystery, whatever it is. Of course we're going to help you," Sabine finished.

The two Baudelaires looked at one another and smiled. Quigley and Sabine smiled back. Violet looked to them and said, "Thank you for volunteering."

"It's what we do." Sabine nodded.

𝔼𝕟𝕕 𝕠𝕗 ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕡𝕥𝕖𝕣