⇗ Chapter 13

As Violet and Sabine climbed back down the slippery slope of the frozen waterfall, their fork-assisted climbing shoes poking into the ice with each step, they looked down and saw, by the last light of the setting sun, the figure of Klaus. He was holding a flashlight over his head to help the two climbers find their way down, Quigley by his side, but it looked as if he'd just had an idea.

"He must have found a flashlight in the wreckage," Sabine said. "It looks like one I saw Kit using."

"I hope he and Quigley found enough information to decode Verbal Fridge Dialogue," Violet said, and tapped the candelabra below her feet. "Be careful here, Sabine. The ice feels thin. We'll have to climb around it."

"The ice has been less solid on our way down," Sabine said.

"That's not surprising," Violet said. "We've poked a great deal of it with forks. By the time False Spring arrives, this whole slope will probably only be half frozen."

"By the time False Spring arrives," Sabine said, "I hope we'll be on our way to the last safe place."

"Me, too," Violet said quietly, and the two climbers said no more until they reached the bottom of the waterfall and walked carefully across the frozen pool along the path Klaus shone with his flashlight.

"I'm glad you returned in one piece," Klaus said, shining his flashlight in the direction of the dining room remains. "It looked like a slippery journey. It's getting cold, but if we sit behind the library entrance, we'll be away from most of the wind."

But Violet was so eager to tell her brother who they had found at the top of the peak that she could not wait another moment. "It's Sunny," she said. "Sunny's at the top. It was her who was signaling us."

"Sunny?" Klaus said, his eyes as wide as his smile. "How did she get up there? Is she safe? Why didn't you bring her back?"

"She's safe," Violet said. "She's with Count Olaf, but she's safe."

"Has he harmed her?" Klaus asked.

Violet shook her head. "No," she said. "But he is making her do all the cooking and cleaning."

"But she's a baby!" Klaus said.

"Not anymore," Violet said. "We haven't noticed, Klaus, but she's grown up quite a bit. She's really too young to be in charge of all the chores, of course, but sometime, during all the hardship we've been through, she stopped being a baby."

"She's old enough to eavesdrop," Sabine said. "She's already discovered who burned down the V.F.D. headquarters."

"They're two terrible people, a man and a woman, who have quite an aura of menace," Violet said. "Even Count Olaf is afraid of them."

"What are they all doing up there?" Klaus asked.

"They're having some sort of villainous meeting," Sabine said. "We heard them mention something about a recruitment plan, and a large net."

"That doesn't sound pleasant," Quigley said.

"There's more," Violet said. "Count Olaf has the Snicket file, and he found out about some secret location – the last safe place where the V.F.D. can gather. That's why Sunny stayed up there. If she overhears where the place is, we'll know where to go to meet up with the rest of the volunteers."

"I hope she manages to find out," Klaus said. "Without that piece of information, all that I've discovered is useless."

"What have you discovered?" Sabine asked.

"I'll show you," Klaus said, and led the way to the ruins of the library, where the girls could see he and Quigley had been working. Klaus's dark blue notebook and Quigley's purple notebook were open, and they could see that several pages were filled with notes. Nearby were several half-burnt scraps of paper, stacked underneath a burnt teacup Klaus was using for a paperweight, and all of the contents of the refrigerator were laid out in a careful half circle: the jar of mustard, the container of olives, three jars of jam, and the very fresh dill. The small glass jug, containing one pickle, and the bottle of lemon juice were off to one side.

"This is some of the most difficult research I've ever done," Klaus said, sitting down next to his notebook. "Justice Strauss's legal library was confusing, and Aunt Josephine's grammatical library was dull, but the ruined V.F.D. library is a much bigger challenge. Even if I know what book I'm looking for, it may be nothing but ashes."

"Did you find anything about Verbal Fridge Dialogue?" Sabine asked, sitting beside him.

"Not at first," Klaus said. "The scrap of paper that led us to the refrigerator was in a large pile of ashes, and it took awhile to sift through it. But I finally found one page that was probably from the same book." He reached for his notebook and held up his flashlight so he could see the pages.

"The page was so delicate," Quigley said, "that we immediately copied it into my commonplace book. It explains how the whole code works."

"Read it to us," Violet said, and Klaus complied.

"'Verbal Fridge Dialogue,'" he read, '"is an emergency communication system that avails itself of the more esoteric products in a refrigerator. Volunteers will know such a code is being used by the presence of very fr – '" He looked up from his notebook. "The sentence ends there," he said, "but I assume that 'very fr' is the beginning of 'very fresh dill.' If very fresh dill is in the refrigerator, that means there's a message there, too."

"I understand that part," Violet said, "but what does 'esoteric' mean?"

"In this case," Klaus said, "I think it refers to things that aren't used very much – the things that stay in the refrigerator for a long time."

"Like mustard and jam and things like that," Violet said. "I understand."

"'The receiver of the message should find his or her initials, as noted by one of our poet volunteers, as follows,'" Klaus continued. "And then there's a short poem. 'The darkest of the jams of three; contains within the addressee.'"

"It's a couplet," Quigley said, "like my sister writes."

"I don't think your sister wrote that particular poem," Violet said. "This code was probably invented before your sister was born."

"That's what I thought," Klaus said, "but it made me wonder who taught Isadora about couplets. They might have been a volunteer."

"She had a poetry teacher when we were young," Quigley said, "but I never met him. I always had a cartography class."

"And your mapmaking skills," Violet said, "led us to the headquarters."

"And your inventing skills," Klaus said, "allowed you to climb up to Mount Fraught."

"And your research skills are helping us now," Violet said. "It's as if we were being trained for all this, and we didn't even know it."

"I never thought of learning about maps as training," Quigley said. "I just liked it."

"Well, I haven't had much training in poetry," Klaus said, "but the couplet seems to say that inside the darkest jar of jam is the name of the person who's supposed to get the message."

Violet looked down at the three jars of jam. "There's apricot, strawberry, and boysenberry," she said. "Boysenberry is the darkest."

Klaus nodded, and unscrewed the cap from the jar of boysenberry jam. "Look inside," he said, and shone the flashlight so everyone could see. Someone had taken a knife and written two letters on the surface of the jam: J and S.

"J.S., Jacques Snicket," Quigley said, referring to Kit Snicket's brother, who he and Sabine had never met, but heard a lot about from Kit.

"The message can't be for Jacques Snicket," Violet said. "He's dead."

"Maybe whoever wrote this message doesn't know that," Klaus said, and continued to read from the commonplace book. '"If necessary, the dialogue uses a cured, fruit-based calendar for days of the week in order to announce a gathering. Sunday is represented by a lone – ' Here it's cut off again, but I think that means that these olives are an encoded way of communicating which day of the week a gathering will take place, with Sunday being one olive, Monday being two, and so on."

"How many olives are in that container?" Sabine asked.

"Five," Klaus said, wrinkling his nose. "I didn't like counting them. Ever since the Squalors fixed us aqueous martinis, the taste of olives hasn't really appealed to me."

"Five olives means Thursday," Violet said.

"Today's Friday," Quigley said. "The gathering of the volunteers is less than a week away."

The two Baudelaires nodded in agreement, and Klaus opened his notebook again. '"Any spice-based condiment,'" he read, "'should have a coded label referring volunteers to encoded poems.'"

"I don't think I understand," Sabine said.

Klaus sighed, and reached for the jar of mustard. "This is where it really gets complicated. Mustard is a spice-based condiment, and according to the code, it should refer us to a poem of some sort."

"How can mustard refer us to a poem?" Violet asked.

Klaus smiled. "I was puzzled for a long time," he said, "but I finally thought to look at the list of ingredients. Listen to this: 'Vinegar, mustard seed, salt, turmeric, the final quatrain of the eleventh stanza of "The Garden of Proserpine," by Algernon Charles Swinburne, and calcium disodium, an allegedly natural preservative.' A quatrain is four lines of a poem, and a stanza is another word for a verse. They hid a reference to a poem in the list of ingredients."

"It's the perfect place to hide something," Violet said. "No one ever reads those lists very carefully. But did you find the poem?"

Klaus frowned, and lifted the teacup. "Under a burnt wooden sign marked 'Poetry,' I found a pile of papers that were burned practically beyond recognition," he said, "but here's the one surviving scrap, and it's the last quatrain of the eleventh stanza of 'The Garden of Proserpine,' by Algernon Charles Swinburne."

"That's convenient," Sabine said.

"A little too convenient," Quigley said. "The entire library was destroyed, and the one poem that survived is the one we need. It can't be a coincidence." He held out the scrap of paper so Violet and Sabine could see it. "It's as if someone knew we'd be looking for this."

"What does the quatrain say?" Violet asked.

"It's not very cheerful," Klaus said, and tilted the flashlight so he could read it. "That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river; Winds somewhere safe to sea."

The children shivered, and moved so they were sitting even closer together on the ground. It had grown darker, and Klaus's flashlight was practically the only thing they could see. The wind whistling through the remains of the library made an eerie noise, which put a pit in Sabine's stomach. She leaned her head onto Quigley's shoulder, wanting comfort from the creepy sounds and creepy poems about dead men.

Quigley kissed the top of her head. "I wish Isadora were here," he said. "She could tell us what that poem means."

"Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea," Violet repeated. "Do you think that refers to the last safe place?"

"I don't know," Klaus said. "I couldn't find anything else that would help us."

"What about the lemon juice?" Violet asked. "And the pickle?"

Klaus shook his head, although they could scarcely see him in the dark. "There might be more to the message," he said, "but it's all gone up in smoke. I couldn't find anything more in the library that seemed helpful."

Violet took the scrap of paper from her brother and looked at the quatrain. "There's something very faint here," she said. "Something written in pencil, but it's too faint to read."

Quigley reached into his backpack. "I forgot we have two flashlights," he said, and shone a second light onto the paper. Sure enough, there were two words, written very faintly in pencil beside the last four lines of the poem's eleventh stanza. Violet, Klaus, Quigley and Sabine leaned in as far as they could to see what it was. The night winds rustled the fragile paper, and made the children shiver again, shaking the flashlights, but at last the light shone on the quatrain and they could see what words were there.

"Sugar bowl," they said in unison, and looked at one another.

"What could that mean?" Klaus asked.

Violet sighed. "When we were hiding underneath the car," she said to Sabine, "one of those villains said something about searching for a sugar bowl, remember?"

Sabine nodded, and took out her purple notebook. "Esme talked about the sugar bowl when Olaf kidnapped me and the Quagmires. She seemed to think I had it, but I still don't know why. And Kit Snicket mentioned a sugar bowl once," she said, "a few days after we forts arrived at headquarters. She said it was very important to find it. I wrote it down on the top of a page in my commonplace book, so I could add any information I learned about its whereabouts." She held up the page so the two Baudelaires could see that it was blank. "I never learned anything more." She sighed and shook her head.

Klaus sighed too. "It seems that the more we learn, the more mysteries we find. We reached V.F.D. headquarters and decoded a message, and all we know is that there's one last safe place, and volunteers are gathering there on Thursday."

"That might be enough," Violet said, "if Sunny finds out where the safe place is."

"But how are we going to get Sunny away from Count Olaf?" Klaus asked.

"With your fork-assisted climbing shoes," Quigley said. "We can climb up there again, and sneak away with Sunny."

Violet shook her head. "The moment they noticed Sunny was gone," she said, "they would find us. From Mount Fraught, they can see everything and everyone for miles and miles, and we're hopelessly outnumbered."

"That's true," Sabine admitted. "There are ten villains up there, and only four of us. Then how are we going to rescue her?"

"Olaf has someone we love," Klaus said thoughtfully. "If we had something he loves, we could trade it for Sunny's return. What does Count Olaf love?"

"Money," Violet said.

"Fire," Quigley said.

"We don't have any money," Klaus said, "and Olaf won't trade Sunny for a fire. There must be something he really loves – something that makes him happy, and would make him very unhappy if it were taken away."

Violet looked at her brother and smiled. "Count Olaf loves Esmé Squalor," Violet said. "If we were holding Esmé prisoner, we could arrange a trade."

"That's true," Klaus said, "but we're not holding Esmé prisoner."

"We could take her prisoner," Quigley said, and everyone went quiet.

Sabine's stomach began to hurt. Was Quigley really suggesting that they take a hostage? As horrible as Count Olaf and everyone associated with him was, taking a hostage was illegal and wrong, and if they did it, then they would be no better than the villains they were trying to stop. She lifted her head off his shoulder, glancing up at him to try and gauge how he was feeling about what he'd just said. But it was too dark for her to see anything, and no one else seemed to want to say anything. She was sure that the Baudelaires would disagree. They would try to come up with another plan. But to her surprise...

"How would we do it?" Klaus finally whispered.

"We could lure her to us," Violet said, "and trap her."

Quigley wrote something down in his commonplace book. "We could use the Verdant Flammable Devices," he said. " According to what you guys said you heard up there, Esmé seems to think they're cigarettes, and cigarettes are in. If we lit some of them, she might smell the smoke and come down here."

"But then what?" Klaus asked.

Violet shivered in the cold, and reached into her pocket. She took a ribbon out of her pocket and tied her hair up, to keep it out of her eyes. "The easiest trap to build," she said, "is a pit. We could dig a deep hole, and cover it up with some of this half-burned wood so Esmé couldn't see it. The wood has been weakened by the fire, so when she steps on it. . ."

Violet did not finish her sentence, but by the glow of the flashlights, it was easy to see that Klaus and Quigley were both nodding. Sabine, however, felt the uneasy feeling in her stomach intensify.

"Hunters have used traps like that for centuries," Klaus said, "to capture wild animals."

"Esmé may be a vile person," Sabine said, sounding disgusted that her friends were seriously considering this, "but she is not an animal. She is a human being and trapping a human being in a pit for our own benefit is cruel and awful."

"It's not for our own benefit!" Klaus snapped. "We need to save my sister. I am still very upset that you two didn't come back down the mountain with her, and I am absolutely not leaving her a third time!" He spat the words with anger, but Sabine could see the tears in his eyes. Sighing, she crossed her arms over her chest determinedly.

"There must be another way," she said, racking her brain for something, anything, better than taking Esmé hostage. She thought in silence for a while, thinking hard.

Quigley scanned her face for a moment and then sighed. He reached over and rested his hand on her shoulder. "It's not the most ethical choice, but I don't see a way around it. While I wish Klaus wouldn't have yelled at you," -here he shot Klaus a sharp and disapproving glare- "we don't really have any other options. So, how could we dig such a pit?"

"Well," Violet said, "we don't really have any tools, so we probably have to use our hands. As the pit got deeper, we'd have to use something to carry the dirt away."

"I still have that pitcher," Klaus said.

"And we'd need a way to make sure that we wouldn't get trapped ourselves," Violet said.

"I have a rope," Quigley said, "in my backpack. We could tie one end to the archway, and use it to climb out."

Violet reached her hand down to the ground. The dirt was very cold, but quite loose, and she saw that they could dig a pit without too much trouble. "Is this the right thing to do?" Violet asked. "Do you think this is what our parents would do?"

"Our parents aren't here," Klaus said. "They might have been here once, but they're not here now."

"Does it matter? Need I remind you that trapping someone in a pit and holding them hostage is illegal?" Sabine said.

"Trapping children in a cage at the bottom of an elevator shaft to steal their sapphires is illegal too, but that didn't stop Esmé!" Klaus replied harshly.

"Do you really want to stoop to her level, Klaus? I want to save Sunny as much as you do, but I refuse to help if you guys are going through with this plan!" Sabine spat, then quickly stood up and stormed away.

~༄~

As the Baudelaires and Quigley dug out the pit they planned to catch Esmé in, Sabine sat off to the side, watching them in silent disappointment. Several times she tried to talk them out of their dangerous and unlawful plan, but they didn't listen to her so eventually she just gave up.

As dawn came and the sun rose, the children put the finishing touches on their trap and Violet lit another of the Verdant Flammable Devices with her hand mirror, the nasty smelling green smoke rising high in the air.

Sabine still sat to the side, tears pooling in her eyes as she realized that her friends actually were going to do this. She wiped the tears and looked down, her gut twisting in guilt. She thought of Kit, who had become a much needed mother figure in her life, and thought of what she might say if she saw what the children were doing.

"If everyone fought fire with fire," she would tell them, "then the world would go up in flames."

Sighing, Sabine wearily lifted her head and saw Violet squinting up at the waterfall. Still a bit angry with her friends for doing something they all knew was wrong, she stood up and walked in their direction, just enough to see what Violet was squinting at without being too close to them.

"Look," Violet said, and pointed to the descending shape. It was a blur of reds and oranges and yellows, and as it accelerated down the ice, it looked almost like a flame.

"Do you think it's Esmé?" Klaus asked.

Violet squinted up at the tobogganing figure again. "I think so," she said. "Nobody but Esmé Squalor would wear an outfit like that."

"We'd better hide behind the archway," Quigley said, "before she spots us."

The two Baudelaires nodded in agreement, and walked carefully to the library entrance, making sure to step around the hole they had dug. Sabine returned to her own spot, away from the Baudelaires and Quigley but right in the view of anyone who might be coming down the waterfall.

"Sabine!" Quigley whispered, waving her over to them.

She shook her head stubbornly, determined to stay right where she was. Quigley dragged his hand down his face in desperation, then glanced at the figure on the waterfall. It was still far away, so he scurried over to Sabine and crouched down next to her. She huffed in annoyance and looked away from him.

"I take it you're still mad," he sighed.

"No kidding, Sherlock," she mumbled sarcastically.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay? You're right, we probably shouldn't be doing this, but we don't have a choice," Quigley said softly.

"We do have a choice," she replied, turning her head to meet his gaze. "There's always another option."

He looked past her at the flaming person flying down the waterfall, then back at Sabine. "Do you have another idea?" he asked.

Reluctantly, she shook her head no. Although she had been thinking for hours, she couldn't come up with any plans that agreed with her conscience. Gently taking her hand, Quigley pulled her over to the Baudelaires. She followed without struggle.

"I'm happy that we can't see the pit anymore," Klaus said when Sabine and Quigley hid with them. "Looking into that blackness reminded me of that terrible passageway at 667 Dark Avenue."

"First Esmé trapped Sabine and your siblings there," Violet said to Quigley, "then she trapped us."

"And now we're fighting fire with fire, and trapping her," Quigley said uncomfortably.

"It's best not to think about it," Violet said, sounding unsure. "Soon we'll have Sunny back, and that's what's important."

"Maybe this is important, too," Klaus said, and pointed up at the archway. "I never noticed it until now."

Violet, Quigley and Sabine looked up to see what he was referring to, and saw five tiny words etched over their heads, right underneath the large letters spelling "V.F.D. Library."

"'The world is quiet here,'" Quigley read. "What do you think it means?"

"It looks like a motto," Klaus said. "At Prufrock Preparatory School, they had a motto carved near the entrance, so everyone would remember it when they entered the academy."

Violet shook her head. "That's not what I'm thinking of," she said. "I'm remembering something about that phrase, but just barely."

"The world certainly feels quiet around here," Klaus said. "We haven't heard a single snow gnat since we arrived."

"The smell of smoke scares them away, remember?" Quigley asked.

"Of course," Klaus said.

Sabine peered around the archway to check on Esmé's progress. The colorful blur was about halfway down the waterfall, heading straight for the trap the Baudelaires and Quigley had built.

"There's been so much smoke here at headquarters, the gnats might never come back," Klaus finished.

"Without snow gnats," Quigley said, "the salmon of the Stricken Stream will go hungry. They feed on snow gnats." He reached into his pocket and opened his commonplace book. "And without salmon," he said, "the Mortmain Mountain eagles will go hungry. The destruction of V.F.D. headquarters has caused even more damage than I thought."

Klaus nodded in agreement. "When we were walking along the Stricken Stream," he said, "the fish were coughing from all the ashes in the water. Remember, Violet?"

He turned to his sister, but Violet seemed to be only half listening. She was still gazing at the words on the archway, looking like she was concentrating hard on something. "I can just hear those words," she said. "The world is quiet here." She closed her eyes. "I think it was a very long time ago, before you were born, Klaus."

"Maybe someone said them to you," Quigley said.

Violet shut her eyes tighter, sitting in silence for a moment. "Nobody said them to me," she said finally. "Someone sang them. I think my parents sang the words 'the world is quiet here' a long time ago, but I don't know why." She opened her eyes and faced her brother and her friends. "I think we might be doing the wrong thing," she said.

"That's what I've been telling you guys the whole time," Sabine grumbled quietly, but no one seemed to hear her.

"But we agreed," Quigley said, "to fight fire with fire."

Violet nodded, and stuck her hands in her pockets. "I know we agreed," she sighed. "But it still seems wrong."

"Volunteer Fire Department," Sabine said, making sure to be loud enough that they could hear her this time. They all turned and looked at her.

"What?" Klaus asked.

"That's what we think V.F.D. stands for, Volunteer Fire Department," she clarified. "We're volunteers now. We shouldn't be fighting fire with fire, we should be fighting fire with water or a fire extinguisher or something. My point is, this is wrong."

"When I was looking into the pit," Klaus said quietly after a while of contemplating Sabine's words, "I was remembering something I read in a book by a famous philosopher. He said, 'Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.'"

Klaus looked at his sister, and then at the sight of Esmé approaching, and then at the weakened wood that the three children had placed on the ground. "'Abyss' is a fancy word for 'pit,'" he said. "We built an abyss for Esmé to fall into. That's something a monster might do."

Quigley was copying Klaus's words into his commonplace book. "What happened to that philosopher?" he asked.

"He's dead," Klaus replied. "I think you're right, Sabine. We don't want to be as villainous and monstrous as Count Olaf."

"But what are we going to do?" Quigley asked. "Sunny is still Olaf's prisoner, and Esmé will be here at any moment. If we don't think of the right thing right now, it'll be too late."

As soon as the triplet finished his sentence however, the three children heard something that made them realize it might already be too late. From behind the archway, Violet, Klaus, Sabine and Quigley heard a rough, scraping sound as the toboggan reached the bottom of the waterfall and slid to a halt, and then a triumphant giggle from the mouth of Esmé Squalor. The four volunteers peeked around the archway and saw the treacherous girlfriend step off the toboggan with a greedy smile on her face.

Sabine, glad that her friends finally decided that trapping someone was wrong, gasped as she saw Esmé adjust her enormous flame-imitating dress and take a step toward the smoking Verdant Flammable Devices. She heard the firm but gentle voice of Kit Snicket nudging at her.

"Do the right thing, S," Kit urged, using a nickname that Sabine had grown very fond of.

Sabine shifted her gaze down at the ground, just a few steps from where Esmé was standing. Four dark, round masks were sitting in a pile, where they had left them upon arriving at the ruins of headquarters. They had assumed that they would not need them again, but Sabine realized they had been wrong. As Esmé took another step closer to the trap, Sabine dashed over to the masks, put one on and stepped out of her hiding place as the Baudelaires and Quigley watched her.

"Stop, Esmé!" she cried. "It's a trap!"

Esmé stopped in her tracks and gave Sabine a curious look. "Who are you?" she asked. "You shouldn't sneak up on people like that. It's a villainous thing to do."

"I'm a volunteer," Sabine said.

Esmé's mouth, heavy with orange lipstick that matched her dress, curled into a sneer. "There are no volunteers here," she said. "The entire headquarters are destroyed!"

Klaus was the next to grab a mask and confront Olaf's treacherous romantic companion. "Our headquarters might be destroyed," he said, "but the V.F.D. is as strong as ever!"

Esmé frowned at the two children as if she couldn't decide whether to be frightened or not. "You may be strong," she said nervously, "but you're also very short." Her dress crackled as she started to take another step toward the pit. "When I get my hands on you –"

"No!" Quigley cried, and stepped out from the arch wearing his mask, taking care not to fall into his own trap. "Don't come any closer, Esmé. If you take another step, you'll fall into our trap."

"You're making that up," Esmé said, but she did not move any closer. "You're trying to keep all the cigarettes for yourself."

"They're not cigarettes," Klaus said, "and we're not liars. Underneath the wood you're about to step on is a very deep pit."

Esmé looked at them suspiciously. Gingerly, she leaned down and moved a piece of wood aside, and stared down into the trap the children had built. "Well, well, well," she said. "You did build a trap. I never would have fallen for it, of course, but I must admit you dug quite a pit."

"We wanted to trap you," Violet said, "so we could trade you for the safe return of Sunny Baudelaire. But – "

"But you didn't have the courage to go through with it," Esmé said with a mocking smile. "You volunteers are never brave enough to do something for the greater good."

"Throwing people into pits isn't the greater good!" Sabine cried. "It's villainous treachery!"

"If you weren't such an idiot," Esmé said, "you'd realize that those things are more or less the same."

"She is not an idiot," Quigley said fiercely, taking a step towards Sabine to grab her hand. "She is smart and very well-read."

At Quigley's words, Esmé threw back her head and laughed, shaking the crackling layers of her enormous dress. "Well-read!" she repeated in a particularly nasty tone of voice. "Being well-read won't help you in this world. Many years ago, I was supposed to waste my entire summer reading Anna Karenina, but I knew that silly book would never help me, so I threw it into the fireplace."

She reached down and picked up a few more pieces of wood, which she tossed aside with a snicker. "Look at your precious headquarters, volunteers! It's as ruined as my book. And look at me! I'm beautiful, fashionable, and I smoke cigarettes!" She laughed again, and pointed at the children with a scornful finger. "If you didn't spend all your time with your heads stuck in books, you'd have that precious baby back."

"We're going to get her back," Violet said firmly.

"Really?" Esmé said mockingly. "And how do you propose to do that?"

"I'm going to talk to Count Olaf," Violet said, "and he's going to give her back to me."

Esmé threw back her head and started to laugh, but not with as much enthusiasm as before. "What do you mean?" she said.

"Just what I said," Violet said.

"Hmmm," Esmé said suspiciously. "Let me think for a moment." The evil girlfriend began to pace back and forth on the frozen pond, her enormous dress crackling with every step.

Klaus leaned in to whisper to his sister. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Do you honestly think that we can get Sunny back from Count Olaf with a simple conversation?"

"I don't know," Violet whispered back, "but it's better than luring someone into a trap."

"It was wrong to dig that pit," Quigley agreed, "but I'm not sure that walking straight into Olaf's clutches is the right thing to do, either."

"It'll take a while to reach Mount Fraught again," Violet said. "We'll think of something during the climb."

"I hope so," Klaus said, "but if we can't think of something – "

Klaus did not get a chance to say what might happen if they couldn't think of something because Esmé clapped her hands together to get the children's attention. "If you really want to talk to my boyfriend," she said, "I suppose I can take you to where he is. If you weren't so stupid, you'd know that he's very nearby."

"We know where he is, Esmé," Sabine said. "He's at the top of the waterfall, at the source of the Stricken Stream."

"Then I suppose you know how we can get there," Esmé said. "The toboggan doesn't go uphill, so I actually have no idea how we can reach the peak."

"She will invent a way," Sabine said, pointing at Violet.

Violet nodded, looking around the burnt headquarters. After a few seconds, she looked to Sabine's feet and then at her own feet. Sabine looked down as well, and saw that she was still wearing her fork assisted climbing shoes. She wiggled her frozen toes inside her olive-green combat boots, making the fork shake a bit, and at that moment she knew exactly what Violet had cooked up inside her inventing mind.

~༄~

After attaching the last four forks to Klaus and Quigley's shoes, Violet had told her companions to tie the leather straps of the toboggan around their waists, so they could drag the villainous girlfriend behind them as they climbed. It was exhausting to approach the peak of Mount Fraught in this manner, particularly after staying up all night digging a pit, and it seemed like they might get washed back down by the dripping water of the Stricken Stream.

The ice on the slope was weakening, after two fork-assisted climbs, a toboggan ride, and the increasing temperatures of False Spring, and with each step of Violet's invention, the ice would shift slightly. It was clear that the slippery slope was almost as exhausted as they were, and soon the ice would vanish completely.

"Mush!" Esmé called from the toboggan. She was using an expression that arctic explorers shouted to their sled dogs, and it certainly did not make the journey any easier.

"I wish she'd stop saying that," Violet murmured from behind her mask. She tapped the candelabra on the ice ahead of her, and a small piece detached from the waterfall and fell to the ruins of headquarters. Sabine watched it disappear below her and sighed. She would never again see the V.F.D. headquarters in all its glory. No one would.

"Mush!" Esmé cried again, with a cruel chuckle.

"Please stop saying that, Esmé," Violet called down impatiently. "That 'mush' nonsense is slowing our climb."

"A slow climb might be to our advantage," Klaus murmured to his sister. "The longer it takes us to reach the summit, the longer we have to think up what we're going to say to Count Olaf."

"We could tell him that he's surrounded," Quigley said, "and that there are volunteers everywhere ready to arrest him if he doesn't let Sunny go free."

Violet shook her mask. "He won't believe that," she said, sticking a fork-assisted shoe into the waterfall. "He can see everything and everyone from Mount Fraught. He'll know we're the only volunteers in the area."

"There must be something we can do," Klaus said. "We didn't make this journey into the mountains for nothing."

"Of course not," Sabine said. "We found each other, and we solved some of the mysteries that were haunting us."

"Will that be enough," Violet asked, "to defeat all those villains on the peak?"

Violet's question was a difficult one, and neither Klaus nor Sabine nor Quigley had the answer, and so rather than continue to expend their energy by discussing the matter, they decided to continue their difficult journey in silence, until they arrived at last at the source of the Stricken Stream.

Hoisting themselves up onto the flat peak, they sat on the edge and pulled the leather straps as hard as they could. It was such a difficult task to drag Esmé Squalor and the toboggan over the edge of the slope and onto Mount Fraught that the children did not notice who was nearby until they heard a familiar scratchy voice right behind them.

"Who goes there?" Count Olaf demanded.

Breathless from the climb, the four children turned around to see the villain standing with his two sinister cohorts near his long, black automobile, glaring suspiciously at the masked volunteers.

"We thought you'd get here by taking the path," said the man with a beard but no hair, "not by climbing up the waterfall."

"No, no, no," Esmé said quickly. "These aren't the people we're expecting. These are some volunteers I found at headquarters."

"Volunteers?" said the woman with hair but no beard, but her voice did not sound as deep as it usually did. The villains gave the children the same confused frown they had seen from Esmé, as if they were unsure whether to be scared or scornful, and a hook-handed man, two white-faced women, and three former carnival employees gathered around to see what had made their villainous boss fall silent.

Although they were exhausted, the two Baudelaires hurriedly untied the straps of the toboggan from their waists and stood with Quigley and Sabine to face their enemies. The orphans were very scared, of course, but they found that with their faces concealed they could speak their minds without showing how frightened they were.

"We built a trap to capture your girlfriend, Olaf," Violet said, "but we didn't want to become a monster like you."

"They're idiotic liars!" Esmé cried. "I found them hogging the cigarettes, so I captured them myself and made them drag me up the waterfall like sled dogs."

The middle Baudelaire ignored the wicked girlfriend's nonsense. "We're here for Sunny Baudelaire," Klaus said, "and we're not leaving without her."

Count Olaf frowned, and peered at them with his shiny, shiny eyes as if he were trying to see through their masks. "And what makes you so certain," he said, "that I'll give you my prisoner just because you say so?"

Sabine thought furiously, looking around at her surroundings for anything that might give her an idea of what to do. Count Olaf clearly believed that the three masked people in front of him were members of V.F.D., and she felt that if she could just find the right words to say, she could defeat him without becoming as villainous as her enemies. She thought back to when she had been trapped in Count Olaf's clutches and remembered something that Esmé had shrieked at her.

"Finally, the sugar bowl is mine!" the woman, Esmé, exclaimed, then laughed maniacally.

"You will give us Sunny," Sabine said, "because we know where the sugar bowl is."

𝔼𝕟𝕕 𝕠𝕗 ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕡𝕥𝕖𝕣