"What's all this shouting about?" asked another voice. "I was fast asleep!"
"It's the middle of the night!" complained someone else. "Why is everybody yelling?"
"I'll tell you why there's yelling!" yelled someone. "Someone was shot with a harpoon gun and then fell into the pond!"
"Come back to bed, Bruce," said someone else.
"I can't sleep if there's murderers on the loose!" cried another guest.
"Amen, brother!" said another person. "If a crime has been committed, then it's our duty to stand around in our pajamas in the name of justice!"
"I can't sleep anyway!" said somebody. "That lousy Indian food has kept me up all night!"
"Somebody tell me what's going on!" called a voice. "The readers of The Daily Punctilio will want to know what's happened."
The sound of the voice of Geraldine Julienne, and the mention of her inaccurate publication, forced the children to stop crying, if only for a moment. They knew it would be wise to postpone their grief-a phrase which here means "mourn the death of Dewey Denouement at a later time"-and make sure that the newspaper printed the truth.
"There's been an accident," Violet called, not turning her eyes from the surface of the pond. "A terrible accident."
"One of the hotel managers has died," Klaus said.
"Which one?" asked a voice from a high window. "Frank or Ernest?"
"Dewey," Sunny said.
"There's no Dewey," said another voice. "That's a legendary figure."
"He's not a legendary figure!" Violet said indignantly. "He's a sub-"
Klaus put his hand on his sister's, and the eldest Baudelaire stopped talking. "Dewey's catalog is a secret," he whispered. "We can't have it announced in The Daily Punctilio."
"But truth," Sunny murmured.
"Klaus is right," Violet said. "Dewey asked us to keep his secret, and we can't fail him." She looked sadly out at the pond, and wiped the tears from her eyes. "It's the least we can do," she said.
"I didn't realize this was a sad occasion," said another hotel guest. "We should observe everything carefully, and intrude only if absolutely necessary."
"I disagree!" said someone in a raspy shout. "We should intrude right now, and observe only if absolutely necessary!"
"We should call the authorities!" said someone else.
"We should call the manager!" "We should call the concierge!" "We should call my mother!" "We should look for clues!" "We should look for weapons!" "We should look for my mother!" "We should look for suspicious people!" "Suspicious people?" repeated another voice. "But this is supposed to be a nice hotel!" "Nice hotels are crawling with suspicious people," someone else remarked. "I saw a washerwoman who was wearing a suspicious wig!"
"I saw a concierge carrying a suspicious item!"
"I saw a taxi carrying a suspicious passenger!" "I saw a cook preparing suspicious food!" "I saw an attendant holding a suspicious spatula!"
"I saw a man with a suspicious cloud of smoke!"
"I saw a baby with a suspicious lock!"
"I saw a manager wearing a suspicious uniform!"
"I saw a woman wearing suspicious lettuce!"
"I saw my mother!"
"I can't see anything!" someone yelled. "It's as dark as a crow flying through a pitch black night!"
"I see something right now!" cried a voice. "There are three suspicious people standing at the edge of the pond!"
"They're the people who were talking to the reporter!" cried somebody else. "They're refusing to show their faces!"
"They must be murderers!" cried yet another person. "Nobody else would act as suspiciously as that!"
"We'd better hurry downstairs," said one more guest, "before they escape!"
"Wow!" squealed another voice. "Wait until the readers of The Daily Punctilio read the headline: 'VICIOUS MURDER AT HOTEL DENOUEMENT!' That's much more exciting than an accident!"
"Mob psychology," Sunny said, remembering a term Klaus had taught her shortly before she took her first steps.
"Sunny's right," said Klaus, wiping his eyes. "This crowd is getting angrier and angrier. In a moment, they'll all believe we're murderers."
"Maybe we are," Violet said quietly.
"Poppycock!" Sunny said firmly, which meant something like, "Nonsense." "Accident!"
"It was an accident," Klaus said, "but it was our fault."
"Partially," Sunny said.
"It's not for us to decide," Violet said. "We should go inside and talk to Justice Strauss and the others. They'll know what to do."
"Maybe," Klaus said. "Or maybe we should run."
"Run?" Sunny asked.
"We can't run," Violet said. "If we run, everyone will think we're murderers."
"Maybe we are," Klaus pointed out. "All the noble people in that lobby have failed us. We can't be sure they'll help us now."
Violet heaved a great sigh, her breath still shaky from her tears. "Where would we go?" she whispered.
"Anywhere," Klaus said simply. "We could go somewhere where no one has ever heard of Count Olaf, or V.F.D. There must be other noble people in the world, and we could find them."
"There are other noble people," Violet said. "They're on their way here. Dewey told us to wait until tomorrow. I think we should stay."
"Tomorrow might be too late," Klaus said. "I think we should run."
"Torn," Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of, "I see the advantages and disadvantages of both plans of action," but before her siblings could answer, the children felt a shadow over them, and looked up to see a tall, skinny figure standing over them. In the darkness the children could not see any of his features, only the glowing tip of a skinny cigarette in his mouth.
"Do you three need a taxi?" he asked, and gestured to the automobile that had brought Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor to the entrance of the hotel.
The siblings looked at one another, and then squinted up at the man. The children thought perhaps his voice was familiar, but it might just have been his unfathomable tone, which they'd heard so many times since their arrival at the hotel that it made everything seem familiar and mysterious at the same time.
"We're not sure," Violet said, after a moment.
"You're not sure?" the man asked. "Whenever you see someone in a taxi, they are probably being driven to do some errand. Surely there must be something you need to do, or somewhere you need to go. A great American novelist wrote that people travel faster now, but she wasn't sure if they do better things. Maybe you would do better things if you traveled at this very moment."
"We haven't any money," Klaus said.
"You needn't worry about money," the man said, "not if you're who I think you are." He leaned in toward the Baudelaires. "Are you?" he asked. "Are you who I think you are?"
The children looked at each other again. They had no way of knowing, of course, if this man was a volunteer or an enemy, a noble man or a treacherous person. In general, of course, a stranger who tries to get you into an automobile is anything but noble, and in general a person who quotes great American novelists is anything but treacherous, and in general a man who says you needn't worry about money, or a man who smokes cigarettes, is somewhere in between. But the Baudelaire orphans were not standing in general. They were standing outside the Hotel Denouement, at the edge of a pond where a great secret was hidden, while a crowd of guests grew more and more suspicious about the terrible thing that had just occurred. The children thought of Dewey, and remembered the terrible, terrible sight of him sinking into the pond, and they realized they had no way of knowing if they themselves were good or evil, let alone the mysterious man towering over them.