"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 three 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 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 aid. "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?"