"They're two terrible people, a man and a woman, who have quite an aura of menace," Violet said. "Even Count Olaf is a little afraid of them."
"What are they all doing up there?" Klaus asked.
"They're having some sort of villainous meeting," Quigley said. "We heard them mention something about a recruitment plan, and a large net."
"That doesn't sound pleasant," Klaus said.
"There's more, Klaus," 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?" Quigley asked.
"I'll show you," Klaus said, and led the way to the ruins of the library, where Violet could see he'd been working. His dark blue notebook was open, and she 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?" Quigley 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," he said, "that T immediately copied it into my commonplace book. It explains how the whole code works."
"Read it to us," Violet said, and Klaus complied, a word which here means "followed Violet's suggestion and read a very complicated paragraph out loud, explaining it as he went along."
"'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."
"That'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 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 researching 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's the darkest."
Klaus nodded, and unscrewed the cap from the jar of boysenberry jam. "Look inside," he said, and shined the flashlight so Violet and Quigley could see. Someone had taken a knife and written two letters in the surface of the jam: J and S.
"J.S.," Quigley said. "Jacques Snicket."
"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?" Quigley 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," Quigley 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, tumeric, 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," Quigley said.
"A little too convenient," Klaus 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 Quigley 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 pratically the only thing they could see. If you have ever found yourself sitting in darkness with a flashlight, you may have experienced the feeling that something is lurking just beyond the circle of ligh
t that a flashlight makes, and reading a poem about dead men is not a good way to make yourself feel better.
"I wish Isadora were here," Quigley 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?"