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"The harpoon hit the ladder!" Isadora called down to her friends in despair. "The rope is coming unraveled!"
It was true. As the crows began to settle in at Nevermore Tree, the Baudelaires could see more clearly, and they stared up at the ladder in horror. The harpoon was sticking out of one of the ladder's thick ropes, which was slowly uncurling around the hook. It reminded Violet of a time when she was much younger, and had begged her mother to braid her hair so she could look like a famous inventor she had seen in a magazine. Despite her mother's best efforts, the braids had not held their shape, and had come unraveled almost as soon as she had tied their ends with ribbons. Violet's hair had slowly spun out of the braid, just as the strands of rope were spinning out of the ladder now.
"Climb faster!" Duncan screamed down. "Climb faster!"
"No," Violet said quietly, and then said it again so her siblings could hear. More and more crows were taking their places in the tree, and Klaus and Sunny could see Violet's grim face as she looked down at them in despair. "No." The eldest Baudelaire took another look at the unraveling rope and saw that they couldn't possibly climb up to the basket of Hector's self-sustaining hot air mobile home. It was just as impossible as her mother ever braiding her hair again. "We can't do it," she said. "If we keep trying to climb up, we'll fall to our deaths. We have to climb down."
"But — " Klaus said.
"No," Violet said, and one tear rolled down her cheek. "We won't make it, Klaus."
"Yoil!" Sunny said.
"No," Violet said again, and looked her siblings in the eye. The three Baudelaires shared a moment of frustration and despair that they could not follow their friends, and then, without another word, they began climbing down the unraveling ladder, through the murder of crows still migrating to Nevermore Tree. When the Baudelaires climbed down nine rungs, the rope unbraided completely and dropped the children onto the flat landscape, unhappy but unharmed.
"Hector, maneuver your invention back down!" Isadora called. Her voice sounded a bit faint from so far away. "Duncan and I can lean out of the basket and make a human ladder! There's still time to retrieve them!"
"I can't," Hector said sadly, gazing down at the Baudelaires, who were standing up and untangling themselves from the fallen ladder, as Detective Dupin began to stride toward them in his plastic shoes. "It's not designed to return to the ground."
"There must be a way!" Duncan cried, but the self-sustaining hot air mobile home only floated farther away.
"We could try to climb Nevermore Tree," Klaus said, "and jump into the control basket from its highest branches."
Violet shook her head. "The tree is already half covered in crows," she said, "and Hector's invention is flying too high." She looked up in the sky and cupped her hands to her mouth so her voice could travel all the way up to her friends. "We can't reach you now!" she cried. "We'll try to catch up with you later!"
Isadora's voice came back so faintly that the Baudelaires could scarcely hear it over the muttering of the crows, who were still settling themselves in Nevermore Tree. "How can you catch up with us later," she called, "in the middle of the air?"
"I don't know!" Violet admitted. "But we'll find a way, I promise you!"
"In the meantime," Duncan called back, "take these!" The Baudelaires could see the triplet holding his dark green notebook, and Isadora holding hers, over the side of the basket. "This is all the information we have about Count Olaf's evil plan, and the secret of V.F.D., and Jacques Snicket's murder!" His voice was as trembly as it was faint, and the three siblings knew their friend was crying. "It's the least we can do!" he called.
"Take our notebooks, Baudelaires!" Isadora called, "and maybe someday we'll meet again!"
The Quagmire triplets dropped their notebooks out of the self-sustaining hot air mobile home, and called out "Good-bye!" to the Baudelaires, but their farewell was drowned out by the sound of another click! and another swoosh! as Officer Luciana fired one last harpoon. After so much practice, I'm sorry to say, her aim had improved, and the hook hit exactly what Luciana hoped it would. The sharp spear sailed through the air and hit not one but both Quagmire notebooks. There was a loud ripping noise, and then the air was filled with sheets of paper, tossing this way and that in the rustling wind made by the flying crows. The Quagmires yelled in frustration, and called one last thing down to their friends, but Hector's invention had flown too high for the Baudelaires to hear it all. ". . . volunteer . . ." the children heard dimly, and then the self-sustaining hot air balloon floated too high for the orphans to hear anything more.
"Tesper!" Sunny cried, which meant "Let's try to gather up as many pages of the notebooks as we can!"
"If 'Tesper' means 'All is lost,' then that baby isn't so stupid after all," said Detective Dupin, who had reached the Baudelaires. He opened his blazer, exposing more of his pale and hairy chest, and took a rolled-up newspaper out of an inside pocket, looking down at the children as if they were three bugs he was about to squash. "I thought you'd want to see The Daily Punctilio" he said, and unrolled the newspaper to show them the headline. "baudelaire orphans at large!" it read, using a phrase which here means "not in jail." Below the headline were three drawings, one of each sibling's face.
Detective Dupin removed his sunglasses so he could read the newspaper in the fading light. "Authorities are trying to capture Veronica, Klyde, and Susie Baudelaire," he read out loud, "who escaped from the uptown jail of the Village of Fowl Devotees, where they were imprisoned for the murder of Count Omar." He gave the children a nasty smile and threw The Daily Punctilio down on the ground. "Some names are wrong, of course," he said, "but everybody makes mistakes. Tomorrow, of course, there will be another special edition, and I'll make sure that The Daily Punctilio gets every detail correct in the story about Detective Dupin's supercool capture of the notorious Baudelaires."
Dupin leaned down to the children, so close that they could smell the egg salad sandwich he'd apparently eaten for lunch. "Of course," he said, in a quiet voice so only the siblings could hear him, "one Baudelaire will escape at the last minute, and live with me until the fortune is mine. The question is, which Baudelaire will that be? You still haven't let me know your decision."
"We're not going to entertain that notion, Olaf," Violet said bitterly.
"Oh no!" an Elder cried, and pointed out at the flat horizon. By the light of the sunset, the Baudelaires could see a small, slender shape sticking out of the ground, while the Quagmire pages fluttered by. It was the last harpoon Luciana had fired, and it had hit something else after destroying the Quagmire notebooks. There, pinned to the ground, was one of the V.F.D. crows, opening its mouth in pain.
"You harmed a crow!" Mrs. Morrow said in horror, pointing at Officer Luciana. "That's Rule #1! That's the most important rule of all!"
"Oh, it's just a stupid bird," Detective Dupin said, turning to face the horrified citizens.
"A stupid bird?" an Elder repeated, his crow hat trembling in anger. "A stupid bird?' Detective Dupin, this is the Village of Fowl Devotees, and — "
"Wait a minute!" interrupted a voice from the crowd. "Look, everyone! He has only one eyebrow!"
Detective Dupin, who had removed his sunglasses to read the paper, reached into the pocket of his blazer and put them back on again. "Lots of people have one eyebrow," he said, but the crowd paid no attention as mob psychology began to take hold again.
"Let's make him take off his shoes," Mr. Lesko called, and an Elder knelt down to grab one of Dupin's feet. "If he has a tattoo, let's burn him at the stake!"
"Hear, hear!" a group of citizens agreed.
"Now, wait just a minute!" Officer Luciana said, putting down the harpoon gun and looking at Dupin in concern.
"And let's burn Officer Luciana, too!" Mrs. Morrow said. "She wounded a crow!"
"We don't want all these torches to go to waste!" cried an Elder.
"Hear, hear!"
Detective Dupin opened his mouth to speak, and the children could
see he was thinking frantically of something to say that would fool V.F.D.'s citizens. But then he simply closed his mouth, and with a flick of his foot, kicked the Elder who was holding on to his shoe. As the mob gasped, the Elder's crow-shaped hat fell off as she rolled to the ground, still clutching Dupin's plastic shoe.
"It's the tattoo!" one of the Verhoogens cried, pointing at the eye on Detective Dupin's — or, more properly, Count Olaf's — left ankle. With a roar, Olaf ran back to his motorcycle and, with another roar, he started the engine. "Hop aboard, Esmé!" he called out to Officer Luciana. The Chief removed her motorcycle helmet with a smile, and the Baudelaires saw that it was indeed Esmé Squalor.
"It's Esmé Squalor!" an Elder cried. "She used to be the city's sixth most successful financial advisor, but now she works with Count Olaf!"
"I heard the two of them are dating!" Mrs. Morrow said in horror.
"We are dating!" Esmé cried in triumph. She climbed aboard Olaf's motorcycle and tossed her helmet to the ground, showing that she cared no more about motorcycle safety than she did about the welfare of crows.
"So long, Baudelaires!" Count Olaf called, zooming through the angry crowd. "I'll find you again, if the authorities don't find you first!"
Esmé cackled as the motorcycle roared off across the flat landscape at more than twice the legal speed limit, so within moments the motorcycle was as tiny a speck on the horizon as the self-sustaining hot air mobile home was in the sky. The mob stared after the two villains in disappointment.
"We'll never catch up to them," an Elder said with a frown. "Not without any mechanical devices."
"Never mind about that," another Elder replied. "We have more important things to attend to. Hurry, everyone! Rush this crow to the V.F.D. vet!"
