'Cra!' Sunny said, which meant 'She probably means the beak of a V.F.D. crow.'
'You might be right,' Violet agreed. 'But why does she say that no words can come from it? Of course no words can come from a beak. Birds can't talk.'
'Actually, some birds can talk,' Klaus said. 'I read an ornithological encyclopedia that discussed the parrot and the myna bird, which both can imitate human speech.'
'But there aren't any parrots or myna birds around here,' Violet said. 'There are only crows, and crows certainly can't speak.'
'And speaking of speaking,' Klaus said, 'why does the poem say 'Until dawn comes we cannot speak'?'
'Well, both these poems arrived in the morning,' Violet said. 'Maybe Isadora means that she can only send us poems in the morning.'
'None of this makes any sense,' Klaus said. 'Maybe Hector can help us figure out what's going wrong.'
'Laper!' Sunny said in agreement, and the children went to wake up the handyman, who was still asleep on the front porch. Violet touched his shoulder, and as he yawned and sat up the children could see that his face had lines on it from sleeping on the picnic table.
'Good morning, Baudelaires,' he said, stretching his arms and giving them a sleepy smile. 'At least, I hope it's a good morning. Did you find any sign of the Quagmires?'
'It's more like a strange morning,' Violet replied. 'We found a sign of them, all right. Take a look.'
Violet handed Hector the second poem, and he read it and frowned. ''Curiouser and curiouser,'' he said, quoting one of the Baudelaires' favorite books. 'This is really turning into a puzzle.'
'But a puzzle is just something you do for amusement,' Klaus said. 'Duncan and Isadora are in grave danger. If we don't figure out what these poems are trying to tell us, Count Olaf will — '
'Don't even say it,' Violet said with a shiver. 'We absolutely must solve this puzzle, and that is that.'
Hector stood up to stretch, and looked out on the flat and empty horizon surrounding his home. 'Judging by the angle of the sun,' he said, 'it's just about time to leave. We don't even have time for breakfast.'
'Leave?' Violet asked.
'Of course,' Hector said. 'Are you forgetting how many chores we have ahead of us today?' He reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a list. 'We begin downtown, of course, so the crows don't get in our way. We have to trim Mrs. Morrow's hedges, wash Mr. Lesko's windows, and polish all the doorknobs at the Verhoogen family's mansion. Plus we have to sweep all the feathers out of the street, and take out everyone's garbage and recyclables.'
'But the Quagmire kidnapping is much more important than any of those things,' Violet said.
Hector sighed. 'I agree with you,' he said, 'but I'm not going to argue with the Council of Elders. They make me too skittish.'
'I'll be happy to explain the situation to them,' Klaus said.
'No,' Hector decided. 'It will be best to do our chores as usual. Go wash your faces, Baudelaires, and then we'll go.'
The Baudelaires looked at one another in dismay, wishing that the handyman wasn't quite so afraid of a group of old people wearing crow-shaped hats, but without further discussion they walked back into the house, washed their faces, and followed Hector across the flat landscape until they reached the outskirts of town and then through the uptown district, where the V.F.D. crows were roosting, until they reached the downtown house of Mrs. Morrow, who was waiting in her pink robe on her front porch. Without a word she handed Hector a pair of hedge clippers, which are nothing more than large scissors designed to cut branches and leaves rather than paper, and gave each Baudelaire a large plastic bag to gather up the leaves and branches Hector would snip off. Hedge clippers and a plastic bag are not appropriate methods of greeting someone, of course, particularly first thing in the morning, but the three siblings were so busy thinking about what the poems could mean that they scarcely noticed. As they gathered up the hedge trimmings they floated several theories — the phrase 'floated several theories' here means 'talked quietly about the two couplets by Isadora Quagmire' — until the hedge looked nice and neat and it was time to walk down the block to where Mr. Lesko lived. Mr. Lesko — whom the Baudelaires recognized as the man in plaid pants who was worried that the children might have to live with him — was even ruder than Mrs. Morrow. He merely pointed at a pile of window-cleaning supplies and stomped back into his house, but once again the Baudelaires were concentrating on solving the mystery of the two messages they had been left, and scarcely noticed Mr. Lesko's rudeness. Violet and Klaus each began scrubbing dirt off a window with a damp rag, while Sunny stood by with a bucket of soapy water and Hector climbed up to clean the windows on the second floor, but all the children thought of was each line of Isadora's confusing poem, until they were finished with the windows and were ready to go to work on the rest of the chores for the day, which I will not describe for you, not only because they were so boring that I would fall asleep while writing them down on paper, but because the Baudelaire orphans scarcely noticed them. The children thought about the couplets while they polished the Verhoogen doorknobs, and they thought about them when they swept the feathers from the street into a dustpan that Sunny held while crawling in front of her siblings, but they still could not imagine how Isadora managed to leave a poem underneath Nevermore Tree. They thought about the couplets as they carried the garbage and recyclables from all of V.F.D.'s downtown residents, and they thought about them as they ate a lunch of cabbage sandwiches that one of V.F.D.'s restaurant owners had agreed to provide as his part in the village's attempt to raise the children, but they still could not figure out what Isadora was trying to tell them. They thought of the couplets when Hector read out the list of afternoon chores, which included such tedious duties as making citizens' beds, washing townspeople's dishes, preparing enough hot fudge sundaes for the entire Council of Elders to enjoy as an afternoon snack, and polishing Fowl Fountain, but no matter how hard they thought, the Baudelaires got no closer to solving the couplets' mysteries. 'I'm very impressed with how hard you three children are working,' Hector said, as he and the children began their last afternoon chore. Fowl Fountain was made in the shape of an enormous crow, and stood in the middle of the uptown district, in a courtyard with many different streets leading out of it. The children were scrubbing at the crow's metal body, which was covered in carvings of feather shapes to make it look more realistic. Hector was standing on a ladder scrubbing at the crow's metal head, which was facing straight up and spitting a steady stream of water out of a hole fashioned to look like its mouth, as if the enormous bird were gargling and spitting water all over its own body. The effect was hideous, but the V.F.D. crows must have thought differently, because the fountain was covered in feathers that they had left behind during their uptown morning roost. 'When the Council of Elders told me that the village was serving as your guardian,' Hector continued, 'I was afraid that three small children wouldn't be able to do all these chores without complaining.'
'We're used to strenuous exercise,' Violet replied. 'When we lived in Paltryville, we debarked trees and sawed them into boards, and at Prufrock Preparatory School we had to run hundreds of laps every night.'
'Besides,' Klaus said, 'we're so busy thinking about the couplets that we've scarcely noticed our work.'
'I thought that's why you were so quiet,' Hector said. 'How do the poems go again?'
The Baudelaires had looked at the two scraps of paper so many times over the course of the day that they could recite both poems from memory.
Klaus said.
'Dulch!' Sunny added, which meant something like, 'And we still haven't figured out what they really mean.'
'They're tricky, all right,' Hector said. 'In fact, I...'
Here his voice trailed off, and the children were startled to see the handyman turn around so he was no longer facing them and begin to scrub the left eye of the metal crow, as if someone had flicked a switch that stopped him from talking.
'Fowl Fountain still doesn't look completely clean,' said a stern voice from behind the children, and the Baudelaires turned around to see three women from the Council of Elders who had entered the courtyard and now stood frowning at them. Hector was so skittish that he didn't even look up to answer, but the children were not nearly as intimidated, a word which here means 'made skittish by three older women wearing crow-shaped hats.'
'We're not completely finished cleaning it,' Violet explained politely. 'I do hope you enjoyed your hot fudge sundaes that we prepared for you earlier.'
'They were O.K.,' one of them said, with a shrug that bobbed her crow hat slightly.
