three children tell us where you were last night?'
'We were at Hector's house,' Klaus said. 'He'll tell you himself.' The middle Baudelaire stood up on tiptoe and called out over the crowd. 'Hector! Tell everyone that we were with you!'
The citizens looked this way and that, the crow hats of the Elders bobbing as they listened for a word from Hector. But no word came. The three children waited for a moment in the tense silence, thinking that surely Hector would overcome his skittishness in order to save them. But the handyman was quiet. The only sounds the children could hear was the splashing of Fowl Fountain and the muttering of the roosting crows.
'Hector sometimes gets skittish in front of crowds,' Violet explained, 'but it's true. I spent the night working in his studio, and Klaus was reading in the secret library, and — '
'Enough nonsense!' Officer Luciana said 'Do you really expect us to believe that our fine handyman is building mechanical devices and has a secret library? Next I suppose you'll say that he's building things out of feathers!'
'It's bad enough that you killed Count Olaf,' an Elder said, 'but now you're trying to frame Hector for other crimes! I say that V.F.D. no longer serve as guardian for such terrible orphans!'
'Hear, hear!' cried several voices scattered in the crowd, just as the children had planned to do themselves.
'I will send a message to Mr. Poe right away,' the Elder continued, 'and the banker will come and remove them in a few days.'
'A few days is too long to wait!' Mrs. Morrow said, and several citizens cheered in agreement. 'These children need to be taken care of as quickly as possible.'
'I say that we burn them at the stake!' cried Mr. Lesko, who stepped forward to wag his finger at the children. 'Rule #201 clearly says no murdering!'
'But we didn't murder anyone!' Violet cried. 'A ribbon, a lens, and some bite marks aren't enough evidence to accuse someone of murder!'
'It's enough evidence for me!' an Elder cried. 'We already have the torches — let's burn them right now!'
'Hold on a moment,' another Elder said. 'We can't simply burn people at the stake whenever we want!' The Baudelaires looked at one another, relieved that one citizen seemed immune to mob psychology. 'I have a very important appointment in ten minutes,' the Elder continued. 'So it's too late to do it now. How about tonight, after dinner?'
'That's no good,' said another member of the Council. 'I'm having a dinner party then. How about tomorrow afternoon?'
'Yes,' someone said from the crowd. 'Right after lunch! That's a perfect time!'
'Hear, hear!' Mr. Lesko cried.
'Hear, hear!' Mrs. Morrow cried.
'Glaji!' Sunny cried.
'Hector, help us!' Violet called. 'Please tell these people that we're not murderers!'
'I told you before,' Detective Dupin said, smiling beneath his sunglasses. 'Only Sunny is a murderer. You two are accomplices, and I will put you all in jail where you belong.' Dupin grabbed Violet's and Klaus's wrists with one scraggly hand, and leaned down to scoop up Sunny with the other. 'See you tomorrow afternoon for the burning at the stake!' he called out to the rest of the crowd, and dragged the struggling Baudelaires through the door of the uptown jail. The children stumbled into a dim, grim hallway, listening to the faint sounds of the mob cheering as the door slammed behind them.
'I'm putting you in the Deluxe Cell,'
Dupin said. 'It's the dirtiest one.' He marched them down a dark hallway with many twists and turns, and the Baudelaires could see rows and rows of cells with their heavy doors hanging open. The only light in the jail came from tiny barred windows placed in each cell, but the children saw that every cell was empty and each one looked dirtier than the rest.
'You'll be the one in jail before long, Olaf,' Klaus said, hoping he sounded much more certain than he felt. 'You'll never get away with this.'
'My name is Detective Dupin,' said Detective Dupin, 'and my only concern is bringing you three criminals to justice.'
'But if you burn us at the stake,' Violet said quickly, 'you'll never get your hands on the Baudelaire fortune.'
Dupin rounded the last corner of the hallway, and pushed the Baudelaires into a small damp cell with only a small wooden bench as furniture. By the light of the barred window the siblings could see that the cell was quite filthy, as Dupin had promised. The detective reached out to pull the door closed, but with his sunglasses on it was too dark to see the door handle, so he had to throw off all pretense — a phrase which here means 'take off part of his disguise for a moment' — and remove his sunglasses. As much as the children hated Dupin's ridiculous disguise, it was worse to see their enemy's one eyebrow, and the shiny, shiny eyes that had been haunting them for so long.
'Don't worry,' he said in his wheezy voice. 'You won't be burned at the stake — not all of you, at least. Tomorrow afternoon, one of you will make a miraculous escape — if you consider being smuggled out of V.F.D. by one of my assistants to be an escape. The other two will burn at the stake as planned. You bratty orphans are too stupid to realize it, but a genius like me knows that it may take a village to raise a child, but it only takes one child to inherit a fortune.' The villain laughed a loud and rude laugh, and began to shut the door of the cell. 'But I don't want to be cruel,' he said, smiling to indicate that he really wanted to be as cruel as possible. 'I'll let you three decide who gets the honor of spending the rest of their puny life with me, and who gets to burn at the stake. I'll be back at lunchtime for your decision.'
The Baudelaire orphans listened to the wheezy giggle of their enemy as he slammed the cell door and walked back down the hallway in his plastic shoes, and felt a sinking feeling in their stomachs, where the huevos rancheros Hector had made for them last night were still being digested. When something is being digested, of course, it is getting smaller and smaller as the body uses up all of the nutrients inside the food, but it didn't feel that way to the three children. The youngsters did not feel as if the small potatoes they had eaten for dinner were getting smaller. The Baudelaire orphans huddled together in the dim light and listened to the laughter echo against the walls of the uptown jail, and wondered just how large the potatoes of their lives would grow.
Chapter Ten
Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion — which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea — you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.
'I don't care what that horrible man says,' Violet said to her siblings as Detective Dupin's plastic footsteps faded away. 'We're not going to choose which one of us will escape and who will be left to burn at the stake. I absolutely refuse to entertain the notion.'
'But what are we going to do?' Klaus asked. 'Try to contact Mr. Poe?'
'Mr. Poe won't help us,' Violet replied. 'He'll think we're ruining the reputation of his bank. We're going to escape.'
'Frulk!' Sunny said.
'I know it's a jail cell,' Violet said, 'but there must be some way to get out.' She pulled her ribbon out of her pocket and tied up her hair, her fingers shaking as she did so. The eldest Baudelaire had spoken confidently, but she did not feel as confident as she sounded. A cell is built for the specific purpose of keeping people inside, and she
