How It Should Have Been

Chapter 11: The Slippery Slope

Begin!

Universe*

~Normal POV

"A jar of mustard, a container of olives, three jars of different kinds of jam, a bottle of lemon juice, a pickle in a small glass jug, and a few strands of some Very Fresh Dill," Isadora listed off the items Sunny had brought to them.

Klaus had shifted through several piles of ashes and found a scrap of paper that explained how the code worked. He copied the instructions into his notebook as Isadora set the fridge items around them in a semi-circle. The researcher examined the items while glancing at his notes. He picked up the glass jug and lemon juice and set them aside to discard them.

"Verbal Fridge Dialogue is an emergency communication system that involves using esoteric items from a refrigerator to send a secret message to other volunteers," Klaus read, "It says volunteers will know such code is being used by the presence of Very Fresh Dill. Or at least that's what it should say, the sentence cuts off there."

"What does esoteric mean," Isadora asked.

"In this case, it means things that aren't used much, or things that stay in the refrigerator for a long time. Much like the things we found here."

"So, we know that someone sent a message," Duncan said, "But how do we figure out what it's about or who it's for?"

"The receiver should first find their initials, then there's a poem, 'The darkest of the jams of three, contains within the addressee.'"

"That's a couplet," Isadora noted, "Just like mine. It seems to say the receiver's initials will be inside the darkest of the three jams."

Quigley examined the jars, "There's apricot, strawberry, and boysenberry. Boysenberry is the darkest."

He opened the jar and revealed the letters J.S. had been carved into the surface.

"J.S. so the message is for Jacques Snicket," Duncan wrote down, "But he's dead."

"I guess whoever wrote it doesn't know that. Next it says they use a small, rounded fruit to tell how many days until something happens. Meaning the number of olives in that jar represents a set number of days," Klaus continued, "How many are in there?"

Duncan picked up the jar and counted, "There's six, meaning six days, so that would be on Friday. Based on the date we saw in the newspaper when were at the Last Chance General Store then by process of elimination six days from now is Friday."

He quickly jotted down the information along with the others. Violet was still off working on her invention to get them up the waterfall, leaving the rest of them to sort this out. Sunny had curled up in Klaus' lap to keep warm from the chilly mountain winds; she was confident they were handling this well without her input, no matter how small it would have been. Violet and Klaus had not yet been able to teach her to read as they hadn't had time with everything happening so quickly in their lives, but they were sure she had been learning steadily on her own.

"So something is happening on Friday," Klaus said continuing down his notes, "Any spice-based condiment should have a coded label referring volunteers to encoded poems. Hm, Isadora read off the ingredients on that mustard jar."

She picked it up, "Vinegar, mustard seed, salt, turmeric, 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. So, they hid the poem in the ingredients list because nobody ever reads it. How clever."

"Indeed," Quigley nodded, "But what does the poem say then?"

Klaus frowned, "I've read that one in a poetry book before, but it's not a very cheerful poem." He recited the verse: