Secrets

Chapter 8

"Where did you get this picture?" Klaus gasped in shock. He removed the same photograph from his pocket and compared the two of them. Aside from the drops of fungus on the Baudelaire picture, the photos were identical, a phrase with here means exactly the same, very similar to the two triplets who also stood next to Klaus to look at the two pictures.

"To be honest, I don't really know," Holly S. responded.

"How could you not know you had a picture of Lucky Smells Lumbermill?" Klaus said.

"I'm sorry Lucky What Mill?"

"Lucky Smells Lumber Mill. It's in Paltryville. My sisters and I ended up going there and found out our parents helped the people of the town after it burned down..." The middle Baudelaire paused and bit his lip very hard; the horrific memories of what happened at the unpleasant, gum obsessed lumber mill and its employees there, flashed in his mind.

"Another fire," Isadora Quagmire said sighing heavily. "Everything just seems to go up in smoke."

"But it's also a picture of our parents," Klaus explained. He pointed to the Baudelaire parents in the photo for Holly.

"And ours," Duncan added, pointing out their parents.

"And several of our guardians, including Uncle Monty and Aunt Josephine," the male Baudelaire sibling continued, pointing out the people whom the three siblings had lost in tragic circumstances... Well, there was really only one circumstance that caused the tragedy and he had a tattoo on his ankle, shiny eyes underneath one eyebrow.

"What happened to them?"

"Furcifer," Sunny shrieked, which probably meant "A treacherous villain murdered them, and he still continues to pursue us."

Holly turned to the older Baudelaire for a translation.

"What my sister means is that they were all murdered in cold blood by a horrible person."

"Oh, my goodness," Holly gasped, placing her hand over her mouth. She took a step back to process this information. "Who would do such an awful thing?"

"Olaf!" the youngest Baudelaire uttered, impressing the Quagmires and Holly as they had not yet heard the baby speak phrases that they could understand.

"Olaf..." Holly said with a distant look in her eye.

"Count Olaf to be exact," Klaus clarified.

"He's a terrible villain who has been pursuing us in order to get his hands on our fortune," Violet Baudelaire finished as she came into the dorm room with the various materials she needed for her invention. The eldest Baudelaire sibling happened to walk in, just as she heard her sister shriek the villain's name. Of course, she should have assumed that they would have to tell their new friend about the series of unfortunate events that had plagued the siblings since they had lost their parents in the fire. It pained each sibling to think about what had happened to them, losing people they cared about deeply and in such ghastly circumstances, a word which does not involve spiritual entities that might haunt a house or perhaps a carbonated drinks factory, but rather means the horrible things which happened to the people and may turn one's face as pale as a ghost's.

"A lot of things have happened to us that we can't explain, but the one thing we can explain is how terrible Count Olaf has made our lives."

However, Holly had a distant look in her eyes, hardly listening to what Violet had said. Most of the time it is impolite to ignore a person when they tell you something important, particularly when that something is about a terrible villain who was willing to do anything, including murder, to get his hands on a fortune. It appeared that her mind continued to drift away from the conversation, further from the moment in time; like a boat drifting into the vast ocean or perhaps a spirit floating away into the wall of the place in which they haunted or a woman walking away from a broken-hearted man, tears in both their eyes. The newest member of the group of friends was in fact not being impolite or disrespectful to her friends, but her mind was connecting the dots, a phrase which means she was realizing the links and unfortunate events that seemed to exist between all of their lives.