"Fountain," Sunny said.

"The Fowl Fountain, at the Village of Fowl Devotees?" Klaus asked.

"No," Sunny said, shaking her head."In city."

"The Fountain of Victorious Finance?" Violet asked. "Why on earth would you miss that?"

"First swim," Sunny said, and her siblings gasped.

"You can't remember that," Klaus said.

"You were just a few weeks old," Violet said. “I remember," Sunny said firmly, as the Baudelaires shook their heads in wonder. Sunny was talking about an afternoon long ago, during an unusually hot autumn in the city. The Baudelaire parents had some business to attend to, and brought along the children, promising to stop at the ice cream store on the way home. The family had arrived at the banking district, pausing to rest at the Fountain of Victorious Finance, and the Baudelaires' mother had hurried into a building with tall, curved towers poking out in all directions, while their father waited outside with the children. The hot weather made Sunny very cranky, and she began to fuss. To quiet her, the Baudelaires' father dipped her bare feet in the water, and Sunny had smiled so enthusiastically that he had begun to dunk Sunny's body, clothes and all, into the fountain, until the youngest Baudelaire was screaming with laughter. As you may know, the laughter of babies is often very contagious, and before long not only were Violet and Klaus also jumping into the fountain, but the Baudelaires' father, too, all of them laughing and laughing as Sunny grew more and more delighted. Soon the Baudelaires' mother came out of the building, and looked in astonishment for a moment at her soaking and giggling family, before putting down her pocketbook, kicking off her shoes, and joining them in the refreshing water. They laughed all the way home, each footstep a wet squish, and sat out on their front steps to dry in the sun. It was a wonderful day, but very long ago—so long ago Violet and Klaus had almost forgotten it themselves. But as Sunny reminded them, they could almost hear her newborn laughter, and see the incredulous looks of the bankers who were passing by.

"It's hard to believe," Violet said, "that our parents could laugh like that, when they were already involved with V.F.D. and all its troubles."

"The schism must have seemed a world away that day," Klaus said.

"And now," Sunny said, and her siblings nodded in agreement. With the morning sun blazing overhead, and the sea sparkling at the edge of the coastal shelf, their surroundings seemed as far from trouble and treachery as that afternoon in the Fountain of Victorious Finance. But trouble and treachery are rarely as far away as one thinks they are on the clearest of days. On that faraway afternoon in the banking district, for instance, trouble could be found in the corridors of the towered building, where the Baudelaires' mother was handed a weather report and a naval map that would reveal, when she studied them by candlelight that evening, far greater trouble than she had imagined, and treachery could be found just past the fountain, where a woman disguised as a pretzel vendor took a photograph of the laughing family, and slipped her camera into the coat pocket of a financial expert who was hurrying to a restaurant, where the coat-check boy would remove the camera and hide it in an enormous parfait glass of fruit that a certain playwright would order for dessert, only to have a quick-thinking waitress pretend that the cream in the zabaglione sauce had gone sour and dump the entire dish into a garbage can in the alley, where I had been sitting for hours, pretending to look for a lost puppy who was actually scurrying into the back entrance of the towered building, removing her disguise, and folding it into her handbag, and this morning on the coastal shelf was no different. The Baudelaires took a few more steps in silence, squinting into the sun, and then Sunny knocked gently on her brother's head and pointed out at the horizon. The three children looked carefully, and saw an object resting unevenly on the edge of the shelf, and this was trouble, even though it didn't look like trouble at the time. It was hard to say what it looked like, only that it was large, and square, and ragged, and the children hurried closer to get a better view. Violet led the way, stepping carefully around a few crabs snapping along the shelf, and Klaus followed behind, with Sunny still on his shoulders, and even when they reached the object they found it difficult to identify.

At first glance, the large, square, ragged object looked like a combination of everything the Baudelaires missed. It looked like a library, because the object seemed to be nothing more than stacks and stacks of books, piled neatly on top of one another in a huge cube. But it also looked like an invention, because wrapped around the cube of books, the way string is wrapped around a package, were thick straps that appeared to be made out of rubber, in varying shades of green, and on one side of the cube was affixed a large flap of battered wood. And it also looked like a fountain, as water was trickling out of it from all sides, leaking through the bloated pages of the books and splashing down to the sand of the coastal shelf. But although this was a very unusual sight, the children stared not at the cube but at something at the top of this strange contraption. It was a bare foot, hanging over the side of the cube as if there were someone sleeping on the top of all those books, and the Baudelaires could see, right on the ankle, a tattoo of an eye.

"Olaf?" Sunny asked, but her siblings shook their heads. They had seen Count Olaf's foot more times than they would like to count, and this foot was much narrower and cleaner than the villain's.

"Climb onto my back," Violet said to her brother. "Maybe we can hoist Sunny to the top."

Klaus nodded, climbed carefully onto his sister's back, and then, very slowly, stood on Violet's shoulders. The three Baudelaires stood in a trembling tower, and Sunny reached out her little hands and pulled herself up, as she had pulled herself out of the elevator shaft at 667 Dark Avenue not so long ago, and saw the woman who was lying unconscious on top of the stack of books. She was dressed in a dress of dark red velvet, which was streaked and soaked from the rain, and her hair lay sprawled behind her like a wide, tangled fan. The foot that was hanging over the side of the cube was bent a strange, wrong way, but she looked otherwise unharmed. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was frowning, but her belly, full and round from her pregnancy, rose and fell with calm, deep breaths, and her hands, covered in long, white gloves, lay gently on her chest, as if she were comforting herself, or her child.

"Kit Snicket," Sunny called down to her siblings, her voice hushed with amazement.

"Yes?" replied a voice that was high-pitched and grating, a word which here means "irritating, and sadly familiar." From behind the cube of books, a figure stepped out to greet the children, and Sunny looked down and frowned as the tower of elder Baudelaires turned to face the person who was confronting them. This person was also wearing a talaric — a word which here means "just reaching the ankles" — dress that was streaked and soaked, although the dress was not just red but orange and yellow as well, the colors melting together as the person walked closer and closer to the children. This person was not wearing gloves, but a pile of seaweed had been arranged to resemble long hair, which cascaded hideously down this person's back, and although this person's belly was also full and round, it was full and round in an odd and unconvincing way. It would have been very unusual if the belly were genuine, because it was obvious from looking at the person's face that the person was not a woman, and pregnancy occurs very rarely in males, although the male seahorse is a creature that becomes pregnant from time to time.