Chapter 9
"Scatter!" Violet hissed. She pushed Klaus left, Sunny back, and dodged right herself.
The sheep were confused by their targets' splitting up. Different parts of the flock tried to turn in front of the others, causing them to mill around in an angry baaah-ing mass.
Sunny knew she couldn't outrun the sheep once they got organized, but she sprang for a tree. She used her strong teeth and exceptional climbing skills to scale up out of their reach. Violet and Klaus both ran in different directions, through thick woods where the sheep couldn't follow.
It was some time later when they all got back together at their camp on the flotsam beach.
"Good news!" Sunny said. "Walnut salad!"
She had climbed from tree to tree and eventually found a walnut tree full of delicious nuts. She stuffed her concierge uniform pockets with them. On the way back to camp, her cooking skills allowed her to spot patches of edible greens. Soon she had cracked the nuts with her teeth and prepared a salad for her sibling that they declared the best they had ever tasted.
"Hunger is the best sauce," Klaus said, using a phrase which here means "When you haven't eaten for two days, you don't need salad dressing to make a walnut-and-greens salad taste wonderful."
Violet got a fire going by focusing the sun through Klaus' glasses. "We have to do this now, while there's still sunlight," she said. "I'll can preserve some coals in a rock-lined hole so we can re-start the fire when we need it, after sunset."
Sunny suggested they go back up and ask Bela if she had seen anything. The others agreed.
When they got to the clearing, Sunny screamed. She pointed to the ground in front of the tree. Bela had been neatly sliced into three equal-sized pieces; she was dead.
"Noooo!" Sunny cried. "Beeelllaaa!"
"Who would do such a thing?" Klaus said. "Bela was harmless!"
"Our fault!" sobbed Sunny. "Asked Bela to watch. Saw killer."
Violet found the note on top of the rock with the heart engraving:
Three little villains met a snake near a tree.
It got sliced and still there were three.
Violet said, "There's someone truly evil on this island."
Klaus examined the note. "There's something familiar about this writing, but I can't quite place it."
"Look!" said Violet. On the engraved rock, the letters "B.B." were highlighted in blood.
"The killer signed," said Klaus grimly.
"But what does it mean?" asked Violet. "It can't be Mother. Even if she survived the fire and got here somehow, she'd never do something like this!"
"One thing is for sure. This killer is ruthless," said Klaus. "We'll have to take turns keeping watch tonight."
They got back to camp and got the fire blazing again. Klaus redoubled his efforts to read the faded commonplace book by the firelight.
"I can just make out one phrase," he said. "It reads 'J/H effect'. What could that mean?"
An "omniscient narrator" is a literary style that reports everyone's thoughts as if the writer can read minds. Since I cannot read minds, this is a style I seldom use. However, if there had been an omniscient narrator present that night, reading the minds of those in the vicinity, he or she might have recorded thoughts like these, in no particular order:
"Who killed Bela? Good, friendly snake. I loved."
"I've got to analyze this -- there must be a solution to this mystery."
"Somehow, we've got to survive this, I'll think of something. There's always something..."
"Now that the snake is gone it will be easy. Tomorrow. Yes... I'll get one of them tomorrow..."