Violet walked quietly back down the stairs, holding her lockpick in one hand and crossing her fingers with the other. She tiptoed past the enormous door of the Reptile Room and hoped that her absence would not be noticed as she slipped outside. Deliberately averting her eyes from Dr. Lucafont's car to avoid catching even a glimpse of Uncle Monty's body, the eldest Baudelaire walked toward the pile of suitcases. She looked first at the old ones belonging to the Baudelaires. Those suitcases contained, she remembered, lots of ugly, itchy clothing that Mrs. Poe had bought for them soon after their parents died. For a few seconds, Violet found herself staring at the suitcases, remembering how effortless her life had been before all this trouble had set upon them, and how surprising it was to find herself in such miserable circumstances now. This may not be surprising to us, because we know how disastrous the lives of the Baudelaire orphans are, but Violet's misfortune was constantly surprising to her and it took her a minute to push thoughts of their situation out of her head and to concentrate on what she had to do.
She knelt down to get closer to Stephano's suitcase, held the shiny silver padlock in one hand, took a deep breath, and stuck the lock-pick into the keyhole. It went inside, but when she tried to turn it around, it scarcely budged, only scraped a little at the inside of the keyhole. It needed to move more smoothly or it would never work. Violet took her lockpick out and wet it with her mouth, grimacing at the stale taste of the metal. Then she stuck the lockpick into the keyhole again and tried to move it. It wiggled slightly and then lay still.
Violet took the lockpick out and thought very, very hard, retying her hair in the ribbon. As she cleared the hair from her eyes, though, she felt a sudden prickle on her skin. It was unpleasant and familiar. It was the feeling of being watched. She looked quickly behind her, but saw only the snake-shaped hedges on the lawn. She looked to the side and saw only the driveway leading down to Lousy Lane. But then she looked straight ahead, through the glass walls of the Reptile Room.
It had never occurred to her that people could see in through the Reptile Room's walls as clearly as they could see out, but when she looked up Violet could see, through the cages of reptiles, the figure of Mr. Poe leaping up and down excitedly. You and I know, of course, that Mr. Poe was panicking over Sunny and the Incredibly Deadly Viper, but all Violet knew was that whatever ruse her siblings had devised was still working. The prickle on her skin was not explained, however, until she looked a little closer, just to the right of Mr. Poe, and saw that Stephano was looking right back at her.
Her mouth fell open in surprise and panic. She knew that any second now, Stephano would invent an excuse to leave the Reptile Room and come find her, and she hadn't even opened the suitcase. Quickly, quickly, quickly, she had to find some way to make her lockpick work. She looked down at the damp gravel of the driveway, and up at the dim, yellowish afternoon sun. She looked at her own hands, smudged with dust from picking apart the electric plug, and that's when she thought of something.
Jumping to her feet, Violet sprinted back into the house as if Stephano were already after her and pushed her way through the door into the kitchen. Shoving a chair to the floor in her haste, she grabbed a bar of soap from the dripping sink. She rubbed the slippery substance carefully over her lockpick until the entire invention had a thin, slick coating. Her heart pounding in her chest, she ran back outside, taking a hurried look through the walls of the Reptile Room. Stephano was saying something to Mr. Poe-he was bragging about his expertise of snakes, but Violet had no way of knowing that-and Violet took this moment to kneel down and stick the lockpick back into the keyhole of the padlock. It spun quickly all the way around and then snapped in two, right in her hands. There was a faint sputter of sound as one half fell to the grass, the other one sticking in the keyhole like a jagged tooth. Her lockpick was destroyed.
Violet closed her eyes for a moment in despair, and then pulled herself to her feet, using the suitcase to gain her balance. When she put her hand on the suitcase, however, the padlock swung open, and the case tipped open and spilled everything all over the ground. Violet fell back down in surprise. Somehow, as the lock-pick turned, it must have unstuck the lock. Sometimes even in the most unfortunate of lives there will occur a moment or two of good fortune.
It is very difficult, experts have told us, to find a needle in a haystack, which is why "needle in a haystack" has become a rather hackneyed phrase meaning "something that is difficult to find." The reason it is difficult to find a needle in a haystack, of course, is that out of all the things in a haystack, the needle is only one of them. If, however, you were looking for anything in a haystack, that wouldn't be difficult at all, because once you started sifting through the haystack you would most certainly find something: hay, of course, but also dirt, bugs, a few farming tools, and maybe even a man who had escaped from prison and was hiding there. When Violet searched through the contents of Stephano's suitcase, it was more like looking for anything in a haystack, because she didn't know exactly what she wanted to find. Therefore it was actually fairly easy to find useful items of evidence: a glass vial with a sealed rubber cap, as one might find in a scientific laboratory; a syringe with a sharp needle, like the one your doctor uses to give you shots; a small bunch of folded papers; a card laminated in plastic; a powder puff and small hand mirror.
Even though she knew she had only a few more moments, Violet separated these items from the smelly clothes and the bottle of wine that were also in the suitcase, and looked at all her evidence very carefully, concentrating on each item as if they were small parts out of which she was going to make a machine. And in a way, they were. Violet Baudelaire needed to arrange these pieces of evidence to defeat Stephano's evil plan and bring justice and peace into the lives of the Baudelaire orphans for the first time since their parents perished in the terrible fire. Violet gazed at each piece of evidence, thinking very hard, and before too long, her face lit up the way it always did when all the pieces of something were fit together properly and the machine worked just the way it should.
CHAPTER Twelve
I promise you that this is the last time that I will use the phrase "meanwhile, back at the ranch," but I can think of no other way to return to the moment when Klaus has just explained to Mr. Poe what Sunny had meant by shouting "Aha!" and now everyone in the Reptile Room was staring at Stephano. Sunny looked triumphant. Klaus looked defiant. Mr. Poe looked furious. Dr. Lucafont looked worried. You couldn't tell how the Incredibly Deadly Viper looked, because the facial expressions of snakes are difficult to read. Stephano looked back at all these people silently, his face fluttering as he tried to decide whether to come clean, a phrase which here means "admit that he's really Count Olaf and up to no good," or perpetuate his deception, a phrase which here means "lie, lie, lie."
"Stephano," Mr. Poe said, and coughed into his handkerchief. Klaus and Sunny waited impatiently for him to continue. "Stephano, explain yourself. You have just told us that you are an expert on snakes. Previously, however, you told us you knew nothing of snakes, and therefore couldn't have been involved in Dr. Montgomery's death. What is going on?"
"When I told you I knew nothing of snakes," Stephano said, "I was being modest. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go outside for a moment, and-"