There was only one Sugar Bowl in Hotel D.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

I am known for defending the idea that SB replicas were used in the fragmented plan of Hotel D. I am here to show that I was wrong. And the problem was my misconceptions about the events on Tuesday night and the early hours of Wednesday at Hotel D in TPP. I believed that crows had been hit shortly before Dewey's death. But there is evidence that crows were hit at any time from dusk. In fact, Carmelita probably shot the harpoons when the sun was setting, and she still had visibility, but people with the special glasses no longer had a good view. From this time until Carmelita's arrival in front of the hotel must have been around 6 to 8 hours. That would be enough time to recover the SB wherever it has fallen.

There is an eyewitness who saw the sugar bowl falling from the paws of one of the crows. Kevin said:

"When the crows hit the birdpaper, they dropped the sugar bowl. I didn't see where it went with either my right eye or my left one, which I'm sad to say are equally strong. But I did see Sunny turn the door of the laundry room into a Vernacularly Fastened Door."

Kevin just saw the SB falling from the crows' paws. (Or was it from the crows' beak, I don't know). Anyway, the thing is, Kevin saw the SB falling after the crows touched the sticky paper, which was way above the laundry funnel. I thought the SB had fallen into the pond that hid a secret library, but the eyewitness's words lead us to conclude that the SB just fell into the Laundry funnel.

The fact that Kevin saw this with his own eyes, without needing any apparatus, reinforces what I said: there was enough light for two people (Carmelita and Kevin) to see the crows. The glasses stopped working after sunset. But according to TPP chapter 8. But between sunset and dark there is a small window of time in which there is brightness. It was at this point that the crows were hit.

Notice this excerpt: "" I'm afraid to report that we couldn't see the thing from the other side of the pond. These Vision Furthering Devices work well in the daytime, but looking through special sunglasses after sunset makes everything look as dark as a crow flying through a pitch black night which is precisely what we are looking for. "" Justice Strauss is correct, " Jerome said sadly. "We couldn't verify the arrival of the crows, or whether their journey was interrupted." "We couldn't see if even a single crow was trapped," the judge said, "or if the sugar bowl fell into the funnel. "" Funnel? "Dewey repeated." Yes, "Justice Strauss said." You told us that if our enemies shot down the crows, they would have fallen into the birdpaper. birdpaper, "Jerome continued," then the sugar bowl would drop into the laundry room, right? "

Dewey's death happens at 2 AM on Wednesday. The crows were struck around 6 pm on Tuesday. (the sun sets earlier in winter). All evidence so far pointed out that the SB was in the laundry room, which was in the basement of the hotel. Still, when Olaf went to the SB for the laundry, the SB wasn't there. But that does not mean that SB has never been there. There are some very simple possibilities, and as always I like one of them more than another. The first possibility is that Dewey took the SB out of there, and then locked the door again. That simple. But the other possibility involves JS. Of course you know I'll like this one more. Esme was told that JS would be underground, right where the laundry room was. In this scenario, JS saw Suny lock the door and then JS unlocked the door, grabbed the SB and then locked the door again. JS then, with the SB in his hands, met the taxi driver. The SB was still damp (not wet) from the steam generated in the laundry room. It's interesting to ask yourself why Dewey would choose exactly those phrases to lock the door. All the sentences were things Beatrice could answer. The weapons that killed Olaf's parents, the Baudelaire allergies, and such an unfathomable question. In fact, it is likely that not even Dewey himself knew what Baudelaire allergies were. This is very specific and very familiar information. So I add these sentences to the evidence that Beatrice is one of Hotel D's JS's, and she programmed that door lock device.

This understanding of what happened makes Lemony's words in TGG something more than a hypothesis, and something that actually happened in Hotel D, not in another hotel. Lemony said in chapter 8 de TGG:

"a small, ceramic bowl, with a tight-fitting lid to keep something important inside, might be difficult to find in the laundry room of an enormous hotel, particularly if there were a terrible villain nearby, making you feel nervous and distracted."

Someone actually searched and found the SB in the Hotel D laundry room before Olaf arrived. This also sheds some light on the mystery of the swimmer. I believed she had gone straight to hotel D. But apparently she went somewhere where she could deliver the SB to the crows.

The idea that there were replicas of the SB created difficult situations to reconcile. The first and most obvious was: If there was an empty replica, why not let that replica be found by Olaf? It would be the ideal plan, Olaf would think that the contents of SB were removed and any volunteer could use and hide in any other container. That would be the best course of action if there were a replica.

And then ... seems to make sense for you?

[Dante]

Jean Lucio, I'm more or less in agreement with your final paragraph, that the existence of sugar bowl replicas being employed within the Hotel Denouement directly is highly improbable in the context of the narrative as it stands. What I don't understand is why most of your theory is concerned with where exactly the singular sugar bowl ended up between arriving at the hotel and being taken away from it. Here is a rare thing in Handler's work, a mystery where we are given all of the clues and they are actually all self-consistent and point to the correct answer. I don't see why you should feel the need to complicate a closed issue yet further.

Your analysis of events surrounding the attack on the crows, so far as timing and the positioning of the various witnesses goes, is all very sound if not particularly remarkable or important. How this leads the sugar bowl to have fallen into the laundry funnel I'm not sure. But you overlook the significance of Kevin having not seen where the sugar bowl fell to at all. You've quoted Jerome delivering this opinion, but omitted the extremely important context of the following passage. Here's the overall segment (p. 197):

We couldn't see if even a single crow was trapped," the judge said, "or if the sugar bowl fell into the funnel."
"Funnel?" Dewey repeated.
"Yes," Justice Strauss said. "You told us that if our enemies shot down the crows, they would have fallen onto the birdpaper."
"And if the crows fell onto the birdpaper," Jerome continued, "then the sugar bowl would drop into the laundry room, right?"
Dewey looked slyly at the steaming funnel, and then at the surface of the pond. "So it would appear," he said.

The narrative is very clearly indicating that Dewey is telling a lie of omission here. He's first surprised by Justice Strauss mistakenly asserting that the sugar bowl would drop into the funnel, and then "slyly" considers both the openly stated destination and the nearby alternative, before delivering the non-committal non-answer "So it would appear." He's letting people believe a lie, but as readers who know how things turned out, we can clearly see his true thought processes here.

What I think you've missed in the equation, Jean Lucio, is a vital characteristic of the hotel's structure: "the building did not stand up straight, but tilted toward the ground at a precise angle" (p. 22). But the birdpaper hanging out of the window would not follow this tilt, but the direct vertical of gravity; and so anything dropped by the crows while they are on the birdpaper would fall down not at an angle but straight down - missing the funnel adjacent to the hotel wall, and falling instead into the pond. And this is exactly how Klaus reconstructs what happened to the sugar bowl (p. 343):

Klaus stared critically at his notes. "I'll angle the sail to catch the wind," he said. "Otherwise, a heavy object like this would fall straight down into the water." He paused for a moment, too. "That's what happened to the sugar bowl," he said. "Dewey Denouement let everyone think it had fallen into the laundry room, so no one would find it in the pond."

You're doing a good job of slowly reconstructing canon into the shape given to us, but you're not quite there yet.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Dante, it's true. And thank you very much for these careful remarks again. That's why it's so good to build theories collectively. The sugar bowl definitely fell into the pond. But in any case, what made me believe there were two sugar bowls was that I had missed the moment when the crows were hit. With such a large margin of time, recovering the SB within the pond was entirely possible. Especially when there are people with scuba gear nearby, like that woman with a diving helmet looking at the ocean floor with a flashlight.

[Dante]

Since it's Christmas, Jean Lucio: I entirely agree with you.