Remarkable (11 page)

S
hortly after Jane fell asleep, the night air of Remarkable was filled with the sound of strange and lovely music. The music was delightfully melodic, and yet rather sad, too. Anyone lucky enough to hear it wouldn’t know whether to dance a joyful jig or weep over all of life’s tragedies and frustrations.

The music was coming from Captain Rojo Herring, who was leaning against a tree at the edge of Lake Remarkable and playing his beloved hardanger fiddle. A hardanger fiddle is not unlike a regular violin, but with twice as many strings. It was Captain Rojo Herring’s favorite instrument for times when he needed to soothe his nerves, and nothing
had ever made him as nervous as realizing he’d fallen in love with a woman whose name he did not know.

That night he played the fiddle in a way that was almost magical. The notes seemed to harmonize with the breeze moving through the forest around him. The crickets and katydids in the woods fell silent to listen to him. Even the waters of Lake Remarkable seemed to be eddying and churning to his tune.

Then the lake waters started to ripple and surge as a large shadowy creature moved beneath the water’s surface. Captain Rojo Herring was so preoccupied with making music that he didn’t notice. He dug deeper into his melancholy mood and played a new melody that was even more beautiful than the ones he had played before. And in response, the shadowy creature rose out of the depths, swaying gently to the sounds of the fiddle. It had a long, serpentine neck, big horns, and fierce white fangs. It stared at the captain with narrowed orange eyes.

“ARRRGHHHH!”
screamed Captain Rojo Herring. He backed away from the edge of the lake as fast as he could.

“
AH-HOOOOO!
”
screamed the creature as it
backed away from the edge of the shore and then dove back down into the lake’s depths.

Captain Rojo Herring was torn between running to the water to see if the large serpentine creature he’d seen was real and running back home so he could climb into bed and hide under his covers. He clutched his fiddle so hard that all eight strings stretched under his fingers.

“I think she likes your music,” came a gentle voice behind him, and Captain Rojo Herring very nearly screamed
“Arrgghhh!”
again. He hadn’t noticed that Grandpa John was sitting on a rock a short distance away and holding an open packet of figgy doodles.

“Ye…yar…did ye see that monstrous thing come out of the lake?”

“Of course,” Grandpa said. “That’s Lucky. She often comes out on quiet nights like this one.”

“But…but…” Captain Rojo Herring was having a hard time speaking because his teeth were chattering so hard. “I didn’t think anyone had clapped eyes on ’er in years and years.”

“Normally she hides when people are around,” Grandpa said. “She doesn’t seem to pay much attention to me though, but of course, hardly anyone does.”

“You mean ye’ve seen her before, and ye’ve never told anyone?”

“Who would I tell?”

Captain Rojo Herring looked back out at the water. The lake monster had vanished completely. He put his fiddle to his chin and began to play it again. After a moment or two, Lucky peeked her head back out and looked at the captain cautiously.

Now that he was over his fright, Captain Rojo Herring could see that she was a beautiful creature—more than beautiful. He played the loveliest music he knew, and Lucky slowly began to swim back toward the shore.

And then, for no reason he could see, she suddenly dove back down into the lake and disappeared. He put his fiddle down and stared after her in wonder.

“Aye. That be a sight that is a privilege for any man to behold,” he told Grandpa John. But Grandpa John’s expression was one of worry instead of awe.

“I suppose you’re going to tell everyone you’ve seen her now, aren’t you?”

“You don’t think I should?”

“No,” Grandpa said. “She’s very shy. It would be a disaster if you told anyone. She’d have news crews
after her. The cryptozoologists will come try to capture her again, and tourists will line the edge of the lake with binoculars and video cameras. It won’t end until she’s been hounded to death.”

Captain Rojo Herring didn’t say anything. He just stared across the lake waters with a melancholy look on his face. For a moment, Grandpa feared the captain had not been listening.

“You can understand how much she’d hate that, can’t you?” Grandpa asked him gently. Captain Rojo Herring turned and gave Grandpa a smile that was as sad a smile as anyone had ever smiled.

“Aye,” he said quietly. “I understand too well. Her secret be safe with me.”

But even as Captain Rojo Herring promised to keep Lucky safe, he himself was in considerable danger.

Jeb, Ebb, and Flotsam had been listening hard to the mysterious music and were trying to determine what direction it was coming from.

“This way, mateys,” growled Flotsam as he lurched to the left, in the direction of the town. “I be certain that the music is coming from over yonder.”

“Argh!”
Ebb said, lurching right toward the jelly
orchard. “Yer ears be full of old barnacles. The music be coming from over there.”

“A pox on you both,” growled Jeb. “The music be coming from behind us, just likes I told you both before.” And he turned around to head back up Remarkable Hill.

“Yer mad! We just came that way.”

The pirates began shoving and pushing each other, each trying to get the others to go in the direction he thought was right.

“It’s a’coming from that way,” growled Jeb, kicking Ebb in the shins and shoving Flotsam’s head with his elbow.

“It’s not! You lily-livered sea toad,” Flotsam said, grabbing Jeb’s elbow and redirecting it at Ebb’s nose.

“Garrghh!”
shouted Ebb, suddenly feeling like the other two pirates were ganging up on him. He lowered his head and charged at both of them. Jeb and Flotsam reeled backward.

Now the three pirates had been working very hard to fight quietly. But when Ebb pushed Jeb, he tripped over an azalea that was in front of a tidy yellow house and broke the flowerpot it was planted in.

Normally, this would have made a startling noise
on such a quiet night. However, in this case, the sound of the breaking pot was hardly noticeable. When Ebb pushed Flotsam, he knocked over a large recycling bin, which made the kind of horrible commotion that only occurs when crushed aluminum cans, polycarbonate containers, and glass bottles spill across a cement driveway.

In the moment of silence that followed, the three pirates held their breath, hoping that no one had heard. But then the porch light of the little yellow house came on and a lone figure stepped out into the night. It was Ms. Schnabel, wearing a pair of fluffy pink slippers and teddy bear pajamas.

“Who’s there,” she said in a stern, teacherly tone. The pirates cowered in the shadows of her lilac bushes.

“Whoever made this mess had better come out right now and clean it up,” she said, even more sternly and more teacherly than before. It was too much for Flotsam, who screamed “run” and tore off down the street as fast as he could. Jeb and Ebb followed close behind.

Ms. Schnabel shouted and shook her fist at the three departing figures, and as she did so, she smelled the strong smell of the pirates in the night air.

Now, most people who have the misfortune of smelling the strong smell of pirates in the night air say “ew” and immediately quit breathing through their noses. But not Ms. Schnabel. She sniffed the air, and then sniffed it again, and then closed her eyes and breathed in as much of the smell as she could. The smell made her remember something—a dream she’d had when she’d been only a little older than Jane. It was a dream she’d abandoned a long time ago.

But dreams are funny things. Sometimes even the most impractical and irresponsible dreams just won’t be ignored. And sometimes when you don’t follow your dreams, your dreams come looking for you.

This is exactly what happened to Ms. Schnabel. She might have thought all she heard was the sound of someone making a mess of her recycling, but it was also the sound of her dream finding her after many years. And although Ms. Schnabel had no way of knowing it that night as she stood on her porch in her fuzzy pink slippers, her life was about to change.

T
he Grimlet twins were in a terrible mood on Monday. They both came stomping into the school after the tardy bell rang and miserably flung themselves into their seats. And even though Ms. Schnabel’s back was to the class as she wrote the date on the chalkboard, the Grimlets couldn’t rouse themselves to take advantage of it. Jane was shocked.

“I don’t suppose any of you did your homework?” Ms. Schnabel asked wearily as she turned around to face another week of teaching.

“I did,” Jane said. The Grimlet twins, however, just shrugged and shook their heads. They were too depressed to make any kind of smart-mouthed reply.

“Well let’s hear it, you two,” Ms. Schnabel said. “What’s your excuse this time? Was it another dog? Some kind of explosion? Maybe you lost it during a museum heist?”

“No,” Melissa said. “We didn’t have enough time.”

“We had to spend a big part of the weekend getting our project ready for the science fair,” Eddie explained glumly.

“You expect me to believe that the two of you are doing something as law abiding as entering a science fair?” Ms. Schnabel was incredulous.

“We’re not entering the science fair, we’re—” Eddie started to say, but then Melissa gave him a particularly savage punch in the arm to make him stop talking.

“The rest of our weekend was wasted by the pirate captain,” Melissa said.

“The pirate captain?” Ms. Schnabel said. “What pirate captain?”

“Captain Rojo Herring. We were hoping he would teach us how to become pirates. Unfortunately, when we arrived, Captain Rojo Herring was trying to learn how to ride a bicycle. He told us if we wanted to learn piracy, we had to give him bicycle lessons.”

“That’s wonderful,” Jane said. “He’s been wanting to learn to ride a bicycle.”

“It wasn’t wonderful,” Eddie corrected her. “It was absurd. Do you know how long it takes to teach someone with two peg legs how to ride a bicycle? He must have crashed three thousand times before he made it to the end of his driveway.”

“But we did it. We finally taught him how to ride,” Melissa said. “And then he said that learning how to be a pirate was hard, and that it was too much work to train landlubbers like us—especially since he’d fallen in love and was going to be busy for a while.”

“And that if we were interested in career development, we should go get a paper route or something. Then he rode away on his bicycle.”

“That is ridiculous,” Ms. Schnabel said, putting her hands on her hips. “That might just be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Wanting to learn to be a pirate is not ridiculous,” Melissa told her. “Just because you never wanted to do anything exciting doesn’t mean that the rest of us are happy being locked up in a boring old classroom.”

“Some of us actually enjoy doing interesting things more than we enjoy doing long division,” Eddie added.

Ms. Schnabel gave the Grimlet twins a flinty stare, and it was flinty enough to startle them into sitting still, if only for a moment.

“It’s ridiculous that anyone would think that you two could be entrusted with a newspaper route,” Ms. Schnabel said. “And what Captain Rojo said about learning to be a pirate is just dead wrong. It’s not hard at all.”

“What would you know about it?” Eddie asked rudely.

“Plenty,” she said. “I could teach you myself if I wanted to. And I’m quite a good teacher, too, which is something you’d know if you were actually willing to sit still long enough to learn something.”

The Grimlet twins looked at each other. Melissa raised her left eyebrow, and Eddie raised his right. They conferred for a few moments, and then nodded in agreement.

“We accept,” Eddie said.

“Excuse me?”

“We accept. We will start behaving in class, as long as you start teaching us about being pirates.”

Ms. Schnabel glared at Eddie for a long moment. Jane held her breath, expecting her to start yelling
about how she was a teacher and this was her classroom and the Grimlet twins would have to behave whether they liked it or not. But Ms. Schnabel didn’t do that. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, almost as if she were picturing herself somewhere else.

“Har!” she said quietly, and then she opened her eyes again. It never paid to keep them closed for too long in front of the Grimlet twins.

“Do we have a deal?” Melissa demanded.

“Well that all depends,” Ms. Schnabel said. “Are you willing to pledge your loyalty to me as your sworn captain? It’ll have to be a blood oath.”

“Well, I don’t know why you should get to be captain…” Eddie Grimlet began, but Ms. Schnabel didn’t let him finish his sentence.

“Arrrghh!” she yelled, and she pounded her fist on the desk. “Either I be the captain or we goes back to doing long division.”

She sounded a lot like Captain Rojo Herring, only much, much meaner.