Salzburg did not answer her. The parrot was mutinously grinding her beak and muttering to herself, as she had been ever since Grandmama had sent them on their way.
As Jane reached the top of the hill, she stepped off the path for a moment to catch her breath. And in that moment, she suddenly found herself being yelled at.
“Arghh!” said a gruff voice. “Arghh! Who goes there? Who be trespassing in me vegetables?”
Jane looked down and saw that when she’d stepped off the path, she’d stepped into the mansion’s garden. Even worse, she realized she’d just trampled a bed of Greek oregano plants.
“Get yer landlubbing feet out of me heirloom herbs or I’ll have you keelhauled!” the angry voice continued.
“Sorry,” Jane said as she scrambled to the garden’s edge.
“Young Jane? Be that you?” the voice asked, sounding suddenly much nicer, and Jane recognized it as belonging to Captain Rojo Herring.
“Yes, it’s me,” Jane answered. “I have your parrot. Grandmama asked me to bring her back to you.”
“Arggh!” the pirate said. “She be a scurvy wee thing. Bring her aboard.”
Jane expected the pirate to open the back door for her, but he did no such thing. Instead, he lowered a gangplank out of one of the windows. It wobbled a little as Jane walked up it.
If Jane had been hoping to see skulls, mold, ghosts, or general decrepitude when she stepped over the windowsill, she was soon disappointed. The room she entered wasn’t just pleasant, it was also pleasantly normal. There were bookcases with books on the shelves and potted ferns on top. There was a set of lovely, overstuffed chairs on a round rug. In one corner was a baby grand piano, and in another was a telescope on a tripod that pointed out the window Jane had just come through.
Salzburg was not happy about finding herself back home with Captain Rojo Herring. When the captain took her off of Jane’s shoulder, Salzburg immediately let out an angry squawk and tried to bite him on the nose. Captain Rojo Herring managed to wrestle her into a large birdcage on a stand by the piano.
“HMPH!!!!” Salzburg shouted as Captain Rojo Herring latched the birdcage door. In the struggle Salzburg had lost some feathers, which drifted down around the pirate like big green snowflakes.
“I’m sorry I was trespassing,” Jane said. “And I’m sorry I trampled your herb garden.”
“Now don’t be getting yer stern line in a twist,” the pirate said. “The likes of you be always welcome to trample me herbs. There be other types o’ people I wants to keep at more than a yardarms length away, if ye take me meaning.”
“What other people?” Jane asked, not taking his meaning at all.
“Why, other pirates, of course. I despise them all now, and everything else about the pirating life besides. Now, I was just about to sit down to me tea. Could I be offering you some?”
“Um. Okay,” Jane said.
He disappeared into his kitchen, and while Jane waited for him to come back, she walked over and peeked through the telescope. It was aimed at the post office. She could see Taftly Wocheywhoski, the construction foreman for the bell tower, bustling around with his survey crew.
When Captain Rojo Herring returned, he was carrying a tray with a big pot of tea, a big plate of toast, and three brand-new jars of Munch’s Generic Jelly.
“How lovely,” Jane said politely, but privately she was scandalized. People in Remarkable didn’t buy jelly from Munch unless they had to, and they certainly wouldn’t be caught dead buying three jars at once.
“It be the least I could do after you stirred yourself to bring me pesky friend back to me,” Captain Rojo Herring said. “I know ye must have more important things to be doing with yer time.”
“Like what?” Jane asked, genuinely puzzled.
“I hear yer brother be a fine painter, and yer sister is master of all things numerical. So I’ve been assuming that ye must have some special skill you spend all of yer time at. So tell me, what is it that you be known for?”
Jane scowled down at her plate and said nothing. And even if she had said something, her answer still would have to be “nothing.”
“Let me guess,” the pirate continued, squinting at Jane as if this would somehow help him see her talents. “You have a flair for lion taming?”
Jane shook her head.
“Figure skating?”
“No,” said Jane.
“Perhaps you knows how to do jigsaw puzzles blindfolded? Maybe you be a card shark?”
“Not me.”
“Ye can climb trees better than a cat? Ye play the harmonica so that it sounds like the wind coming down a fine hill? Perhaps ye do magic tricks that baffle and amaze all who see ’em?”
“My parents argue about it sometimes,” Jane said. “My mother thinks I’m a late bloomer, but my dad thinks I just haven’t realized my true potential.”
“Well, which one of them be right?” Captain Rojo Herring asked.
“Neither,” said Jane. “I’m not good at anything, and I probably never will be.”
“So you’re ordinary, eh?” the pirate said. “Well, that be a fine thing to be. A mighty fine thing.”
Jane looked up at the pirate to see if he was joking, but his face was quite serious.
“No, it’s not,” she told him. “It’s actually quite boring.”
“Thar be a time in me own life once when I had a chance to be ordinary, but no, I had to run off to do something special. Aye, but thar be days when I looks back and regrets it still.”
“Why?” Jane asked, not quite believing him. “I’d love to be good at something. Then maybe people would finally notice me.”
“But what if ye grow weary of doing what you are good at all the livelong day? What if doing something well doesn’t make ye happy?”
Jane looked at the pirate, surprised. “I don’t know. Do people get bored of doing things they are good at?”
“Aye,” the pirate said wearily. “Aye, they can. And it be a sad thing, too. Because they’ve been doing what they are good at for so long that they don’t know what else they might do with their lives.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Jane asked. “Did you get bored with being a pirate captain?”
“Something like that,” he said. “But mostly, I want to put me pirate days behind me and look for something else to fill me days. I’m going to learn all those things I never had time for—like riding a bike and learning to swim.”
“You never learned to swim?” Jane asked. “Wasn’t that dangerous when you were living on your pirate ship?”
The captain looked sheepish. “Aye. I just had to make sure I never fell overboard, now didn’t I?”
A clock from somewhere inside the house chimed four times. “It’s late,” Jane said. “I think I’d better get home.”
“Are ye sure? There’s still a little bit o’ jelly left.”
“You can have it,” Jane said. “Thank you very much for the tea.”
“It be my pleasure,” Captain Rojo Herring replied as he happily ladled the last of his jelly onto some toast.
A Bit about the Jelly
To most people, jelly is not very controversial. It is just jelly after all—something to spread on biscuits, eat on sandwiches with peanut butter, or fill the middle of jelly-filled donuts. But in Remarkable, jelly was remarkably important, and it was remarkably important because it was the source of one of Remarkable’s most vexing problems.
The problem wasn’t with Remarkable’s locally produced jelly. Remarkable’s Finest Jelly came from organic fruit grown in a picturesque orchard at the edge of town that was watered with the pure, natural spring water that bubbled up delightfully from Remarkable Springs. The fruit was picked at the peak of its freshness, and then cooked by renowned celebrity jelly chef Caspar Snikerdeski Despartie in his own kitchen using a secret recipe handed down through his family for generations.
Once the jelly had finished cooking, it was packed lovingly into handblown glass jars, a
nd these jars were decorated with a single silver ribbon tied in a perfect bow. The jelly was a lovely color, had a marvelously smooth texture, and a taste so delicate that it almost didn’t taste like jelly at all.
The jelly made in the nearby town of Munch, on the other hand, was made in a huge jelly factory out of concentrated, processed, conventionally grown fruits of dubious origin. This dubious fruit was smashed into an even more dubious goo by a large machine, and then filled with sugar, preservatives, artificial colors, and fillers. Then, another big machine glurped it into plain plastic jelly jars, and the jars were sent off to supermarkets all over the country to be sold very cheaply.
The jelly from Munch was lumpy, had a horrible fluorescent color, and smelled like artificial flavorings. But the jelly had one quality that the people from Remarkable never could explain. For all of its artificiality and its careless mass production, the jelly from Munch tasted wonderful. It tasted so good, in fact, that many people secretly wondered if it wasn’t almost nearly as good as the jelly made in Remarkable.
No one would admit this out loud, of course. It was a matter of civic pride. But every now and then someone from Remarkable would pick up a jar at the store and bring it home to eat. If anyone asked about it, they made up some excuse or another—like “Oh, they were out of Remarkable’s Finest Jelly at the store today. I had to get this instead,” or “Oh, I must have knocked this into my shopping cart by mistake,” or “Oh, I accidentally won it as a consolation prize in a candlepin bowling contest.” But of course, whoever bought the jar of jelly would gobble up every last bite just as soon as no one was watching.
The fact that the people of Remarkable couldn’t admit to liking jelly from Munch as a point of civic pride wasn’t good for Munch’s civic pride at all. The people who lived in Munch worked very hard in their jelly factory, and it bothered them that everyone from Remarkable acted like their jelly wasn’t good enough to eat, even though they secretly ate gallons of it.
To make matters worse, the town of Remarkable had managed to acquire something that the town of Munch wanted very badly—and that was a good dentist. Many of the townspeople there had terrible teeth, which wasn’t surprising, given that the fumes from the jelly factory were so sweet that breathing the air in Munch was like inhaling sugar.
The people of Munch had been planning to offer Dr. Pike a position as the town’s dentist, but Mayor Doe had gotten to her first. It was frustrating, but Mayor Kate Chu, the mayor of Munch, was a fair-minded person and recognized that it was her own fault for not asking Dr. Pike sooner. Still, she didn’t see why Remarkable needed the best dentist in the country when it barely needed a dentist at all.
Unfortunately, no one had ever bothered to explain the long and bitter jelly rivalry to Captain Rojo Herring. And because the pirate didn’t know about it, he had no idea how much trouble he was about to cause when he dialed the toll-free number for the Munch Jelly Factory and asked if he could have an entire truckload of jelly delivered to his house.
Captain Rojo Herring made the phone call right after Jane left. His teeth had begun to ache, which made him think about jelly, and this reminded him that he had finished up all of the jelly from Munch at tea. He like the jelly from Munch so much that he’d never bothered to try Remarkable’s Finest Jelly, and he ate so much of the jelly from Munch that he was always having to run to Filbert’s Fine Grocery Store to pick up a few more jars. Going to the store that often was hard on his peg legs, and besides, he was tired of the disapproving looks the grocery store clerk gave him when he went through the checkout line.
Right after Captain Rojo Herring placed his order, Mayor Kate Chu got a call from one of the plant managers at the jelly factory.
“Just thought you should know that a citizen from Remarkable has ordered an entire truckload of jelly for his own personal consumption,” the jelly plant manager told the mayor.
“Is that right?” Mayor Kate Chu said, and then she immediately called Mayor Julietta Augustina Doe to ask if her position on Munch’s jelly had changed.
“Of course not, why should it have?” Grandmama Julietta Augustina snapped. She sounded crosser than she needed to, because she was drinking out of a leaky coffee mug that Jane had made for her in pottery class, and it had dribbled hazelnut cappuccino onto the official correspondence she’d received from the Scottish Parliament. The letter was full of words like Cease and Desist and False claims made about superiority of alleged lake monster and mentioned the possibility of an ugly international incident.
“I’ll have to call you back.” She hung up abruptly on Mayor Chu and shouted for Stilton, her highly proficient secretary, to bring her some paper towels. The Scottish Parliament was always sending her letters like this, and she always found them annoying.
Mayor Chu didn’t know about the leaky coffee mug or the letter from the Scottish Parliament, so she thought that Mayor Doe was just being rude. And if Mayor Doe wasn’t going to be civil, then Mayor Chu decided she didn’t need to be civil either. She shouted for her secretary to bring her a pen and paper so that she could write a letter of her own.
Mayor Chu’s letter went out in the mail that afternoon. By the next morning, it had arrived at Remarkable’s undistinguished post office. There, it was promptly sorted and handed off to a remarkably efficient mail carrier, and just before lunchtime, the letter was delivered to Dr. Josephine Christobel Pike, DDS.
Asta Magnifica’s Day at School
For the next several weeks, Mayor Kate Chu sat in her office and stared at the phone, hoping against hope that Dr. Pike would call in reply to her letter. In her more optimistic moments, she gleefully allowed herself to anticipate Mayor Doe’s reaction when she discovered the lengths that she, the mayor of Munch, was willing to go to in order to defend the honor of her town’s jelly. She’d make Mayor Doe admit what everyone in Munch already knew—that their jelly was better than any jelly ever produced in Remarkable.
Meanwhile, Grandmama Julietta Augustina had no reason at all to suspect that Mayor Chu was plotting against her. Everything in her fair town was running as smoothly as ever. The citizens were happy and thriving, construction on the bell-tower addition was ahead of schedule and below budget, and most importantly, Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted was nearly back to being as excellent as ever. Every inch of the building, playground, and parking lot had been scrubbed thoroughly, and the school was mostly school-colored again instead of blue.
The students were almost back to being student-colored as well. Jane had watched as Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III and Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina’s hair and skin gradually faded from dark blue to light blue, and then to lilac, then lavender, then to pale cerulean, until they were finally back to looking like their remarkable selves again. It was a good thing, too, since the Science Fair Dance was only a few weeks away, and they wanted to look their best for it.
Jane wished she were going to the Science Fair Dance, but she didn’t mind being in the public school nearly as much as she had before. School was exciting now. The Grimlet twins were up to something nearly every minute, and when they weren’t up to something, they were plotting something, and when they weren’t plotting something, they were writing down their latest crime in The Book of Dangerous Deeds and Dastardly Intentions. One day, the Grimlet twins turned all the desks upside down and glued them to the floor when Ms. Schnabel’s back was turned. Another day they disorganized the periodic table, de-alphabetized the dictionary, and renumbered the rulers, all before lunchtime.
Then there was the time that Ms. Schnabel left the room for just a quick minute to check her fantasy football standings. In that minute, the Grimlet twins managed to build a small volcano out of modeling clay, poured sixteen different colors of paint down into its cone, and then filled it full of baking soda, vinegar, and a secret ingredient Melissa claimed would give it more oomph. The volcano erupted just as Ms. Schnabel came back. Big globs of multicolored paint splattered in all directions.
“Hoo
ray!” the Grimlet twins shouted as they skipped around the room. “Huzzah! It worked!”
Jane thought the room looked rather pretty with bright paint splatters all over it, but Ms. Schnabel was not pleased at all. She thought about sending the Grimlet twins to the principal. She thought about making them stand in the corner. She thought about making them write “I will not build volcanoes out of clay and load them with paint, vinegar, baking soda, and a secret ingredient to give it more oomph when Ms. Schnabel steps out of the room for a quick minute.” four thousand times each on the blackboard. But she knew none of these punishments would work. The Grimlet twins were impervious to punishment.
“Incorrigible! You two are incorrigible!” she finally shouted at them.
Melissa Grimlet stopped skipping in midstride.
“You really think so?” she asked.
“You are the most incorrigible students I’ve ever met!” Ms. Schnabel yelled.
The Grimlet twins were so pleased by this that they behaved themselves two whole days just to show Ms. Schnabel their appreciation. But by Thursday, they were back to their old tricks.
“A dog ate my homework,” Eddie Grimlet said when he came into the classroom.
“Mine too,” Melissa said.
“A dog, huh?” Ms. Schnabel said. “You expect me to believe that?”
They did expect Ms. Schnabel to believe it, but they had guessed she wouldn’t, so they had taken the precaution of bringing the dog to school and feeding her Jane’s homework while Ms. Schnabel watched.
“Hey!” Jane said indignantly. As much as she liked dogs, she didn’t want her homework gobbled up by one—not even by this particular dog, which was a prizewinning basset hound named Asta Magnifica.
Ms. Schnabel longed to go to the teachers’ lounge and soothe her nerves with a nice cup of coffee, but she didn’t dare leave the Grimlets alone in the classroom again. She spent the rest of the day glaring at them; the twins spent the rest of the day looking innocent, and Asta Magnifica spent the rest of the day at the back of the classroom eating blackboard erasers.
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