Remarkable (20 page)

Flip and Bitsy Penzing had many old-fashioned beliefs about parenting, which they felt would help Mirabel Maisie and their younger daughter, Ingrid Ann, grow up to be proper young ladies. They believed that children should be seen and not heard, so Mirabel Maisie and Ingrid Ann hardly said anything other than “please” and “thank you.” They believed that children should be neat and tidy, so Mirabel Maisie and Ingrid Ann never played outside where there was dirt and never ate things like cookies or potato chips in case they got crumbs on their clothes. Flip and Bitsy also believed that children were happiest when busy doing chores, so Mirabel Maisie and Ingrid Ann spent most of their free time helping them cook their marvelous dinners, clean their gracious home, and construct their delightful craft projects.

Ingrid Ann had inherited her parents’ love of
decorum and order, and so she thrived under her parents’ care. But life was not so easy for Mirabel Maisie. Proper behavior did not come naturally to her. She developed nervous tics from having to sit still so often. Her face was pale and strained from lack of sunshine and fresh air. Loud inappropriate laughter sometimes escaped from her mouth for no particular reason. Worst of all, she began having recurrent nightmares about being chased by a spring salad made with arugula, pine nuts, and goat cheese, and being eaten alive by a properly worded thank-you note.

Her parents decided to send her off to summer camp in the hopes that it might revive her spirits—and because they still wanted her to act like a proper young lady, they shipped her off to a very respectable place known as Camp Doilyfeather. Instead of singing songs around a campfire or telling ghost stories, the young ladies at Camp Doilyfeather sat in a parlor each night and learned to make polite small talk and play the harp. Instead of making crafts out of leather and popsicle sticks, the young ladies at Camp Doilyfeather learned to embroider homilies on pillows and to decorate fancy hats for special occasions. And instead of learning how to hike, canoe, and ride horses,
the young ladies at Camp Doilyfeather learned how to stroll with their parasols and practiced sitting with their legs crossed at the ankles.

It was during one of the long sessions of sitting with her legs crossed at her ankles that Mirabel Maisie had a sudden realization: She wasn’t comfortable. In fact, sitting with her legs crossed at her ankles was extremely uncomfortable, and she couldn’t understand why any young lady in her right mind would do it. And once she started thinking about it, she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do half the things her parents had taught her were important. It was all nonsense. Nonsense!

Mirabel Maisie uncrossed her ankles, and then recrossed her legs at the knees in an unladylike way and immediately felt much more comfortable.

“Miss Mirabel Maisie, what on earth do you think you’re doing?” one of the Camp Doilyfeather counselors asked as she gave Mirabel Maisie a disapproving glare.

“Leaving,” answered Mirabel Maisie rudely, and then she jumped out the parlor window and ran as fast as she could.

By the time Mirabel Maisie stopped running, she
found herself at a dockyard near the ocean. In front of her was a large ship called
The Wild Three O’Clock
, and hanging in one of its portholes was a “help wanted” sign.

Mirabel Maisie knew she couldn’t go home. If she did, her parents would send her straight back to Camp Doilyfeather and make her write properly worded notes of apology for her unladylike behavior. So she walked up the gangplank and asked if she could have the job. She was asked to sign her name to a piece of paper for tax purposes, or so she was told, and hired on the spot.

But it was only after
The Wild Three O’Clock
had cast out to sea that Mirabel Maisie learned the truth.
The Wild Three O’Clock
wasn’t just any ship. It was, in fact, a pirate ship commanded by Captain Two-Eyed Jake McSween, the fiercest and most feared pirate captain in all of the seven seas. And the piece of paper that Mirabel Maisie signed before she came on board was the Pirates’ Code. By signing it, she promised to stay faithful to the ship and to attend to all of her pirate duties until their voyage was over.

Most young ladies who’d had such a proper upbringing might have been appalled to find themselves
contractually obligated to serve on a pirate ship, but not Mirabel Maisie. For one thing, she found that swabbing decks, sharpening cutlasses, and stacking cannonballs wasn’t nearly as much work as trying to maintain a proper and gracious home. Furthermore, she discovered that she loved life at sea. She liked being out in the sunshine and the salt air all day. She liked sleeping on the ship’s deck and watching the stars at night. And she discovered she had a real aptitude for piracy. She was a natural at sword fighting, had an uncanny aim with a blunderbuss, and developed a real talent for drawing treasure maps.

Mirabel Maisie was also blessed with an unusual amount of pirate cunning, meaning that she knew how to scheme and manipulate the ship’s politics to her favor. It didn’t take her long to get promoted from deck-scrubber to dogsbody, then from dogsbody to boatswain, and then from boatswain to first mate. But Mirabel Maisie wasn’t satisfied with being first mate. She stayed in the position just long enough to organize a mutiny, strand Captain Two-Eyed Jake McSween in the Bahamas, and take over as captain herself.

She soon became known in the pirating community as Mad Captain Penzing the Horrific. Captain Two-Eyed
Jake McSween may have been tough, but Mad Captain Penzing was ten times tougher, forty times meaner, and her exploits were a hundred times more legendary. All pirates knew that there was nothing more horrible than catching sight of
The Wild Three O’Clock
coming up fast on their starboard bow. She left no ship that crossed her path afloat, no battle unwon, and no treasure unplundered.

But even though she loved her new life at sea, she couldn’t quite shake her upbringing. It didn’t matter that her parents cared more about proper etiquette than they’d ever cared about her—they were still her parents, and she longed to make them proud.

So after she accidentally sunk
The Wild Three O’Clock
and was imprisoned in the port town of Ferragudo by the Portuguese Navy, she used her one phone call to contact them. She could have escaped without help, of course—breaking out of prison was easy for a pirate—but she wanted to use the opportunity to show her parents how well she had done for herself.

But her parents were not at all pleased with her success—and they told her in no uncertain terms that she had not only disgraced the family name, but that she
was an embarrassment compared to her sister, Ingrid Ann, who’d gone to college to become an educator. The only way they could ever forgive her was if she promised to never, ever involve herself in piracy again.

And this is where Mirabel Maisie made a terrible mistake. She made that promise, trading the life she loved for one she hated and hiding her true self so well that even she had almost forgotten who she was. And now, even after years of unhappiness, she couldn’t see a way to reverse that mistake without breaking her word.

T
he jail in Remarkable was another one of Jane’s mother’s great architectural masterpieces, even though it was one she rarely bragged about. Angelina Mona Linda Doe had crafted it to be so bleak and sad inside that the criminals incarcerated in it would be forced to rethink their criminal ways. All of the cells had hard cement floors, the walls were a particularly blah shade of gray, and there was nowhere to sit but on uncomfortable wooden benches.

Of course, when Angelina Mona Linda Doe was designing the jail, she probably never imagined that her own father-in-law would someday wind up in it,
just as Jane had never imagined that she’d ever visit a prisoner there.

“I’d like to see John Doe, please,” Jane told the junior detective who was sitting at the front desk in the jail’s lobby.

“Who?” the junior detective asked.

“My grandfather. He was arrested this morning. He’s…he’s the man who stole the bell-tower ropes.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Can’t help you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s against the rules.”

“What rules?”

“The rules that say you need to be a grown-up to visit the prisoners.”

“But that doesn’t seem fair,” Jane protested.

“What’s not fair is him stealing those ropes,” the junior detective told her. “He left a lot of people disappointed this morning. But don’t worry. We’ll set him free as soon as he tells us where he hid them.”

“Oh,” Jane said, her heart sinking like ropes in a Dumpster full of spoiled school lunches. “But what if I…er…he doesn’t have them anymore?”

“Then I guess you can visit him when you grow up.”

Jane went back outside. There was, as far as she could
tell, no rule about sitting on the jailhouse steps, so she found a spot shaded by an ornamental forsythia bush and tried to think of what to do next. But she hadn’t been there for more than a minute when a straw wrapper few out of nowhere and hit her squarely in the chin.

“Ow!” Jane said indignantly, even though it didn’t really hurt. She looked up to see that the Grimlet twins were standing on the sidewalk before her. They were struggling to carry a large wooden box with the words S
CIENCE
F
AIR
P
ROJECT
stenciled on the side. The box was clearly very heavy, and the Grimlet twins seemed happy enough to set it down.

“So,” Melissa said admiringly. “We hear your grandfather is a felon now. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t envious.”

“He’s not a felon!”

“Really?” Eddie asked. “Because we heard he sabotaged the bell tower. It’s absolutely brilliant—even if it is a bit pointless.”

“Why is it pointless?”

“Because the town will just order new ropes and the bell tower will ring anyway.”

“Unless we steal the new ropes,” Melissa suggested excitedly.

“And then frame Jane’s grandfather so that no one knows it’s us.”

“Excellent plan. And while we’re at it we could—”

“Stop it!” Jane yelled. “You’re not framing my grandfather. And you couldn’t frame him even if you wanted to. They’re not going to let him out of jail unless he gives the ropes back, and he can’t do that, because I…well I…” Jane closed her mouth, sure she shouldn’t say another thing.

“Jane?” Melissa asked. “Do you know something about the ropes you’re not telling us?”

“No!” Jane said, but she was not a very good liar. Melissa looked at Eddie in delight.

“And here I thought she was much too boring to ever become a criminal.”

“It’s always the quiet ones that surprise us the most, isn’t it?” Eddie said wisely.

“Stop it!” Jane said. “I don’t want to talk about the ropes anymore. All I want to do is figure out how to get Grandpa John out of jail without them, okay?”

“You mean a jailbreak?” Eddie asked.

“A jailbreak could be fun,” Melissa said. “Let’s schedule it for the first thing on Monday.”

“Monday? But that’s three days from now!”

“We have a rather full weekend planned,” Melissa explained.

“We’d hate to overextend ourselves,” Eddie added. “Anyway, it’s not like you can do it without us. You don’t have a clue how to break someone out of a jail cell, do you?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Monday will be here soon enough,” Melissa said. “And you know what will help you pass the time? You could assist us in carrying this weather machine up to the top of Mount Magnificent. We need to get it to the gifted school.”

“No,” Jane said angrily. “If you won’t help me get Grandpa out of jail right now, then I won’t help you either.”

“Suit yourself,” Melissa said, not unkindly. “But on the bright side, jail might be the safest place for anyone to be tonight.”

“It’s true. Your grandfather might be the luckiest man in town.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The Grimlet twins just smiled their wicked smiles, picked up their crate, and continued on their way.

“You’re not the only criminals in Remarkable, you
know!” Jane bellowed after them. “Maybe I’ll just ask someone else.”

The Grimlet twins didn’t even bother to turn around. They didn’t think Jane really meant it. But they were quite wrong.

Jane had a plan. And in that moment, she was absolutely convinced of its brilliance.