Free Remarkable by Elizabeth Foley

the kitchen to get her checkbook when the phone rang.
    It was Mrs. Jeeter, and she was not very happy. That afternoon, she’d discovered a strange man digging through her trash. She’d immediately set her fleet of Afghan hounds on him, and they’d chased him up a tree in a frenzy of barking, yelping, and slobbering. She’d refused to call off her dogs until the manexplained that he was one of Detective Burton Sly’s junior detectives and that Mrs. Belphonia-Champlain suspected that Mrs. Jeeter might be involved in the disappearance of her dog.
    “Why you think I’d want to dognap your stumpy basset hound is completely beyond me!” Mrs. Jeeter shouted at Mrs. Belphonia-Champlain.
    “My basset hound is not the least bit stumpy!” Mrs. Belphonia-Champlain shouted back. “You’d know that if your Afghan hounds weren’t flea-bitten, bowlegged mongrels.”
    The two women were soon engaged in a fierce exchange of insults about the conformation, breeding, and dispositions of champion show dogs. Jane could tell that the conversation was not going to end any time soon, and she doubted that Mrs. Belphonia-Champlain would remember that she was planning to give her a reward by the time it was over. Jane nodded good-bye to Detective Burton Sly and slipped outside.
    It was a shame that Jane did not get a reward for bringing Asta Magnifica back to Mrs. Belphonia-Champlain. If she had, she might have used the money to give herself a treat instead of heading straight home.She might even have tried to get a scoop of ice cream from Mrs. Peabody’s Colossal Ice Cream Palace. And if Jane had stopped there that day, she would have discovered three more pirates.
    These pirates had arrived in Lake Remarkable that morning on a valiant little yawl called
The
Mozart Kugeln
, which they’d sailed up from the ocean via various distributary channels. They were named Jeb, Ebb, and Flotsam—and Mrs. Peabody wasn’t at all pleased to have them in her restaurant. Unlike Captain Rojo Herring, these new pirates were not meticulously dressed, and their table manners were terrible. They cursed at the prices on the menu, ate their banana splits with rusty fishing knives, and made rude faces at the other customers. When they were done eating, Flotsam beat his fist on the table to get Mrs. Peabody’s attention.
    “Har!” he growled. Flotsam was the shortest and meanest of the three. “I’ll be wanting a word with you.”
    “Argghh!” the other pirates growled in agreement, and they beat their fists on the table, too.
    “Well, what is it?” Mrs. Peabody asked, wrinkling up her nose as she walked over to them. The three pirates smelled very strongly of pickled squid and mildew.
    “We be looking for a pirate friends of ours. He has two peg legs and a big green parrot. Have you seen the likes of him around here?”
    “I’m sure I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Mrs. Peabody said huffily. This wasn’t strictly true, of course. Mrs. Peabody had seen Captain Rojo Herring that very morning. He came to her ice cream parlor almost every day, so he could sit by the window and watch Taftly Wocheywhoski and his crew work on the post office addition. She’d never seen anyone so fascinated by a construction project before. But Mrs. Peabody wasn’t about to mention that Captain Rojo Herring was a regular customer, because she didn’t want Ebb, Jeb, and Flotsam to think she ran the kind of ice cream parlor that was frequented by pirates.
    Ebb scowled like he suspected she was lying. He was the tallest of the three and had a patch over one eye.
    “Well, if you should see such a man, don’t be telling him that we be asking about him,” Ebb said. “He’s caused us a bit o’ trouble, you see. And if he finds out we’re after him, he’ll run again befores we can return the favor.”
    “And we’ll be causing quite a bit of trouble ourselvesif we don’ts find ’im,” Jeb added between bites of ice cream. He was almost handsome, almost