Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire!
Read Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire! Online
Authors: Polly Horvath
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Polly Horvath
Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Sophie Blackall
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horvath, Polly.
Mr. and Mrs. Bunnyâdetectives extraordinaire! / Polly Horvath. â1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Middle-schooler Madeline's hippy parents have been kidnapped from Hornby Island, Canada, by foxes and Madeline, upon discovering that she can understand animal languages, hires two rabbit detectives to find them.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89827-3
[1. Human-animal communicationâFiction. 2. KidnappingâFiction. 3. RabbitsâFiction. 4. FoxesâFiction. 5. MarmotsâFiction. 6. HippiesâFiction. 7. Hornby Island (B.C. : Island)âFiction. 8. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.H79224Mr 2011
[Fic]âdc22
2010024133
Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
To Mr. Bunny, of course!
And to rabbits everywhere.
CONTENTS
 SUMMER SOLSTICE 
B
y nighttime Hornby Island would be a blaze of lights. It was the summer solstice, and for the festival of Luminara all the scattered squatters and homeowners were making luminaries to celebrate the day of longest light.
Madeline, walking home from the ferries her last day of school, wondered why they celebrated a long day of light with more light. They celebrate the shortest days with lights, winter solstice with lights and the long days of summer with lights. Lights, lights, lights. What's wrong with a little dark? If we didn't spend so much on candles, maybe we'd have money for shoes.
Hornby was a very small island east of Vancouver Island. Madeline lived there with her parents, Flo and Mildred, for so they asked to be called by everyone, including Madeline, even though their names were Harry and Denise. Flo and Mildred were hippies who had started out in San Francisco but migrated north. There they joined the rest of the family, who were living not one hundred percent legally in Canada, spread out on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. When Flo and Mildred got to Hornby Island, they came into their own by discovering that with very little effort they could both play the marimba and make jewelry out of sand dollars. There was no stopping them after that.
As nature often has it, they had a child who did not want to join them in their all-day pursuit of enlightenment and a better mung bean. Instead, she became very good at cooking and cleaning and sewing and bookkeeping and minor household repairs. She was the one who changed the lightbulbs. When only ten, she got herself a waitress job part-time at the Happy Goat Café, a fine establishment of three tables, some tree stumps, the owner (KatyD) and a resident goat. Madeline managed to earn enough money there that if the sand-dollar art had a slow month or two, they still managed to get by.
All the other children on Hornby were homeschooled, but Madeline preferred to get up at five every morning and walk to the harbor, where she took a ferry to Denman Island, the bus across Denman, the ferry to Vancouver Island and then the bus that took her to a real school. She had made the decision to do this when she entered grade five and was finally old enough to make the trip without help. This earned her the reputation for being eccentric, but the happy hippies of Hornby were tolerant of Madeline, if a little wary. Mostly they felt sorry for Flo and Mildred, raising an oddball like that.
The children in Madeline's school were less tolerant. The students who came from other tiny islands like Hornby usually wore homemade natural fabrics and, often, tie-dyed clothes. They bathed infrequently because water on the small islands was scarce. They never had money for field trips, and a good portion of them didn't seem to brush their hair. Madeline was as neat and clean as she could be, but her clothes were never in style or even always in one piece, and she was the only child who had ever come all the way from Hornby. This alone made her suspect.
Madeline's schoolmates, raised in more mainstream, connected-to-the-rest-of-the-world ways, thought all children
from the smaller islands were holier-than-thou, attached to bizarre goddess-worshipping religions, and surly. Madeline didn't start out surly, but she quickly
became
surly. She didn't know how to make the other children like her, and she felt she constantly had to defend herself from unspoken accusations about a way of life she hadn't chosen to begin with. Well, she thought, who needs them? I bet none of them know how to make plumbing repairs. I bet none of them have read
Pride and Prejudice
. Twice.
On this summer solstice day, the last day of school, she
really
felt surly. Her teacher had announced that Prince Charles, who was doing a Canadian tour, was stopping on Vancouver Island and visiting one school! And that school was theirs! He was going to grace them with his presence at the graduation ceremony for grades four, five and six. He was
personally
going to give out the awards! The children who had won awards would get them from Prince Charles himself! Because of this, today they would be making special white tissue paper graduation gowns, which they would decorate with red maple leaves, and for graduation were requested to wear white shoes to match. If they did not own white shoes, they could be purchased cheaply at Walmartâno one need go out of their way
to get expensive white shoes, Madeline's teacher stressed. She was sure all parents would be amenable to this. After all, it wasn't every day that
Prince Charles
made an appearance at your graduation ceremony! Such an honor would probably never come again!
Madeline's heart sank. Mildred got Madeline's shoes from the Salvation Army. They were usually serviceable, scuffed and ugly. Often they were the wrong size, because there was never much choice. Madeline knew that even if she could convince her mother to take her to the Salvation Army store, the chance of just happening to find white shoes was unlikely. Graduation was in a week. What waitressing money Madeline had, Mildred had already spent on Luminara.
Of course Madeline knew she didn't
have
to go to graduation. But she had won the reading award and the music award and the writing award. Three awards her first year in a real school! She wanted to stand on the stage and collect them. She wanted Prince Charles to hand them to her in front of all the kids who didn't talk to her because she was “islandy” and “homeschooly.”