Remarkable (10 page)

“You’re welcome,” Jane called after him. But Anderson Brigby Bright didn’t hear her, and Jane was left to walk home by herself.

W
hile Jane and Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III were at Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa’s house, Dr. Josephine Christobel Pike was eating breakfast on her back porch.

It was a remarkably nice day for having breakfast outside. The weather was perfectly fine, and if Dr. Pike had looked up, the fabulous view of Remarkable Hill would have brought a smile to her face. But Dr. Pike did not look up. She was reading and rereading a letter she’d received a few weeks ago, and her face was scrunched up in a thoughtful frown.

The letter was an impassioned plea from Mayor Kate Chu, begging Dr. Pike to accept an offer to
become the official dentist of the town of Munch. She described the tooth-related woes of the town—how so very many citizens needed root canals, dental implants, fillings, scalings, cleanings, and good stern lectures about regular flossing. Dr. Pike couldn’t help but be excited by the offer. Lately, she’d even begun to wonder if her fine dentistry skills weren’t getting a little rusty. But despite the lack of tooth decay in the town, Remarkable was her home now, and it would not be easy to leave.

Mayor Chu had sensed that she might need more persuading, so that morning, she’d sent a jar of Munch’s Generic Jelly to Dr. Pike’s house to demonstrate how sugary and cavity causing it was. Dr. Pike had brought the jar outside with her, and was planning to spread a sensibly thin layer on a piece of whole wheat toast. But she was feeling so unsettled that she picked up a spoon and ate a bite of jelly directly from the jar. The jelly was very, very sweet, and very, very good. She could understand why the people of Munch needed her services so badly.

She took another bite, and then another, and only stopped because she suddenly saw a flash of reflected sunlight coming from the direction of Remarkable
Hill. She looked up and realized that someone was watching her through a telescope.

That someone was Captain Rojo Herring. She could see him standing in the window of his mansion with the telescope pressed to his eye. Dr. Pike had never met Captain Rojo Herring, but she had seen him in town a few times hovering around the post office.

She put down her spoon, embarrassed that she’d been caught indulging in such a sugary treat, and waved to him guiltily. He waved back. Then she stood up and went straight inside to floss and brush.

Captain Rojo Herring was embarrassed that he’d been caught staring at the woman who’d been eating jelly with a spoon. He didn’t know who she was, and he certainly hadn’t meant to intrude on her privacy. He had only intended to check on the progress of the bell tower. The bells were supposed to be delivered soon, and he wanted to watch while they were installed.

But the area around the post office addition was quiet. The truck with the bells on it had not yet arrived. He was just about to put his telescope down when he caught a glimpse of something that was very nearly as exciting to him as the post office addition.

It was a beautiful, brand-new jar of Munch’s Generic Jelly, which was sitting on top of a table on a back porch. And even more beautiful than the jar of jelly was the woman who was eating dainty spoonfuls of it. Captain Rojo Herring’s heart flipflopped in his chest as he watched her spoon another bite of jelly into her mouth. Her teeth were white and perfect. He’d have bet all the pirate treasure in the world that she had the world’s loveliest smile.

She looked up suddenly, as if she’d sensed him watching her. Her eyes scanned the hill above until they met his through the telescope. She put down her jelly spoon and raised a hand to wave to him. Captain Rojo Herring’s face blushed red, and his peg legs went weak and wobbly. He waved back.

The woman suddenly stood up and went inside, and Captain Rojo Herring found that all he could do was stare after her. His heart had moved on from doing flipflops to cartwheels, somersaults, and happy backflips.

“Avast!” he sighed as he clutched his chest. He’d heard of love at first sight, but he’d never believed in it until just that moment.

A
t six o’clock, the doorbell rang at the Doe house. When Jane answered it, she found Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa on the front steps.

“Oh, hello again,” Jane said. “Are you here to see my brother?”

“Hmmm,” Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa hummed. “I don’t think so. Do I know your brother?”

“Sure. He’s Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III. He’s taking you to the Science Fair Dance.”

“If you say so,” Lucinda said. “But no. I’m not here about that. I’m here to give you this.”

She was pulling a red metal wagon that was full of cartons of milk. She handed Jane one.

“Look at the back,” Lucinda instructed.

Jane turned the carton around. She saw the word MISSING in large letters over a vague and out-of-focus picture of a man. And under the picture it read T
HE
F
AMOUS
C
OMPOSER
Y
SQUIBEL.
L
ARGE REWARD OFFERED FOR HIS SAFE RETURN
.

“You may remember,” Lucinda told Jane, “that I am the regional copresident of the Save Ysquibel Now! Club. We are distributing milk cartons in our attempts to locate the great composer before the premiere of his composition for the new bell tower. There’s some urgency. He’s never missed one of his own premieres before.”

“Oh,” Jane said. “I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t? Hmm,” she hummed disapprovingly. Lucinda couldn’t believe anyone knew so little about Ysquibel. “Well, I can’t stay and chat. I have more milk cartons to deliver.”

Lucinda walked back down the front steps and picked up the handle of her wagon.

“Wait,” Jane called. “Don’t you at least want to say hi to Anderson Brigby Bright? I’m sure he’d love to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“My brother. The one who is taking you to the dance.”

“Does he have information on Ysquibel’s whereabouts?”

“Um…I doubt it.”

“Then what could we possibly talk about?” Lucinda asked, and she headed off down the street with her wagon in tow.

Jane carried the milk carton inside. Lucinda was the second surprise visitor to come to their house that evening. The first had been the delivery driver from Madame Gladiola’s House of Otherworldly Pizza.

“There must be some mistake,” Jane’s father had said when he opened the door and saw the delivery driver. “We don’t need pizza tonight. I’m planning on making my world-famous olallieberry pancakes.”

“Madame Gladiola has foreseen your confusion,” the driver said. “She said to tell you that soon you will realize that you lost your handwritten notes for your new chapter when you went to town earlier today. And your wife will realize that you accidentally picked up the bell installation instructions when you were organizing your notes on the kitchen counter, and now those are lost, too.”

Jane’s mother gave Jane’s father a wild look.

“What! Tell me you didn’t!” she shrieked. “I need those instructions! The bells arrived an hour ago!”

Jane’s father gave the pizza delivery driver a wild look.

“I lost my notes? But I can’t have lost them! I finally figured out how to incorporate the symbolism of the dog!”

“We have to retrace your steps,” Jane’s mother cried as she ran out the front door. “Your mother is going to have a fit when I tell her about this.”

“You don’t have to tell her, do you, dear?” Jane’s father wailed as he ran out the door after her.

Her parents had been gone for a while now, which made Jane think that the hunt for the notes and the instructions wasn’t going well. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for them as she walked back into the dining room where her brother and sister were eating pizza.

“Who was at the door?” Penelope Hope asked.

“It was Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa,” Jane said.

“Lucinda?” Anderson Brigby Bright said. His face took on the pale, loopy look of a boy in love. “What did she want?”

“She brought us this,” Jane said, setting the milk carton down in front of him.

“Is it for me? Is it a present. Did she send me some token of love?”

“Um…actually I think it’s a…”

Anderson Brigby Bright grabbed the carton and looked at it.

“It’s milk,” he said. “Why did she bring me milk?”

“It’s not about the milk,” Jane tried to explain. “It’s about the picture on the back.”

Anderson Brigby Bright turned the carton around. “But this picture is ghastly!” he complained. “Who would choose to use an inferior photograph when they could use a photorealistic painting instead?”

“Most people,” Penelope Hope told him. “At least most people who don’t spend their days in front of an easel.”

“Anderson Brigby Bright, are you sure you want to take her to the dance?” Jane asked. She was starting to worry that Lucinda didn’t care very much about her brother, certainly not as much as she cared about being the regional copresident of S.Y.N!C. “I’m not sure that you have much in common with her.”

“We are both brilliant!” Anderson Brigby Bright said indignantly. “Isn’t that enough?”

Penelope Hope raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you planning to talk to her about? Her perfect pitch?”

“I assume we’ll talk about the photorealistic portrait I painted of her. She must have been thrilled to get it.”

“I doubt she was thrilled,” Penelope Hope said. “I wouldn’t want a portrait. I couldn’t care less about photorealistic paintings.”

“What?” Anderson Brigby Bright stammered.

“If some boy wanted to impress me, he’d have to do something important, like calculate the square root of thirteen in his head. I wouldn’t ask him to a dance just because he’d drawn some silly painting.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” Anderson Brigby Bright snapped.

“Square roots are never ridiculous.”

“Square roots are the most ridiculous thing in the world!”

Jane looked back and forth between her brother and sister as they scowled across the table at each other. Like most geniuses, they always assumed that
everyone in the world was just as interested in what they were a genius at as they were. She didn’t think either one of them had ever noticed that photorealism and math were not the only things in the world that people cared about.

“Um, Anderson Brigby Bright,” Jane said. “I think maybe Penelope Hope has a point. I think maybe if you want to impress Lucinda, you should do something she cares about.”

Anderson Brigby Bright did not look convinced. “What would she care about more than a beautifully realistic painting of herself?”

“She seems to like music an awful lot,” Jane answered.

“Oh, music,” Anderson Brigby Bright said disparagingly. And even Penelope Hope agreed.

“Music is nowhere near as interesting as math.”

“And math is nowhere near as interesting photorealistic paintings,” Anderson Brigby Bright added.

“Math is much more interesting!”

“It’s boring!”

“Portraits are boring.”

“No. They’re interesting!”

They spent the rest of dinner yelling at each other.
And they were still yelling when Jane went upstairs to brush her teeth and go to bed. Finally, her father came home from looking for the lost papers (which he hadn’t found) and told them that their argument was boring, and that it was interrupting his plan to write new notes for his novel, which was more interesting than painting and math combined.

Shortly thereafter, Jane’s mother came home (having found both the handwritten notes and the bell installation instructions in the trash at Coffeebucks) and spent some time being upset at her father for letting his boring novel interfere with the most interesting architectural project she’d ever designed.

Her father apologized, and her mother told him he’d better never lose anything of hers again or else. She had a way of saying “or else” that made it clear how serious she was. And Jane’s father promised that he never would.

And then finally, all was forgiven—and the house was remarkably quiet at last.