Remarkable Read Online Free

of Remarkable’s finer attributes. This extra box would no doubt mention that a great many of the town’s citizens were people who were famous, but it would also have to acknowledge that the town’s most famous citizen wasn’t a person at all, but rather a serpent named Lucky.
    Lucky lived in Lake Remarkable, which was a beautiful lake that was known for its sweet-tasting waters and its large schools of flying fish. Lucky was larger than Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland, even if she wasn’t as famous. Of course, this was only because Lucky was much more elusive and much too clever to ever allow herself to be photographed. Those few who had been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Lucky claimed that she was purple and black with a snakelike body, three big humps, and a long snout full of very sharp teeth.
    Lucky had been heard more often that she’d been seen. It was said she made a soft calling sound that was somewhere between an eerie
hoot
and a haunting
coo
. In Remarkable, nearly everyone believedthat hearing Lucky’s call was a sure sign of good luck. Bronson Seurrier claimed to have heard it just as he bought the lottery ticket that won him the mega jackpot for the second time. Elinor Rosalind Wallace heard it just before the Swedish king called to tell her she’d won her third Nobel Prize in Chemistry and one in Physics, too. Even Grandmama had heard it once—on the night before she met Grandpa—and she always said that meeting Grandpa was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.
    Of course, Lucky’s existence wasn’t just interesting to those who lived in Remarkable. Many people from outside of Remarkable were interested in her, too. Once a year, the government would send a team of cryptozoologists—who are people who investigate mysterious creatures for a living—to try to capture Lucky so that she could be studied by important scientists.
    The cryptozoologists would spend a week hiding in the bushes with tranquilizer guns or rowing around the lake with large fishing nets and blowing on small whistles to try to lure Lucky out into the open. It never worked. Lucky was even more elusive during this week than usual.
    When the week was over, and the cryptozoologists had packed up their nets and whistles and gone home, the town would celebrate with its renowned Lucky Day Festival. It was a marvelous event. There were snow cones and cotton candy, free T-shirts, and carnival rides. Every year Jane went with her family, and she enjoyed standing off to one side watching as everyone else in town had a great time.
    This year, the town was using the festival to raise money to build a bell-tower addition to the post office to keep it from looking so ordinary. The town had commissioned a thrillingly talented composer named Ysquibel to write a song that would chime every day at noon from the tower’s fifty-seven brass bells.
    Ysquibel was Europe’s most famous composer, who had recently and mysteriously disappeared during a performance of his latest opera,
Prise de Corsaire
. Fortunately, the last thing he did before he vanished was put the sheet music for Remarkable’s bell tower in the mail.
    Jane’s mother was the architect for the new bell tower, and she’d brought a dollhouse-sized model of her design to display on a pedestal near the free T-shirt stand. It was the best architectural model of apost office addition that anyone had ever seen. People kept coming up to Angelina Mona Linda Doe to tell her she’d outdone herself. Even Grandmama Julietta Augustina had been impressed enough to say, “Well, Angelina, it’s not completely terrible.”
    The rest of Jane’s family was getting a lot of attention at the festival as well. Jane’s father’s newest book had just hit the bestseller list, and he was being followed by crowds of people who wanted him to sign their copies. Mr. Phelps, the bank president of Remarkable Savings and Loan, had asked Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina to explain