The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline (12 page)

Stacy began to laugh. Then Joanna Tate started to laugh. Frederick Fiske chuckled.

"Forgive me, Mr. Keretsky," Caroline's mother said. "I shouldn't laugh. But do you know that you're wearing one blue sock and one green one?"

Gregor Keretsky grinned sheepishly. "Ah, Caroline," he said with a sigh, "my darkest secret is exposed."

From the kitchen, the timer on the stove buzzed.

"Dinner's ready," Joanna Tate said, standing up. "Caroline, will you come and help me in the kitchen? J.P., will you show everyone to their seats? And both of you—you too, Stacy—will you kindly put your shoes back on?"

Caroline leaned over to put on her sandals and whispered to J.P., who was forcing his feet back into his own shoes, "This is going to be a horrible evening. Horrible horrible horrible."

Stacy had retied her shoes. She stood up. "
KIDS RE-SHOD
," she announced, "
MEAL BEGINS.
"

Outside, the spring evening had turned from pink and gold to a dark, threatening night. Thunder rumbled across the city.

Joanna Tate refilled the adults' wine glasses and got up to close the windows. "It's raining," she said. "So much for the beautiful spring weather."

"April showers," said Frederick Fiske.

"Nope," announced Joanna Tate. "April downpour."

"When I was in London last week," said Gregor Keretsky, "it rained both days." He looked up suddenly and smiled. "That reminds me! I brought Caroline a small gift from my conference. You will forgive me if I make this little presentation during dinner?"

Everyone nodded and watched curiously as he removed a little packet from the inside pocket of his suit coat. He grinned proudly. "For most of you, this will seem a strange gift, I think. But for Caroline, I
hope it will be a treasure." Meticulously he unwrapped the bit of folded paper and then held up a tiny, gray, mottled object. He handed it to Caroline, who took it carefully and held it in the palm of her open hand.

"What is it—a
rock
?" asked Stacy, peering across the table.

Caroline grinned and shook her head. She knew it wasn't a rock.

"It's a chip of a mastodon bone," Gregor Keretsky explained. "Radiocarbon dates it about one and a half million years ago."

"Early Pleistocene," breathed Caroline, in awe. She turned it over and over in her hand.

"A glacial period," Gregor Keretsky explained. "New York was probably covered with ice when this mastodon lived."

"Even the Empire State Building?" asked Stacy, reaching for some more string beans.

Everyone laughed, even Stacy, after she had thought for a moment. "Someday we'll all be extinct," said Frederick Fiske. "Someday I suppose scientists will be digging up
our
bones."

His voice, and what he had said, brought Caroline back to reality from the Early Pleistocene Age. You first, she thought; you're going to be extinct before I am, Frederick Fiske. J.P. and I are going to see to that as soon as we finish the dessert.

"Well," said Joanna Tate, "this leg of lamb is extinct. I guess it's time for chocolate cake."

"Mom," said Caroline, "you stay right in your seat. J.P. and I can clear the table and serve the cake." Carefully she put the mastodon bone into the pocket of her skirt. "Thank you, Mr. Keretsky. It's the best gift anyone ever gave me."

She and her brother conferred in the kitchen as they scraped the bits of food from the plates into the garbage disposal. Lightning streaked across the sky outside and was followed by heavy, shuddering thunder.

"Good night for a murder," Caroline remarked, shivering. She nibbled at a string bean that Stacy had left on her plate. "Keep your eye on Fiske in case he tries to sprinkle poison on our dessert."

J.P. was sulking. "I can't zap him, Caroline, unless he takes off his shoes. I spent all afternoon rigging up that zapper, and then he wore rubber-soled shoes, the jerk."

Caroline sliced the chocolate cake carefully and put it on plates. She could hear her mother and the company talking and laughing in the other room.

"I have an idea," she said slowly, watching the rain splatter against the kitchen window. "I think I can get his shoes off."

"How?" J.P.'s eyes brightened.

"Never mind. It's too complicated to describe. You just be ready. When we're almost finished with dessert, you watch me. I'll get Fiske's shoes off—for a minute, at least; the timing will have to be perfect—and you press your switch when I say 'Now.'"

"It's not a switch; it's a button. I've got it all rigged on the floor. I press the button with my foot, and it activates the wire to his chair leg, which activates the wire attached to the flat bottom of Mom's old iron, which I slipped in through the ripped part of the chair seat so that it's right under his butt, and the whole thing's attached to my old Lionel train transformer in my room, and—"

"Skip the details. I don't understand electricity, anyway. Here—take some of these plates in."

Caroline and J.P. served the cake and poured coffee for the adults. As Caroline leaned over Stacy to put her plate down, Stacy whispered, "He doesn't seem like a crazed killer. I think he's kind of nice."

"Wait till you see all the evidence laid out. Later," Caroline whispered back.

Caroline watched all the plates. Gregor Keretsky ate his cake slowly, savoring each bite. "This is wonderful," he said. "Caroline, your mama said you helped her make this cake. Maybe you should become a chef instead of a paleontologist?"

His eyes were twinkling. Caroline knew he was only joking.

Stacy nibbled at her cake, fastidiously wiping crumbs from her mouth with her napkin. "I'm really interested in the Computer Club at school, J.P.," she was saying. "What exactly do you do?"

Caroline groaned to herself. She knew Stacy didn't give a hoot about the Computer Club. What Stacy was
interested in, all of a sudden, was Caroline's brother. She was going to have to have a serious talk with Stacy. Once a woman got involved with the opposite sex, her whole future career could go down the drain.

Frederick Fiske was also devouring his cake enthusiastically, and his plate was almost empty. He was scraping up the last bits of frosting with his fork. It was time. She glanced meaningfully at J.P.

Caroline took a deep breath. If her plan didn't work, she didn't have any alternative plan in mind, and the whole thing would be a horrible failure. Horrible horrible horrible.

She took a big bite of cake. Then she said, "This cake makes me very thirsty." With her left hand she picked up her glass of milk and took a swallow. Still holding the glass of milk, she took her mastodon bone out of her pocket.

"This is such a wonderful gift, Mr. Keretsky," she said.

She glanced up to be sure that J.P. was watching. She dropped the small chip of bone on the floor. "Whoops!" she said. "I dropped it!" Everyone, including J.P., looked a little startled.

"Excuse me, everyone," Caroline said. "I know it's rude to crawl under the table, but I don't want to lose my mastodon bone."

Still holding her glass of milk, she knelt on the floor and then disappeared under the tablecloth.

"Don't move your feet, anyone!" she called in a
commanding voice. "I don't want anyone to step on the mastodon bone!"

Quickly she returned the chip of bone to her pocket. No matter what else happened, she wasn't going to sacrifice the mastodon bone. Caroline glanced around at the pairs of feet under the table. There were Mr. Keretsky's, with their unmatched socks. There were her mother's, in dark brown high-heeled shoes. There were Stacy's, curled around the rung of her chair. There were J.P.'s best shoes, and beside them, with wires running from it, was a small button that looked like a discarded doorbell. J.P.'s left foot moved and arranged itself over the button in pushing position.

And there were Frederick Fiske's feet in their rubber-soled loafers. For an eerie instant she wondered whether, with his shoes off, he would reveal huge scaly feet with long curved nails, like those of a Tyrannosaurus.

But she didn't hesitate. She poured her glass of milk over both of Frederick Fiske's feet, carefully including his socks. He jumped.

"Sorry!" called Caroline from under the table. "Don't get up, Mr. Fiske. By mistake I spilled my milk. Here, let me help you get your shoes off so I can dry them with my napkin!" She grabbed one of his feet so that he couldn't stand up, and in an instant she had both of his loafers off.

"NOW, J.P.!" she yelled. And her brother's foot came down hard on the button.

There was a loud buzzing noise, a flash of sparks, and everything went dark.

Caroline groped her way through the maze of human legs and the folds of the tablecloth. She re-emerged into a room that was totally dark except for the two small sputtering candles on the table. She looked at the dim figures seated around the table, expecting to see Frederick Fiske slumped in his chair, zapped and stunned.

But Frederick Fiske was laughing. He was bending over to mop at his wet socks with his napkin.

"What on earth happened?" asked Joanna Tate. "Where are the lights?"

"It must be the storm," explained Gregor Keretsky. He stood up and looked through the window, out into the rainy street. "The street lights are on. And the lights in other buildings. Could it be maybe just a fuse?"

Caroline peered through the darkness at J.P. He was sitting silently, with his head in his hands. "I blew it," she could hear him mutter.

"Well," said Frederick Fiske, standing up, "I can squish down the stairs to the basement, I guess, and see if I can find the fuse box." He went to the door of the apartment, stumbling into a chair in the darkness, and opened it. They could hear him speak to someone in the pitch-black hall. In a moment he was back.

"Jason Carruthers is going down," he said. "All the lights are off in the whole building. He's going to find a flashlight and check out the wiring in the basement. He said we should just sit tight."

Sure we'll sit tight, thought Caroline. Here we are in a dark room with a murderer, a thunderstorm outside, two candles that are just about to go out, and no other candles in the house.

I want my Stegosaurus, she thought suddenly. I want my stuffed Stegosaurus.

Then she reached into her pocket, remembering her mastodon bone. She held it tightly in her hand and found that it was just as comforting as the stuffed animal on her closet shelf.

One of the candles, no more than a stub now, flickered and went out. "
LIGHT FAILS
," headlined Stacy a little nervously. Outside another roar of thunder rumbled across the sky; heavy sheets of rain washed against the windows in the gusty wind.

The last candle flared briefly, hissed, and went out. Now the room was completely dark.

"I think," said Joanna Tate cheerfully, "that we should have a conversation. It's a little spooky, sitting here without saying anything."

"Not spooky," said Gregor Keretsky. "It's cozy, being with other people. Most nights I am alone in my little apartment. For me it is more pleasant to be with friends, even in the dark, than to be alone with bright lights on. Don't you think so, Caroline?" Through the
darkness he reached over and took Caroline's hand. Now she had the mastodon bone in one hand and Gregor Keretsky's firm hand in her other. She felt better, less terrified.

"I guess so," she said uncertainly.

"Mr. Keretsky," asked Stacy, "why do you live all alone? Don't you have a family?"

He was silent for a minute. He sighed and shifted in his chair, still grasping Caroline's hand. "I don't want to tell a sad story on such a pleasant night," he said. "So I will tell only a little of what happened to me, and you must not let it make you feel sad, because it is many years ago, and now you see how things are: we are all happy here together!

"When I was a young man—you will never believe this, Caroline, but it is true—I was a painter. I was not a
great
painter, but I was a
good
one, I think. This was in Europe. And then, in Europe, came the war.

"Now, I am not going to talk about the war, because you all know that war is a bad time. I lost my family."

Caroline held tightly to his hand. "Did you have children?" she asked.

He cleared his throat. "A little girl. She was about your age, Caroline, though she was not as—what would the word be?—incorrigible? I don't mean that as a bad thing. In fact, if I may borrow your mama's way of speaking, it is the ninety-fourth thing that I love about Caroline, I think: that she is incorrigible."

"Me too," said Joanna Tate from the end of the table.

Gregor Keretsky went on. "Now, that was the sad thing, that my family—my parents, my wife, my daughter—were gone. But it is long ago, and I will not dwell upon that. I will tell you of the other thing that I lost. Can you guess what it is, Caroline?"

She nodded in the dark. "Colors," she said, squeezing his hand. "You lost colors. I think that's
very
sad."

"I thought so, too, at the time, because of course I could never paint again. But as I told you, I was not a great painter. The doctors could find no reason that my colors had disappeared. They wrote about me, in journals and medical books.

"I had to find another profession. And this is the happy part. I had always been interested in science, and so I went back to the university, and after a long time of study I became a paleontologist. The bones I study—like your little mastodon chip, Caroline—have no colors. We don't have any way to know what color the great beasts were. Maybe the mastodon was pink? Yellow?"

Caroline giggled, picturing a Walt Disney version of the mastodon. "Blue with yellow polka dots?" she suggested.

"Perhaps," said Gregor Keretsky. "We will never know. And this is my story: why I have no family, Stacy; why I am a paleontologist instead of a painter; and why, even, I have a funny pair of socks. You see
it is a story with a happy ending, even though there are sad parts to it."

"Maybe all of our stories are similar," suggested Joanna Tate. "I always wanted to be a poet. Instead, I'm a bank teller. I would never have been a
great
poet—"