The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline (8 page)

"James," said his mother, "if you would divert your inventive energy into worthwhile projects, you could be very successful someday."

"Yeah," he replied. "I could be an only child, too, after the eyeball lasers are perfected."

Joanna Tate sighed in exasperation. "It would be
terrible
to be an only child. It would be
lonely.
"

"WRONG," said Caroline and J.P. in unison. They glared at each other with laser-beam glares.

"Listen," said their mother as she stacked the breakfast dishes, "I want you guys to promise me that you won't kill each other tomorrow night. I'm going out, so you'll be alone here. Alone
together.
"

"What do we get for dinner?" asked J.P. "And can I eat in my room?"

"TV dinners," said his mother. "The fried chicken ones. And yes, you may eat in your room if you
promise
not to leave garbage in there. I do
not
want to have to deal with cockroaches."

"If I perfected my laser eyeballs," mused J.P., picking up his schoolbooks, "I could be an exterminator. I could go around staring at cockroaches. Zap! Zap! Gotcha!" He moved his eyes in all directions, staring fixedly at imaginary cockroaches.

"Where are you going tomorrow night?" asked Caroline as she pulled on her sweater.

Her mother grinned. "I have a dinner date," she said. "First time in ages. He's taking me to an Italian restaurant."

"
Who's
taking you?" Caroline asked. But she knew. Somehow she knew the answer.

"Scoot, guys, you're going to be late for school. It's that nice-looking man who moved in upstairs. Fred Fiske."

I've got to tell someone, Caroline thought, all day during school. Someone. Not just Stacy. Stacy will just write headlines,
KIDS' MOM DATES LONER
, Stacy will say. woos
MOM, SLAYS KIDS
.

By afternoon it was all she could think about. In history class, she could hear Mr. Winslow droning on and on about the Phoenicians—and ordinarily Caroline
liked
the Phoenicians—but she didn't listen to what he was saying. Who can I tell? she was thinking.

Then she remembered: Mr. Keretsky would be back by now. Gregor Keretsky was the only person she knew who would go to Europe and then come right back home, not even staying around to have dinner in restaurants or to visit castles. His conference in London, he had said, was only for one day. He would be back in his office at the Museum of Natural History by now. She would visit him there after school. She would tell
him everything, even how Frederick Fiske looked like a Tyrannosaurus. Gregor Keretsky would understand how sinister that was. She smiled and relaxed, looking up from her desk just in time to see Mr. Winslow peering over his glasses at her with an irritated frown.

"Caroline?" he was saying. "I don't think you've been listening to a single word. Can you tell the class, please, what the eastern and western boundaries of Phoenicia were?"

Caroline grinned. "The Mediterranean Sea on the west," she said. "And the Lebanon Mountains on the east." Hah, she thought. Even though I'm about to be the victim of a savage crime, I still do my homework, Mr. Winslow.

She jogged home from the bus stop, eager to drop off her books, change to jeans, and head for the Museum of Natural History. J.P. wouldn't be around, thank goodness; he always stayed after school on Thursday for Computer Club. Caroline fished her keys out of her backpack, opened the front door, and stopped to take the mail out of the box marked
J. TATE.

Typical, she thought. Dentist bill. Bank statement. Child-support check from Des Moines. Addressed to her, from the museum, were illustrated brochures telling about a whale-watching expedition and a symposium on primates. She read them through carefully, standing there in the first-floor hallway. Too bad: the
whale-watching trip was on a weekend, but it cost a lot. The primate symposium was free, but it was on a weekday afternoon, so she'd be in school. She'd have to write thank-you notes explaining why she couldn't come. She always did that, even though Mr. Keretsky had told her it wasn't necessary. But Caroline was afraid they'd quit inviting her if she never came and didn't explain why. Once, in fourth grade, she had invited a girl named Tamara St. John to come and play on Saturday at least four times, and Tamara St. John had never come and hadn't explained why. Finally Mrs. Tate had explained very gently to Caroline that it appeared that Tamara St. John didn't
want
to come and play at her house, so Caroline had quit inviting her. It seemed like the same sort of thing. So she always wrote a polite note to the President of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Natural History, explaining why she couldn't attend seminars or lectures or safaris.

If her mother had simply refused to have dinner with Frederick Fiske without an explanation, she thought suddenly, he would quit inviting her, simple as that.

At the foot of the stairs, she glanced at the last piece of mail—and stopped dead in her tracks. It was another letter to Frederick Fiske from Carl Broderick. It had been in the Tate mailbox by mistake.

Sometimes that happened. Sometimes they found in their mailbox notices of chamber music concerts addressed to Mr. DeVito. Sometimes old Miss Edmond found Caroline's museum mailings in her mailbox by
mistake. They would simply leave the mistaken mail on the hall table, and the right person would pick it up.

And that, Caroline realized, was what she should do with Frederick Fiske's letter. But she didn't. She looked back at the hall table, a Victorian monstrosity with an ugly vase full of dried flowers on it. Right there, on the dusty top of that table, was where she should put Frederick Fiske's letter.

Instead, she stuck it in between the two notices from the Museum of Natural History and took it upstairs. Ten minutes later, when she bounded back down the stairs and jogged toward 79th Street and the museum, the letter was in the back pocket of her jeans.

In one way, it was a great comfort to be in Gregor Keretsky's office, drinking tea while her dear, dear friend stirred and sipped his coffee. His desk was covered, as always, with papers in messy stacks; on the shelves around the walls were books and bones and small replicas of different kinds of prehistoric mammals. Mr. Kerestsky was tilted back in his leather chair, with his feet up on his desk, the way he usually was. And Caroline, as usual, had found a space on his big lumpy couch by moving aside the piles of books that were always there. It was the coziest place in the whole world, she thought.

But she was frowning and feeling less comfortable than she ordinarily did in that room. Gregor Keretsky hadn't reacted the way she had expected or hoped. The unopened letter to Frederick Fiske lay between them on the corner of his cluttered desk.

"No, Caroline," Mr. Keretsky was saying, for about
the third time, "you must not open that letter. It isn't addressed to you. It would be against the law."

"But—"

"No buts. I understand, my little paleontologist. You are frightened of this man."

"He looks like Tyrannosaurus Rex," Caroline pointed out once more.

"I understand even that. Many of these great beasts take on human qualities for me, too. And Tyrannosaurus—ah, the Great Killer. He is the most horrible of all. He could take you and me together, Caroline, and crush us both in his teeth, and his small brain would have no room in it to feel compassion."

"What if he lived right upstairs from you, Mr. Keretsky?" Caroline asked him.

Gregor Keretsky smiled at her. "It is only a man that lives upstairs, my small scientist. Don't forget that. The world of science must never mix daydreams with reality. These beasts that you and I know so well? They are all in the past. They don't live upstairs, not anywhere. It is a man. It is a man named—what did you tell me?" He leaned forward, his chair squeaking, to peer at the name on the envelope.

"Frederick Fiske," Caroline reminded him.

"Yes. Frederick Fiske. A man's name, that is all. Just as the name Gregor Keretsky is the name of a man, an absent-minded man who sees no colors. And the name Caroline Tate, the name of a girl who should maybe be home by now, helping her mama get the dinner
ready?" He grinned at her and looked at his watch.

"But Mr. Keretsky, remember the other letter? The one about getting rid of the kids? And remember I didn't open that one. It was already open and thrown away."

"Yes, I remember. But there too, Caroline, the daydreams are getting in the way of the thinking. Would a killer—even a killer who looks like the Greatest of Killers—so casually toss away evidence of such a thing? Remember that a man has a
big
brain. This letter you showed to me, surely it has some other meaning. Why did you not show it to your mama?"

"She would have laughed. She would have said that the eighty-third reason she loves me is because I make her laugh so often."

"And is it such a bad thing, to laugh? There is not enough laughter around; that is what I think."

Caroline sighed. She didn't feel at all like laughing. "I thought that if I opened just this one, Mr. Keretsky—"

"No. You must not. In this country it is the law, and one of the most important of laws. A man's mail is his own. It is one of the reasons I came to live in America, Caroline. I have lived in other countries where this could happen, that a man could be accused, his mail opened, false evidence used against him..." His voice trailed off, and he gazed through the small office window. "You go home now, Caroline," he said finally, after a long silence. "Come back tomorrow, or maybe
Saturday, and I will tell you about the conference in London. I brought you a present, but it is at my apartment because I did not expect to see you today. When you come back, I will tell you about London, and we will eat ice cream together. How would that be?"

Caroline stood and put the letter back into her pocket. "All right," she said. "I'd like to hear about the London conference. And about London. Did you see the Queen's Guards with the red coats?"

"Ah, Caroline." Gregor Keretsky chuckled. "You are teasing me. You know that for me even the coats of the Queen's Guards would be gray. You're the most colorful thing in my life, Caroline, and even then, the color is all here"—he tapped his chest—"in the heart. Never in the eyes. What color are those very practical-looking trousers you are wearing?"

Caroline started to laugh. "Mr. Keretsky," she said, "jeans are always blue."

Walking slowly back home, Caroline took the sealed letter from her pocket and turned it over and over in her hands. Mr. Keretsky was right, she knew. Once, when she was a little girl and still believed in magic things, she had had a crush on Santa Claus; she had imagined him to be kind and wise and full of fun. Now Gregor Keretsky was all those things—and more, because his past had taught him something about sadness, too. So his wisdom was better wisdom than Santa Claus
wisdom. She believed in what he said. And she knew she would not scurry sneakily up to the apartment to turn on the tea kettle and steam the letter open.

But when she held it in front of her to read the address once more, the late afternoon spring sunlight glinted off a puddle on the sidewalk. Against the light, through the envelope, she could see writing. Almost without looking, she could clearly see the word "poison."

When she entered her building, Caroline guiltily passed the front hall table without putting the letter there. J.P. was home; she could see his jacket and books on the living room couch and could hear him puttering in his room, behind the closed door.

"It's only me," she called so that he wouldn't think a burglar had entered the apartment. He grunted something in reply.

She took the letter into her room and turned on the lamp beside her bed. Carefully she held the unopened letter in front of the bright bulb. And there it was: a short note, typed, and all of it in one place so that it wasn't folded on top of itself. It was the easiest thing in the world to read. It was also the most horrible. Horrible horrible horrible.

Fred:

When this goes through and you get paid, would you install a phone, please?

Have you figured out how to eliminate the children? I know it's tough, but you have to be
brutal—and thorough—and
quick
. The May 1st deadline is inflexible.

About the poisons: I'll leave that to you. But best not to use cyanide, not after the Tylenol thing. Find something obscure.

Carl

Caroline read it twice. Then she read it a third time, slowly, and copied it onto a page of notebook paper. After she was certain she had copied it word for word, with no mistakes, she took the letter back downstairs and deposited it on the table next to the vase of dried flowers.

Trudging back upstairs, she thought again about her dream. It had been, after all, the Coelophysis, ratty-looking though he was, who had come to her rescue, who had said, "I'll help you."

She knocked on her brother's bedroom door and called, "J.P.? Would you come out?"

"Why should I?" he called back.

"Because," said Caroline in despair, "I need your help."

"I have to think, I have to think, I have to think," muttered J.P. nervously, after Caroline had described her suspicions to him and shown him the first note and the copy of the second. "Shut up and let me think."

"How can I shut up when I'm not even saying anything?" asked Caroline. She went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of orange juice. "Here," she said,
handing one to her brother. He was sitting on the living room couch, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands.

"I'm thinking. I'm thinking," J.P. repeated, taking the glass of juice absent-mindedly. The telephone rang. "Shut the phone up, would you? I'm thinking."

"
KID CALLS PAL
," announced Stacy over the telephone.

"Hi, Stace," said Caroline. She took the phone into the bathroom so that she wouldn't disrupt J.P.'s thinking process.

"Anything going on? You dashed away after school, and I've been calling and calling, but you weren't home until now."