The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

10

"Peel the tinfoil back after half an hour so the chicken will get brown, okay?" said Caroline's mother. "And don't forget to lock the door after I leave."

"We always lock the door, Mom," Caroline pointed out.

"How do I look?" Joanna Tate twirled around. "I haven't worn this dress in ages. Does it still fit all right?"

"You look fine," said Caroline glumly. "Doesn't she, J.P.?"

J.P. looked up from his new issue of Scientific American and grunted.

"Mom, if you want to stay home, you can have my TV dinner. I'm not very hungry," Caroline said.

"Why would I want to stay home? Did I tell you he's taking me to an Italian restaurant? Spaghetti and Chianti. Yum." She went to the mirror near the front door and combed her hair again.

"I don't like that guy," muttered Caroline.

"Fred Fiske? You don't even know him."

"Neither do you," Caroline said meaningfully.

"I don't know him well. But I've been walking to the corner with him lots of mornings. He goes down to get a newspaper at the drugstore by my bus stop."

"You don't even know what he does for a living."

"Well, I know that he's a history professor at Columbia. But he's on a year's leave of absence, because he's got some project."

"Right," said Caroline. "And you don't know what that project is."

"True, he's kind of mysterious about that. But when someone says he's working on a project, you don't become overly inquisitive. I don't do that to you, James, do I? When you're working on a project in your room, I don't stand at the door, saying 'Tell me all about your project, James. I want to know all about your project.' I don't, do I, James?"

J.P. turned a page of his magazine and looked up. "No," he acknowledged. "You stand at my door and yell, 'If you're taking the toaster apart again I'm buying you a tourist-class ticket to Des Moines!'"

"Tell you what, Caroline," suggested her mother. "If it turns out that Fred Fiske is taking toasters apart up there in his apartment, I'll never have dinner with him again. Fair enough?"

"You never take me seriously," Caroline muttered.

Her mother came over and kissed the top of her head. She smelled of cologne. "Of course I do. But not when you're being silly. And the thirty-fourth thing I love about you, Caroline, is that you're so silly so often."

Since it was apparent that her mother was not going to change her mind and stay home, Caroline decided to change the subject. "Mom," she said, "I had a fight with Stacy. I hung up on her when we were talking on the phone yesterday. We didn't speak to each other all day, except for once in gym class, and then all she said was, 'KID SNUBS BEST PAL.' Can I invite her to come for dinner on Sunday?"

"Sure," said her mother, glancing at her watch. "I have a leg of lamb in the freezer. It'd be fun to have company. We haven't had company for ages."

"Hey," said Caroline suddenly. "Can I invite somebody else, too? I told my friend Mr. Keretsky that I'd invite him for dinner sometime."

"I guess so. But you're not trying to cook up a romance, are you?"

The thought made Caroline giggle in spite of her bad mood. "No," she said. "He's at least seventy years old, I think. Too old even for you."

"Well, sure. Go ahead and invite him. We'll have a real dinner party. Shhhh—did you hear a knock?" There was a second knock on the door. "Be polite. Even if it kills you," she whispered as she went to answer it.

Caroline and J.P. said "How do you do" very politely to Frederick Fiske. Then their mother was gone in a flurry of smiles and the lingering scent of her cologne. She went down the stairs on the arm of the killer.

Caroline watched through the apartment window until the pair had walked as far as the corner and disappeared from view. J.P. had put his magazine down and was on his feet, pacing.

"How long do you think they'll be gone?" Caroline asked him.

He put on his stern, scientific look and calculated in his head. "Twenty minutes to get to the restaurant. Twenty minutes to eat spaghetti. Twenty minutes to come home. They'll be gone an hour. Five minutes longer if they have dessert."

Caroline sighed. Sometimes, for all his high IQ, her brother was a moron. "J.P.," she pointed out, "this is a date. It isn't a speed-eating contest. They won't be home till ten, I bet. Maybe even eleven."

"Well, I don't know what they can do all that time in an Italian restaurant. I could eat two orders of spaghetti in twenty minutes. But I hope you're right. That gives me plenty of time." J.P. started looking through the pockets of his corduroy pants.

"What exactly are you going to do? No hot wires; remember, you promised while Mom was getting dressed."

Her brother was holding his Swiss Army knife, his bus pass, tweezers, some paper clips, and the tiny screwdriver he used every time he took the toaster apart. "I'm just going to collect evidence. I can get his door open using the knife and the bus pass. I always open our door that way when I lose my keys."

"You'll need gloves so you won't leave fingerprints."

"Right." J.P. went to the closet in the hall, poked around, and came back wearing thick knitted mittens. "These won't work," he said in disgust. "They're like paws."

"Here, try these." Caroline brought her mother's rubber gloves from under the kitchen sink. J.P. put them on. They were huge and bright turquoise. "Gross," he muttered.

"One more thing," he said. "Get me some envelopes. I'll need them to put the evidence in."

Caroline went to her mother's desk and took out three envelopes. J.P. took them awkwardly in his rubber gloves, folded them, and stuffed them into his back pocket.

"What if you find big evidence?" asked Caroline apprehensively. "Those envelopes won't hold much."

"I'll hire a U-Haul trailer," said J.P. sarcastically. He headed for the door. "If you hear them coming back, run up the stairs and warn me."

Caroline nodded. "Do you want a pencil and paper so you can write stuff down?" she asked.

J.P. shot her a withering look. "Don't forget that I have a photographic memory," he said. "I never have to write anything down." Then he was gone.

It was beginning to get dark. Caroline turned on the living room lamps. She went to the kitchen and peeled back the tinfoil from the TV dinners. She glanced out the window again to make sure her mother and Frederick Fiske weren't returning unexpectedly, but there was only a young couple, arms around each other, on the corner, and an old woman trudging along with a large bag of groceries.

She looked up Gregor Keretsky's telephone number in the Manhattan telephone book and called him. She felt a little nervous, because she had never called him at home before; she had never seen him, in fact, outside the Museum of Natural History. But he responded cheerfully, and with a funny formal kind of politeness, that he would be delighted to come for dinner at six on Sunday.

She checked the stove, found that the chicken was brown and sizzling, and turned the oven off.

She opened the apartment door, listened in the hall, and heard nothing. The Carrutherses, upstairs, apparently weren't home. Downstairs, Miss Edmond's apartment was silent as well; she was still in the hospital. On Fridays, Mrs. DeVito usually took Billy to the Little Hungary for dinner, where they got a discount if they ordered the special. Probably no one was home in the entire building except J.P. and Caroline. The silence was scary.

She called Stacy on the phone and apologized for her half of their fight.

"TIFF ENDS," announced Stacy. "Thank goodness."

"J.P.'s upstairs, Stacy," whispered Caroline. "He broke into Frederick Fiske's apartment and he's up there now, looking for evidence."

"You should have called me first," Stacy said tersely. "You know I'm an expert on evidence. Is he wearing gloves?"

"Yes. Big turquoise rubber ones."

"Good. That's essential, to wear gloves. Is he writing everything down?"

"He doesn't have to. J.P. has a photographic memory. He can memorize a whole list of spelling words just by looking at it for five seconds."

"Ohhh," groaned Stacy. "Is he lucky! I'd give anything to have a photographic memory! I wish I knew your brother better, Caroline. He and I could team up and—"

"J.P. is a creep," Caroline said impatiently.

"I think he's kind of cute," Stacy said. "Well, anyway, no need to have another fight. Listen, does he know that there has to be a corpus delicti?"

"A what?"

"Corpus delicti. All the evidence in the world is no good unless there's a corpus delicti. My father told me that."

"But what is it?"

Stacy hesitated a minute. "I forget," she said, finally. "That's why I wish I had a photographic memory. But you have to find one. Tell J.P."

"Okay." Caroline wrote it down, spelling it as well as she could. "I have to go. But listen, the reason I called was to ask if you could come for dinner on Sunday. Six o'clock."

"PAL SAYS YES," said Stacy, and she hung up.

Caroline looked through the window again; the street was empty now. The street lights had come on. She took the piece of paper on which she had written the incomprehensible words, went out into the hall, listened to the silence again, and then went up two flights of stairs. Frederick Fiske's door was closed. She reached for the doorknob, realized she was not wearing gloves, and finally knocked on the door with the toe of her shoe.

"J.P?" she called softly through the door. "It's only me."

He opened the door a few inches and peered through the crack. "I'm almost through," he said softly. "What do you want? Are they coming home?"

Caroline shook her head. "No. But I talked to Stacy and she said that evidence is no good unless you find a"—she looked at the paper in the dim hall light—"corpus delicti."

"What's that?"

"I don't know. Neither does Stacy. But she's positive you have to have one."

"Read it again, slowly."

"Corpus delicti." Caroline pronounced the words as precisely as she could.

"It's Latin," J.P. mused. "And I don't take Latin till next year. But I leafed through Mark Peterson's Latin book once. Let me see it, Caroline. A photographic memory only works if you see something."

She handed him the paper through the crack in the door, and he took it in his giant gloves.

"Yeah," he said after a moment, and handed the paper back. "Got it. No sweat. We have one."

"What is it?"

"I don't know what 'delicti' means. That didn't register anything on my photographic memory. But 'corpus' means 'body' in Latin."

"Body? BODY?"

"Shhhhhh."

"You found a body?" Caroline was trying to be quiet, but she could hear her voice rising shrilly. She backed away from Frederick Fiske's door.

"Yes. Now go back down and stand guard. I'll be down in a minute."