The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

2

"Don't put this blue blouse in with the white things, Caroline."

"Mother, for heaven's sake. I'm the laundry expert, remember? Of course I won't put the blue blouse in with the white things. Here, give it to me. It goes in this pile, with the jeans."

Joanna Tate chuckled. "That's the thirty-eighth thing I love about you, Caroline," she said. "Your laundry expertise."

"You're positive it isn't the thirty-seventh?"

"Nope. Thirty-seventh is your perpetual ability to wake up cheerful on Saturday mornings. Very few people have that ability."

"I love Saturdays," said Caroline. "There's so much stuff to do."

Together they sorted the dirty clothes, put them into pillowcases, and loaded them into the wheeled shopping cart. Caroline thumped it down the stairs of their building—sometimes she wished they had an elevator, the way Stacy's building did—and stopped on the first floor to check the mail.

Most eleven-year-old people didn't get mail very often. But Caroline did, because she always sent away for free catalogues. Then her name was on mailing lists: Ms. C. Tate. There was always mail for Ms. C. Tate.

In addition, of course, her membership in the Museum of Natural History brought mail. Today there was a notice about a lecture on spiders; she saved that, even though she wouldn't be able to go because it was a school night. But she would write a note to the lecturer, Dr. Morton Schultz from the University of New Mexico, telling him that she was sorry she couldn't make it. She was moderately interested in spiders. Caroline had a subscription to the National Geographic, which her father renewed every year as a Christmas gift, and she always read the articles about spiders, bees, and ants. Mountain-climbing expeditions didn't interest her much, because she didn't like being cold; and sailboat trips around the world didn't interest her much, because she didn't like being wet. But there was almost always an article about insects or archaeological projects. So she was able every year to write an honest and enthusiastic thank-you note to her father, in Des Moines, for the National Geographic.

Her father didn't interest Caroline much, because he had moved to Des Moines when she was two years old and never wrote her any letters. She went to visit him now and then, and she liked his wife okay, but they made her baby-sit with their little boy. If Caroline wanted to baby-sit, she didn't need to go all the way to Des Moines.

Also in the mail for Ms. C. Tate was a catalogue from Publishers Central Bureau, which she would read later. Reading the descriptions of books was always interesting, even though she never had the money to buy any.

And there was something telling her "Congratulations C. Tate you may have won the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes." When she was younger, she used to believe that. Now she just tossed it into the wastebasket by the mail slot. Some of the other people in the building had already picked up their mail, apparently, because there were two other Reader's Digest letters in the wastebasket.

Caroline leaned over and looked at the wastebasket more closely. It could be a good source for investigative reporting. Stacy spent a lot of time in the basement of her building, wearing rubber gloves so that she wouldn't leave fingerprints, going through the trash.

Sure enough, there were two crumpled pieces of mail addressed to Frederick Fiske.

She left her mother's mail—all bills, addressed to Ms. J. Tate—on the hall table. But she stuffed Frederick Fiske's two letters into a pocket of her jeans. Frederick Fiske was the Mystery Man who lived on the fifth floor.

Caroline thumped the laundry down the front steps and out to the sidewalk. Billy DeVito was playing on the sidewalk with two stones and a piece of string. Billy DeVito was five and lived on the first floor.

"Hi, Billy. How's it going?"

Billy wrinkled his nose and thought for a minute. Caroline liked Billy because he always took things very seriously, even things like "How's it going?"

"Good," he said, finally. "I got me this string. It busted last night when it was playing 'Lady of Spain.'"

Most people wouldn't have understood what Billy DeVito was talking about. But Caroline did, because she knew a lot about the DeVito family. Investigating them had been easy; Mrs. DeVito liked to talk. Her husband played the violin in a Hungarian restaurant. He gave his broken violin strings to Billy.

Mr. DeVito's violin had cost four thousand dollars, and they had insurance on it. Mrs. DeVito had told Caroline once that she wished her husband's violin would be stolen; then the insurance company would pay them four thousand dollars, and they could buy a new living room set, and Mr. DeVito could get a job in the post office or something, like a normal person.

She didn't really mean that, though. She liked it that Billy's father played the violin in the Little Hungary Café. Some nights he brought home leftover food and they would light candles and pretend they were eating in a restaurant themselves, and he would play "Night and Day" on his violin, just for her. Someone who worked in the post office could never do that for his wife.

Caroline walked on down to the Laundromat on the corner. She loaded three machines, added detergent, put three quarters into each machine, and turned them on. The gray and white cat jumped down from the top of the drier where he'd been sleeping, and rubbed against her leg, purring.

"Hi, Cheery," said Caroline and scratched behind his ears.

No one knew whom the cat belonged to, or who fed him, or what his name really was. But the people who did their laundry at the Laundromat all called him Cheery, because he liked to roll in the little piles of spilled detergent on the floor; then he would jump on top of the drier and clean the detergent out of his whiskers and sneeze.

He didn't care what kind of detergent he rolled in. But it would have sounded stupid to call him All or Tide. So everybody called him New Blue Cheer. Cheery, for short.

Caroline glanced around to see who else was in the place this morning.

"Hello, Mrs. Kokolis," she called. "Are you starting to pack yet?"

Mrs. Kokolis smiled and kept on knitting. She was such a good knitter that she could talk and make complicated sweaters at the same time.

"Not yet," she said. "Soon, though."

Mr. and Mrs. Kokolis used to own the Greek restaurant across the street. They had come to the United States from Greece thirty years ago and had been saving, ever since their children grew up, to go back to Greece for a visit. Then Mr. Kokolis had died one day, very suddenly. He had been making stuffed grape leaves—his specialty—when he looked up, Mrs. Kokolis had told Caroline, and said, "Well. My goodness." Then he fell over and was dead, of a heart attack.

So Mrs. Kokolis was going to go back to Greece all alone. At least she said she was. But she never quite got around to doing it. She kept canceling her airline reservations.

"Soon, though," she kept saying.

"In June," she said, today. "June for certain."

Caroline smiled at Mrs. Kokolis. She watched a man putting his clothes into a drier. She giggled to herself. An Apatosaurus, she thought. He looks like an Apatosaurus.

It was true. He wasn't as large as an Apatosaurus, of course, because a real Apatosaurus would have filled two Laundromats and still had to stick its head out through a window.

But he was very tall, with a long neck and a nose that looked too high on his face. He had buck teeth and a stupid look.

Caroline giggled again, remembering something. The Apatosaurus had two brains, both very small; so he wasn't at all smart. But his second brain was located in his bottom, right where his tail began.

The man putting his clothes into the drier didn't have a tail, of course. And Caroline was fairly certain that he didn't have a second brain in his behind. But he sure looked like an Apatosaurus.

It was surprising, the number of people who resembled dinosaurs.

No one else was in the laundry this morning except for a couple of teen-age girls reading magazines. Caroline checked to make sure that her laundry was going around in the washers. Then she sat down and took Frederick Fiske's mail out of her pocket.

She felt a little guilty, beginning to read it. But it was open, after all, and it had been in the wastebasket.

Anyway, investigators had to use any method possible to find out stuff. Stacy had reminded her of that often.

The first letter was simply boring. It was a note from the public library, reminding him politely that a book he'd checked out, Forensic Toxicology, was a month overdue. Caroline didn't know what "forensic toxicology" meant; it didn't sound very interesting. She stuffed that letter back into her pocket.

Then she read the second letter, and her head began to whirl, the way her laundry was whirling now in the washing machine.

Fred, [the letter began]:

The woman's terrific. But the kids, frankly, seem more and more of a problem. Eliminate the kids. You can figure out a way.

Call me, and we'll have lunch and talk it over.

Carl

That was all. Caroline turned the envelope over and looked at the return address. Carl Broderick was the man's name, and he lived on East 52nd Street.

Why would a man on East 52nd Street be telling Frederick Fiske to murder some children?