The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

3

Caroline dialed Stacy's number as soon as the laundry was folded and put away.

"Guess what, Stace?" she said.

"You guess what," said Stacy Baurichter. "Harrison Ledyard is having an affair."

"How do you know?"

"I looked through his trash. It was down in the basement of our building, because the superintendent hadn't put it outside yet. And there were cigarette butts with lipstick on them, and—"

"Stacy. Maybe his mother came to visit. Maybe his mother smokes. Or his sister. Or his cleaning lady. You have to verify your evidence, Stacy."

"That's not all. Wait'll you hear." Stacy paused ominously. "There was something else. A bra."

"In his trash?"

"Ripped."

"A ripped bra?"

"Torn in a passionate frenzy. Honest. Now don't try to make me believe that was his mother!"

"No," said Caroline, "I guess not. Was it black lace?"

"Pink. No lace, but some embroidery. Thirty-four B."

"That's not very big," said Caroline. "I think for a passionate frenzy you really need a thirty-eight D at least."

But Stacy assumed her investigative reporter's voice. "Research indicates that ever since Brooke Shields became so popular, small boobs are in."

"Stacy, in is one thing. Passionate frenzy is something else."

"Well. Anyway. It's the first interesting thing I've found out about Harrison Ledyard in all these months. Can you imagine? He looks so quiet and intellectual and Pulitzer Prize-winning. And now it turns out that in his spare time he's grabbing and ripping and tearing the clothes off of innocent women. I made a lot of notes. The bra's a Maidenform. And the lipstick is Misty Coral, I think. The cigarettes are Benson and Hedges menthol."

"Stacy, for a minute I almost forgot what I wanted to tell you. It's even better than Harrison Ledyard's sex life."

"What could be better than that?"

Caroline looked around to be certain no one could overhear her. She had taken the telephone into the bathroom, but the door wouldn't close tight over the cord. J.P. was in his bedroom, probably working on an electrical project. Her mother was washing the kitchen floor, and the radio was on in the kitchen. She eased the door closed again as far as it would go and spoke in a low voice.

"Frederick Fiske," she whispered into the telephone.

"The guy upstairs? He's having an affair, too?"

"Yes. But worse than that."

"BAURICHTER DEMANDS DETAILS," said Stacy. When she was excited about something, she often spoke in headlines. It was part of her journalistic training.

"He's a murderer," announced Caroline.

"A what? How do you know? Did you find body parts in his trash?"

"The murder hasn't taken place yet," Caroline explained. "But I found a letter. He's going to commit a murder. And guess what kind?"

"Ax?"

"No, it doesn't say the method. But it's going to be a child murder. A children murder, actually. The letter said, 'Eliminate the kids.'"

"Save it for fingerprints," ordered Stacy, "PRINTS OFTEN PROVE CASE," she added, in a headline.

"Too late," said Caroline. "I picked it up in my bare hands already. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I know who wrote it, and I know who it was to."

"Well, save it for evidence. And take notes. Listen: this is important, Caroline. Do friends describe him as a loner?"

"What?"

"In the newspapers," Stacy explained, "after they catch a psychopathic killer, it always says, 'Friends described him as a loner.' Do Frederick Fiske's friends describe him as a loner?"

"Stacy," Caroline pointed out impatiently, "I don't even know if he has any friends. He's always by himself."

"That proves it, then."

"Proves what?"

"He's a loner," said Stacy.

"Stace," Caroline whispered suddenly, "I have to go. My mother's coming.

"See you at school Monday," she said cheerfully, and loudly, into the phone as her mother passed in the hallway. "Bye, Stacy."

J.P. came out of his bedroom. "Bye, Stacy," he imitated, in a high, girlish voice. His own voice was beginning to deepen.

"Creep," said Caroline to her brother.

"Guess what I'm building in my room," said J.P.

"Couldn't care less."

"An electrifier," he announced happily. "Sometime, when you least expect it, when you're sound asleep, I'm going to sneak into your bedroom and—"

"MOM!" yelled Caroline.

Her mother sighed. She had curled up on the living room couch with a magazine. "He's only kidding, Caroline," she said. "James, stop teasing your sister."

"Zap," said J.P. meaningfully, looking sinister.

"Go zap yourself, Beastly," said Caroline with disdain. She went into her room and closed the door.

In her bedroom, Caroline knelt on her freshly made bed (Saturday was the only day that she didn't have to make her own bed; her mother changed the sheets on Saturday), reached up to the bookcase attached to the wall, and took down a dictionary. She rarely used her dictionary. It was wedged in so tightly that when she removed it, three mystery books and a fat volume about the Paleolithic Age came crashing down, bounced on her blue bedspread, and fell to the floor. Caroline glanced at them, shrugged, and left them there. Sometimes, in the house-decorating magazines that her mother liked to read, there were books scattered on the floor of a room. It gave a room a casual, intellectual look. Caroline decided that her room could have a casual, intellectual look until next Saturday, when it was cleaning day again.

She took Frederick Fiske's mail out of her pocket. The letter from Carl Broderick didn't require a dictionary. It was quite clear: a clear command to "eliminate the kids." No words to look up there. "Eliminate the kids" meant murder them, and you didn't need a dictionary to figure that out.

It was the other letter that was more puzzling. She had simply brushed it aside when she'd read it the first time. A notice from the library about an overdue book. Caroline got notices like that all the time. Once she had kept a book on vertebrate paleontology so long that the fine was $2.50; she had had to use some of her grandmother's birthday check to pay off that fine. She could almost have bought a book about vertebrate paleontology for that amount.

But now she looked carefully at Frederick Fiske's notice from the library. She realized that if the police ever examined the library records for Caroline MacKenzie Tate, they would be able to figure out quite a bit about her. They would find a few teen-age romances and one or two books about good grooming that she had checked out last year, when she had begun to be interested in a boy at school and thought that maybe if she changed her hair style and maybe used eye make-up he would notice her. He hadn't. She had tried three different hair styles with no effect at all on the boy. And her mother had said no, absolutely not, not until you are much older, to the eye make-up.

The police might also think that she was briefly interested in breeding cocker spaniels or something, but that would be a mistake. It had to do with the eye make-up and hair styles. She had taken out a book called Grooming a Dog by mistake.

But mostly they would find that she had checked out books about prehistoric eras, extinct mammals, fossils, reptiles, and paleontology. They would be able to figure out from them that Caroline was more interested in being a paleontologist than she was in eye make-up or in raising champion dogs.

So it was definitely one way to figure out what Frederick Fiske was interested in. She looked at the letter from the library again. The overdue book was called Forensic Toxicology. She didn't know what either word meant.

"Forensic" meant, she found from the dictionary, "pertaining to legal proceedings."

Well. That was interesting. If Frederick Fiske intended to start murdering children, there were certainly going to be legal proceedings.

Actually, Caroline thought, she really had to give him credit. It was pretty clever to read a book about legal proceedings before he murdered anyone.

She checked the library letter again and searched through the dictionary for the second word, "Toxicology." When she found it, her eyes widened. She read the definition twice to be sure it said what she thought it said.

"Toxicology (tok'si-kol'o-ji) n. (toxic + logy). (See TOXIC.) The science of poisons."

It was horrible. Horrible horrible horrible. It made Caroline think vaguely of eggplant. She shuddered, and put the dictionary away.

It confirmed what she had already known, down deep. "Eliminate the kids" could, conceivably, have meant, Send them off to live with their father in Des Moines. Every now and then, Caroline's mother threatened to do just that, usually when Caroline and J.P. had been fighting a lot. Once, at the end of a long rainy Sunday, when Caroline and J.P. had been at war all day, they ran through the apartment throwing ice cubes at each other. The whole fight had started over ice cubes. Caroline had poured herself a ginger ale that morning, and she had said to her brother sarcastically, "It sure is nice to find ice cubes in the refrigerator occasionally," because usually he never refilled the ice trays.

J.P. had just looked at her in a fake friendly sort of way while she drank half the glass of ginger ale. Then he had said, casually, "I spit in the trays before I put them in the freezer."

By the end of the day, their fight had escalated into major warfare, with ice cubes as weapons. Finally their mother had thrown down the book she was reading and shouted, "That's it? If you two don't stop it this instant, I am sending you both to Des Moines to live with your father!"

It was the sort of thing parents said once in a while. But Frederick Fiske wasn't a parent. He lived alone on the fifth floor. No children ever came to visit, Caroline was quite sure.

And the library book cinched it. An angry parent might be tempted to send a bratty child to Des Moines, but an angry parent would never start studying up on the science of poisons. Eggplant, maybe. Not poisons.

Only a murderer would do that.