The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

6

On Monday morning Caroline threw some overnight things into her gym bag. Everyone had agreed that it would be easier if she spent the night at Stacy's instead of coming home across New York City after dinner. Stacy's parents didn't mind. They never minded. Into the top of the bag, she thrust something she had bought, on Saturday, for Stacy. She grinned as she wedged it in on top of the pajamas, poking it down between two furry bedroom slippers.

"Bye, Steg," she said, as she returned her stuffed Stegosaurus to his hiding place on the closet shelf. No way would she take a stuffed animal to Stacy's overnight. Some things you don't tell even your best friend.

The apartment was quiet. J.P. had already left for school; he refused to be seen riding the bus or walking on a public street with his sister.

And her mother had left already for work. Most mornings she was still there when Caroline and J.P. ate their breakfast. But this morning she had gotten up at 5:00 A.M. She hadn't intended to. But it had something to do with her clock-radio, which J.P. had returned to her after a weekend of fooling with its insides. Caroline had heard bits and pieces through her closed bedroom door, very early, when it was still dark outside.

"James Priestly Tate, Jr.!" she had heard her mother roar.

After a moment she had heard a groggy response from her brother.

"Would you please explain to me," said Joanna Tate angrily, "why, although I set this alarm for seven A.M., it is still pitch dark outside? What time is it, anyway?"

Caroline could hear the click of a lamp being turned on. A crack of light appeared under her door. She pulled the sheet over her head and listened sleepily.

"It's 5:04," muttered J.P. Caroline could picture him looking at his digital watch with half-open eyes.

"Wake up and look at this clock, J.P.," demanded her mother. "Just look! It says 11:22. The alarm is set for seven, the clock says 11:22, and you tell me it's actually 5:04. What have you done to my clock?"

"Lerame see," said J.P. There was a long silence.

"That's weird," Caroline could hear her brother say.

"What's weird?" her mother asked.

"Look at the calendar part," J.P. said. His voice was wide awake now. Caroline could tell that he was becoming interested in the mystery of the clock-radio. She could tell that her mother was not.

"That calendar is irrelevant," Joanna Tate said, still angry. "I know what day it is. It's Monday, April third. What I want to know is why—"

"But look, Mom," insisted J.P. "Where it says the date? It says February 19, 1997! I must have screwed that up somehow! I've entered a Time Warp!"

"The only thing you are going to enter is Des Moines, Iowa, by bus, if you don't fix my clock-radio," said his mother icily.

Caroline hugged Stegosaurus and drifted back to sleep. When she woke up, her mother had left early for work, and Beastly was headed out the door. The clock-radio sat on the coffee table, its back removed. Caroline looked at her own Timex; it was seven forty-five.

"Why didn't you wake me up, you turkey? I don't even have time to eat breakfast!"

J.P. smiled pleasantly at her and closed the door noisily behind him, without saying goodbye. Caroline threw one of her bedroom slippers at the closed door. Then she picked it up and hurried to pack her bag.

Before she left the apartment, she wrote a note to her mother and left it on the kitchen table.

Dear Mom:

Be sure to eat those THINGS for dinner tonight. I don't want to come home if they are still in the house.

Love,

Caroline

She couldn't bring herself to write the word "parsnips."

"I'm so glad you're spending the night tonight," said Stacy happily as they walked beside the park, up Fifth Avenue, after school. Spring was really here. Birds were singing and chirping, and both girls were wearing sweaters, finally, after a long winter of down jackets. "We have so much to do!"

"Yeah," said Caroline gloomily. "Like the math homework."

Caroline couldn't understand fractions. Fractions didn't make any sense to Caroline at all, and her arithmetic book felt like a huge and horrible weight in her backpack. She could almost feel the list of problems on [>], stabbing her between the shoulder blades.

"That math's not due till Wednesday," said Stacy. "Get your mom to help you with it. She'll know how to do fractions. People who work in banks have to be good at math."

"Wrong," said Caroline. "My mom says they only do decimals in banks."

"Caroline," Stacy pointed out patiently, "Miss Wright said just today, in class, that we have to master fractions because next year we get decimals. And we can't do decimals until—"

"Right," said Caroline, making a face. "Until we've mastered fractions. So?"

"So. Your mother must have mastered fractions. Because now she works at a bank, where they do decimals. She'll be able to help you."

"Maybe." Stacy was probably right, Caroline realized. The weight of the arithmetic book seemed to lighten a bit.

"Anyway, we have lots of other stuff to do, besides homework, tonight. Did you bring that note? The one to the killer from the secret agent?"

Caroline nodded. She had the sinister note to Frederick Fiske tucked inside one of her bedroom slippers.

"We have to analyze that some more," Stacy went on. "There may be clues that we missed. You know, when you're an investigative reporter, like I am, you learn to notice clues everywhere. For example—" Stacy stopped short suddenly. Her forehead wrinkled under her neatly trimmed dark bangs. "Did you notice that?"

Caroline looked around. A woman was wheeling a baby carriage through the entrance to the park. A taxi had pulled over to the curb to pick up a passenger. Two pigeons were waddling on the sidewalk. A jogger had just passed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

"What?" she asked.

Stacy was frowning. "The jogger was an impostor. A fake jogger."

Caroline glanced back. The jogger was continuing on, panting and perspiring. He had hairy legs. He looked just like a million other joggers.

"What do you mean?" she asked. "That's not fake sweat. I could smell it when he went past."

"You're not a trained observer like me," said Stacy. "He has a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of his shirt. No real jogger smokes Marlboros. It's a dead giveaway." She sighed. "Probably I should make a note of it in my investigative notebook. He could be an escaped criminal or something. But honestly, Caroline, one human being can only do so much. And right now I'm concentrating on Harrison Ledyard. Remember that ripped bra in his trash? The man could well be a crazed killer. Tonight we'll have to—"

"Stacy," Caroline interrupted. "That reminds me. I brought you something. Come over here for a minute and I'll get it out of my bag."

They entered the park, sat down on a bench, and Caroline dug into her gym bag, between the bedroom slippers.

"Here," she said, handing it to Stacy. "You owe me $1.25. I wouldn't ask you, except your allowance is so much bigger than mine."

Stacy took it between two fingers and eyed it with disdain. "A People magazine? Caroline Tate! What on earth? Don't tell me you have a crush on some rock star or something! Caroline, my interests go far, far beyond the world of shallow glamour and tasteless gossip. Honestly!" She dangled the magazine from her fingers without looking at it. "Here. Take it back. If you think I'm going to pay you $1.25 for something I could read in my orthodontist's waiting room—"

Caroline grinned smugly. "Turn to page sixty-eight," she said.

Stacy looked at her suspiciously. Then she opened the magazine and found [>]. Her shoulders stiffened. "What the—" she exploded. Then she read, silently, for a minute. "Who wrote this? How did they find all this stuff out? That's not fair! For a month I've been up to my elbows in that guy's trash—I mean cigarette butts and old carbon paper, Caroline. I've been doing the nitty-gritty work of investigation! And then some pipsqueak reporter comes along and steals my story! What ever happened to journalistic ethics? Who wrote this? There's not even a name on it!"

She flipped angrily through the pages, and then back to 68. Caroline leaned over her shoulder and read the headline again, PULITZER WINNER TAKES ANOTHER PRIZE. In smaller print, underneath, it said, "Acclaimed Author Harrison Ledyard Claims Hometown Sweetheart As Bride." Photographs showed the chubby, balding man grinning as he and his wife vacuumed their apartment together and washed the dishes, wearing matching aprons.

"Come on," said Stacy furiously. She stood up and began walking out of the park. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this."

"Bottom of what?" asked Caroline, running to catch up. "He got married, that's all. And his wife threw away an old bra. Bottom of what?"

Stacy slapped the magazine back and forth between her hands as she walked. "I'm going to find out how People magazine scooped me on a blockbusting story I've been investigating for weeks!"

"What are you going to do?"

Stacy sighed. "I could hang around the Time-Life Building, I suppose, and search their trash for clues. But that might take weeks. Anyway, they probably shred their evidence. I think this particular problem calls for a direct, aggressive approach." She groaned. "I hate the direct, aggressive approach. You don't get to wear a disguise or anything. But at least I can use one of my fake voices."

"How?" They were approaching Stacy's apartment building. "How are you going to use a fake voice?" Caroline asked, hurrying to catch up with Stacy at the front door.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Santos," said Stacy, tossing her hair back and speaking in a cool, poised voice to the doorman. "Isn't this spring weather lovely?"

In the elevator, she turned to Caroline and asked, "What did you think of my voice to Mr. Santos?"

Caroline shrugged. "It was okay, I guess. But you sounded about forty years old."

"Right. Good. That's the effect I want. I'm going to use that voice when I call People magazine and inquire about their investigative methods."

Caroline sprawled on one of the beds in Stacy's room and looked around. Sometimes she really wished her family were rich. Stacy had her own TV. She had her own typewriter, which sat on a polished desk with a matching chair. Everything in the room matched. The wallpaper, pale yellow with pink and green flowers, matched the dust ruffles on the two beds, which matched the draperies and even the lampshades. The only jarring notes were Stacy's backpack, which she had dropped on the floor in the middle of the green carpeting, and her sweater, which she had draped over a lamp.

Even her telephone, on the table between the two beds, was pale yellow. Stacy was sitting cross-legged on her own bed, writing down the number she had found in the telephone directory. Finally she looked up, took a few deep breaths, and dialed.

"Good afternoon," she said in her fake mature voice. "This is Ms. Baurichter. I'm with Bentley, Baurichter, and Bernstein, Attorneys? I would like to inquire as to whom—ah, what I mean is, I want to know who wrote the article about Harrison Ledyard in this week's issue."

She pressed her hand over the receiver and whispered to Caroline, "They're checking."

"Thank you so much," she said, returning to the telephone. "Is he in, by any chance?"

"They're transferring my call," she whispered. "Michael Small. That's his name. What an ordinary name. Boy, when I'm doing investigative reporting for a national magazine, I'm going to change my—Hello? Mr. Small?

"Mr. Small, I'm calling you to inquire about your methods for obtaining the material for an article such as the one on Harrison Ledyard. It's a brilliant piece of reporting, by the way."

She covered the receiver and grinned at Caroline. "Flattery is a very effective way of getting information," she whispered.

Caroline could hear a man's voice on the telephone. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but Stacy was listening intently.

"Yes," said Stacy. "Oh, I see. Yes. Of course. Mr. Small, didn't you have to do any undercover-type work? I mean, you didn't consider looking through his trash cans or anything?"

Caroline could hear the man laugh. He went on talking.

"Oh," said Stacy, when he had finished. "I would certainly like to congratulate you on a fine job, Mr. Small."

"What?" Caroline could hear that the man was asking a question. "Mr. Small," said Stacy angrily, in her own voice, forgetting to use the fake one, "I wasn't rude enough to ask you how old you are. It's none of your business how old I am."

She listened as the man said something else. "Well," she said finally, "thank you for your interest. And for the information. Goodbye."

She hung up. She sat there glumly for a minute as Caroline watched; then she threw the telephone book across the room. It landed on the floor next to her backpack.

"Shoot," she said.

"What's the matter?" asked Caroline. "What did he say?"

"He said," said Stacy in an irritated voice, "that I should work on my school newspaper; that it's a good way to start to get experience in journalism. How did he know I was still in school? Didn't I sound mature?"

"I thought you did," acknowledged Caroline. "What else did he say? About Harrison Ledyard?"

Stacy groaned and flopped back on her pillow with her hands behind her head.

"He simply called up Harrison Ledyard and arranged an interview. Of all the dumb ways to go about investigative reporting. He went there for a day. He even took a photographer with him. What if the man had been a crazed murderer?" She sat back up and looked at Caroline. "What was his name—Michael Small? What a dope. He could have found himself, unarmed, right in the apartment of a brutal killer. Now if he had gone about it the way he should have, sifting through trash, doing surveillance work—"

"Stacy," suggested Caroline tentatively, "I think you're mixing up detective work and magazine work. I mean, maybe you are."

"Well," sighed Stacy. "The heck with Harrison Ledyard. Let him stay up there and vacuum with his hometown sweetheart. At least we have another case to work on. At least we know that other guy's a crazed killer. What was his name?"

"Frederick Fiske."

"And now at least we have some new ideas for methods, from Michael Small. We might consider calling for an interview and taking a photographer."

Caroline shuddered. "I don't think so, Stace. This guy isn't just a killer. He's a child killer. And you and me, Stacy, after all, we're—"

"Oh, Caroline," groaned Stacy. "I know. We're children. Don't remind me, please. Michael Small already brought it to my attention in a very tactless way."

There was a knock on the bedroom door. Caroline and Stacy both jumped. "Stand over there, Caroline," hissed Stacy under her breath, "by the closet door. I'll be here behind this chair. If they have weapons—"

The door opened. "Girls," said Mrs. Baurichter, looking in, "dinner's almost ready."