The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline Read Free Page B

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,