The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

'No,' said Caroline casually. 'I'm just calling Stacy about an assignment.'

That wasn't a lie. She took the telephone into the bathroom, closed the door as far as she could over the cord, and said loudly, when Stacy answered, 'Hi, Stace. I'm calling you about an assignment.'

Then she lowered her voice. 'Listen, Stace, it's not a school assignment. I just wanted my mother to think that it was. It's a detective assignment.'

'About the murderer?' Stacy was whispering, too, although she didn't need to. Stacy had her very own private telephone, in her bedroom. It was yellow, to match the decorator bedspreads and curtains. There were some really good things about being rich.

'Yeah. Can you go out this afternoon? It's not very far.'

'Sure. I'll just tell my mother I'm going to the art museum. She always thinks it's terrific that I go to the art museum all the time.'

'I didn't know you did.'

'I don't. Half the time I'm down in the basement going through the trash. But I can't tell my mother that.'

'Well, listen. I want you to go to East Fifty-second Street. That's not far, is it?'

'Nope. I can get the bus at the corner and be there in twenty minutes. Or I can jog and be there in ten.'

'Whichever. Anyway, it's important.' Caroline took Carl Broderick's letter out of her pocket and read the name and address to Stacy. 'Just check it out, would you? He's an accomplice. He may be the mastermind, in fact.'

'What should I look for?'

'I don't know,' Caroline whispered. 'Just see what's at that address. Probably it won't be a Poisoning Center, or anything. But there might be clues. Look for clues.'

'Gotcha. I'll call you back in, say, an hour or so.'

'Right.'

'Caroline,' Stacy said ominously before she hung up, 'if no one ever hears from me again, give that address to the police, would you? They'll find my body there.'

'Right. But don't take any dangerous chances, Stacy.'

'I won't. But if after, oh, three days, say, I don't return—'

'I will, Stacy. I promise. But be careful. Remember, it's children they're after.'

'I'll wear lipstick,' said Stacy. 'I got some Crimson Shadows lipstick at the drugstore, just for assignments like this.'

'Stacy's calling back in about an hour,' said Caroline when she went to the kitchen for lunch. 'She's doing some research for an assignment we have together.'

'Fine,' said her mother cheerfully. 'Want a pickle with your sandwich?'

Caroline and J.P. each took a dill pickle.

'The phone may not be working in an hour,' announced Caroline's brother. 'I'm going to do some experiments on it after lunch.'

'Don't. Touch. That. Phone,' said Caroline angrily, with a mouth full of bologna sandwich.

'She's absolutely right, James,' said Mrs. Tate. 'The phone company said they were going to charge for the repairs next time you experimented with the telephone.'

'Well,' said J.P., chewing, 'can I borrow your radio then? I need to experiment with something.'

His mother sighed. 'All right. You can use my radio. But don't wreck the alarm, okay? I can't be late to work Monday. I was late twice last week, once because you ruined my toothbrush, James—'

'I had to clean the gunk out of my motor with something,' J.P. explained.

'—and once because I couldn't find my pocketbook.'

Caroline sighed. 'I already said I was sorry, Mom. I was examining the alligator skin under a magnifying glass, and somehow it ended up under a whole pile of stuff on my desk.'

'It isn't alligator, anyway. It's plastic. That pocketbook only cost fourteen dollars. If I lose my job because I'm late one more time, I won't even be able to afford a plastic pocketbook. I'll have to become a bag lady.'

'I'll support you in your old age, Mom,' said Caroline. 'After I'm a paleontologist, I'll send you a check every month, from Asia Minor or wherever I am.'

'Me too,' said J.P. 'When I'm an electrical engineer, I'll be really rich.'

'Maybe by then I will have married a millionaire,' said their mother. 'In the meantime, do either of you want another sandwich, bearing in mind that this bologna cost $1.89 a pound?'

'Me,' said J.P.

'Pig,' said Caroline sweetly, and ducked just in time to evade the dill pickle that her brother threw her.

'Sometimes,' sighed their mother, 'I wish that I had remained childless.'

Back in her room, waiting for Stacy to call, Caroline curled up on her bed with her stuffed Stegosaurus. She began to think about dinosaurs in general, and about the particular contribution that she would make to science after she was a qualified paleontologist.

Caroline had begun to develop the Tate Theory of Evolution. According to her theory, certain people alive in the twentieth century had not actually evolved very much from prehistoric times. Of course, they were disguised as civilized people, because they wore clothes and held jobs and went to school and did all the things that civilized people are supposed to do.

But the man at the Laundromat was a good example. He really had been very much like the buck-toothed Apatosaurus, with his nose too high on his face. Fortunately, old Apatosaurus was weak and dumb and harmless; probably that man would go home from the laundry and eat some lettuce and cucumbers for lunch, since Apatosaurus was a plant-eater. He wasn't a danger to society, but he was a good example of Caroline's theory that some people are little more than barely evolved dinosaurs. She was surprised that no scientists had noticed it yet.

James Priestly Tate, for example. Talk about a creepy-crawler. Her brother was a perfect example of a practically unchanged Coelophysis. Small, skinny, with a rat face and lousy posture. Little clawlike hands and a terrible disposition. And a carnivore, to boot. J.P. had gnawed into that second bologna sandwich as if there was no tomorrow, just the way a Coelophysis would. J.P. even ate eggplant.

And now—Caroline thought about her Tate Theory again—there was Frederick Fiske. Extremely tall. Big head, with a grin all the time. When she had first begun to notice Frederick Fiske, after he moved in upstairs, she had thought his grin was just the kind of indiscriminate friendliness that some adults display. Now she knew differently. Now she knew why that grin was familiar. It went with his tall body and his long strides. Probably concealed behind that grin was a whole mouthful of steak-knife teeth.

She recognized all of the symptoms. They belonged to the most terrible dinosaur of all, the one that a book she had read described as having a completely sinister pattern of life. It was the kind of life that she now knew Frederick Fiske was leading. The author had described it as: Hunt. Kill. Eat. Sleep. Hunt. Kill. Etc.

She was quite, quite sure now that her theory was correct, and that Frederick Fiske was, in truth, little more than an unevolved Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The Great Killer.

When the telephone rang, half an hour later, Caroline jumped up to answer it. Her mother had gone out to the grocery store, and J.P. was in his room, busily removing all the inside parts of Joanna Tate's clock-radio.

Stacy was breathless. 'I jogged,' she said, panting. 'All the way there and all the way back. I stepped in one dog mess and almost got hit by a taxi. But I'm safe, except my left shoe stinks.'

'What did you find out?'

'Let me get my breath.' Stacy panted for a minute. 'Yuck,' she said, finally. 'Now that I can breathe normally, I can really smell my shoe.'

'Take it off.'

'Hold on a minute.' There was a very long silence while Caroline held the phone and waited. Finally Stacy