“Yes, so?”
“So, I’m a Finkel.”
“Sooo?” Lara said. “FIASCCO is my agency.”
“And investigating Dad was my idea.”
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. They just sat in tense silence while Caroline stared at her speech app, trying to come up with magic words that would somehow make her sister understand why she wanted—no, needed—to be part of FIASCCO too.
Finally, Lara nodded. “Okay. Fine. You are officially part of this investigation as a junior detective.”
She was less than thrilled about the junior part, but Caroline would take it.
* * *
It turned out that investigating Dad was difficult business.
The first and biggest problem was that Dad basically lived in his office these days. Caroline and Lara could hardly sneak behind his back when his back was, well, right there!
Luckily, an opportunity arrived early in the morning on Day 5 of the investigation. Like many other unexpected events in the Finkel household, it was all thanks to Benny.
Caroline had only been awake for fifteen minutes when a loud crash sounded from the backyard. It was quickly followed by a high-pitched yelp.
She hurried to the patio in her nightshirt. Everyone else was there in similar states of just-got-out-of-bed-ness. Aunt Miriam looked particularly ridiculous in fluffy purple slippers.
And then there was Benny, sprawled out on the grass completely unmoving. There was something unsettling, Caroline thought, about a still Benny.
Ima rushed forward, and within an instant she became Dr. Ima, talking rapidly about bones and fractures and other medical-y things that made Caroline’s stomach turn.
Benny’s eyes flew open. “I fell out of the tree,” he announced, rather unnecessarily.
“Obviously,” Ima said, the lines around her mouth disappearing into her skin. “Though I think the more relevant issue is what you were doing up there in the first place.”
Caroline didn’t quite make out Benny’s rambling answer, but it seemed to involve some kind of treehouse-building effort. She released a breath and turned toward Lara, whose face was several shades paler than usual. Lara often got weird when someone was hurt, even though Benny wasn’t even bleeding.
Sometimes Caroline wondered why her squeamish sister wanted to investigate grossness as a career, though she didn’t dare say it out loud.
After Ima fussed for several minutes, it was decided that she and Dad would accompany Benny to the emergency room right away. He protested, but Ima would not be swayed on the matter.
“He’ll be okay,” Caroline said to her sister. “Ima’s just being a doctor again.”
“Yeah,” Lara said. But her voice shook ever so slightly.
Lara still seemed a little out of sorts when the station wagon chugged out of the driveway, but she looked at Caroline and managed a weak grin. “This is our chance to investigate. Dad’s office, stat.”
Even though she didn’t really understand what stat meant, Caroline smiled. This was exactly what she’d been waiting for: a chance to prove herself indispensable to Lara.
As the sisters headed straight for Dad’s office, Caroline held her breath. Barging right through the door when Dad wasn’t there felt a little scandalous—this was something the Finkel children Did Not Do.
“Stage one complete. Now you can take watch by the door,” Lara said.
The order was ridiculous. Giving Lara her very best glare, Caroline grabbed her tablet and started tapping at top speed.
“We don’t need a lookout. Dad and Ima are gone.”
“Lookout is a very important job,” Lara protested. “Besides, you can never be too careful. Georgia usually has a lookout.”
Caroline glared again.
“Okay, okay,” Lara said. “We’ll do this together. But we need to stay alert for intruders.”
They began to paw through the skyscraper-sized mound of papers on Dad’s desk. Dad, apparently, never saw the need to throw things away. Nor did he bother to arrange his things in anything that remotely resembled order. Loose sheets of paper stuck out every which way from towering stacks, which teetered on the verge of total collapse.
Lara sighed at the sight. “Oh, Dad,” she said.
Most of Dad’s papers were boring—bills and invoices and other adult-ish things. But one piece of paper grabbed Caroline’s attention. It looked just like a dozen other papers in the stack, save for the words stamped in bold type across the top. It just looked sinister somehow, even though Caroline wasn’t quite sure what it all meant. She gulped.
“What does severance mean?” she asked Lara.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Lara said. “I know that sever means to cut something off. Like a severed head. But why are you asking about severing things? This isn’t supposed to be that kind of mystery!”
Lara shuddered dramatically. Caroline just frowned. She was pretty sure this piece of paper didn’t have anything to do with wayward body parts. But what did it mean?
“We don’t know what kind of mystery this is,” Caroline said.
She shoved the piece of paper toward Lara. As her sister read, trouble crept into her face, wrinkling her forehead. Lara’s eyebrows danced up, up, and up.
Caroline did not like that look one bit. The canvas in her mind flashed red, then pitch-black.
Finally, Lara spoke again. “Lina, this is bad. Really, really bad.”
Caroline typed a single word on her tablet: “What?”
“I think . . . I think Dad lost his job.”
Oh.
Oh no.
CHAPTER SEVEN: CRACKING THE CASE
LOCATION: Dad’s office, noon.
EVENT: C. and I found a piece of paper in Dad’s office. It says SEVERANCE PAYMENT.
CONCLUSION: Dad got fired and didn’t tell us about it.
QUESTION FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION: Why can’t Dad tell us the truth?
Lara’s mind burst with thoughts, but one kept circling back to her. This was not how her very first investigation was supposed to go.
In Georgia Ketteridge books, solving mysteries was always fun. Sure, Georgia might get trapped in a cellar for a few hours on occasion. And there was that one time when she broke her arm after a rather suspicious fall in a dark cave.
Yet Georgia never got an awful, twisting feeling in her gut. The feeling that maybe she shouldn’t have started
