“Go away, Lara,” she typed.
A dark eyebrow jerked upward. “My goodness! Someone seems to be in a bad mood today. I wonder why?”
Somehow, Caroline felt as though anything she might say would just incriminate her further. Which was ridiculous, of course, since Lara wasn’t really a detective. And she hadn’t really committed a crime. Technically, she hadn’t even replaced Marissa’s pens—that was all Micah.
You were an accomplice, though, her brain helpfully informed her. Caroline knew all about accomplices from the Georgia books.
Enough was enough. Caroline gritted her teeth. With a pointed glare at her sister, she shoved the tablet back into her backpack. Even Lara ought to understand that this conversation was now 100 percent over.
CHAPTER TWENTY: IN WHICH MAJOR EVIDENCE IS LOCATED
LOCATION: Home, 6:30 p.m.
EVENT: After highly suspicious activities with an unknown (read: shady) figure this morning, C. is moping around the house. She won’t talk to me.
QUESTION FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION: Why do people change?
Lara rubbed her eyes and stared at her math homework. She’d been working on problem number seven for forever—well, at least for ten minutes—and wasn’t any closer to a solution. Her brain kept wandering toward other problems. More interesting and more troublesome problems.
Well, her study skills tutor always said that it was okay to take breaks when she had trouble concentrating. Lara shoved the math problem away and flipped open her detective notebook. The most recent entry—about Caroline and the highly suspicious boy—stared back at her.
The evidence was, admittedly, rather lacking. But that was no reason why she couldn’t speculate about what her sister was up to.
She started to write.
WHAT WERE CAROLINE AND HER FRIEND DOING?—THEORIES
Early Halloween costume planning—possible but kind of boring
Training as a paramedic—no, they’re not old enough
Faking somebody’s murder—I don’t know why they would do that, but it’s definitely the most interesting option
Lara tried to invent a scenario in which her sister would be involved in faking a murder. But even she could not imagine such a thing. Caroline was the sort of person who always put away her socks in the right drawer. It was rather difficult to imagine her staging a bloody crime. So far, the Case of the Fake Blood was a total dead end.
Clenching her jaw, Lara flipped through the notebook some more. Caroline’s odd behavior wasn’t the only mystery she had to solve.
She started a new page.
QUESTION: Why did Noah take the bus going in the wrong direction last week?
Lara started to write out a list of possible explanations, but none of them were at all satisfying. She was pretty sure that Noah had not, in fact, started taking trapeze lessons to pursue his secret dream of joining the circus. Still . . . Noah had not yet arrived home, she noted. Was he at the mystery location again?
At the moment, Benny was doing homework in the den. Or, more likely, playing video games while not doing his homework. Regardless, Benny and Noah’s room was currently unoccupied. And that meant Lara could do some real investigation on the matter of Noah and his secret life.
After double-checking to make sure that Benny was in fact in the den, Lara made her way to her brothers’ room.
She wrinkled her nose upon entering. The room stank of dirty socks. Normally Dad and Ima bugged all of them to clean up dirty clothes, but she supposed they’d had other things on their minds as of late.
She hesitated a bit before examining Noah’s desk. It was one thing to spy on Caroline, but Noah was the oldest. There was probably some kind of unwritten rule against going through his stuff.
No matter, Lara decided. He was hiding something and she needed to know exactly what it was.
The first few shelves of Noah’s desk were full of boring-ness: calculus homework and registration papers for the football team. And that car manual again—very strange.
Lara frowned. Why would Noah have this?
She opened a drawer. At the very top, she found a glossy brochure with “VOCATIONAL SCHOOL: AUTOMOTIVE MECHANICS” printed in big black letters across the top.
Well. This was most interesting. Noah was supposed to be going to the University of Washington next year. Ima bugged him approximately five times a week about how he needed to get his application in soon.
And Noah always found an excuse to avoid doing it, Lara realized. The last time it happened he had practically snapped at Ima.
She rummaged through his desk for more evidence. Sure enough, she found a purple University of Washington brochure—at the very bottom of Noah’s drawer. As if it had been buried.
If Lara was correct—and she felt quite confident that she was—then her perfect brother had a very big secret. If Ima and Dad knew that he was thinking about not going to college because he wanted to be a car mechanic . . . well, Lara could just hear the commotion that would ensue. In all likelihood, Ima would use some colorful Hebrew vocabulary. The kind of words the Finkel children weren’t supposed to repeat.
Loud footsteps interrupted Lara’s thoughts. Heart pounding, she spun around. She relaxed when she saw it was only Benny. Him she could handle—even if he was scowling at her rather fiercely.
“Hey! What are you doing in my room?” Benny demanded.
Time to come up with an excuse that sounded at least a little bit true.
“Just looking for a paperweight,” she said.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the greatest excuse ever. A paperweight! Not your best work, Lara.
“We don’t have any paperweights,” Benny pointed out. Lara tried not to grit her teeth.
“Right,” she said. “That’s why I’m currently leaving. To go find a paperweight . . . um, somewhere else. You know.”
Lara made straight for the door. Unfortunately, her brother was still standing there.
Benny crossed his arms around his chest, his scowl intensifying noticeably. “You were spying
