Caroline was a girl who liked her routine. Every evening at eight, she took a bath for about twenty minutes. For Lara’s purposes, that should be enough.
She waited until she heard the steady stream of water pit-patting from the bathroom. Then she made her move.
Lara’s heart pounded as she grabbed Caroline’s phone off her nightstand. She got the PIN right on the first try, because of course she knew Caroline’s favorite numbers. And there it was. Everything she needed to know was right there.
As she opened up Caroline’s text messages, it occurred to Lara that she ought to feel guilty. Did she feel guilty?
No, she did not. Besides, Caroline could be in real trouble. It was practically Lara’s obligation to figure it all out.
Lara glanced at the messages. Caroline really only texted one person: Micah.
There were far too many messages for Lara to read. It didn’t matter. She only needed to look at the most recent texts. Once she did, the story was very, very clear.
Great job! Micah had written several hours previously. That mouse toy really did look like a dead rat.
Lara mentally awarded herself a point for having solved the mystery. Then she frowned. She’d known that Caroline had been more distant ever since school started. But this . . . this was something else entirely.
Sweet Caroline, with her art and her Candy Crush obsession and her general sensible-ness. The same girl who was, apparently, playing cruel tricks on her classmates.
It was confounding.
Maybe Lara didn’t understand her sister as well as she thought. Still, she felt quite certain that her sister wouldn’t do something so cruel without good reason. Whoever this girl was must have deserved a scare. Who could it be?
It did not take much detective work to land upon an answer: the girl who had destroyed Caroline’s sculpture, back on the first day of school. That had to be it.
Well, Lara certainly couldn’t object on moral grounds. In her opinion, that girl deserved at least a dozen fake dead rats, plus some dead possums and squirrels thrown in.
No, that wasn’t the trouble.
But why had Caroline turned to this Micah boy for help when she refused to talk about it with Lara? Her very own sister!
As Lara quickly scrolled through dozens of messages between the two, she couldn’t help but wonder. Had she been . . . replaced? By a boy who wore X-Men T-shirts and had a bizarre obsession with fake blood?
For the next several minutes, Lara continued to stare at the phone screen. Only when the sound of the bath draining water began did she put the phone back where she’d found it. She certainly didn’t want Caroline to know what she’d done. Still, she couldn’t let the issue rest.
Lara and Caroline would most certainly be having a conversation. Soon.
Although she was bursting with the desire to unleash all her questions right away, Lara chose her moment carefully.
She waited until right before bed, when Caroline was brushing her teeth. Lara figured that her sister was probably on the groggy side so close to bedtime. Besides, she couldn’t run away when her mouth was still full of peppermint-flavored toothpaste.
Lara did not knock on the bathroom door. She just let herself in.
“Hi, Caroline!” she said.
Caroline did not answer on account of her hands being occupied with toothbrushing. Her eyes narrowed in a definite glare and Lara’s heart thumped faster.
“That meeting with the principal was really terrible, wasn’t it?” Lara asked. Softening her sister up with sympathy seemed like a good tactic.
There was no answer, of course. But Lara was pretty sure that her sister started brushing with enough vigor to make her gums bleed.
“I wonder why she thought your friend was involved in the whole dead rat incident,” Lara continued. “I don’t know him well, but it doesn’t seem like something a friend of yours would do.”
Caroline finished brushing. She rinsed her mouth. Finally, she picked up her tablet and responded.
“He is really nice,” she said.
Lara immediately noted that Caroline hadn’t really addressed the issue of whether or not Micah was the kind of person who would stick fake dead rats in people’s lunches.
“I’m sure he is nice. And that girl—well, I don’t know very much about the sixth graders. But I bet she’s a real nightmare. Personally, I don’t think it’s wrong to play a little trick on that kind of a person. When you go around acting the way she does . . . well, that’s the kind of thing that happens, isn’t it?”
For a long time, Caroline did not respond. Lara quirked an eyebrow at her.
“I guess,” she said finally.
“Mmm,” Lara replied. “Just so you know, if you do know anything about what happened . . . you can tell me. I promise I won’t tell Ima or Principal Jenkins. Especially not the principal. I don’t care to spend any more time in her office than absolutely necessary.”
There it was. An invitation for Caroline to tell Lara everything, with the promise that nothing bad would happen if she did. Now the only question was, would she accept it?
“Mind your own business, Lara,” Caroline said.
Then, nothing. Caroline just picked up her tablet, marched out of the bathroom, and crawled into her bed without saying so much as a good-night.
It was all Lara could do not to scream out loud. She’d given her sister every chance to tell the truth. They could have been Lara-and-Caroline again. Instead, Caroline had told her not to bother. Apparently, she didn’t need Lara anymore. Not when she had Micah Perkowski.
Fine. From now on, maybe Lara didn’t have to try so hard to be a good sister.
She mentally composed another entry in her notebook.
PROBLEM: I’m not Caroline’s best friend anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE CASE OF THE NOT-SO-HAPPY HOLIDAY
LOCATION: The usual, dinnertime, blah blah blah
EVENT: Rosh Hashanah stuff is
