The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline Read Online Free

"pertaining to legal proceedings."
    Well.
That
was interesting. If Frederick Fiske intended to start murdering children, there were certainly going to be legal proceedings.
    Actually, Caroline thought, she really had to give him credit. It was pretty clever to read a book about legal proceedings
before
he murdered anyone.
    She checked the library letter again and searched through the dictionary for the second word, "Toxicology." When she found it, her eyes widened. She read the definition twice to be sure it said what she thought it said.
    "Toxicology (tok'si-kol'o-ji)
n.
(toxic + logy). (See TOXIC .) The science of poisons."
    It was horrible. Horrible horrible horrible. It made Caroline think vaguely of eggplant. She shuddered, and put the dictionary away.
    It confirmed what she had already known, down deep. "Eliminate the kids" could, conceivably, have meant, Send them off to live with their father in Des Moines. Every now and then, Caroline's mother threatened to do just that, usually when Caroline and J.P. had been fighting a lot. Once, at the end of a long rainy Sunday, when Caroline and J.P. had been at war all day, they ran through the apartment throwing ice cubes at each other. The whole fight had started over ice cubes. Caroline had poured herself a ginger ale that morning, and she had said to her brother sarcastically, "It sure is nice to find ice cubes in the refrigerator occasionally," because usually he never refilled the ice trays.
    J.P. had just looked at her in a fake friendly sort of way while she drank half the glass of ginger ale. Then he had said, casually, "I spit in the trays before I put them in the freezer."
    By the end of the day, their fight had escalated into major warfare, with ice cubes as weapons. Finally their mother had thrown down the book she was reading and shouted, "That's
it?
If you two don't stop it this
instant,
I am sending you both to Des Moines to live with your father!"
    It was the sort of thing parents said once in a while. But Frederick Fiske wasn't a parent. He lived alone
on the fifth floor. No children ever came to visit, Caroline was quite sure.
    And the library book cinched it. An angry parent might be tempted to send a bratty child to Des Moines, but an angry parent would never start studying up on the science of poisons. Eggplant, maybe. Not poisons.
    Only a murderer would do that.

4
    "What is all this secret telephoning?" asked Mrs. Tate. "You're not in any kind of trouble, are you, 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