Free The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline by Lois Lowry

east." Hah, she thought. Even though I'm about to be the victim of a savage crime, I still do my homework, Mr. Winslow.

    She jogged home from the bus stop, eager to drop off her books, change to jeans, and head for the Museum of Natural History. J.P. wouldn't be around, thank goodness; he always stayed after school on Thursday for Computer Club. Caroline fished her keys out of her backpack, opened the front door, and stopped to take the mail out of the box marked J. TATE.
    Typical, she thought. Dentist bill. Bank statement. Child-support check from Des Moines. Addressed to her, from the museum, were illustrated brochures telling about a whale-watching expedition and a symposium on primates. She read them through carefully, standing there in the first-floor hallway. Too bad: the
whale-watching trip was on a weekend, but it cost a lot. The primate symposium was free, but it was on a weekday afternoon, so she'd be in school. She'd have to write thank-you notes explaining why she couldn't come. She always did that, even though Mr. Keretsky had told her it wasn't necessary. But Caroline was afraid they'd quit inviting her if she never came and didn't explain why. Once, in fourth grade, she had invited a girl named Tamara St. John to come and play on Saturday at least four times, and Tamara St. John had never come and hadn't explained why. Finally Mrs. Tate had explained very gently to Caroline that it appeared that Tamara St. John didn't
want
to come and play at her house, so Caroline had quit inviting her. It seemed like the same sort of thing. So she always wrote a polite note to the President of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Natural History, explaining why she couldn't attend seminars or lectures or safaris.
    If her mother had simply refused to have dinner with Frederick Fiske without an explanation, she thought suddenly, he would quit inviting her, simple as that.
    At the foot of the stairs, she glanced at the last piece of mail—and stopped dead in her tracks. It was another letter to Frederick Fiske from Carl Broderick. It had been in the Tate mailbox by mistake.
    Sometimes that happened. Sometimes they found in their mailbox notices of chamber music concerts addressed to Mr. DeVito. Sometimes old Miss Edmond found Caroline's museum mailings in her mailbox by
mistake. They would simply leave the mistaken mail on the hall table, and the right person would pick it up.
    And that, Caroline realized, was what she should do with Frederick Fiske's letter. But she didn't. She looked back at the hall table, a Victorian monstrosity with an ugly vase full of dried flowers on it. Right there, on the dusty top of that table, was where she should put Frederick Fiske's letter.
    Instead, she stuck it in between the two notices from the Museum of Natural History and took it upstairs. Ten minutes later, when she bounded back down the stairs and jogged toward 79th Street and the museum, the letter was in the back pocket of her jeans.

9
    In one way, it was a great comfort to be in Gregor Keretsky's office, drinking tea while her dear, dear friend stirred and sipped his coffee. His desk was covered, as always, with papers in messy stacks; on the shelves around the walls were books and bones and small replicas of different kinds of prehistoric mammals. Mr. Kerestsky was tilted back in his leather chair, with his feet up on his desk, the way he usually was. And Caroline, as usual, had found a space on his big lumpy couch by moving aside the piles of books that were always there. It was the coziest place in the whole world, she thought.
    But she was frowning and feeling less comfortable than she ordinarily did in that room. Gregor Keretsky hadn't reacted the way she had expected or hoped. The unopened letter to Frederick Fiske lay between them on the corner of his cluttered desk.
    "No, Caroline," Mr. Keretsky was saying, for about
the third time, "you must not open that letter. It isn't addressed to you. It would be against the