The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline by Lois Lowry Page B

apprehensively. "Those envelopes won't hold much."
    "I'll hire a U-Haul trailer," said J.P. sarcastically. He headed for the door. "If you hear them coming back, run up the stairs and warn me."
    Caroline nodded. "Do you want a pencil and paper so you can write stuff down?" she asked.
    J.P. shot her a withering look. "Don't forget that I have a photographic memory," he said. "I never have to write anything down." Then he was gone.

    It was beginning to get dark. Caroline turned on the living room lamps. She went to the kitchen and peeled back the tinfoil from the TV dinners. She glanced out the window again to make sure her mother and Frederick Fiske weren't returning unexpectedly, but there was only a young couple, arms around each other, on the corner, and an old woman trudging along with a large bag of groceries.
    She looked up Gregor Keretsky's telephone number in the Manhattan telephone book and called him. She felt a little nervous, because she had never called him at home before; she had never seen him, in fact, outside the Museum of Natural History. But he responded cheerfully, and with a funny formal kind of politeness, that he would be delighted to come for dinner at six on Sunday.
    She checked the stove, found that the chicken was brown and sizzling, and turned the oven off.
    She opened the apartment door, listened in the hall, and heard nothing. The Carrutherses, upstairs, apparently weren't home. Downstairs, Miss Edmond's apartment was silent as well; she was still in the hospital.
On Fridays, Mrs. DeVito usually took Billy to the Little Hungary for dinner, where they got a discount if they ordered the special. Probably no one was home in the entire building except J.P. and Caroline. The silence was scary.
    She called Stacy on the phone and apologized for her half of their fight.
    " TIFF ENDS ," announced Stacy. "Thank goodness."
    "J.P.'s upstairs, Stacy," whispered Caroline. "He broke into Frederick Fiske's apartment and he's up there now, looking for evidence."
    "You should have called me first," Stacy said tersely. "You
know
I'm an expert on evidence. Is he wearing gloves?"
    "Yes. Big turquoise rubber ones."
    "Good. That's essential, to wear gloves. Is he writing everything down?"
    "He doesn't have to. J.P. has a photographic memory. He can memorize a whole list of spelling words just by looking at it for five seconds."
    "Ohhh," groaned Stacy. "Is he
lucky
! I'd give anything to have a photographic memory! I wish I knew your brother better, Caroline. He and I could team up and—"
    "J.P. is a creep," Caroline said impatiently.
    "I think he's kind of cute," Stacy said. "Well, anyway, no need to have another fight. Listen, does he know that there has to be a corpus delicti?"
    "A what?"
    "Corpus delicti. All the evidence in the world is no good unless there's a corpus delicti. My father told me that."
    "But what
is
it?"
    Stacy hesitated a minute. "I forget," she said, finally. "That's why I wish I had a photographic memory. But you have to find one. Tell J.P."
    "Okay." Caroline wrote it down, spelling it as well as she could. "I have to go. But listen, the reason I called was to ask if you could come for dinner on Sunday. Six o'clock."
    " PAL SAYS YES ," said Stacy, and she hung up.
    Caroline looked through the window again; the street was empty now. The street lights had come on. She took the piece of paper on which she had written the incomprehensible words, went out into the hall, listened to the silence again, and then went up two flights of stairs. Frederick Fiske's door was closed. She reached for the doorknob, realized she was not wearing gloves, and finally knocked on the door with the toe of her shoe.
    "J.P?" she called softly through the door. "It's only me."
    He opened the door a few inches and peered through the crack. "I'm almost through," he said softly. "What do you want? Are they coming home?"
    Caroline shook her head. "No. But I talked to Stacy and she said that evidence is no good unless you