by Sarah Kapit
Lara folded her arms across her chest, head high. “I didn’t want to investigate family things,” she said. “I already know everything about us. What’s there to investigate?”
Caroline doubted that Lara knew nearly as much about the Finkels as she claimed, but decided not to pursue the argument.
“Think about it,” she said. “Sure, Dad has ADHD. But when has Dad ever made bad food?”
“Last Purim. Those hamantaschen were like clay bricks.”
“That doesn’t count! Benny mixed plaster powder into the flour as a joke.”
The memory made Caroline giggle. Lara, however, clearly was not in the mood for amusement.
Caroline inhaled deeply before starting to type again. “It’s not just the brisket,” she told Lara. “Dad’s done a bunch of weird things lately.”
“Really? I haven’t noticed.”
Not typing out a snarky remark required Caroline to exercise considerable restraint. Of course Lara hadn’t noticed anything amiss with Dad. She had been far too busy moping over the failure of FIASCCO and Aviva’s existence and who knows what else.
So Caroline took it upon herself to recite the long list of evidence that there was, in fact, something weird with Dad.
#1: He’d been nearly forty minutes late picking them up at day camp last Tuesday.
#2: On Thursday night, he hadn’t been at all interested in watching Family Cooking Extravaganza with everyone else. Normally, Dad made special popcorn just for the occasion. This week? Nothing.
And, of course, there was #3: The door to Dad’s office had remained completely shut every day for two full weeks—even on the weekends! Normal Dad left the door open most of the time so that the kids (and Kugel) could wander in and say hello. Weird Dad kept himself locked in there for hours, only emerging when Ima asked him to.
Lara made a face, and Caroline knew that even this evidence hadn’t been enough to convince her sister.
“Come on,” Caroline prodded. “It will be fun. And it’s not like you have anything else to investigate right now.”
That prompted another face from Lara, this one decidedly more unpleasant. But after a moment, she nodded. “Okay. You’re right. I didn’t really plan to investigate minor family matters, but since you’re the only one to ask for help from FIASCCO, I’ll do it. I will solve the case of the gross brisket.”
“You mean we’ll solve it,” Caroline corrected. “It’s called the Finkel Investigation Agency Solving Consequential Crimes Only, right?”
“Yes, so?”
“So, I’m a Finkel.”
“Sooo?” Lara said. “FIASCCO is my agency.”
“And investigating Dad was my idea.”
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. They just sat in tense silence while Caroline stared at her speech app, trying to come up with magic words that would somehow make her sister understand why she wanted—no, needed—to be part of FIASCCO too.
Finally, Lara nodded. “Okay. Fine. You are officially part of this investigation as a junior detective.”
She was less than thrilled about the junior part, but Caroline would take it.
* * *
* * *
It turned out that investigating Dad was difficult business.
The first and biggest problem was that Dad basically lived in his office these days. Caroline and Lara could hardly sneak behind his back when his back was, well, right there!
Luckily, an opportunity arrived early in the morning on Day 5 of the investigation. Like many other unexpected events in the Finkel household, it was all thanks to Benny.
Caroline had only been awake for fifteen minutes when a loud crash sounded from the backyard. It was quickly followed by a high-pitched yelp.
She hurried to the patio in her nightshirt. Everyone else was there in similar states of just-got-out-of-bed-ness. Aunt Miriam looked particularly ridiculous in fluffy purple slippers.
And then there was Benny, sprawled out on the grass completely unmoving. There was something unsettling, Caroline thought, about a still Benny.
Ima rushed forward, and within an instant she became Dr. Ima, talking rapidly about bones and fractures and other medical-y things that made Caroline’s stomach turn.
Benny’s eyes flew open. “I fell out of the tree,” he announced, rather unnecessarily.
“Obviously,” Ima said, the lines around her mouth disappearing into her skin. “Though I think the more relevant issue is what you were doing up there in the first place.”
Caroline didn’t quite make out Benny’s rambling answer, but it seemed to involve some kind of treehouse-building effort. She released a breath and turned toward Lara, whose face was several shades paler than usual. Lara often got weird when someone was hurt, even though Benny wasn’t even bleeding.
Sometimes Caroline wondered why her squeamish sister wanted to investigate grossness as a career, though she didn’t dare say it out loud.
After Ima fussed for several minutes, it was decided that she and Dad would accompany Benny to the emergency room right away. He protested, but Ima would not be swayed on the matter.
“He’ll be okay,” Caroline said to her sister. “Ima’s just being a doctor again.”
“Yeah,” Lara said. But her voice shook ever so slightly.
Lara still seemed a little out of sorts when the station wagon chugged out of the driveway, but she looked at Caroline and managed a weak grin. “This is our chance to investigate. Dad’s office, stat.”
Even though she didn’t really understand what stat meant, Caroline smiled. This was exactly what she’d been waiting for: a chance to prove herself indispensable to Lara.
As the sisters headed straight for Dad’s office, Caroline held her breath. Barging right through the door when Dad wasn’t there felt a little scandalous—this was something the Finkel children Did Not Do.
“Stage one complete. Now you can take watch by the door,” Lara said.
The order was ridiculous. Giving Lara her very best glare, Caroline grabbed her tablet and started tapping at top speed.
“We don’t need a lookout. Dad and Ima are gone.”
“Lookout is a very important job,” Lara protested. “Besides, you can never be too careful. Georgia usually has a lookout.”
Caroline glared again.
“Okay, okay,” Lara said. “We’ll do this together. But we need to stay alert for intruders.”
They began to paw through the skyscraper-sized mound of papers on Dad’s desk. Dad, apparently, never saw the need to throw things away. Nor did he bother to arrange his things in anything that remotely resembled order. Loose sheets of paper stuck out every which way from towering stacks, which teetered on the verge of total collapse.
Lara sighed at the sight. “Oh, Dad,” she said.
Most of Dad’s papers were boring—bills and invoices and other adult-ish things. But one piece of paper grabbed Caroline’s attention. It looked just like a dozen other papers in the stack, save for the words stamped in bold type across the top. It just looked sinister somehow, even though Caroline wasn’t quite sure what it all meant. She gulped.
“What does severance mean?” she asked Lara.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Lara said. “I know that sever means to cut something off. Like a severed head. But why are you asking about severing things? This isn’t supposed to be that kind of mystery!”
Lara shuddered dramatically. Caroline just frowned. She was pretty sure this piece of paper didn’t have anything to do with wayward body parts. But what did it mean?
“We don’t know what kind of mystery this is,” Caroline said.
She shoved the piece of paper toward Lara. As her sister read, trouble crept into her face, wrinkling her forehead. Lara’s eyebrows danced up, up, and up.
Caroline did not like that look one bit. The
canvas in her mind flashed red, then pitch-black.
Finally, Lara spoke again. “Lina, this is bad. Really, really bad.”
Caroline typed a single word on her tablet: “What?”
“I think . . . I think Dad lost his job.”
Oh.
Oh no.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
CRACKING THE CASE
LOCATION: Dad’s office, noon.
EVENT: C. and I found a piece of paper in Dad’s office. It says SEVERANCE PAYMENT.
CONCLUSION: Dad got fired and didn’t tell us about it.
QUESTION FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION: Why can’t Dad tell us the truth?
Lara’s mind burst with thoughts, but one kept circling back to her. This was not how her very first investigation was supposed to go.
In Georgia Ketteridge books, solving mysteries was always fun. Sure, Georgia might get trapped in a cellar for a few hours on occasion. And there was that one time when she broke her arm after a rather suspicious fall in a dark cave.
Yet Georgia never got an awful, twisting feeling in her gut. The feeling that maybe she shouldn’t have started investigating something at all.
The feeling that Lara now couldn’t shake off.
She hadn’t wanted to believe it. But the paper Caroline found was perfectly clear. Two weeks ago, Dad had been “terminated.” (What a horrible word! But Lara supposed that horrible things needed horrible words.)
As she read further, she filed away more information in her mind. Dad’s newspaper had fired him two weeks ago. They’d given him something called a severance package, which seemed to mean he got a lot of money. It was a staggering number that had to be more allowance than Lara would ever get in her whole life. But still. Fired meant fired.
That was why Dad burned the brisket. He must have been . . . distracted.
Lara flapped her fingers. Dad’s job at the newspaper was supposed to be the one that worked out for him. He’d had it for nearly three whole years. Whenever he talked about work, he went on about how much he liked his boss and his stories. “The best job in the world,” he’d say, “apart from being a dad, of course,” and the whole thing was so cheesy that Lara groaned on principle.
Dad getting fired from the best job in the world was not supposed to happen. But it did, and now it couldn’t un-happen.
“Why didn’t Dad tell us?” Lara wondered out loud. “Not telling something important is basically the same as lying.”
Caroline did not respond for a long while. It was so long that Lara thought maybe she’d gone into a not-talking mood. But eventually Caroline spoke. “I don’t like it either. But maybe there’s a reason Dad didn’t tell us about it.”
“And what would that be?” Lara asked, still cross.
This time, Caroline’s response came much more quickly. “Maybe it has something to do with the reason why he got fired.”
Lara locked her gaze on her sister. Caroline was right. The reason behind Dad’s firing probably was important. Did he make a mistake in one of his stories? No, Dad would never. Maybe he’d written something that a powerful person didn’t like. Dad was always complaining about “the higher-ups” at his newspaper and how they wanted to control things. Yes. That had to be it.
Still, Lara wished she knew for sure. She did not care at all for the not-knowing feeling. Wanting to know things was precisely why she’d become a detective in the first place. She hadn’t realized that answering one question would lead to so many more. Was this what real detectives did? Enter an endless spiral of questions, one after another?
“Ima probably knows,” Caroline continued. “Maybe they just don’t want us to worry.”
It made sense. And yet Lara couldn’t shake the Very Bad Feeling from her gut.
“Don’t you remember what happened last time Dad lost his job?” Lara asked.
“Not really.”
Lara stared at her sister. As a nine-year-old, Lara had only been a little kid when it happened, but she doubted that the memories would ever go away.
At first she’d thought the whole thing would be fun. If Dad was going to stay at home during the day instead of going to work, that meant he would have more time to play with her. Cook her favorite foods. Listen to her detailed accounts of life in fourth grade.
Only it didn’t happen. In fact, Dad didn’t play with her at all during those long months. He didn’t cook much, either, leaving everyone to suffer through microwaved dinners and Ima’s questionable attempts at cooking. And whenever Lara tried to talk to him about her days, he never asked questions or laughed at the proper places in her stories. He just sat there on the couch, fiddling with his hands and staring at the TV screen.
Then Dad got his job at the newspaper and things got better again. It didn’t happen all at once, but soon enough life in the Finkel family was normal. Or about as normal as it ever got. And Lara could almost—but not quite—forget that her dad had ever spent days at a time in his pajamas, watching game shows on TV.
There had been only one bright spot to the whole experience: Georgia Ketteridge. Lara read her first Georgia book a month after Dad lost his job. Within four days, she’d finished the entire series and started her first of many rereads. Maybe she didn’t have her father, but at least she’d had Georgia. In Georgia’s world, dads didn’t start acting scarily weird all of a sudden. Her dad certainly would not lose his job, ever. And even when things got really, really bad for Georgia, everything worked itself out by the end of the book. Always.
Yet apparently none of these events had made much of an impression on Caroline.
“You really don’t remember it at all?” Lara asked her sister. “Dad was . . . weird. Ima too. That was the only time Ima ever let us have mac and cheese out of the box for dinner. Which we had about three times a week.”
Caroline frowned. “I remember the mac and cheese. I never liked the box stuff.”
“Well, you’ll probably need to get used to it,” Lara said, thinking back to the ruined brisket. “At least until Dad gets a new job. Or Ima learns how to use the oven. Which will probably happen at around the same time Kugel gives up shrimp and goes kosher.”
“Oh,” Caroline said.
That was all—oh. Well, Lara understood her sister’s feelings. “We need to do something,” she declared.
Caroline tapped her tablet for quite a while, but decided against actually saying anything. Lara often envied her sister’s way of communicating. She could think of more than a few occasions when deleting her words would have been quite useful. But sometimes not knowing what Caroline wanted to say was just plain annoying.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! We may have completed the first phase of the investigation, but FIASCCO’s work isn’t done. Not while there are still loose ends.”
Georgia always talked about the need to tie up loose ends. Lara figured that there were plenty of those in the Case of the Gross Brisket.
“But we already solved the mystery. Right?” Caroline asked.
She had a point. But Lara wasn’t about to admit it. If she were being perfectly honestly, it stung a little that Caroline had figured out that something might be wrong with Dad before she herself had noticed. Caroline didn’t even want to be a detective! Not like Lara did. Now it was her turn to decide on a mission for her detective agency.
“We don’t know why Dad lost his job,” Lara pointed out. “That’s part of the case.”
“I guess so. But I’m not sure how we can find out more than we already know, and besides, aren’t we going to be busy? You know, with school.”
Lara scoffed. “We won’t be in school all day. There’s no reason for it to intrude on FIASCCO business. But if you don’t want to be involved anymore, you can just say so.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“Well, it sure sounded like it,” Lara told
her.
A fierce frown still glued to her face, Caroline paused in the middle of typing her response. “Do you hear something?”
Lara tried to silence her thoughts and listen to the outside world. Sure enough, footsteps echoed from downstairs, accompanied by loud Benny-chatter.
“We need to get out of here ASAP,” Lara said.
Caroline nodded and slid toward the door. Lara took one last look around the disorganized office and sighed.
By all rights, their progress in the investigation should be a cause for celebration. Yet Lara felt as though boulders were tied to her feet as she scurried away from her father’s office.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
WORDS AND WORRIES
Caroline thought perhaps that discovering the truth about Dad would change everything right away. But for the next week, life in the Finkel household plodded on more or less as usual. Benny still raced around with his toy cars. Noah still spent most evenings away with his friends, returning just before the curfew Ima set. Lara and Aviva still bickered over issues both large and small. (Their most recent kerfuffle erupted when Aviva tried to instruct the rest of the family on the correct way to prepare hummus.)
Soon, a very big distraction from the Dad problem began to eat up more and more of Caroline’s thoughts.
Tomorrow, Caroline would officially be a middle school student. Tomorrow, everything would change. And so tonight was one of those nights when sleep was quite impossible. There were far too many thoughts flitting around Caroline’s mind, each one spawning another chain of thoughts until she just about burst with worries—dark splatters of paint blotting a perfect white canvas. Within the splotches of brown and black, she saw a classroom of kids laughing at her. She saw herself sitting alone at lunch, everyone whispering and pointing. She saw Principal Jenkins, looking at her with pitying eyes as she explained that she was very sorry, but girls like Caroline just weren’t suitable for Pinecone Arts Academy.