The Many Mysteries of the Finkel Family

by Sarah Kapit

  Maybe it meant nothing. Yet when she considered the fact that some sixth-grade girl found a not-dead not-rat in her lunch . . . maybe it did mean something.

  Lara gulped. Caroline had said Micah hadn’t put the supposed rat in the lunch box. Perhaps he hadn’t.

  Perhaps Caroline was the one who committed the crime.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was the first night of Rosh Hashanah, so Lara probably should have gone to services at synagogue. Should have—but she didn’t. Given her current mood (very bad), she’d asked Ima if she could stay home. Ima must have been in no mood for an argument, so she agreed. Caroline, too, stayed home. That gave Lara plenty of time to observe her sister and to stew.

  The idea that Caroline would place a fake dead animal in someone’s lunch was completely ridiculous. Caroline! And yet the more she thought about it, the more sense it made.

  She had to know for sure. Could she somehow weasel a confession out of her sister?

  Lara considered taking the direct approach. She could just ask, “Caroline, did you paint one of Kugel’s toys to look like a dead rat and then put it in a girl’s lunch box? And also, why?”

  But as much as Lara liked the idea of a direct approach, she suspected that it might not work. Whenever Georgia Ketteridge wanted to question an unsuspecting witness, she was sneaky about it. Subtle. Lara would have to be too.

  She certainly couldn’t count on Caroline to tell her the truth on the matter. No, she needed more evidence. And when she spotted Caroline texting rapidly over dinner—again—she knew exactly what she needed to do. Whatever it took, she would get her hands on that phone.

  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 happening. I don’t feel like writing anything else.

  In theory, Rosh Hashanah was a moment for celebration. So, despite her decided lack of holiday spirit, Lara went about the usual Rosh Hashanah business the next mornin
g. She dressed up in her very nicest dress for synagogue—purple with white trim. She went to synagogue and recited the prayers. She mostly contained her rage at Benny, who had taken to blowing the shofar at inconvenient moments.

  By the time the late afternoon rolled around, Lara just wanted to curl up in bed with a book. Unfortunately, reading wasn’t generally considered an appropriate Rosh Hashanah activity.

  “Hello.”

  Lara glanced up at her sister, who was dressed in a bright green dress that Lara considered rather hideous. “Hi,” she said.

  “We’re going to Lake Sammamish to do tashlikh. Do you want to come?” Caroline asked.

  Lara made a face. She did not particularly want to walk around the lake in the cold while throwing bread crumbs into the water. The ritual of tashlikh was supposed to symbolize throwing away sins for the new year, but Lara didn’t feel particularly burdened by sin. Caroline, however, probably could do with throwing several loaves into the lake. She could do that without Lara, though. Just like she did everything without Lara these days.

  She shrugged. “No thanks.”

  For a moment, Caroline looked as though she was about to say something. Instead, she just said a single word. “Fine.”

  Lara wandered into the kitchen in search of something more interesting to do. Instead, she just found the chaotic sight of her father and Aunt Miriam trying to cook at the same time in the same kitchen. Well, hopefully at least one of them would manage to cook decent food.

  She returned to her room to enjoy a precious few hours of quiet time before the holiday started up again. Sure enough, Ima called the family to dinner at exactly six o’clock.

  “When can I have my shofar back?” Benny asked Ima.

  “Yom Kippur. Possibly,” their mother replied.

  Lara silently cheered the apparent confiscation of Benny’s shofar. No doubt he’d find some other way to annoy her, but she would take the victory.

  She slid into her favorite seat at the dining table. A few moments later, Aviva joined her. Lara reminded herself that she was trying to be nice to Aviva now. Maybe it could even be her Rosh Hashanah resolution. After all, Aviva actually wanted Lara’s friendship. Unlike certain other people.

  “L’shana tova,” she told Aviva. There. Wishing her cousin a good year was, at the very least, a start to her new and improved approach.

  “Thank you,” Aviva said. “But you should know that it’s not actually ‘l’shana tova.’ It’s just ‘shana tova.’”

  Clenching her fists, Lara sighed. Already she regretted her choice of resolution. Maybe she should just pick something easier, like cleaning her room more often.

  “Why exactly is the lah wrong?” Lara asked crossly. She’d always rather liked the sound of the Hebrew lah, and not just because it sounded a little like the first syllable of her own name.

  “Lah means ‘for’ in Hebrew. So if you say ‘l’shana tova’, you’re saying ‘for a good new year.’ That sounds a little odd, do you not think so?”

  Lara bit her tongue. Several sharp retorts popped into her brain, most of which centered around Aviva’s problems with English. She did not, however, actually say any of her mean thoughts. Really quite noble of her, when you thought about it.

  Still, she wasn’t going to let Miss Know-It-All have the last word.

  “I don’t see why saying ‘for a good year’ is wrong,” she said. “After all, we say ‘l’chaim.’ That means ‘for life,’ doesn’t it? Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Aviva bit her lip and looked down at the plate setting of Ima’s best china. “I don’t know. It’s just that I’ve never heard a Hebrew speaker say ‘l’shana tova.’ I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Lara said, more sharply than she’d intended.

  The rest of the family bursting in for dinner spared Lara from the need to continue the conversation. Thank goodness.

  Lara glanced at Caroline. She opened her mouth to invite Caroline to sit next to her. Before she could manage to find the right words, Caroline found a seat at the other end of the table.

  Fine.

  Aunt Miriam came out, hands full of platters. Lara’s mouth watered in anticipation.

  “Anyada buena, dulse i alegre,” Aunt Miriam said from the head of the table.

  Lara blinked in confusion. Those words weren’t English, obviously. But they didn’t sound like Hebrew, either. If anything, it sounded a lot like Spanish, which was most definitely not Lara’s best subject.

  “What does that mean?” Benny blurted out.

  “It’s Ladino,” Aviva answered for her mother. “It’s our New Year’s greeting. The Sephardic greeting, I mean.”

  Lara scowled. She and her siblings were Sephardic too, even if Dad wasn’t. There really was no end to Aviva’s know-it-all-ness.

  Aunt Miriam nodded. “Yes. And in the Sephardic tradition, we’re going to have some yehi ratzones—appetizers, that is—before our dinner.”

  “Oooh, mozzarella sticks?” Benny asked. “Nachos?”

  “Not exactly,” Aunt Miriam replied.

  Yehi ratzones turned out to be decidedly less appetizing than nachos. Still, Lara was hungry enough to manage a few baked apples and a spoonful of spinach. Soon enough, the main course would be out. She hoped.

  “I hope your dad cooked good food this time,” Aviva said, dipping an apple into honey.

  “Of course he did,” Lara snapped. After all, Dad had made plenty of great food since the brisket fiasco. “I hope you actually can appreciate it.”

  “Stop, Lara,” Caroline said—the very first words she’d said directly to Lara for the entire dinner. “Aviva didn’t mean anything by it. You don’t have to get so mad over every little thing.”

  Lara glared. Just as she was busy coming up with the perfect response, Dad plopped a plate of roast chicken onto the center of the table. Lara grabbed a leg and was relieved to find that it tasted just as it ought to—juicy, moist, with just a hint of rosemary.

  For several blessed moments, they enjoyed the satisfaction of good food. There were no whining comments from Benny, no know-it-all lectures from Aviva, no reprimands from Caroline. It was, Lara decided, a Rosh Hashanah miracle.

  After finishing her second drumstick, Lara pulled out her notebook. With so many bad things to record lately, it was nice to report on something happy.

  Noah—noisily chewing on sweet potato kugel next to her—peered over her shoulder. “What’s that?” he asked, not bothering to swallow before speaking.

  Lara wrinkled her nose at him and set down her notebook with a thunk. “That’s none of your business. But it just so happens to be my detective notebook.”

  Her brother smacked his lips together noisily. “You’re still doing that? What are you working on now—a mystery involving cat vomit?”

  Clenching her fists, Lara gave Noah her very meanest glare. “As a matter of fact, I have uncovered quite a bit of information. Information that might interest you, in fact.”

  His eyebrow quirked. “Oh, really? Well, I’d love to see it, in that case.”

  What happened next happened quickly. Far, far too quickly. Noah reached over Lara’s half-empty plate—so rude!—and grabbed the notebook. He started flipping through the pages at a rapid speed.

  “Give that back!” Lara protested.

  “Noah, give your sister her notebook back,” Ima said, using her Ima-est voice.

  Noah looked Lara straight in the eye, shut the notebook, and passed it to her. That’s when Lara knew. She just knew. It was too late.

  “Some interesting stuff in there,” Noah remarked. “You’re quite the spy.”

  A hot, uncomfortable feeling invaded her body. What, exactly, had he seen? And would he keep his mouth shut about it?

  Lara straightened her back and summoned her very best In Charge voice. �
��I am not a spy,” she said.

  Her brother only shrugged. “If you say so.”

  For a blissful moment it appeared as though that would be it. That somehow, miraculously, they could all just move on with the Rosh Hashanah dinner. They still hadn’t started dessert, after all.

  “You are too a spy!” Benny accused.

  Well. So much for moving on.

  Lara dropped her fork with a satisfying clang. She crossed her arms across her chest and turned to face Benny. “If that’s what you want to call it, fine. By the way, have you given Ima her brooch back yet?”

  For the first time in who knows how long, Benny became quiet. At least for a good ten seconds or so. Then he had plenty of things to say. “Lara, you said you wouldn’t tell! You promised.”

  Lara certainly didn’t like to think of herself as the sort of person who broke promises. But in that moment, she didn’t much care. Besides, Benny had accused her of spying first. As far as she was concerned, that meant all promises were off.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Uh, guys? I really don’t think we should be doing this right now. Can it wait for another half hour, please? Probably less if we eat fast?”

  Lara barely heard him. “Benny took your brooch and used it for his stupid invention!” she told her mother.

  Ima rubbed her hand against her forehead. “Is this true?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Benny mumbled.

  “We will discuss this—later.” Ima placed an unmistakable emphasis on the word later. “For now, we will continue having a nice Rosh Hashanah dinner. As a family.”

  Lara privately thought there wasn’t much hope for that, but she reached for her plate again. She picked at her kugel, barely tasting it.

  Her family—well, some of them—tried. Aunt Miriam, who had missed some of the argument while tending to the pies—tried to engage Noah in conversation despite his obviously foul mood. “How are your college applications going?”

  “Fine,” Noah said. If anything, he looked even more miserable.

  That gave Lara an idea. It definitely wasn’t nice. But Noah hadn’t been nice, either. Really, he’d started all of it. If not for him, this would have been a perfectly pleasant holiday dinner.