Jake lifted the receiver. “Hello?” he said. “Oh, hi, Mom. We just got in…. Yeah, everything's okay….” He looked at Caroline. Caroline didn't blink. He hoped she was still breathing. “Yeah?” he said. “Yeah … okay. Bye.” And he hung up.
Jake turned and faced his brothers. “She said she'll be working late tonight, and if we get hungry we should open a can of chili.”
“I'm hungry!” said Peter. “I want a cookie.”
Wally unfastened the dish towel from around Caroline's mouth. He was hungry too. He looked in the refrigerator for leftover pizza or something. There was a dish of peas and mushrooms, and half a jar of lima beans.
“Let her go, Jake. Let's get something to eat,” Wally said.
“Yeah, let me untie her,” said Josh.
Peter lifted the lid of the cookie jar and gave a howl. “They're gone! We ate all the cookies!”
“Will you all shut up while I think?” said Jake. “What would be the right punishment for a girl who rubs snow in your face?”
“Drop ice cubes down her back?” ventured Wally, wishing they could just get it over with and send Caroline on her way.
“We're supposed to treat her like a sister!” Peter insisted. “Make her bake us some cookies.”
Jake looked at Peter. Then he looked at Josh and Wally. “Good idea, Peter!” he said. “Bake us some cookies, Caroline.”
“All right,” she agreed as Josh untied her arms, “but you'd better call my sisters and tell them where I am.
“Oh, no!” said Jake. “I'm not having Beth and Eddie charging over here to rescue you. Bake us some cookies and then you can go. In fact, make it brownies. Make us some brownies.”
“Show me where the flour and sugar and stuffare,” Caroline said.
They found a recipe on a box of cocoa, and Caroline read off the ingredients. The boys found them for her. Jake turned on the oven and got out a baking pan. Then he made sure that the back door was locked so that she couldn't escape, and—with the key in his pocket—went into the living room with his brothers to watch TV.
“Hey!” said Jake, his feet up on the coffee table. “This is the life! Sitting out here watching TV while our slave bakes up a batch of brownies for us. Not bad!”
“Yeah!” said Peter happily. “I like having a sister!”
Out in the kitchen, Caroline began to sing.
The boys switched from one channel to another as the sound of mixing and scraping and stirring came from the other room. The oven door opened, the oven door closed, and there was the noise of spoons and bowls being set in the sink. Very soon the boys began to smell the wonderful chocolate fragrance of brownies.
Caroline came out of the kitchen with her jacket and book bag.
“I have to eat an early dinner because I'm going to try out for the Buckman Community Players,” she said. “The brownies should be done at twenty past four. You're supposed to take them out and let them sit for five minutes before you cut them. Can I go?”
Jake went into the kitchen and opened the oven door. There were the brownies, beginning to puff up in the pan.
“Okay,” he said. “You can go. But tell Eddie if she ever ambushes us like that again, we'll drag her in here and make her bake us a three-layer cake.”
“Yeah!” said Peter. “A chocolate cake.”
Wally closed his eyes. He couldn't imagine dragging Eddie anywhere. A tiger, maybe, but not Eddie Malloy.
“Okay,” said Caroline. “Goodbye. Enjoy the brownies.” She went to the front door and was soon heading down the path to the swinging bridge and then across the Buckman River.
The boys went out to the kitchen and sat around the table waiting for the brownies to finish baking. Josh opened four cans of Pepsi and passed them around.
“It might be sort of nice to have sisters,” he said.
“Providing they always did what you told them to do,” said Jake. “I think maybe they've learned their lesson. I'll bet all this time Eddie and Beth have been out looking for Caroline, and they didn't dare call here.”
“What are we going to tell Mom about the brownies?” asked Wally. “We never bake brownies. She'll want to know where they came from.”
“There's only one answer,” said Jake. “We'll have to eat them all—every single one.” He grinned.
“And wash the bowl and pan,” said Josh.
They watched as the minute hand on the clock reached twenty after four. Jake turned off the oven and Josh took a hot pad and pulled out the pan. He set it on top of the stove.
“Yum!” said Peter.
“If we cut the brownies into sixths one way and eighths the other, that'll make forty-eight brownies, or twelve apiece,” said Wally. “We've each got to eat a dozen brownies.”
“Poor us!” said Jake.
They let the pan cool for five minutes; then Jake did the cutting and carefully lifted them out with a spatula and placed them on a platter. Each boy picked up a brownie with a napkin and blew on it until it was cool enough to eat. Then, all together, they took a bite and grinned at each other and chewed.
And all together, they spit them out.
“Hey! What's in these?” cried Jake.
“They're lumpy!” said Josh.
“They're gross!” cried Wally.
“They're awful!” said Peter in dismay.
Jake got a fork from the drawer and dissected a brownie on the table. It was full of lumps and bumps.
He pulled it apart. It was a brownie filled with leftover peas and mushrooms, and half a jar of lima beans.
Six
Tryout
Beth and Eddie were coming down the hill when Caroline crossed the bridge.
“Where were you?” Beth cried. “Caroline, we've been looking all over for you! We were afraid you'd fallen in the river. Thank goodness Mom's not home or we'd have to explain it all to her. We didn't know whether to call Dad at the college or not.”
“We went back to the school and looked all around,” said Eddie. “What happened?”
Next to being onstage, Caroline most loved to tell a story. Her eyes flashed as she faced her sisters.
“I was kidnapped and gagged,” she said.
“What?” cried Beth. “By who?” And then she gasped. “The Hatfords?”
“The Hatfords,” said Caroline dramatically. “They forced me into their house and tied me up.”
“What?” shrieked Beth and Eddie together.
Caroline had to explain the whole thing, beginning with the phone call from Mrs. Hatford.
“It's all my fault!” Eddie cried. “If I hadn't tackled Jake, this wouldn't have happened. I just didn't want him to think I was too friendly for helping him get out of trouble with the principal.”
“What did they do to you, Caroline?” Beth asked worriedly.
“They made me bake brownies,” Caroline told them.
Her sisters stared.
“They were hungry, and they said if I'd bake brownies, I could go. So I did.”
Beth was amazed. “What kind of brownies?”
“I used a recipe on a box of cocoa,” Caroline told her. “The boys locked the back door so I couldn't get out, and went in the other room to watch TV.”
“So you just baked brownies for them like a dutifid slave!” Eddie said indignantly. “Jake thinks he can lob a snowball at me whenever he pleases, and now the guys will think they can kidnap one of us and make us cook for them!”
“Not quite,” said Caroline as they reached the door of their rented house and went inside.
Caroline took off her coat and threw it on a chair. She looked at the clock. It was a quarter past four. “In five minutes the Hatfords will go out in the kitchen and turn off the oven. They'll take out the pan of brownies and set it on the stove to cool. And then …” She gave a delighted laugh. An evil laugh. “Then … they will each pick up a brownie, take a big bite, and spit it out, because I filled them full of peas and mushrooms and lima beans.”
Beth and Eddie ho
wled with laughter.
“Oh, it serves them right! Can't you just see their faces?” Eddie shrieked, and they were off again.
Mrs. Malloy came in with a sack of groceries. “What's so funny?” she asked. “What's going on? It sounds like a convention of witches in here. I never heard such cackling and braying.”
“A little justice is going on,” said Eddie. “A little crime and punishment, that's all.” And leaving their mother to wonder, the girls went upstairs, where Caroline put her mind on what she would wear to tryouts for the Buckman Community Players.
She wasn't sure what part she would want to play. If she was to try out for the part of a sweet girl with a gentle voice, she should probably come in her pink-and-white dress with lace on the collar. If she was to play an evil daughter, she should wear her gray dress with the metal buttons; if an adventurous girl, her leopard-print skirt. She decided finally on a bright red dress with black tights so that she would stand out from all the others, and then she went into Beth's room.
“I'm going to tryouts tonight,” she said. “How do I look?”
Beth studied her for a moment. “Like a girl who wants to stand out from all the others and make sure she gets a part,” she said.
“Beth, please come and try out,” Caroline pleaded. “It would be so much fun if we were in the play together.”
“Oh, I don't know….,” Beth began, but Caroline could tell she was wavering.
“Just come with me, then,” Caroline begged. “I don't want to go alone.”
So the two girls ate dinner early—it was stew night—and set off for the old movie theater three blocks away, which had been abandoned and then reclaimed by the Buckman Community Players.
▪
The play's director was clearly worried as she faced the small group assembled there in the front rows of the old theater.
“I know this isn't Broadway,” she said, smiling a little, “but I really hoped more people would show up.”
“Well, you've got enough girls,” someone observed.
“That's right,” the director said brightly. “I need only three girls and I've got … five … six … seven! Even enough for understudies.”
No, no, thought Caroline. She could not bear to be an understudy.
“But don't worry,” the director continued. “We need a group of townspeople who will be in almost every scene. We can use every one of you.”
“Tell us about the play,” a man suggested. So the director told the story of how two families—a farmer's and a grocer's—decided to incorporate their little settlement and call it Buckman. But there were lots of problems, because the grocer had two lazy sons, and the farmer, who needed all the hired men he could get, had only daughters, and they were needed in the kitchen.
“What were the daughters like?” Caroline asked.
“They were all very different, from what I can determine,” said the director. “The oldest was very beautiful. She actually later married one of the grocer's boys, and they managed, by all accounts, to live quite happily. The youngest daughter was a rather quiet girl, I understand, who was said to be sickly.”
Caroline was neither the shortest nor the tallest girl there, and doubted that she would be chosen for either the youngest or the oldest daughter. She would have loved to be the beautiful girl or even the sickly one who just lay about the stage and moaned every now and then.
“… But the middle daughter absolutely drove her parents crazy,” the director continued. “If she wasn't in trouble of one kind, people said, she was in trouble of another kind, and a real mischief-maker.”
Caroline frantically waved her hand in the air. “That's the part I'd like to try out for,” she said excitedly, and was dismayed to see two other hands shoot up.
“Me too,” said another girl.
“And me,” said someone else.
“That's wonderful. We won't have any trouble finding daughters, will we? But let's think about the other parts,” the director said as a few more people arrived, and she went on with her story of the founding of Buckman. There were just enough men to play the roles of Joseph Buckman, the grocer; Ed Smith, the farmer; the mayor; the sheriff; and the two extra women for the female leads, but no boys at all to play Clyde and Elmer, the grocer's sons.
“All right, we'll try out the girls first so they can leave early. We'll start with the youngest daughter. I'll need the smallest girls for that. Who wants to try out?”
Two girls raised their hands. All they had to do was come onstage, cough a little, and lie down on a couch with a towel over their foreheads. The girl who coughed most convincingly got the part, and the other girl became her understudy plus “girl with cat” among the townspeople.
Caroline was glad she hadn't tried out for the sickly daughter, since she didn't even have any lines to say.
“Okay, middle daughter,” the director said.
Now there were four girls who wanted the part, and they all went onstage together. One girl, named Tracy Lee, seemed to want the role every bit as much as Caroline, even bumping into her once and standing in front of her every chance she got.
“All right, one at a time, I want you to go offstage, then come on again with a very mischievous look on your face,” said the director. “I want you to stand center stage and say to the audience, ‘So the grocer wants to call our town Buckman, does he, after his family? Why not call it Beulah, after me? If he thinks it was a big deal when I turned our chickens loose in his store, wait till he sets what I'm going to do on the Fourth of July!’ ”
The four girls recited these lines a few times and then, one by one, they came out to center stage and said them to the little audience.
The first girl said her lines in a monotone with no expression whatsoever, Caroline thought.
The second girl forgot her lines and talked so softly when she was prompted that she could hardly be heard at all.
Tracy Lee was next, and Caroline's heart sank, for she was very good. Even Caroline had to admit it. She spoke the lines clearly, with great expression, and when she came to the line “Why not call it Beuhh, after meV she threw out her arms in a grand gesture, and everyone laughed.
She'll get the party I know they'll give it to her, Caroline thought in dismay.
Tracy Lee walked over to the side of the stage with a smug smile on her face and managed to step on Caroline's toes.
“All right, let's have the last girl,” called the director.
Caroline walked out to center stage, reciting the lines in her head, then took a deep breath. In her most distinct voice, hands on her hips, she said, “So the grocer wants to call our town Buckman, does he, after his family? Why not call it Beulah, after mei” Here she threw one arm grandly out to one side and placed her other hand over her heart. “If he thinks it was a big deal when I turned our chickens loose in his store, wait till he stts what I'm going to do on the Fourth of July!” And then, with the most mischievous look she could muster, Caroline put one finger to her lips, grinned an evil grin, and with a low “Heh, heh, heh,” tiptoed offstage.
The others laughed.
“Well, I think we've found our Beulah,” the director said, smiling. “Caroline, you'll be Beulah, and Tracy Lee, who also did a fine job, will be her understudy, as well as ‘girl in lace shawl’ among the townspeople. Now, who wants to play the eldest daughter? I really need an older girl for this part.”
Tracy Lee glared at Caroline. But Caroline was beside herself with joy. This would be her first performance outside of school. She was headed for Broadway, she was sure of it. Only two girls, however, stood up to play the part of the eldest daughter, and one wasn't even as tall as Caroline. They were not very good actresses, either. All the part really required was to hold hands with the stage manager, who was filling in for the part of Elmer, the grocer's oldest boy, look into his eyes, and say, “With you by my side, Elmer, we can do anything.”
The first girl was too embarrassed to hold the stage manager's hands and decide
d she didn't want to try out after all. The second girl sounded as though she were simply reading her lines.
“You know, I really do need a taller girl for this part,” the director said, looking out over the small crowd. Her eye fell on Beth. “What about you, dear? What part are you trying out for?”
“Not anything,” said Beth.
“Just for me, would you mind coming up here and saying the lines? I'd like to see how the three daughters might look together onstage,” the director said.
Beth got up. Almost anyone could say the lines better than the others had done, so she didn't mind. She took the hands of the stage manager and said, “With you by my side, Elmer, we can do almost anything.”
“That was excellent! Excellent!” the director said.
‘ Would you please consider taking the part? We need you. We really do. See? You girls are like stair steps, the perfect heights.”
Beth had never thought about being an actress. These days she was totally into baking, but she had talked once of being a writer, maybe writing a play. It was a new experience, however, for her to stand up before a crowd and be told that she was good, so she said, “I guess so,” and everyone clapped.
The two other girls who had tried out for the eldest daughter were given roles to play among the townspeople, and then the girls were dismissed until the following evening, and Caroline and her sister chattered all the way home.
“You were wonderful, Beth!” Caroline kept saying. “We're going to have so much fun!”
“I wonder who they'll get to play the part of Elmer,” said Beth. “I hope it's someone cute.”
“Like Josh Hatford?” Caroline said, and in the light from the drugstore window, she saw Beth blush just a little.
Aha! said Caroline to herself. Bingo! She laughed a silent heh, heh, heh and thought, If they think putting lima beans in brownies was a big deal, wait till they see what I'm going to do next.
Seven
Elmer
Mrs. Hatford stood at the door of the refrigerator.
A Traitor Among the Boys a Traitor Among the Boys Page 3
