Mrs. Malloy was the only one who understood.
“Thanks, Mom,” said Caroline. It didn't make the humiliation less real, but it did help to think that maybe all great actresses had to go through this from time to time, and that someday, when she was on Broadway, people would forget all about tonight and remember her only as a famous actress.
But that was a long way off. Right now she had to think about facing her friends at school. Worse yet, she had to face the Hatfords.
▪
It was Thursday before she could go to school. Wally had been bringing her homework by and leaving it with Mrs. Malloy. But now the time had come to face the class. The first day back she asked Eddie to walk in front of her so no one could see her coming, and Beth to walk in back so no one could see her from behind.
Still, she felt absolutely sick inside, and as soon as she walked into her classroom, she knew that everyone was looking at her, even the teacher, as though at any moment she might stand up and do something crazy.
Wally, in fact, kept leaning forward in his seat as if she might go berserk and take a bite out of his shoulder or something.
But Caroline tried to remain calm, and when Wally finally turned around and said, “Welcome back from the crazy house,” Caroline replied, “You're right. I was positively out of my head with fever. It was the highest fever a girl has ever had and survived, and if it had been any higher I would have died.”
“No kidding?” said Wally, his eyes growing larger.
“In fact,” said Caroline, who couldn't stop herself, “I didn't have any shoes on, just boots, when I walked to the theater, and I couldn't even feel the cold. If there had been hot coals onstage, I could have walked across them and not even felt it. When a person is in as feverish a state as I was, she could stick knives in her arms and pierce her tongue and not feel a single thing. In fact—”
“Caroline, do you have something you'd like to share with the whole class, or can your private conversation wait until recess?” the teacher asked.
“Uh … it can wait,” said Caroline.
But when Miss Applebaum began writing on the blackboard, Caroline leaned forward and whispered in Wally's ear, “In fact, I just may get my name in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the highest known temperature of any nine-year-old who lived to tell about it.”
Sixteen
War
It seemed as though January might end peacefully. Caroline, Wally noticed, was quieter than usual. Josh noticed that Beth was kinder and more polite. Eddie, Jake reported, seemed as though she might be friendly after all.
The temperature dropped to the low twenties, and the Buckman River completely froze over, bringing out sleds and ice skates. Skaters glided down one side of Island Avenue, under the road bridge that led to the business district, and back up the river on the other side, their breath frosty in the sunny, crisp air.
Then it snowed—wonderful snow, excellent snow, the kind that packed a powerful snowball.
No one knew how it happened, but the peace didn't last.
The battle didn't start with Beth and Josh.
It didn't start with Caroline and Wally.
It didn't even start with Jake and Eddie, and it certainly didn't start with Peter.
All Wally knew was that he and his brothers were standing on the swinging bridge looking down at the Malloy girls ice-skating on the river below, and the next minute Caroline and her sisters were frantically building a snow fort on their side of the river as though they suspected the boys were up to no good. Every so often the girls shot suspicious glances their way.
“What did we do?” asked Josh. “Why are they glaring at us?”
“Who knows? Who cares? But they aren't building a fort to play house in,” said Jake excitedly. “You build a fort for war!”
“Yeah!” said Wally. “It sure looks like war, all right.” From where he was standing, he could see Beth and Eddie rolling big balls of snow down the bank on their side of the river and stacking them one on top of the other. Caroline, meanwhile, appeared to be making snowballs.
“Okay!” said Jake excitedly. “Let's fight!”
The boys ran to their end of the swinging bridge, went slipping and sliding down the bank, and began building a fort on their side of the river.
“Hey! Look what the guys are up to!” Wally heard Eddie shout. “I told you they were probably planning something back there on the bridge. We'll settle this once and for all.” She picked up a large stick and went sliding out to the center of the river, where she scratched a long line in the ice.
“All right, you guys,” she yelled. “Everything on this side of the line is our territory. Everything on the other is yours. Don't cross the line and you won't get—
Plop!
A snowball hit her on the shoulder.
At that, Beth and Caroline shrieked like savages and came swarming out of their fort. Suddenly the air was filled with snowballs going in both directions— some hitting their targets, some smashing on the ice, all of them accompanied by whoops and yells.
Every so often both camps retreated for a time to make more snowballs or repair their forts, and the walls grew even higher. Peter and Wally were busily making peepholes so that they could see out, in case Eddie got it in her crazy head to run over and stuff a snowball down somebody's neck.
They stayed until dusk set in and it was too dark to see anymore. Then they went home, half frozen but eager to continue the war.
After dinner that evening, the boys gathered as usual in Jake and Josh's bedroom, and while Peter absently ran his Matchbox cars along one windowsill, then another, the boys discussed their battle strategy.
“Let's go out and dump boiling water on their snow fort,” said Wally.
“Naw. That would take too long. You'd have to keep carrying kettle after kettle,” said Jake. “I think we should just go over and knock it down.”
“Then they'll come over and knock ours down,” said Josh.
“Not without a fight, they won't,” said Jake. “Come on. Let's go.”
Mrs. Hatford, however, came upstairs just then to remind Peter to take a bath, so Wally and the twins decided to go without him.
“Let's wait another fifteen minutes to be sure the girls aren't out there, and then we'll sneak over,” Jake said. And they went downstairs to watch TV while they waited.
Finally they put on their jackets and caps and mittens and went outside. From the road the deserted ice gleamed in the light from the streetlamp. Wally could see a lone skater far down the river, going around a curve.
“I don't know,” said Josh as they turned their feet sideways and started down the bank. “It does seem sort of a shame to tear their fort down. It has turrets and everything. It looks like a castle.”
“Ha!” said Jake as they reached the bottom. “If they were out here right now, don't you think they'd be tearing down ours? You think they'd just walk across the ice and admire it? You think—”
Pow!
Biff!
Bop!
Whop!
The Hatfords were ambushed from their own fort. With bloodcurdling yells, Eddie, Beth, and Caroline rose up from inside the boys’ fort, lobbing snowball after snowball, then ducking down when the boys returned their fire.
The boys retreated up the bank to rethink their strategy.
“How did they know we were coming?” Wally panted. “They couldn't have been waiting out here all this time!”
“I don't know, but it sure looks like a setup to me,” said Josh.
“Peter!” the three boys said together.
They stomped across the road and into the house. In single file, they marched up the stairs. There was still water in the bathtub. There was a wet towel on the floor. There were wet footprints leading from the bathroom, past the phone in the hallway, and on into Peter's room.
Jake opened Peter's door. Peter was lying motion-less in his bed, one arm and one leg thrown over the side. His eyes were closed and
he was breathing deeply. He looked too innocent for words.
▪
The three boys did a little homework, and then, with their parents putting up shelves in the basement, they slipped on their coats again, their caps and mittens, and went back out for the third time that day.
Carefully they looked about. They walked out to the middle of the swinging bridge so that they could see down inside their fort. In the light from the street-lamp, they could see nothing. They crossed the river and slid down the bank by the girls’ fort, then scouted out the area. Up on the hill they could see lights from the Bensons’ old house. But there were no girls anywhere to be seen.
Wally felt slightly better about tearing down the girls’ fort now that they had been ambushed, but Josh still seemed to hesitate. “They didn't really do anything to us, you know,” he said. “If we hadn't come out here to knock down their fort in the first place, we wouldn't have run into them.”
“Hey! It's all in fun! This is what brothers and sisters do!” Jake said.
He drew back one leg and kicked the girls’ fort. A huge ball of snow on the bottom gave way. The wall crumbled, the turret landing in a heap at his feet.
It was sort of fiin to watch the turrets fall, Wally decided as he slid around on the ice to the other end of their fort and pushed. The second turret exploded on the ice.
After that it was just a matter of pushing down the rounded hunks of snow and stepping on them, until the fort was nothing more than a pile of scattered snow on the ice.
“I wish we had a flag,” said Jake.
“Why?” asked Wally.
“So we could prop it up on the pile—let the girls know we were here.”
“I think they'll figure it out pretty fast,” said Josh. “Who else would do this to them?”
“Yeah, but it would be fun to leave our mark somehow.”
“We could do what dogs do,” Wally suggested. “We could pee on it.”
The twins turned and stared at him.
“You're really weird, Wally, you know?” said Jake.
Seventeen
The Traitor Returns
As soon as Caroline got Peter's phone call, she and her sisters hurried down to the river and hid in the Hatfords’ fort. And as soon as the ambush of the boys was over and they returned home, Beth said, “You know they'll just come back and tear down our fort, don't you?”
“Of course!” said Eddie. “We're only going to stay here in the house until we're sure they've had time enough to do it. Then we'll go back down to the river, take their fort apart, and put it up on their front porch.”
Caroline squealed with delight. This was one of the best tricks yet!
The girls took off their gloves and laid them over the radiator to dry.
“I spent a lot of time shaping those turrets, though,” said Beth. “Our fort looked like a castle.
“The Hatfords probably enjoy being destructive! They enjoy tearing things down,” said Eddie.
“Not Josh, though. I can't imagine he'd enjoy it very much,” Beth mused.
“You'd be surprised!” said Eddie.
▪
A half hour later the girls went out again. Just as they suspected, their snow fort had been demolished.
“Never mind,” said Eddie, leading them across the ice to where the boys’ sturdy fort stood guarding their side of the river. “Let's go!”
Following their plan, Caroline climbed up the bank and waited at the top. Beth climbed halfway up, and Eddie began the careful demolition of the fort. The idea was to move the whole thing, ball by ball, but the snow was so heavy that only the smaller hunks could be lifted. Eddie picked up a ball of snow and passed it carefully to Beth, who passed it to Caroline, who set it at the top of the bank. The work was slow, but finally at least half of the fort, minus one or two pieces that had crumbled along the way, had been moved.
“Whew!” Beth panted. “I've got to rest a minute, Eddie. This is hard. Why don't you ever get an easy idea?”
“You can only take a minute,” said Eddie. “If we don't get home pretty soon, Dad will come looking for us. It's almost Caroline's bedtime.”
They took a brief rest, and then, very, very quietly, they carried the hunks of snow across the road, up the sidewalk, and up the steps to the Hatfords’ front porch. Eddie could carry whole balls of it herself, but it took both Caroline and Beth to carry one. They set to work reconstructing the fort right in front of the door, so that when the Hatfords came out the following morning, they would find themselves facing a wall of snow. One lump of snow … another … another …
Suddenly the porch light came on. In panic the girls flattened themselves against the house, holding their breath. Out of the corner of her eye, Caroline could see Mrs. Hatford peering out a side window. The snow fort, however, was not visible from that window, and a minute later the light went off again and the girls could hear Mrs. Hatford's footsteps retreating back down the front hallway.
“Whew!” said Beth, one hand on her chest. “Eddie, what would we have said if she'd come out?”
“I don't know, but we've got to hurry!” Eddie insisted. “Try not to make a sound.”
The second row of snow was piled onto the first, then the third, igloo fashion, until finally the wall of snow blocking the front door was almost five feet high. All it would take was a single hard push to knock it down, of course, but they weren't trying to keep anyone from getting out. They were only trying to give them—namely Jake, Josh, Wally, and Peter— the surprise of their lives—a taste of their own medicine.
“What now?” asked Beth.
“Nothing,” said Eddie. “Now we go home, and tomorrow we pretend that nothing out of the ordinary happened. We pretend we didn't even look at our own fort, didn't even realize it was gone.”
Beth, however, didn't move. Looking as mischievous as Caroline was supposed to have looked in the play, she tentatively put one finger on the doorbell.
Caroline looked from Beth to Eddie.
Eddie began to grin. “Okay,” she said.
“One … two … three … gol” Beth said, pressing the doorbell hard, and she and her sisters went sailing off the porch, across the yard, and tumbled down the bank toward the bridge.
They lay in the snow, their heads barely peeping up over the bank.
The porch light came on again, and they could hear the door opening.
“Hey!” came Wally's voice. “Hey! Jake! Josh! Come here!”
There was the sound of running feet, Jake's bellow, Mr. Hatford's whistle, and Mrs. Hatford's exclamations.
“Who in the world did this?” said Mrs. Hatford. “What do they think it is? Halloween?”
“Can we get out?” asked Wally, and the girls giggled when they heard the worry in his voice.
And then the snow wall came tumbling down, and Wally, Jake, and Josh ran to the edge of the porch in their stocking feet and looked around.
Silently the girls went on across the bridge, and then they linked arms and sang as they climbed the hill toward home.
▪
Mr. Malloy was watching TV when his daughters came in. “Where have you been?” he asked. “You look as though youVe been ice-skating! It's almost nine o'clock!”
“We've been having so much fun out on the ice!” Caroline said, winking at Eddie. “We just couldn't make ourselves stop.”
“Girls!” called their mother from the dining room, where she was looking through a brochure of oil paintings, “I want you to see something.”
The girls slipped off their jackets and walked into the next room. Mrs. Malloy pointed to a painting of the Appalachian Mountains in snow and fog. “I'm thinking of buying this painting from a gallery in El-kins—if not this exact picture, maybe one like it. I thought it would look especially nice over there above the buffet. What do you think?”
The girls came around behind her chair and looked at the picture.
“I like the fog,” said Beth.
“I like the snow,”
said Caroline.
“I like the mountains,” said Eddie. “Go ahead and buy it, Mom.”
“I think this artist does wonderful work,” Mrs. Malloy said, “but sometimes paintings look better on canvas than they do in a brochure and sometimes they look worse. I'll just have to see for myself.”
“Does this mean we'll be staying in Buckman? I mean, are you buying pictures to go in this house?” asked Beth.
“I have no idea where we'll be come August,” her mother told her. “But wherever we are, I think this painting might be gorgeous on any wall. You girls get to bed now. It's late.”
The girls went upstairs, smiling to themselves. Their parents didn't suspect a thing.
“That will teach the guys to mess around with us,” said Eddie.
“That will earn us a little respect,” said Beth. ‘’They'll never guess we lifted all that heavy snow and carried it up to their porch.”
“We are totally, positively amazing!” said Caroline. “The magnificent Malloy sisters strike again!”
▪
“I suppose you thought that was funny,” Wally said to Caroline the next day as he slid into his seat at school.
“Funny, and extremely clever,” smiled Caroline. “We're not just girls, Wally! We're professional We are so professional at being girls that we can outfox a boy any day, any time, any season. We can outgirl a boy before he even knows what hit him! Just think, Wally Hatford, we are something that you and your brothers can never be—wonderful, glorious, intelligent, adventurous, magnificent girls!”
She threw out her arms in a grand gesture and whacked Miss Applebaum, who happened to be coming up the aisle passing out their book reports.