The Many Mysteries of the Finkel Family

None of this felt quite right. “How about we order pizza?”
“On Shabbat?” Aviva said.
Lara’s irritation with her cousin flared up again. Okay, yes. Pizza wasn’t exactly traditional. But so what?
“Pizza is absolutely delicious,” Lara pronounced.
A slight frown lingered on Aviva’s face, but she didn’t say anything else. Good.
In truth, Lara thought pizza on Shabbat felt a little weird too, but she wasn’t going to say so. Not when Dad still looked so out of it.
Ima squeezed Dad’s shoulder. “Pizza Shabbat will be a new experience, yes?”
“You know how I love doing new and weird things,” he replied. He smiled slightly, staring at Ima with one of those lovey-dovey looks that bordered on gross.
And so it was decided that this would be the first-ever pizza Shabbat. After some heated debate, Ima placed an order for three large pies with vegetarian toppings, therefore making their pizza a kosher meal. Even Aviva no longer seemed bothered with the change in the menu.
By the time the pizza arrived, everyone was chattering happily. As Lara took a big bite of her first slice, Caroline bounced over. Her own cheeks were puffed out with food. Caroline tapped away on her tablet while she chewed. One of the advantages of Caroline’s communication method was her ability to talk and eat at the same time without subjecting anyone to the sight of half-chewed food.
Caroline’s face hardly moved at all while she typed. “You want a mystery to solve.”
“Yes,” Lara said through a mouthful of cheese. “Why?”
“I have one for you. A very important mystery.”
Her little sister had some big mystery? Hmm. Lara couldn’t imagine it would be any good, on account of Caroline being eleven and not an expert detective at all. She was pretty sure Caroline hadn’t even read all the Georgia books!
Still, it wasn’t as though FIASCCO had a ton of cases to choose from at the moment. Lara had exaggerated when she’d told Aviva she was already working on a case. Just a bit! Aviva being Aviva, she’d probably ask about it soon and then Lara would have to lie again. Not great.
Lara considered. She needed all the leads she could get.
“Okay. What’s the big mystery?” she asked.
Caroline’s mouth was pressed into a thin line as her fingers flew across the screen.
“You need to find out why Dad made yucky brisket tonight.”

CHAPTER SIX: YOUNGER SISTER PROBLEMS
Caroline saw things. Some people failed to recognize this rather basic fact, mistaking her lack of mouth-words for a lack of thoughts. Caroline actually had loads of thoughts, thank you very much. Sometimes she typed them out on her tablet, sometimes she kept them to herself. But she always saw things.
That’s how she knew that Dad’s mistake with the brisket might be worthy of investigation.
Lara, however, looked doubtful. “I don’t think bad brisket is exactly mysterious. He said he was having a bad ADHD day. Case closed. Besides, would Georgia Ketteridge spend an entire book investigating brisket?”
“She’s not Jewish,” Caroline pointed out. She was pretty sure that brisket was a Jewish thing.
“I don’t think Georgia would investigate bad ham, either,” Lara insisted.
Caroline sighed. No matter what Lara thought, she’d known the moment she’d bitten into the gross brisket that it meant something. She just didn’t know what.
Why wouldn’t her sister listen to her? Just because she was a year younger and couldn’t take charge of things in a Lara-like way didn’t mean she couldn’t do anything. As much as Caroline loved her sister—and she did!—sometimes she couldn’t help but feel like Lara thought she lived in a Georgia Ketteridge novel. Lara, of course, was Georgia. Caroline? She was lucky to be a sidekick.
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.