Who Won the War? by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Read Free Book Online Page A

afternoon of your life, because something fell on Caroline at the school and I'm here to deliver the sad news that your youngest daughter is no more. Passed on. Deader than a doornail.
    No, this wouldn't do at all.
    The nurse was looking at him strangely. “Would you possibly know where her parents are?”
    Wally figured that Beth had gone to the baseball game to watch Eddie play, and Mrs. Malloy was probably off doing errands or something.
    “I'll see if I can find her mom,” Wally said.
    “Tell her that Caroline wasn't seriously hurt, but school policy is to call an ambulance if someone has an accident on the premises. We'll probably take her up to X-ray, but we can't let her go home until a parent gets here.”
    So she wasn't dying!
    Wally got back on his bike and headed for the road bridge leading to Island Avenue.
    As he crossed the bridge, he saw Mrs. Malloy's carahead of him, just turning into the driveway of the Malloy house. Wally rode up behind her.
    “Hello, Wally,” Mrs. Malloy called, getting out of her car and pulling two empty boxes from the backseat. “How are you?”
    “I'm fine, but Caroline's not,” said Wally. “Something fell on her at the school and she's at the hospital.”
    “What?” cried Mrs. Malloy, dropping the boxes.
    “She's okay, I think. But the nurse said for me to come and get you.”
    “What happened? Why was she at the school?” cried Caroline's mother.
    “I don't know; I'm only the messenger,” said Wally miserably.
    Mrs. Malloy jumped back into the car and turned around so fast that she ran over one of the boxes. Soon the car was out of sight.
    Wally rode down the hill to the swinging bridge and walked his bike across. Two more days and the Malloys would be gone. If he could just lie low for two more days—forty-eight hours—he could stop worrying that some terrible thing would happen and that he would be stuck with the Malloys forever.
    Stranger things had happened. Suppose Mr. Malloy died of heatstroke in Ohio and Mrs. Malloy put the girls in the car to go home for the funeral and she was so upset that the car went off the bridge and the only person who survived was Caroline. And suppose his own mother said, “Poor Caroline! She has no one totake her in. We'll have to adopt her, and she can be your little sister, Wally. She'll be moving into your room and you can bunk with Peter.”
    Wally felt sort of sick. What if Caroline was hurt worse than the nurse thought? What if the X-rays showed that a broken bone had punctured her heart? What if she died here in Buckman and the Hatfords went to the funeral, and, because Wally had been in her class, he had to stand up in the front of the church and say nice things about her? What if he had to lie and say she was a true and loyal friend and her death left a hole in his heart forever?
    Wally went into the house, lay down on the couch, and pulled a pillow over his head.

Nine

Oh, No!
    T here were no broken bones in Caroline's body, but Mrs. Malloy said she almost felt like breaking somebody's neck if anybody caused her any more trouble in the next two days. She said she didn't care if Caroline wanted to be onstage more than anything else in the world. Caroline ought to have had more sense than to go sneaking into a school where she shouldn't have been, and Mrs. Malloy told the girls' father this when he called to tell them that Ohio was really suffering in the heat wave.
    “No more than we are here, George,” she said. “It's so hot, I'm almost afraid to let Eddie play ball.”
    Nonetheless, she told him, as she had told the girls, the moving van was coming on schedule on Wednesday. It was due at eight in the morning, and as soon as all the furniture was out, she was turning thehouse over to a cleaning crew to get it ready for the Bensons' return. She and the girls had been invited to the Hatfords' for brunch before they left town, and wasn't that nice of Mrs. Hatford?
    There was too much to do to even think about the