The Scariest Tail (A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

told John to relax and take a hot shower. She told him to stay in his pajamas and forget what had happened the night before.
    “He wouldn’t relax,” Lisa said. She insisted he had tried, but he kept looking over his shoulder as if someone were sneaking up on him. He kept dropping things, bumping into things, and tripping over his own feet. It was as though his whole equilibrium had been thrown off.
    At three o’clock in the morning, he had gone upstairs without saying a word to Lisa. The next thing she knew, she heard a huge crash and ran upstairs to find that the window to the master bedroom had been broken out. There was blood on the broken shards of glass that were still in the window frame.
    It hadn’t crossed her mind that John had jumped out. She just wondered what the heck had happened to the window? Who had thrown something through the window? Why was there blood? But as she called for John, she realized the house had become eerily quiet.
    Hearing that sent a shiver up my spine as I recalled how quiet it had been that morning on my way to the café.
    Stepping to the edge of the window, Lisa had peered out and seen John’s body lying face down with shards of glass and broken pieces of wood from the frame all around him.
    She ran downstairs, tore open the front door, pulled her cell phone from her pocket, and dialed 9-1-1.

The Red-Eye
    B lake said her eyes welled up with tears again as she wrapped up her story.
    “I just kept asking John to hold on and asking why,” Lisa had said. “Why would he do this to himself? Why would he leave me all alone? I held his hand and could feel bones rolling around inside, broken and ripped from their muscles. I told him not to move. I don’t know if he heard me or not. His eyes were barely open. So much blood was coming out of his ears.”
    “So what did Samberg think of all this?” I asked Bea. I couldn’t help but think a guy so grounded in reality would have felt as though she were yanking his chain.
    Bea shrugged. “Blake said he didn’t know what to think about Lisa’s story. But he did say that if there were some local kids around playing tricks on the more seasoned citizens of Wonder Falls, and this was the result… well, I don’t have to tell you how he’d plan on handling it. He doesn’t play.”
    “No, he doesn’t,” I concurred. I thought back to the one time I had seen Blake interrogate a suspect. It was my good friend Min. Even though Blake had been wrong to think Min had anything to do with the crime, he’d certainly known how to interrogate. Heaven help the guy or guys who Blake had to interrogate for this prank.
    “So, are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?” Aunt Astrid asked, standing up and shuffling behind the counter to grab the full pot of coffee. “This sounds like black-eyed children.” She went around to the tables, making a little small talk as she refilled coffee cups and picked up empty dishes.
    I looked at Bea with wide eyes. “I thought black-eyed children were an urban legend—Internet hoaxes like Slender Man and The Grudge type of stories.”
    “I don’t know,” Bea said, “but remember, I had to blow this off like it was a whole lot of hoo-ha. I couldn’t tell Blake that back before the trials in 1692, women in the craft could often change their eye color to blue, green, brown, and sometimes black just as easily as they could change their clothes. I couldn’t let on that in other instances, jet-black eyes indicated something was possessed by a demon.”
    “Or demons,” Aunt Astrid added.
    “But that’s if we believe this was a real occurrence and not what Samberg says it is,” I said. “A couple of kids playing games and freaking people out just for the fun of it. What do we do?”
    Aunt Astrid put the coffee pot back on the burner and turned to face Bea and me. “I’ll tell you what we need to do. We need to do some research and find out if anywhere in history, these kinds of things have