The Scariest Tail (A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 4) Read online

  Lisa Roy outlined the day as if it were nothing special. John had been fine until she’d left for the store in the early evening.

  “I had forgotten eggs, or milk, or butter, or something.” She paused for a second, trying to remember why she had gone to the store, then shook her head. “I can’t remember.”

  Blake gently urged her to continue.

  “So, when I got home and stepped into the house, John came flying from the kitchen, dashing toward the front door as if he were going to run outside. But when he saw me there, he stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me.”

  Blake said Lisa had looked directly into his eyes as she’d spoken. There was no shiftiness or agitation in her facial expression or voice. He was convinced she was telling him the truth.

  “When I looked at him,” she continued, “I saw a man who was terrified out of his mind. John was all pale. His eyes were wide, and he was sweating terribly.”

  Lisa told Blake that John had kept repeating, “They said they needed to use the phone.” He’d said it over and over as he searched the house.

  “Who?” Lisa asked while she took off her jacket and hung her purse on the peg across from the door. “Who needed to use the phone?”

  “The two kids,” John said. “The two kids I let in the house. They just said they needed to use the phone.”

  Lisa suddenly became very afraid. For some crazy reason, John had let two people in the house to use the phone. He was a trial attorney who did work with the public defender’s office. He was no stranger to the seedier elements of life, and he knew better than to let strangers into the house.

  Blake asked her if she had seen the people John had let in and if she could give him a description, but she shook her head. Lisa insisted she never saw the people or kids John had claimed he let in the house. She said John had taken both of her hands in his, and she had felt them trembling.

  “Their eyes. Their eyes were completely black,” John had said.

  Both Aunt Astrid and I sat back when we heard that, as if we had both been given a jolt of electricity.

  “Contact lenses.” Lisa had insisted as she tried to calm her husband down. She looked at Blake, shaking her head and repeating how she knew it all sounded crazy and that it probably didn’t even mean anything. If there were any people in the house and they did have black eyes, Lisa was convinced they were teenagers or young adults getting into the Halloween spirit or rebelling against their parents and society at large by being creepy.

  Blake asked her where John had said the kids went, but Lisa gave him a very strange answer. She said John didn’t know. According to John, they’d shown up at the door. He’d let them in. They scared the hell out of him, and just as he was about to run out of the house, Lisa had come home and the kids were gone. Vanished.

  Of course, Blake asked if she had searched the house, and she said she had. She grabbed a carving knife from the cutlery block in the kitchen, and with her husband, John, begging her to just leave with him, she searched every room. They went down into the basement and checked every corner, even places they both knew no human could fit. They even checked the attic that could only be accessed by a ladder that pulled down from the ceiling and made enough noise to wake the dead in the cemetery ten miles away.

  Lisa continued, saying John had insisted there were two pale-faced children who came to the door and asked to use the phone. He said he had let them in even though something inside him had screamed at him to slam the door shut. And after the kids were in the house and the door was shut behind them, they had looked at John with black, bottomless eyes.

  “Oh dear,” Aunt Astrid said. “That is very weird.”

  Bea nodded and covered her heart with her left hand. She felt a great deal of sadness and confusion about the situation, but not just from Jake. A good deal of Lisa’s emotional trauma had rubbed off on Blake. When he’d come over to Bea’s house that morning, he had a negative residue on him and didn’t even know it.

  “But it gets worse,” Bea said.

  Lisa had gone on to say that John had been acting strangely the whole night. Even after they’d checked the whole house, he couldn’t seem to wind down. He’d paced as if he were a caged tiger and kept mumbling to himself, acting like someone who was in a huge hurry to leave but couldn’t find his keys. In bed, he’d tossed and turned the entire night, insisting all the lights in the lower part of the house stayed on just in case they had to get down the stairs quickly. More than once when his eyelids had gotten too heavy to fight, he’d dozed for a couple minutes then sat bolt upright, looking around frantically and whimpering as though he were a child who had woken up to find his nightlight had gone out.

  Finally, after neither of them had slept much, the sun began to lighten the sky. John got out of bed and began walking the floors. Lisa couldn’t sleep with him in that kind of state, so she got up and made coffee. She suggested they both take a personal day and 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

  Blake 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 been seen before. Cath, bring your laptop to my house and check on the Internet to see if you notice any similarities in any of the stories online or if you think they’re mostly fiction. Bea, you can help me look through the library and see if we can find any references to children with black eyes. That is where I suggest we start.” Aunt Astrid pushed her wild, flowing locks back behind her shoulder and straightened her back.

  “So meet at your house. Will there be food there?” I asked.

  “Maybe we should order some Chinese food?” Bea suggested.

  “Count me in.” I grabbed a rag and got to work, cleaning up the empty tables and washing the dishes.

  I was surprised the rest of the afternoon went by smoothly and without any crisis or incident. Plenty of our regular customers came in, including my friend Min and his sweetheart Amalia.

  “Hey, Cath!” She waved excitedly as she walked in. “I gotta ask you a favor.”

  “Okay.” I looked her up and down suspiciously. “Step into my office.” We took a couple of steps away from the counter as Min gave me a happy wave and talked with Bea. “What can I do for you?”

  “Min mentioned to me that you were a really fantastic artist,” she said.

  I shook my head, a little surprised. I had loved to draw in high school, and I wasn’t bad at it, but I’d never thought I was fantastic. I kept most of my artistic endeavors to myself. Only Treacle knew that I kept a sketchpad under my bed, and that was only because he was one of my favorite subjects.

  “I’ve been known to dabble. Why?”

  She looked around at Min then back at me, putting her hand up as if whispering a secret.

  “Min’s birthday is coming up.”

  “Holy moly! You’re right. I completely forgot. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Hey, no biggie,” she said. “But what I wanted to ask you was if you thought you could draw a picture for Min’s birthday. I’ll pay you, of course. And I’ll take care of putting it in a frame. But I think it would be an awesome gift to give him. We can even make it from both of us.”

  “Well, I think I could if you give me a picture to draw from. And I’d never take any money from you for it. That is out of the question.”

  “I’ve got a picture already. I was hoping you’d say yes.” She giggled joyfully as she dug in her purse, which was the size of a small suitcase. She pulled out an envelope to hand to me, and she was practically bouncing with excitement. I tucked it into my back pocket just as Min was sauntering over, holding two to-go cups of Bea’s fabulous tea with lavender-infused honey.

  “What are you two talking about?” he asked, leaning in to give me a peck on the cheek.

  “Nothing,” Amalia said. “Just plotting world domination one coffee shop at a time. You want in?”

  “Is that all?” Min asked.

  “That and where to get some really tasty barbeque ribs.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Amalia came up with the oddest things to say, but she was the only person I knew who could get away with saying them and sound totally sane.

  “What are you guys doing tonight?” I asked, waiting to hear the details of some horribly romantic plan that included champagne and rose petals and violins.

  “I’ve actually got to catch a red-eye to New York tonight,” Min said. “I have a meeting with some board members for I can’t even remember what. So this tea is about it, then I’ll be on my way.”

  “I’ve got a double shift at the nursing home, so I’m going to work and then recuperate for another two days.”

  “It’s tough having to work for a living, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, if only we knew someone who could pay all our bills and buy all our groceries for us all the time,” Amalia said with such a hysterically funny serious face that I thought I was going to bust a gut.

  “They should pay just to be our friends,” I added.

  “Right?” She looked up at Min and started to laugh.

  “I think I might start paying to keep you two away from each other,” he said. “Amalia, you’re a bad influence. Or wait, is it Cath who’s the bad influence? Either way, you two together are too much.”

  I laughed and slipped behind the counter. I grabbed two homemade biscotti dipped in caramel and chocolate, tossed them into one of our festive orange-and-purple Halloween Brew-Ha-Ha carry-out bags, and handed them to Amalia.

  “On the house. And Amalia, stop in after you’ve recovered from your double shift. We can talk some more.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  She and Min waved good-bye and left the café. Just a short while later, we were all locking the place up and arranging to meet at Aunt Astrid’s house for some research and Chinese food.

  I really didn’t expect for things to take the turn they did.

  The Happy Family

  When I got home, I went to my bedroom and pulled out my sketchbook and pencils. The pages mostly contained detailed images of Treacle. I drew them as lifelike as I could.

  There were also a couple of drawings of the Brew-Ha-Ha immediately after the fire. I had gone back in the early morning after the investigation of the mysterious fire to scribble a few sketches.

  I’d also drawn a caricature of Darla as a zombie that felt extremely satisfying to put on paper. I’d made sure every boil, blister, and patch of decay was as realistic as possible. The picture made me smile every time I saw it.

  After tossing the book and pencils on my bed, I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and threw it on top of them. I’d start drawing later. I grabbed my laptop and headed back out, happy that I had some research and Chinese food to tend to.

  As I walked down the sidewalk and crossed the street, I noticed that the tension I had felt in the air that morning was gone. I saw people driving, raking leaves, and jogging. My little part of Wonder Falls seemed back to normal, at least. Who knew what was going on just one block over? The world could have dropped off over there, and I would never know it.

  After I let myself into Aunt Astrid’s house, I inhaled deeply, smelling the wonderful aroma of egg rolls and my favorite, beef and peppers.

  “Hey, we got you some tofu and sprouts,” Bea shouted from the kitchen. I passed by a stack of paperback novels on Aunt Astrid’s coffee table as I walked through the living room. She had a frighteningly complete collection of Jackie Collins novels, her guilty pleasure.

  “I do hope you’re kidding,” I said as I stepped into the kitchen. Unlike Bea’s very modern home, Aunt Astrid had a flair for the traditional. The walls of her kitchen were painted an olive green. Everyone gathered around a thick oak table that had a bench on one side and mismatched chairs on the other. Her living room was boho-chic to match her peace-and-love attitude. And every flat surface was covered with at least one stack of books.

  I cleared myself a small square of wood on the bench at the table, sat down, and propped my computer up on a stack of books so I could eat while I did my research.

  “Bea, don’t tease your cousin so much. It isn’t her fault she can eat anything she wants and not gain a pound.” Aunt Astrid placed my container of pepper steak, rice, and three egg rolls in front of me.

  I looked over the books at Bea, who was crossing her eyes at me
.

  “Oh, what did you get?” I asked her, more concerned with food at the moment than black-eyed tweens or anything that might be chewing at our psychically implemented security system.

  “The Happy Family. Mixed veggies in a lobster sauce, no MSG.”

  My aunt had what she always had—an extra-large container of shrimp fried rice that she would stretch out for three days.

  We began to eat, and the food was delicious. But as the evening went on and we read more and more stories about black-eyed kids, we started to realize that what Lisa Roy had told Detective Samberg might have been more sinister than we’d first imagined.

  I knew I couldn’t always believe what I read on the Internet. But true or not, the stories were still pretty compelling.

  One woman claimed a black-eyed kid robbed her of her casino winnings in Florida. A dude in New Mexico claimed he’d seen an army of them flood off a space ship. My personal favorite was a lady in Portland, Oregon who claimed to have been impregnated by a black-eyed man and said she had black-eyed twins as a result. Of course, when asked to produce the little bundles of joy, she revealed they were with their father on the planet Seti-Alpha Five.

  “I’m not really finding anything that doesn’t sound like memoirs of a crackpot.” I shut my laptop and took another bite of egg roll.

  “Yeah. I can’t say I’m finding anything too substantial here either,” Bea said, closing a big green book with worn and weathered yellow pages.

  Aunt Astrid stood up and stretched. “We just don’t have enough to go on.” She stifled a yawn. “If only we could have talked to John before he…”

  “Took his big leap,” I said.

  “Cath, have a little compassion,” Bea said. “We don’t know if these beings had something to do with his suicide or if he was really torn up on the inside due to some other influence.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny, but it is what the guy did. And I for one think that maybe there was more to the story than we or even Samberg were told.”