A Tiger's Tale (A Call of the Wilde Mystery) Read Online Free Page B

A Tiger's Tale (A Call of the Wilde Mystery)
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skidded backward and bumped into the cabinet. I gave Ozeal a quick nod, turned, and walked out the door.
    Outside, I shoved my arms into the raincoat and flipped up the hood. Kai caught up to me at my Suburban, where I was pulling a flashlight from the door’s side pocket.
    “Grace, what are you doing?”
    “Going to look around,” I said, turning to march toward Boris’s enclosure.
    “Brooke has been gone since Wednesday,” Kai said, walking beside me. “It’s been raining almost nonstop since then. If there was any evidence, the chance of finding it in the dark is slim.”
    “If?”
    “Yes, if.”
    “You don’t think she was kidnapped.”
    “I didn’t say that. But you have to look at the facts.”
    “Okay, let’s start with this one: Boris said Brooke was taken. He didn’t say she’d run away. Taken.”
    I tried to stay calm and keep my argument as logical as possible, reminding myself that Kai was a scientist, and even though he accepted my ability, it had been a while since we talked about it, at least as it applied to his world. No matter how much my temper was riding me, I had to remember that as a crime scene investigator, Kai was used to working with facts and evidence.
    “Could Boris have misunderstood?”
    “He didn’t.”
    “Grace.” As we trudged past a small pavilion dotted with picnic tables, he snagged my arm and pulled me out of the rain. “Just stop for a second and listen. Brooke is a teenager with issues. Her own parents think she ran away.”
    I could barely see his face in the glow of the distant security light. But I could tell he was irritated. Water ran down the lines of his furrowed brow and dripped from the tips of his hair.
    I knew it was hard to understand that a tiger’s worry trumped Brooke’s own parents. But that’s what I needed—to be understood. Having Kai question me hurt.
    A calming chill swept over me. My self-defense instinct has always been to freeze people out. But in my heart I knew something was different with Kai.
    Once you let someone in . . .
    The thought brought my hackles up. “Look, if you don’t believe me—”
    “I never said I didn’t believe you. But you’ve told me that you feel an animal’s emotions. It affects you.”
    “Not really,” I lied.
    “So that night you came over to watch a movie and fell asleep in the first five minutes wasn’t because of Dusty?”
    I flushed. It had been one of our first dates. Kai’s cat, Dusty, had curled up in my lap—content and comfy—and his mellowness had washed over me like a warm bath. I’d conked out almost instantly.
    “That wasn’t my fault. I’d had a really long day. You remember the deal with the water buffalo and the lady with the chickens?”
    “Not easy to forget that story.”
    “Well, I was tired and I didn’t have my guard up.”
    “Exactly. You can be influenced, which makes you less objective.”
    “This is different.”
    “How?”
    “It just is.”
    I started pacing to release some of the frustration that had started to boil through me. After a few seconds, I realized it was a very tigerlike thing to do and stopped.
    “Why can’t you just take me at my word?” I asked.
    “I’m not doubting your word. I’m questioning the circumstances of the situation.”
    “Fine. You have questions—ask.”
    “It’s never that easy with you.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you don’t like to answer.”
    “That’s not—”
    He held up a hand and cut me off. “I’ll rephrase. You don’t like to
explain
your answers.”
    I shook my head, at a loss. Where had all this come from? I felt like I was back at square one with him, trying to substantiate something too nebulous to be proven.
    “There’s nothing to explain,” I told him as rain pounded around us. “Brooke was kidnapped. No explanation needed.”
    “What do you want me to do, Grace? I can’t call in a kidnapping based on what a tiger told you.”
    I knew that, logically. The trouble was, I wasn’t

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