Case File 13 #3 Read Free Page B

butterflies?”
    â€œWhat?” Angelo jerked his gaze from the woods. “Oh. No, I’m sure we can see them another time.”
    â€œWhy so quiet then?” Carter asked.
    Angelo tapped his fingers on the car window and looked at Carter. “I’ve been thinking about what you heard out there.”
    â€œThe kid?”
    â€œWhat if it wasn’t a kid?” Angelo asked. “What if it wasn’t even human?”
    Nick narrowed his eyes. “What are you saying?”
    Angelo opened his monster notebook to a page with a series of names written in bold red ink. Momo, Yowie, Meh-Teh, Raksha, Kikomba, the Great Bear, Yeti, Sasquatch.
    â€œBigfoot?” Nick asked, unsure if Angelo was joking.
    Angelo flipped the page to where a picture of a large, hairy creature was pasted next to a map of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The map was covered with blue dots, each of which had a date written beside it.
    â€œJune 1980,” he said. “Two campers smelled something like rotting garbage. A few minutes later, they heard snapping branches and a twelve-foot-tall creature came running down the side of a hill.”
    He tapped another dot. “In 1998, a family thought they saw a really big homeless guy dressed in animal fur.”
    â€œMaybe it was a homeless guy,” Carter said. “You know, one of those hermits.”
    Angelo pointed to a picture of a deep, animal-like footprint. “Not unless he had feet six inches longer than a size-twelve shoe.” He flipped through several pages of notes. “There are dozens of reports of Bigfoot sightings in this area.”
    â€œWhere did you get all this stuff?” Nick asked. He knew Angelo collected a lot of monster information. But this was amazingly detailed, even for him.
    Angelo opened his pack and took out the new iPad his mom had given him for a birthday present the week before. He tapped a few links and pulled up a website with a picture of a large, hairy creature next to a map of the United States. “The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. I’ve been following them for years. But I looked a little more closely when I knew we’d be near here.”
    Carter stared out the window at the darkening woods. “So somewhere in those trees there might be a twelve-foot-tall beast with feet the size of snowshoes?”
    At that moment, the car jerked to the right and Nick’s head banged against the window. “What happened?” he yelped as his dad pulled the car off the freeway. He stared out the front windshield, halfway sure they’d just hit a Yeti.
    â€œDidn’t you see the sign?” Dad cried. “There’s a campground here with openings.”

“I’m not so sure about this,” Mom said as Dad steered the car slowly down a narrow road.
    â€œWhat’s not to be sure of?” Dad asked, staring into the darkness ahead of them. “You wanted to go camping, and that’s just what we’re doing.”
    â€œI wanted to go camping in a state campground near the beach. This looks like the kind of area where you’d hide a dead body.”
    Nick had been looking forward to this trip for weeks. But although he hated to admit it, he sort of agreed with his mother. The road they were on didn’t look like anyone had driven over it in years. Weeds poked up through the middle of the asphalt and the trees seemed to be getting closer and closer to the road the farther they went. “Are you sure there’s an actual campground here?” he asked.
    From where he was sitting, Nick saw his dad’s jaw clench. “Maybe I forgot the stovefuel. And maybe I made the reservation for the wrong month. But I can read. I definitely saw a sign that said S WEET W ATER C AMPGROUND . N O R ESERVATIONS R EQUIRED .”
    â€œI think it’s awesome,” Carter added. “The woods look totally creepy. I’ll bet we run into a Sasquatch before we even get