Hardy plunks down heavy in his seat, creaks it back again, regards Jade over his steepled fingers.
“So you hoping you’re right about all this, and a lot of people die, or is it better if you’re wrong?” he asks.
“People are already dying,” Jade tells him. “Doesn’t matter what I do and don’t hope. I’m not part of it, am just, like, calling it.”
“Good answer, good answer,” Hardy tells her. “But here’s mine. I’m concerned that if you’re not locked up in back, here, then you find a way to ruin Saturday for everybody. Or at least for me and my deputies.”
“Sheriff, you can’t—”
“I know, I know, charge you or set you free. Turn you over to Child Protective Services or… or don’t. But I’ve got forty-eight hours to decide, too, don’t I? Don’t answer that. I do have forty-eight hours where I can know exactly where you are the whole time. And, the way I tally that up, that clock started last night on the pier. So your forty-eight hours will be up about ten o’clock Friday night, which’ll be well after working hours. Meaning you spend the weekend here, Jade. You miss all the festivities. Sorry.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Sir?”
“This is bullshit, sir. You can’t—”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Hardy says. “Your mom or dad comes down, sits where you are right now and pleads your case, I’ll probably have to listen, won’t I?”
Jade just stares out across the lake.
Mr. Holmes is barreling back to Proofrock now, is like a bobsled racer in the air, scraping down some frictionless channel, rocking back and forth from side to side, goggled eyes fixed on home.
“If I was eighteen—” she says, not sure where to go with that.
“This is for your own good,” Hardy tells her. “And for the good of the town.”
“I’m not the killer here, Sheriff. I’m no slasher.”
“But you do want him to ruin the big party, don’t you?”
Jade tries her best to make her eyes go dull, film over. It’s the only armor she has.
“Do I get a phone call at least?” she asks, starting to reach for her phone, but then something keeps her fixed on the… lake?
Growing up, staring out over the water, what she’d always imagined was some monster of a fish spurting up through the glistening surface, snatching a bird or three, then splashing back down. Anything to break the boredom.
Not this, though.
“Sheriff!” Jade doesn’t just say, but shrieks, just like the stupidest most bouncy cheerleader.
Hardy stands fast, his chair crashing back behind him, and he’s fast enough to see the very end of it: Mr. Holmes’s ultralight, not skimming the lake anymore, but skipping on it. Once, twice, and on the third time it sticks, Mr. Holmes’s small body crashing through one purple wing and floating through the air, floating, then cartwheeling across the hard-hard water.
Hardy’s gone faster than a sixty-one-year-old man should be able to be gone, actual papers drifting in the air behind him. Because that’s the last member of his old pirate band out there sinking in the lake, Jade knows.
“Go, sir,” she says, quietly pocketing her phone and the charger then touching the glass of the window with her fingertips, which is her version of a prayer for Mr. Holmes: the longer she keeps her fingers there and perfectly still, the better chance he has.
By degrees, then, she realizes she’s… alone? unmonitored?
She turns in wonder and Meg’s standing in the door, waiting to be seen.
“I’m to deposit you back in 1A,” she informs Jade.
“But Mr. Holmes—”
“The sheriff is on it, dear.”
“I can’t—”
“You have to, I’m sorry.”
Jade shakes her head in disappointment, regret, and sneaks one last look out the window on her way out of the office, for Hardy’s airboat, the throttle pulled back to 11.
Not yet.
“Can we just wait and see if he—?”
“I have to call emergency services, I have to call—”
“Okay, okay,” Jade says, and slips past Meg into the hall.
“We all told him to be careful in that death machine,” Meg says behind Jade, as if she’s talking to herself, is actually flustered for once. In the front office, at least two phones are ringing, meaning Jade wasn’t the only one to witness the crash.
“Oh, oh,” Jade says. “The sheriff—I have to pee, and I can’t, not in that—Sheriff said I could use this one again.”
“I don’t have time for this, Jennifer.”
“Please.”
“You can hold it.”
“I’ve been holding it.”
“Just—”
“Could you, in that thing?”
“Fine,” Meg says, and holds the door to the bathroom open.
Jade steps in, Meg of course not letting the door shut, and Jade makes a production of the complicated mechanics of her coveralls, pretty certain Meg is fully aware of what she said last week, about the window in this bathroom being rusted open.
But then the cowbell above the front door jangles and Lonnie’s trying to get his words out, is trying to tell someone, anyone, what he just saw out on the water, but he keeps sticking, can’t get it all the way out, and—
Jade pulls the stall door closed, loudly runs the slide bolt home, and then every iota of her awareness is focused on the line of shadow she can see through the crack of space between the stall door and the stall. That line is the leading edge of the door Meg is holding open. And the sound is her toe tapping.
Both fade, the tapping first, turning into quick footsteps, then the shadow, slowly blurring as the door sighs in, so she can hustle up front, talk Lonnie down.
Jade zips up much faster than she unzipped, steps out, and is up and through the window before Meg’s even told Lonnie that the sheriff’s on it, that this is being handled, thank you.
It’s trees and trees behind the sheriff’s office.
Jade crashes through them holding her arms in front of her face, and wonders if that’s another part of why slashers are so into masks: to avoid scratches. Five minutes later, when she can’t hold it anymore, she has to step behind a tree, pop a squat. Because she wasn’t lying about needing to pee in the worst way.
Five minutes after that she’s standing on the shore over by Banner Tompkins’s, her right hand opening and closing. All the boats that could scramble are out on the lake where Mr. Holmes went down, meaning… meaning what? Why do they still need to be out there? Jade’s heart sinks, then rises back into her throat, her eyebrows doing that stupid V thing she hates.
“No,” she says, a hundred seventh periods reeling through her head, “not him too, please, he’s not part of it,” and then claps her hand over her mouth when, just to make the nightmare complete, there’s a mewling sort of animalish creak over to her right, on shore.
Slowly, still holding her hand over her mouth, she cranks her head over.
It’s—it’s…
Jade can’t breathe anymore, maybe can’t breathe ever again.
It’s a shadow on four legs, tumbling after a shopping bag, a small shadow, a—
Not a dog, not a cat.
Jade feels a smile spread across her face by degrees: it’s a bear cub.
It’s just playing.
Jade shakes her head, impressed with the world for knowing just how to give her a heart attack.
When the shopping bag snags on something in the gravel, the bear cub’s moving too fast, slides past, reaching back to try to bite it, its effort the cutest thing ever, pretty much. Even to a horror chick.
“Go,” Jade says to the little bear. “Go find your mom, snuggle up close. There’s a scary bear out there somewhere, the kind that eats little guys like you.”
The bear cub stills, having heard her voice, Jade guesses, and she starts to step out past the trees, maybe snap a picture of this, but then she stops herself.
She’s a fugitive now, isn’t she?
She steps back into the deeper shadows, feeling for dry branches before giving her foot any real weight.
She still has a good line on the lake, though. On the part of the lake she needs to be watching. One of the boats’ lights are just coming on, in anticipation of dusk, and Jade shakes her head no, runs through Idaho state history dates in her head, on the idea they can somehow help Mr. Holmes: Nez Perce in the north, Shoshone in the south; Lewis and Clark, 1805; Oregon Trail, 1846 through 1969—no, 1869, shit; gold in the hills, 1860s; Henderson-Golding, 1869; Chief Joseph, 1877; becomes a state in 1890.
“I know them all, sir,” she whispers.
The lights out there just keep on, though, and none of the boats are buzzing back to Proofrock yet, and that can’t be good, can it? Keeping to the trees and watching for baby bears—for anything, anyone—Jade slips through town, her lips pressed together in an attempt to keep her eyes from crying for Mr. Holmes.
Stupid idiot, she tells herself. Senior citizen high school teacher flying a sky go-cart just so he can smoke cigarettes his wife won’t know about? What the hell did he expect? Except she already knows the answer to that: to get away. And, yes, okay already, she does it with slashers a little just the same, so what. And for Hardy an airboat is what he uses to get away, isn’t it?
Before she can stop herself, then, she’s answering for her dad, too: beer, and reliving high school. For her mom, though? What does her mom use to check out?
“Dollar store customers,” Jade mumbles, trying for a smart-ass grin but probably easing more into the “constipated grimace” category.
She hates herself more than a little for giving that voice, and slips through the staging area’s fence for a third time. There’s bodies lumbering back and forth, calling orders and stacking things, rounding out the day’s work, but they’re on the other side of the lot, the active side. Over here on the dead side, Jade’s alone.
She chooses the least-used storage shed, the one with pallets teetering in front of the door so she has to slide sideways to get in, and with her phone light she inspects her new home. It’s just junk sheathed in cobwebs. But some of the junk has a crackly-stiff tarp over it, who knows why. Jade peels the tarp, folds it into a sleeping pad of sorts, and nestles into it, not letting herself sniffle, not letting herself think of the way Mr. Holmes would look up when she was late again, and then pretend to count her tardy. Except those tardies never quite added up to detention, did they?
Goddamn him.
But at least there’s no windows in here. And, really? It’s a shed, sure, but that’s a skip and jump from a shack in the woods. All she needs now is Pamela Voorhees’ head in a tableau of flickering candles on an upturned spool. Or, you know: her father’s. If you’re gonna dream, right?
Anyway, at least now she knows Mr. Holmes wasn’t working with Hardy to drive the Terra Novans away. He had the hatred, though, didn’t he? He needed the revenge, had the investment in the community, and there’s probably some personal history Jade can’t even guess at.
“Unless I was right all along,” Jade says to herself, sitting up in the darkness. Maybe Mr. Holmes’s plane wreck was staged, is supposed to remove him from suspicion. Maybe this is just another cog of their plan, part of the setup for Saturday’s Grand Guignol, Proofrock’s version of Demons.
“You wish,” Jade says into the tarp.
Except it might explain why Hardy let her keep the sandwiches in her cargo pockets, that are pretty well flattened in their baggies now: because he knew she was going to run, and figured she might need some calories to get her through to Saturday’s big party in the water. Because… because he needs her there? They both do? To, what, frame her?
Jade has to call bullshit on that.
Though, at the same time, was it really any accident that she got that pink phone right when it could convince her all of this was real? And, aside from her, who else in Proofrock would know the slasher any better than Mr. Holmes, who took Letha’s final girl crash course over the last four years?
Jade doesn’t know which version of Mr. Holmes she wants to believe in, the one who died out on the water, or the one with a score to settle, and a blade to settle it with. And… and she doesn’t even know what color this tarp is, does she? It can’t be “dust-colored,” even though that’s what it keeps sighing up, coating her with.
Whatever.
She zones out not by listing giallos in her head like usual but by pretending she can hear the kids playing on the park that’s going to be here someday. By imagining what it would have been like to have had a park like this when she was young enough for it to matter. But she would have still ended up sitting alone in a swing at three in the morning, smoking a cigarette, wouldn’t she have?
“Run, little bear,” she says again, into the dusty crunchiness of the tarp.
She wakes with the shift change at four in the morning but nobody opens the door to toss any cutters or pry rods in on top of her, and nobody needs the tarp to cover the equipment, and Shooting Glasses’s radar doesn’t lead him to her a second time. She’s not sure what exactly she’d say to him if he did open the door, though. Probably bluster and lie, hide that she’s homeless now—homeless, jobless, and escaped from jail, sort of.
Before dawn—“Just before dawn,” she tells herself, patting herself for that tape, which is also still there—Jade is gnawing on the second sandwich (either the first was appetizer or this one’s dessert) and moving through the dark trees for the dam, to tightrope across one more time. If she’d thought ahead she’d have a pair of binoculars and more cigarettes. If she’d thought even more ahead she would have just braved the dark, bunked in Camp Blood with the rest of the ghosts, and her stolen axe. Then she’d already be most of the way over to Terra Nova. Not that there would have been any electrical sockets to charge a phone with at the abandoned camp. Not that there were in the shed, either.
That’s got to be the first thing at Terra Nova, then. Sneak in, find an unmonitored plug to juice back up, then scope the place out, get a line on Theo Mondragon.
Is she just stacking tasks in front of actually having to find him out, though?
Her big fear is that once she settles in to watch for the day, it’s just going to be business as usual: yacht people doing yacht things, construction grunts grunting over construction, nature blasting out serene and pristine all around, Theo Mondragon walking the deck or the dock, having important phone conversations.
If so, then… what? Who’s left that it could even be?
Jade walks and thinks, thinks and walks, and, even though there’s warning signs and the chance of being spotted, still, she hops up onto the concrete spine of the dam, to balance across. But not before sparking a cigarette up to keep her feet steady and sure. There’s no fence, no handrail, just nearly two hundred feet to plummet down on her left if she slips. And then about halfway across there’s the control booth to shimmy around.
At least having to be sure about each foot placement, having to track each trailing boot lace, it keeps her from dwelling too much on Mr. Holmes. She focuses hard on each next step, dials down and tries hard to think about what she’s not thinking about, as, in a slasher, that’s usually key.
What she comes up with is Cry_Wolf and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which means admitting the worst of all possibilities: Letha herself. What if the final girl is finding all these bodies specifically because she knows where she’s left them? Would that not be the best cover? What if Letha fought tooth and nail not to move out to the sticks of Idaho, and blames everyone in Terra Nova for her losing her friends, her social life, her favorite boyfriend?
Jade would allow this… except for Letha herself. Letha who made a hard phone call to Hardy to try to save the horror chick, the sad girl, the—the Ragman of Indian Lake, yes. Trick or Treat, 1986, Alex. Ragman’s peers hate him, are always crapping on him, but so what, he’s got metal, faster harder thrashier, and he finally wishes hard enough that
he gets the slasher he so thought he needed.
And it tries to kill him too.
Figures.
But no, not Letha, not the final girl. There was a moment when the slasher was getting turned on its head like that, but that moment’s over and done with. And Letha is pure, anyway—too pure. She’s not going to be the so-called final girl Leslie Vernon’s dreaming about, swinging her own panties over her head. No, Letha’s bookish, she’s virginal or close enough and she’s got the long limbs of a girl meant to run through the syrupy colors of a Dario Argento sequence. Only, where she’s running, it’s right through the Golden Age, what she’s vaulting over, it’s the Scream Boom of the late nineties, and where she’s coming down to make her stand, it’s here, it’s Proofrock.
She’s a killer, yes, but not until pushed. Not until having her good-girl veneer carved painfully away.
Jade pads up to the control booth window, can’t see through the dark glass, shimmies around anyway, and then hears the door shut behind her and has to run, run, no balance, all forward momentum, the sky all around her.
She crashes to her knees on the other side breathing hard but smiling big.
This is why she loves coming around the lake this way instead of walking two miles down for the bridge: it’s always a close call, is always the best rush.
And, where she’s landed, she’s pretty sure, is in the last act, the third-reel bodydump. Somewhere out there Letha’s probably screaming about a corpse unfolding from the ceiling, and another crammed into a cabinet.
It puts a pep in Jade’s step, just on the off-chance she can see that from far way.
She keeps to the top of the chalky bluff above Camp Blood—no choice: it’s not like you can get to Camp Blood without looping around almost all the way to Terra Nova. Two or three minutes later she can see the yacht at its usual mooring, and then the Umiak in its shadow, no longer in floating impound. Since it’s the first boat anybody takes, Jade assumes the rest of the boats are in their garages, even though all the Founders are, for once, because one of their own fell, here.
The long flat barge the construction crew drinks their coffee on, crossing before sunup each morning, is already back at Proofrock, Jade imagines, taking up ten or twelve berths, Terra Nova just renting out that whole quarter-mile of the shore.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 25