She does wonder if she maybe just peed a little, though. Or a lot.
“For trespassing,” Jade pulls out of the thinnest of thin air.
Letha steps in, says, “What are you looking at?” in a way that can either be charged honestly and innocently, which Jade so wants to believe, or can be charged with that cat-playing-with-its-food way, which would mean that Letha completely knew her dad wasn’t after wasps earlier. That she knew it was a different breed of pest getting taken care of. And yes, Mars Baker, a shotgun would have been more efficient. Good one, sir.
Shit.
“Looking for the bear,” Jade says.
“It’s still around?” Letha says in either real or mock shock, holding the candle away so she can lean over the sink and study Terra Nova in the dark, her dad’s disc of light just barely gone into the woods. Or, if not gone, then she doesn’t say anything about it.
“Don’t know,” Jade says. “That’s why I’m, y’know, looking.”
Every word that comes out of her mouth is stupider than the last.
“You’re running away, aren’t you,” Letha says then, turning around to fix Jade in her hundred-watt caring eyes. “The sheriff called over looking for you.” Letha sets the guttering candle down by the sink between them.
“C-called over?” Jade stammers.
“Um, yeah?”
“But—”
Jade pulls her phone out, like that proves the lack of signal.
“Oh, did he not turn that off?”
Letha gets her own phone up, shakes her head at how stupid this is.
“We—” she starts, then picks her words more carefully: “Some of the construction crew was spending too much time on their phones, and Instagramming stuff too. Mr. Baker said the floorplans for some of our houses could be in the backgrounds of their selfies, so—”
She leaves that hanging.
“So?” Jade prompts.
“Mr. Pangborne had a jammer installed? The yacht’s out of the radius, but all the houses are in it, or in them, however it works.”
“A jammer,” Jade repeats.
“Like an umbrella, except it blocks from the—”
“No, I get it,” Jade says. “Is that legal?”
“There’s no guarantee of service over here,” Letha says with a shrug. “It’s the wilderness, right?”
What do they call those jammers, though? She’s heard it online. A… a rape tent, or something? At least when they’re used to keep a victim from calling the cops.
Or, a potential victim.
“Hardy was warning you about me?” she says.
“No, no,” Letha says, crossing to Jade to touch her forearm, swat that possibility away. “He was worried that you might be in danger.”
“Figured he’d be busy.”
“I mean, his office called.”
“Meg.”
“Tiff’s mom?”
“You caught that machete last night,” Jade tells Letha.
“T was behind me,” Letha says. “It could have—she might have gotten hurt.”
“It’s for tomorrow night,” Jade says. “Hardy didn’t take it?”
“I told him my dad was putting it in the safe. He had to… you know.”
“Take me to jail, lock me up for my own good, keep me from being a menace to society.”
“He really cares, Jade.”
“This too,” Jade says, unholstering Just Before Dawn. “I couldn’t throw it. That’s… it’s why I came over.”
She holds Just Before Dawn across.
“A videotape,” Letha says, like identifying a bug.
“Yeah, it’s the only way—”
“We don’t have a player on the yacht?” Letha says, kind of in apology.
Jade winces, says, “So—wait, does this mean you coudn’t watch Bay of Blood?”
“Bay of—oh, oh, yeah. No, I’m sorry. But I’ve still got it—” She’s walking and talking, Jade’s wrist somehow in her hand now, like she’s been arrested in the kindest way possible.
“No, we can’t, your dad—” Jade starts, unsure how to say what she needs to say.
“He won’t mind,” Letha says, pulling, not stopping, “won’t even know I’ve got someone over. The yacht’s so crowded tonight, everybody’s here for the Fourth! And for, you know, Mr. Samuels. Anyway, my dad’s room’s all the way in the bow, we’ll be—”
“I can’t, I’ve got to—”
“Walk around the lake in the dark with a bear in the area?” Letha asks, dragging Jade across the living room now. “I mean, if you want, I can call the sheriff, have him send a boat.”
“Or, or. You could—”
“My stepmother won’t let me drive the boat at night,” Letha says with ill-feigned disgust. They’re coming through the front door now, are on the porch.
Jade immediately clocks the inky black trees Theo Mondragon is about to come slouching out of in his burly-lithe way, the bulb in his headlamp off but still warm.
“Okay, okay,” Jade says ahead to Letha, giving up this futile resistance, stepping in alongside so as to get up the pier and into the boat faster, please. If Theo Mondragon really doesn’t know his daughter has a guest for the night? That can almost maybe work. Or, it can work one hell of a lot better than getting caught out in the open by him when his hands are still red.
“So where did you spend the day?” Letha asks in a making-conversation bid.
“Camp Blood,” Jade monotones, looking behind them at the candlelight flickering in the kitchen window like a beacon.
“That old—?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t it scary over there?”
“You tell me.”
“I know I’ll never go there again,” Letha says, doing a full-body shiver, the memory of Deacon Samuels apparently washing through her.
“I’m serious about tomorrow night,” Jade says.
“The—the slasher?” Letha’s lips are pressed together in a way that feels one hundred percent patronizing. “So from… from Camp Blood,” she says, changing direction for them now that they’re up on the pier, “from over there could you see… out onto the lake?”
The way she’s picking through her words, Jade can hear what she’s trying not to say, as she doesn’t want to say it if Jade doesn’t already know: “Mr. Holmes.”
Letha looks over, her eyes blinking fast and tragic.
“It’s funny,” Letha says, then takes Jade’s forearm in both of her hands, draws best-friend close, whispers, “not funny-funny, but… ironic, I guess?”
“What’s ironic?” Jade asks, not sure she wants to know.
“My dad was always saying he wished he had a BB gun for him,” Letha says, letting Jade assemble the rest in her head. But Jade has pieces Letha doesn’t know she has: Mars Baker tracking that duck across the water for Theo Mondragon, saying he should have used a shotgun; Mars Baker saying that to a guy who just had a nailgun.
Jade looks back to the woods.
“The bear?” Letha asks, pulling Jade closer.
Jade shakes her head no. Well. The “bear” that killed Deacon Samuels, yeah. The one that, say, was out turning their handy-dandy jammer on when a certain history teacher buzzed over for the hundred and first time. No, Theo Mondragon didn’t have a BB gun or a shotgun handy, but he could pick up the only gun handy: the one that spits nails.
Why not fling a golden nail up into the sky at the annoyance Mr. Holmes most certainly was? It’s just a gesture. It’s not like the nails are arrows, it’s not like they’re made for flying. It’s not like they’re meant to rip through a Dacron wing.
But what if one did, right? A one-in-a-million shot? Isn’t that exactly the kind of shot someone like Theo Mondragon’s been making his whole life already?
And what if, for sixty seconds after that, Theo Mondragon stood alongside three construction grunts and watched the little kit plane he’d just shot founder in the air, finally nosedive into the lake, launching its old pilot out i
nto the water?
What if Theo Mondragon had just accidentally killed someone in broad daylight, and done it in front of three witnesses? Probably what he’d do then was what Deacon Samuels had already done: stuff those grunts’ hands with cash, assure them it was an accident, it was just a joke that got out of hand, but someone of his station didn’t need the kind of media attention this could bring, surely they could understand, couldn’t they? And then… he probably didn’t sleep on it, probably didn’t sleep at all. Who would?
What he would do, though, what would make sense at two in the morning, would be to involve himself with the construction the next day, and maybe send everyone but those three back across the lake. So he, the quintessential businessman, taking risk analysis and cost-benefit margins into severe account, could take care of business. Nobody on the yacht would think twice about a nailgun going off in Terra Nova. Nailguns were always going off in the houses.
And—and from his angle, he’d have to do it, wouldn’t he? If he didn’t, Shooting Glasses and Mismatched Gloves and Cody could pull this whole enterprise down. Pull his whole life down.
“What is it?” Letha says, peering over into Jade’s eyes.
“Just… thinking about that BB gun,” Jade says back.
“He would never get one, though,” Letha says. “He hates guns.”
Of course he does, Jade answers inside. All slashers do.
She stands up fast when a light’s bobbing through the trees. When Letha starts to look back to see what’s got Jade’s attention, Jade hustles them ahead.
“Hungry,” she says. “Haven’t eaten since, since…”
As if she could.
Except then she does, two plates’ worth of smoked salmon and crackers and leftover potato skins warmed in the microwave, delivered back to Letha’s room because Jade says she doesn’t want to startle anybody in the tight halls, meaning: there are no other girls on this yacht in coveralls, with hair like all the crayons melted together at the bottom of the box.
The salmon is so good, too, and the potato skins themselves, being left over, have a sort of skin over them that’s the most wonderful rubbery sensation to bite through. Each time it scrapes against Jade’s gums, she almost has to wince in a delight so pure she feels guilty for it.
“More if you want it,” Letha says in her jaunty, nonjudgmental way.
What they’re drinking is sparkling grape juice. Only non-alcoholic beverages for final girls.
“What were you, um, doing out there?” Jade asks between bites and gulps.
Letha’s nibbling at the one potato skin she has on her plate, which Jade’s pretty sure she just forked over so Jade wouldn’t have to eat alone.
“In the houses?” Letha asks, which feels like a stall.
Jade chews, nods.
Letha shrugs, studies the wall of her grand bedroom, and the way she doesn’t answer at first makes Jade sure that she was part of the hunt, that she was flushing construction grunts for her father, that she was supposed to lure them out in the open.
“Looking for you?” she says at last, in a small voice, her shoulders up by her ears.
“Me?”
“The sheriff—he’s worried about you, Jade.”
“So he did call.”
“It was Tiffany’s mom the first time. I wasn’t lying about that.”
“He probably just thinks I’m a threat or something.”
“You could never—”
“So you came out with a candle to look for me?”
“The houses aren’t locked yet,” Letha says with a shrug. “And… and you already left me those pants before?”
“So you… knew I could walk around the lake?” Jade says, following this logic.
“I couldn’t sleep, thinking of you over here without a blanket, afraid, alone.”
“Thanks?” Jade says, the word unfamiliar in her mouth. “Not really tired, though, I mean—”
“And if my dad saw you,” Letha adds, no eye contact for this.
“He… doesn’t like trespassers?”
“He’s kind of really into privacy, I guess?”
“Hardy said someone was always calling Mr. Holmes’s plane in, yeah,” Jade says.
Letha tries to suppress her grin, ends up standing to take her earrings out at the dresser, tilting her head this way and that. “It was kind of pervy,” she says.
“Pervy?”
“My stepmom…” Letha closes her eyes to get through the next part: “On the top deck, she’ll—she’ll lock the deck door and tan her… all of her?”
“No top,” Jade fills in, and about Mr. Holmes, “that dog.”
Letha’s dabbing some solution or formula onto her eyelashes now, blinking fast from it. “She doesn’t like tan lines,” she says.
“White woman married to a black man,” Jade fills in. “She’s trying to catch up.”
“She’s white?” Letha says, lilting her voice up like she might really have not noticed.
Jade waits a beat then looks away, kind of impressed. “She doesn’t want to peel out of her shirt in the bedroom and have literal headlights,” she says, doing bright beams in front of her chest with her hands, Letha clocking that in the mirror.
“Stop!” she says, giggling, and Jade wonders if this is what it’s like, having a best friend. One who’s so unselfconsciously applying moisturizer to her face now that it seems Jade and her must have been connected at the hip since kindergarten.
But then, “What’s that smell?” Jade asks.
Letha angles her head up to sniff, says, “Oh yeah—you’re not allergic, are you?”
“To what?”
“Lavender and melatonin,” Letha says, sitting down on her bed with one long leg folded under her. “A diffuser. Helps me sleep. It’s on a timer.”
“Flowers,” Jade says, patting her pockets for the charger still up on the second floor of the last house she was in.
“The lavender,” Letha says with a shrug. “Makes you think purple thoughts.”
“You have a phone charger, maybe?”
Letha does, and of course her model of phone’s generations newer than Jade’s clunker.
“Want to ask Mr. Pangborne?” she says, standing to go do just that. “He’s got every connector known to man, and some that aren’t out until next year probably.”
“Not important,” Jade says, blinking against the sleeping pills misting through the air.
“I’ll sleep on the futon,” Letha says, gathering an extra blanket and pillow off the bed.
Jade tries to protest but Letha isn’t having it.
“What time is it?” Jade asks, knowing full well it can’t even be seven o’clock yet.
“We can watch a movie!” Letha answers back, and aims a remote at the flat-screen on the wall.
“What do you got?” Jade asks.
“Everything?” Letha answers, and, of course: her dad’s the media mogul. She tosses Jade the remote, says, “Just say a title to it.”
“To the remote?”
To remote, yes.
Jade looks down to it for a microphone hole, doesn’t see one, finally just says timidly, to test Letha’s “everything,” “The Dorm That Dripped Blood.”
The movie rolls up by its alternate title Pranks, the cursor blinking on the play button.
“What’s it about?” Letha says.
“Kittens and rainbows, obviously,” Jade says, and falls through all the video shelves in her head, knowing this is her one chance, that she has to pick one single movie that can show Letha how to fight, how to survive, how to win tomorrow night. And Just Before Dawn is practically spinning its two reel hubs in her pocket. But no. Even though it’s 1981, it’s still too seventies for a newbie. No, Letha needs something she can recognize herself in, something where the killer isn’t a cartoon, something—
“Kristy,” Jade says into the remote, with authority.
Which brings up all the actresses with that name.
“Kristy, 2014,”
Jade corrects.
Same result, different shuffle of faces.
“Who you looking for?” Letha asks, snuggled into her blanket on the futon.
“Different dorm that dripped blood,” Jade says, scrolling through. “A Lifetime movie, actually.”
“Like Hallmark?”
“More stalkers and psycho grannies.”
Kristy’s not there, though. Probably because the copy Jade watched was downloaded onto her phone a bit at a time over five nights, and had two stacks of different-colored subtitles on it, neither of which she could read, all of which were in the way.
It would have been perfect, though. Justine, the girl in Kristy, fights. It’s probably more of a home invasion than a slasher, but Letha doesn’t need to know motivations or builds at this point, or what can count as “home.” She just needs to feel a girl insisting on her own life, and living through the night, and having that slow-down moment where she stops running, turns to face her attacker.
“Wait,” Letha says, rolling off the futon, pulling her phone up, dialing before Jade can stop her. “Dad?” she says, and repeats the title and the year to him, adding a “Pleeease?” at the end, batting her eyelashes even though this is audio-only. “We really want to watch it…”
She sits up straighter from whatever her dad says back. Sits up straight and looks over to Jade like oops.
“Just—no, of course not, Ginn’s scared enough already. I’m talking to someone on the phone, Dad. We want to watch it at the same time… someone from school… no, it’s not… it’s a Lifetime movie? Thank you, just check, thank you.”
She hangs up, sits back hugging a pillow and making a face that Jade guesses means “parents,” and then before Jade can even ask what exactly that was about, the flat-screen on Letha’s bedroom wall fizzes, resolves back with what Theo Mondragon is pushing to it from upstairs, downstairs, “the bow,” Jade has no real sense.
“Where is he?” she asks.
“They’re probably up on deck?” Letha says with a shrug. “He sleeps up there sometimes.”
Of course he does, Jade thinks. Because creeping out of a bedroom and down a hall can draw attention. Slipping over the railing when you’re already on-deck is nothing, though. And he probably does use a little Zodiac boat with a trolling motor. Or, it’s not like he can’t swim the lake, or walk around it.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 28