My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(103)

Jade peers behind Letha, across the lake. Not to the barge that makes a daily crossing, but to the idea of it.

Right?

Except tomorrow’s a holiday, and the lake’s closed to all powered watercraft. Only paddles and oars. Because everyone not checked into Pleasant Valley is going to be watching the movie from innertubes and canoes and dressed-up rowboats tomorrow night. Unless of course word of this massacre in Terra Nova makes it across the water. Then the staties will break Hardy’s injunction, and the media won’t be far behind.

Jade hitches along with Letha, looking behind them again— no light, which is fifty times worse—and reaches into her pocket, comes out with her phone. With her dunked phone.

Her phone with the case still leaking lake water.

Jade holds it out to the side and drops it, says to Letha, “Breadcrumbs.”

Letha nods about the solidness of that idea, pats her pajama bottom pockets for the phone she doesn’t have.

“Oh,” Jade says then, when they stumble back out into the moonlight of… of the meadow Mr. Holmes was showing them. Sheep’s Head, something like that?

“Too exposed,” Letha says, looking around like a prairie dog with a hawk complex, and Jade agrees, is letting Letha turn them around to hug the treeline, but then… there’s that light again. Even closer.

At their new rate of speed, he’s going to catch them inside two minutes, maybe less.

“No, no,” Jade says, turning them back the other way, to cross the meadow. Which no way can they do.

“Is that my dad?” Letha says, then comes up onto her toes, waving one arm. “Dad, Daddy!”

Jade winces and Letha feels it, comes around, her eyes questioning.

“It is him,” Jade says.

Letha studies Jade’s face about this, then looks up to the light drawing closer, making more of a straight line now that it can echo-locate. Maybe Theo Mondragon can even see them now, for all Jade knows. One wounded duck with a shaved head, one improbably-alive daughter.

“You don’t mean…?” Letha says. “He would never—he couldn’t—”

“He is,” Jade says. “And he has been. Sorry. I saw.”

“But Tiara.”

“I don’t know why yet,” Jade says.

“Mr. Pangborne, Mr. Baker,” Letha says. “Ladybird, Mrs.

Todd, Mr. Singleton—”

“Deacon Samuels,” Jade adds. “Those two Dutch kids.”

“Two? ”

“The other one… she’s still out there somewhere.” Jade tilts her head lakeward.

“And that—in the propeller?”

Clate Rodgers.

Jade blinks, looks behind them again, to the light bobbing in.

“Wave again,” Jade says. “You’ll see.”

Letha stares into Jade’s face again, harder, deeper, then turns to call her dad in but this time with hesitation, and not as loud: “Dad! Daddy!”

The light keeps on coming, keeps on, and then— Snap!

Yes.

The bear trap.

Letha turns to Jade and pushes her hard enough Jade spills into the tall grass. “You used me!” she nearly screams, getting what just happened. “You used me to hurt my dad!”

“To keep him from hurting us.”

Out in the trees, her dad is bellowing.

Letha steps forward but Jade grabs her by the knee.

“If it is him, and it is,” she says, “then we approach, we’re dead. If it’s not, and we stay here, then… my leg is a lot wimpier than his, right? He can’t be hurt bad?”

“No, I—”

“Five minutes,” Jade says, not letting go.

Theo Mondragon is free in two, standing again.

The chainsaw he’s carrying rips awake and Letha steps back involuntarily.

“What was that guy’s name in the stairwell?” she asks, even though she knows. Just, Letha needs to be seeing the two halves of Ross Pangborne up and down the stairs right now, and what might have made him like that.

“It can’t be,” Letha says, but she’s talking to herself now.

“Do you want to stay and find out?” Jade asks, Theo Mondragon slinging the chainsaw back and forth before him like Leatherface’s last dance. He’s cutting the brush and limbs out of his way, and kind of lurching now from the bear trap’s bite.

“Shit,” Letha says, looking around for what to do, where to go, how to live.

“This is gonna suck the big one,” Jade says, standing with Letha’s help, then pointing with her lips to where she means.

Letha looks across, doesn’t get it at first, then does.

“No,” she says.

“Only way,” Jade says.

“We can—” Letha tries.

“Not enough time,” Jade says back, not letting her finish because whatever she’s going to say isn’t taking her hurt leg into account.

“You’re sure he won’t look there first?” Letha asks.

“Would you?” Jade asks.

When Letha has no answer, the two of them lunge ahead to the pile of rotting elk. That’s what it is now. Not a killing field anymore, but a mound of corpses, which Jade guesses must be some stage of cleanup: pack them tight enough that a front-end loader can scoop them up in as few runs as possible, since heavy machinery leaves deep ruts in the national forest.