My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(118)

The corners of Mr. Holmes’s eyes crinkle like he appreciates the effort.

“Will she or won’t she what?” he manages to get out, and the massacre they’re in becomes just mute backdrop for the moment, a movie going on in the next theater over.

Will she or won’t she? Jade repeats, inside, feeling through it.

Where is this from? She knows, she does, she— No.

She closes her eyes.

It’s what she told Hardy and Letha and Mr. Holmes her mom was asking herself, sitting in the car at that gas station in Idaho Falls, wasn’t it? It’s what she wrote in her letter to Letha.

And—and her deal with Holmes, to get her diploma. She has to pass her orals. She has to answer this one question for him truthfully, the same as he confessed to her about having started the fire in 1965.

His fingers tighten in her hand.

Jade opens her eyes, still shaking her head no.

“Will she—” she starts, breathing so deep now to finally be saying it, after all these years, “will she or won’t she… be a grandma before she’s thirty. The doctor was—was to see if he’d gotten me preg-preg—or not.”

And Jade only thought she was crying before. Her whole face is leaking now, though, and it’s from—it’s from deeper than she’s ever felt.

She’s finally telling someone. She’s finally saying it. It’s not just inside her, now, it’s out in the world, it’s real, it really happened. She wasn’t down in Idaho Falls to get baby aspirin pumped from her stomach, baby aspirin was just the first thing her mom saw on the impulse rack by her register, Keyser S?ze–style. No, they were down there to see if—if she had something else inside her.

Mr. Holmes closes his eyes like this hurts him more than his head injury, more than his leg, more than anything.

“I’m—I should have—” he says, and uses his left hand to pull her face to his neck now, and, this close, Jade can feel the tremor passing through his body, the… Twitch of the Death Nerve, yes. Also known as A Bay of Blood.

Thank you, Mario Bava.

Jade pulls Mr. Holmes closer, as close as she can, but she can’t stop it. He’s dying. Right now this actual instant while he’s in her arms, he’s dying.

“Somebody should, somebody should…” he says, and Jade mumbles the end into his neck, her lips right against his rough skin: “Somebody will, sir.”

When she looks up to him his eyes are glassy, and he’s gone, is—say it, she tells herself: he’s history.

Jade lets him float away, back into the frothing blood, the screams, the mayhem, all the volume dialing back up for her now. Where she’s looking is to her father, still standing on his boat in the middle of all this madness, untouched, his black-and-white warpaint not even running.

For the moment.

“You’re getting all the wrong people!” Jade screams to Theo Mondragon, wherever he is, whoever he’s carving through now.

Jade’s not moving stealthily anymore. She doesn’t have to.

All around her it’s craziness, it’s blood in the air and screams cutting through it, multiplying. And Letha was right, these coveralls are heavy, but Jade’s fingers are too numb to get a grip on the wet zipper, so she just pulls ahead, pulls ahead.

On the way to her dad’s boat she collects a shattered piece of a wooden pole—a rib from the cheerleader’s shark, probably. Her dad’s not a vampire, but the thing about stakes to the heart is that they work on non-vampires just the same.

And this is one bloodsucker that needs to die. And in carnage like this, nobody will question one more body facedown in the mix. That’s a lesson she’s learned from the sheriff.

“This is for you,” Jade tells her eleven-year-old self, a completely weird thing to say, but she’s got to say something.

She comes up behind her dad’s boat, glides up into it as stealthy as any slasher. Everything’s already rocking, so a little more rocking—her climbing aboard—doesn’t draw his attention. Before she can talk herself out of it, she steps cleanly ahead, takes his neck from the back in the crook of her arm, and presses the sharp leading point of the pole into his back, his chest swelling away from this pain but she has him by the neck, so he can’t get away from this.

Of all the lines Jade’s tried to have ready for this moment, all she manages to come up with is, “I wasn’t for you, Dad.”

“J-Jennifer?” he says back, realizing that it’s her, that this isn’t the end he thought it was, and for a bad flash—his tone is so surprised—Jade lets herself believe that he was drunk enough that night that he doesn’t even remember what he did.

How else does he get across the last six years in such good spirits?

It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, though.

It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, Jade’s telling herself.

Whether he remembers what he did or not doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

When her dad tries to twist, see her face, she tightens her arm on his throat, shoves the splintered point of the pole maybe a quarter inch in, blood spurting warm onto the web of her hand.

She’s in the shower again, which is where it happened. The water heater’s failing, so they’re doubling up. He’s washing her, his bottle of vodka up by the shampoo, he’s washing her and he’s—he’s— “What if Janet Leigh was waiting for Norman?” Jade says through her sudden tears, or tries to say, but her throat is clenching, her whole body is trembling, is cringing away from this skin-to-skin contact with him, and—and she wants to spasm her head back and forth faster and faster like Jacob’s Ladder, to shake free of this Lost Highway memory, she wants to remember things her own way, please, she wants to blur that whole year away, smear it into just a bland sixth-grade nothing, and she still isn’t stabbing this sharp pole into her dad’s back like she needs to.