My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(17)

Mr. Holmes is always arguing that he wouldn’t eat cows if they weren’t made of meat, which is enough of a groaner to sort of wrap around to endearing, in a sad way.

“More like cucumber, right, Ambs?” Lee Scanlon announces to the room single entendre–style, Amber Wayne kicking his chair from behind.

“Now now,” Mr. Holmes says, and the way he does slow-motion with the playback is by tapping the pause button over and over, inching his flight forward. It’s like a slideshow now, Jade guesses, and settles in to see what he saw on his last big trip across the lake.

From the front of the room, Tiffany Koenig, closest to the screen, gasps and covers her face, turns away. Mr. Holmes just smiles, tapping the pause button with delicious slowness.

In the high sloping meadow just past the tall line of trees right on the shore, spread out so you can kind of still see the formation they were in, are ten or twenty dead elk, their legs and heads all twisted and contracted into grotesque configurations.

Jade leans forward in her desk, because there was definitely some real and unique pain in this lonely meadow. Some roving Cenobite got its pound of flesh, and then the rest of the pounds of flesh as well.

Banner Tompkins stands, crowds the screen, a couple of the other football players suddenly interested in history class as well. It’s kind of a first.

“What—what did it?” Letha asks, and all heads turn to her.

She’s not looking away, but the pain in her voice, on her face, is about to spill over into tears, it sounds like. For the sad innocent animals.

“Such a tragedy,” Banner says, trying to match her emotion.

“Please,” Jade hears herself scoffing, and Banner looks back to her, flashes his grin that she’s pretty sure means Shhh, shh, I’m almost into her pants, here.

If only he knew who he was dealing with.

“What did it, yes,” Mr. Holmes is saying, doing that thing where he thinks on his feet while the image is paused and trembling. “As you can see, there are no bullet or arrow holes, no holes at all.”

“Beaver fever,” Lee says, and gets a high five from Banner, a sneer from most of the girls.

“Giardiasis,” Mr. Holmes corrects, as if considering this possibility. “But… wouldn’t an elk’s four-chambered stomach take care of most parasites? Or, would nineteen elks’ stomachs fail to do so, and all at the same time?”

“Griz,” Banner finally says, and, as if his judgment here is final, he takes his seat.

Mr. Holmes comes around slow on the heel of his right loafer, his left skating just over the floor, stopping him perfect, a move Jade’s always appreciated—not that she’d ever tell him.

“Mr. Tompkins may be on to something,” he says. “Do you see how the bull’s neck there has been broken? What other animal out there would have that kind of raw power?”

“A bear?” Letha says, as if just making the connection between it and “griz.”

“Oh my,” Amber adds with fake drama, covering the O of her mouth with her so-delicate fingers.

“There is wildlife on that side of the lake, Ms. Mondragon, yes,” Mr. Holmes informs Letha. “One of the many perils of living in what was formerly a national preserve.”

“Can we—you know?” Tiffany K pleads, rolling her hand forward for the play button please.

Mr. Holmes grins, lets his flight glide on past this meadow of dead elk and then bank high over the forest, swoop back in the direction of Proofrock— “Wait, wait,” Letha says, coming up from her seat a bit.

Mr. Holmes catches the pause key and Jade realizes she has been gone a long time: not only have the houses of Terra Nova been getting real and actual skins over their wood frames the last two months, but there’s driveways being carved out, unlikely pools and ponds being scraped into the rock, and an actual dock latched onto the shore now.

Tied onto the dock somehow, but probably anchored too, because the lake is deep on the steep side of Pleasant Valley, is the kind of yacht Jade’s only seen in movies. Ones about drug dealers.

Did it get lifted in on a fleet of cargo helicopters, or was it trucked in on one of those wide-load rigs?

“Oh, that’s just Tiara,” Letha says, not so much with pride as with… defeat?

Tiara must be the bombshell blond white woman tanning in a nothing-bikini on one of the many decks of the yacht. She’s straight out of Cheerleader Camp—easy to hate.

“Sister?” Banner says hopefully.

“Stepmother,” Letha says curtly, no malice at all, but maybe a trace of what sounds to Jade a lot like forced pleasantness.

It’s the first chink she’s seen in Letha’s final girl armor, but really it’s just more support for her being a final girl: before getting sucked into the slasher cycle, the final girl will have to have some sort of pre-existing issue. For example, Mr.

Holmes: in Scream, Sidney’s pre-existing issue was her mother’s death. In Urban Legend, Natalie’s trying to live down the death she accidentally caused years ago.

Letha’s issue must be this trophy wife who’s supposed to be her mom. Either that or—or it’s whatever happened to her actual mom, all wrapped up with how fast her dad found a replacement, one who could be Letha’s older sister.

Had this “Tiara” already been cued up, possibly? Were the circumstances of Letha’s mom’s death perhaps… mysterious?