My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(19)

not-so-little somethings?”

“Um,” Jade says, no eye contact, resisting the urge to check the zipper of her coveralls. “I’m seventeen? Not that that’s even an appropriate request if I was legal.”

“Had to try,” Rexall says with a no-harm no-foul shrug, then out-louds the magic key-combo he’s typing that runs his program: 36-26-36.

“You sure you should be working around kids?” Jade asks.

“Or even around, you know, living people?”

“Tried the morgue in Boise,” he says. “There was… an incident. Ask your dad about it sometime, he was there.”

Jade waits for him to guffaw or chuckle, because this has to be a joke, doesn’t it? Please? Finally she just says, “How about you do this for free, I don’t narc you out to Hardy. Not for cracking this phone, I mean. For… inappropriate requests?”

Rexall stiffens but doesn’t turn around.

“I was just goofing,” he says as if hurt, hitting return grandly, the pink phone flashing twice then going black.

“Great, your fancy program bricked it,” Jade says, taking it when he hands it to her. “Thanks.”

“Power her up,” he says. “No passcode anymore, all the data remains. You’re welcome, jailbait.”

“You give scuzz a bad name, Rexall,” Jade says, holding the pink phone’s power button in.

“Thank me now or thank me later…” he says. Then, about his own phone in the timecard slot: “Plug mine back in, won’t you? It’s… it’s doing something.”

Jade nods her best noncommittal nod, is waiting for the pink phone’s startup to finally get over with.

“And—and don’t, like, look at it?” Rexall adds on his way out, eyebrows raised like he’s just asking for common courtesy here.

Jade doesn’t dignify this, just stares him down until he’s gone. A half step later she has his phone, is powering it down without having to log in, mostly because she doesn’t want the distant thrill it would probably give him for her to type that “36-26-36” in. When the phone’s cycled down, she steps up onto the stool, hides his phone in the ceiling, pulls the tile back into place, says in monotone, “Sheriff Hardy, the evidence you need is right above Main Supplies, I saw him tucking it up there one day.”

The pink phone buzzes awake in her hand. Jade taps through this and that, most of it in a language she doesn’t know. But then she lands in the photo album, because selfies are the universal language.

The most recent is a video.

“What have we here…” she says, ducking out of Main Supplies, watching and walking, trying to beat the rush of elementary kids to the exit doors.

At first it’s just foggy nothing playing back at her, but then the phone’s camera figures out how to focus through whatever that is—that same sandwich bag?—and it’s a naked blond girl, flashes of a naked blond guy.

“Unauthorized Use of the Town Canoe,” Jade tells them, unwinding her earbuds and clocking the date: six days before her “attempt,” as the therapist in Idaho Falls calls it.

She guesses she’s lucky the town canoe had even found its way back by the time she needed it, right?

As for who these kids are, first, their English is all intoned funny, and second, around here they’d be Towhead 1 and Towhead 2—blond mops she’d have shared crayons with, freckled faces she would know. And she doesn’t.

“Sven,” Jade says then, turning backwards to push through the double doors, out into the sunlight. Inside Golding Elementary the bell rings, meaning Jade’s just ahead of the tidal wave of coughing and sniffing and yelling and crying.

It could wash right over her and she wouldn’t even notice.

The guy—Sven—has just gone over the side of the canoe.

Jade stops walking, stops breathing.

“What the bleeping bleep…” she says, looking around for if any of the parents in the hug-n-go lane have cued into the momentous thing happening on this phone’s screen. They’re just staring, waiting for her to move already, please.

Jade nods sorry, sorry, and steps along, scrubbing the video back to when Sven goes over, the pale soles of his feet there and gone.

The girl is all alone now, and, going by what Sven called her at the pier, her name is… ‘Throat Murder?’ ‘Thromudder?’

‘Crone Mother?’ Jade settles on the easier “Blondie.” As in, Just what is Blondie flinching away from?

Jade looks up, out to Indian Lake, as if she can see what was terrorizing this blond girl that night.

She rewinds again to Sven going over the side, memorizing every splash, every breath, every moment of this magical thing that happened after Proofrock was asleep, and this time through she flinches with Blondie, even turns around with her, trying to see over all sides of the canoe as well.

“This could have been you, horror girl,” she says to herself.

Same lake, same pier, same boat, almost the same night.

Now the girl is paddling away from something alongside the canoe, and now—no, no—she’s slipping over the side because swimming has to be faster. Meaning Jade can only hear now.

The girl’s scream splits the night in two and then cuts off just as fast, the silence after it quieter and deeper than any Jade’s ever experienced.