My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(37)

Who’s to say, though, right?

Life isn’t like the nature shows. In the documentaries the coaches play in biology, the mother rabbit will stand up to the snake or the coyote or the hawk when it’s after her baby rabbit, will stand up to them when she doesn’t have even one chance in all of hell at fighting off this perfect predator, but she throws her little body into those claws and fangs all the same and kicks for all she’s worth, for all her baby’s worth to her, which is… everything?

“Not likely,” Jade mumbles, and is glad she doesn’t have a stupid diploma, because that would mean she took some test where she answered yes to “this is how a mother rabbit protects her young,” which would have been a lie.

But fuck it.

Not every mom is a Pamela Voorhees, going after all camp counselors because one or two of them let her baby drown.

And Jade is far from a baby anymore, either.

She steps forward again, again, drilling her eyes across the lake, trying to picture what Holmes painted for them one seventh period: the fire of 1965, coming right up to the shore over there, Proofrock holding its breath, all of Idaho ready to burn.

But it didn’t.

It never does.

Jade shrugs like just wait, spins on a combat heel, and slouches back up her street almost grinning. All in all, this night’s been almost a win, hasn’t it? Hardy could have confiscated her papers, meaning she’d have had to have broken into one of the schools to reprint them from her email, and, who knows, she might have walked in on Rexall cleaning the lenses of all his hidden cameras.

No thank you.

Jade kicks dramatically across her lawn—no, she Holden Caulfields it across her lawn. As far as Jade knows, nobody at Henderson High ever turned that into a way of walking, an attitude of walking, so it can be all hers.

She Holden Caulfields it up onto her ramshackle porch again, endures the gauntlet of the living room, her dad making a show of pausing The Night of the Hunter to let her pass, and then she clamps her headphones on, pulls her little television close, and pushes the The Hitcher tape in, tells herself it’s Prom Night II after that, hating the whole time that she kind of wants to sneak back into the living room, see if she can catch any of The Night of the Hunter—see if that old-time preacher in it is maybe some figuration of Ezekiel. Maybe him being on-screen in her own house is a sign, even, that she shouldn’t dismiss Drown Town so fast for this slasher cycle. Jade pauses Rutger Hauer on her thirteen-inch, tries to eavesdrop on Robert Mitchum in there on the twenty-seven inch, and it takes enough effort that part of her sort of drifts off, is partially awake on the couch in the living room, her dad quietly spreading a blanket over her.

Jade jerks awake blinking hard, trying to shake that image, flush it, and scans her videotapes for that orange pumpkin sticker she put on the spine of Halloween years ago, so it can be the last thing she sees before conking, so she can take it with her into sleep, and the next time she opens her eyes it’s nearly noon, meaning she’s sleeping through today’s litter-stabbing expedition. But fuck it. Let the trash stab itself for one day. Like Rexall’s watching her time card that close? No, his cameras are more zoomed in on her chestal area.

Jade shudders, trying to shake the grime of his eyes off.

Carrying a box of Honeycombs and not exactly moving at top speed—the house is empty like the tomb—she folds some of her old pants around her prize A Bay of Blood tape, and then she ties a white ribbon around it both ways, to be sure the boxy VHS won’t clatter out at Tiara Mondragon’s feet, get kicked away like a roach.

Next she folds all the papers shut, and instead of hiding them at the center with A Bay of Blood, she slips the thick little bundle under the ribbon’s bow like some long, heartfelt, meandering girl-to-girl note about boys and make-up and…

and whatever normal girls talk about. Then it’s just suiting up and trucking through the muck around the lake, tightwriting it across the spine of the dam, and clomping up the dock at Terra Nova forty-five minutes later, knocking on whatever passes for a door.

Except the yacht… isn’t there?

Jade cases the lake slow. Where can something that size be?

Camp Blood, it turns out, which she’d saluted down to on the way over, from the top of the bluff.

“Excuse me? ” Jade says out loud, truly affronted about this transgression—about them being at Camp Blood. She comes right up to the lip of the dock as if ten feet more might explain all this to her, and finally cues in that there’s no construction going on in Terra Nova behind her. Like the second Thursday before July 4th is some kind of Idaho holiday? Not any one she knows about, and even if it were, the Founders would be paying holiday rates.

Where is everybody?

Jade shields her eyes and squints her vision better, can see now that the yacht’s pulled right up to the jetty in front of Camp Blood, the one that used to be for kids to earn their diving badges off of.

This makes zero point zero sense. Jade looks around absently, finds the mailbox she’s seen Dan Dan the mailman puttering across the lake for, and stuffs the pants and tape and pages into it like a bomb, just to complete her mission.

Because now there’s another mission, this one more recon oriented.

Twenty breathless minutes later she’s on the chalky bluff back behind Camp Blood, peering down. Hardy’s there, his airboat skidded up onto shore like he always does, and his two deputies are milling around with trash bags. But so are the state police, and some leathery rail of a guy in park ranger colors, and Letha is sitting on the jetty, wrapped in a blanket, Tiara hugging her from the side.