My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(39)

“Kimbat” is Kimmy plus Batman, because her purse was her utility belt, something like that, it’s all dim and distant for Jade.

“And then the sheriff—” she says, trying to get this over with already.

“Deputy,” her dad corrects, holding his fork up like to cross that T.

Jade makes her voice as bored and flat as possible, finishes his story: “He would blast off for the other side of the lake for this emergency call, and you and Rexall and Clate and whoever would come up from under the pier on those ski ropes, barefoot skiing until he looked back to see what the drag was.”

“We’d have had cameras in our phones back then, there’d be proof,” her dad says, bringing his plate up to his face because the yolks are just gelid enough to string. “Or if we’d have had phones at all,” he adds with a smile-and-eyebrow thing that Jade would bet everything she owns is the exact same smile that lured her mom over to Camp Blood for a party one night, at the right-wrong time in her uterine cycle.

But it always starts like that, doesn’t it? Some randy dude making eyes when he should be making tracks? Even when she dials up old Indian stories online, there’s always some goofy old dude smiling exactly like Tab Daniels while he scraps the world together from goopy mud, making deals with muskrats and beavers, ducks and crows, anybody stupid enough to listen to him.

“You’re saying a bass boat can pull three skiers?” Jade says to her dad.

“We were skinnier back then.”

Jade shakes her head, narrows her eyes, and looks out the front door again, telling herself she’s not doing this, she’s not interacting with him, not even on accident. Because he can flip it all around on her in an instant.

“Why you telling me this story again?” she asks. “It was bullshit then, it’s bullshit now.”

Her dad forks another bite in, makes a show of savoring it, swallowing it down.

“You’ve got a mouth on you, you know?” he says.

“And a knee,” Jade says. “A machete in my room.”

Her dad smiles to show how little threat she is and rattles his plate down into the sink to either sit there for days or for Jade to wash it. And if she doesn’t do it? Eggs are superglue after about half an hour. She hates when he’s still in the house, can hear her doing his dirty dishes. But they don’t have enough plates to let them sit, either.

“The ski rope’s what I want you to pay attention to, there,”

he says at last, all the silence before it serving as emphasis.

“The rope?”

“How long they go, you think?”

“Why’s it matter?”

“Seventy feet,” her dad very clearly enunciates, reaching into his pants to scratch his hip bone but never breaking eye contact with Jade. “But let’s say seventy-five, just to be safe.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jade says. “And I don’t care, either.”

“You should,” he says. “Seventy-five feet is as close as I need to be to the law, get it? It went for high school and it goes for now too.”

“Thanks for the update?”

“And the street in front of the house here is a sight closer than that. Want me to measure it out?”

Jade dials back, translates. “This is about Sheriff Hardy dropping me off last night?”

“This is about you bringing the law to my front door. And how that’s gonna be the end of that.”

“It was just—”

“Any more interactions with Deputy Hardy, I’m gonna have to think my own daughter’s a snitch.”

“What am I going to rat you out about? Drinking on the job? Do you think that’s some big secret?”

“Safer this way.”

“What way?”

“Any more interactions with the law, you’re out of here.”

“You can’t kick me out,” Jade says, her eyes heating up.

“I’m not eighteen yet.”

“You’re out of school. Might need to find your own place, like your mom there.”

“Because I take up so much room here?”

“Because you’re bringing the law to my front door,” her dad says again, taking a step closer, putting himself in knee range as a dare, Jade knows.

“You shouldn’t even be here right now,” she tells him.

“My own house.”

“Why aren’t you at work, I mean? They giving Breathalyzer tests to cross the lake now?”

“Everybody go home, one of us Richie Riches bought it,”

her dad says like repeating an announcement, and then, so he can be the one to end this conversation, turns to the fridge, reaches in for milk, or a beer, or who cares, Jade’s already stalking out, her heart thumping from anger, from fear, but mostly from what he just said: one of the Founders bought it?

In her bedroom she scrolls through her phone for whatever news blips she can glom onto, finally finds it out of Idaho Falls, which tracks since Proofrock doesn’t exactly have its own broadcast: one of the Terra Novans has died in a “tragic accident,” “stick with us,” “more details as they surface.”

No news on which Founding Father it is, but Jade knows it’s not Theo Mondragon, anyway. She just saw him. Meaning it was one of the other four? Are there only five of them? Aren’t there ten houses over there, meaning more moguls and tycoons coming in? But aren’t they all waiting for their, you know, homes to be complete? This must be one of those ones who sniped in to breeze through, check on progress, be hands-on.