My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(43)

Meg sucks air in through her teeth, has to look away fast.

Jade can still hear her daughter Tiff throwing up in the tall grass. Like mother like daughter.

“He said you might have some filing for me,” Jade explains, using her pleasant voice.

“During working hours maybe,” Meg explains right back with just as much false cheer.

“You’re here.”

“Special circumstances.”

“I can’t go home right now,” Jade says, covering the rest of that particular story with a “don’t want to talk about it” shrug, a purposeful breaking of eye contact that can only mean it’ll crack her tough-girl fa?ade if she has to go any further into this.

Meg bites her top lip in then rotates halfway around in her chair, tapping the plastic button of her pen on the front of her top teeth, which Jade takes as a strong reminder not to chew on any pens in this office.

“Why is everyone here?” Jade’s not physically able to keep from asking after a few slower and slower tooth taps.

“Somebody die, what?”

Meg doesn’t twitch a single muscle on her face, just keeps looking around for a menial enough chore. One someone with zero clearance can do, someone with negative clearance, which is to say: this one’s got sticky fingers, hungry eyes, and a bone to pick with authority. Only trust her as far as you can throw her, and keep in mind that you don’t have any arms.

“You wore your other work clothes,” Meg says, holding the back of her index finger under her nose so Jade gets the drift.

“Laundry day,” Jade tells her. Or, challenges her with.

“Are you presentable under them?”

“What do you—?”

“Do you have other clothes on?”

“What’s wrong with being a janitor?”

“Too many pockets,” Meg says, staring right into Jade’s soul, “too roomy. An enterprising seventeen-year-old could smuggle a coatrack out in that.”

Jade stands and slowly unzips, holding Meg’s eyes the whole while. She steps out of the coveralls, rolls them into a ball, sets that ball on Meg’s desk, careful not to disturb all the inboxes and trays and pencil holders.

What she’s wearing now—what Meg can see now—is a shirt with a Raymond Pettibon gig poster silkscreen of a bare-breasted dead woman named Janie, and Janie’s friend asking Jesus, also pictured, about why, if he’s Christ, why oh why won’t he raise Janie?

Meg’s lips tighten with disapproval.

“I can put them back on,” Jade says, taking a seat, slouching down in it like the criminal she is, “but who knows, I might steal all the staplers. Get a pretty good price for them on the street. Kids these days can’t get enough office supplies, I’m sure Tiff’s told you.”

“You can stuff envelopes is what you can do,” Meg says, standing with purpose, her posture prim and schoolmarmish.

“I live to serve,” Jade says, and hauls her ashes up, follows Meg… all the long way to the next desk over?

“So I can keep an eye on you,” Meg informs her.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jade says, and starts to take a seat in the empty rolling chair but Meg’s already rolling it away, replacing it with a battered stool.

“Helps with posture,” Meg says, reaching around behind Jade like to straighten her up but not going so far into legally fraught territory as to actually touch the temporary employee.

Jade allows her posture to be improved, straddles the little stool, and takes the envelopes and flyers Meg provides, enduring her walk-through as well: proper method, desired results, blah, blah. The flyers are pale green, are for some referendum to restrict the airspace over Proofrock.

Hilarious.

“Sorry, Sherlock,” she says, and licks envelope number one, starts her stack of done-withs, pulls up the second flyer in desperate need of a careful crease.

For the first forty or so of them, Meg watches, harrumphing at Jade’s more sloppy attempts, humming conditional approval over the better ones. The sun goes down and the overhead lights become more important. Phones ring and radios hiss, feet scuffle, and Jade’s shoe-polished hair, she has to admit, is letting off an acrid scent that she thinks might be either getting her high or dollying her up to some ledge she’s meant to tumble off.

At the hundred and fourteen mark she nods forward, her forehead resting on the top of the desk for just a moment’s peace, but Meg clears her throat in a wake-up way and Jade startles, leans back into it.

“How many hours is this so far?” she asks.

“You keep your own time,” Meg says. “We’ll just hope it matches the time sheet I turn in to the sheriff.”

“Wonderful,” Jade says, and accidentally-on-super-purpose rips the flyer she’s trying so hard to fold just right.

“Recycling,” Meg tells her, directing Jade to the bin across the room, by the copy machine—same model as the library’s, probably the same purchase order—and by the time Jade shuffles back she knows it’s not worth the pleasure of wasting paper if it means she has to get up each time to do it. Her back does feel better, though. Maybe stools aren’t as evil as she’d always thought.

“What is that smell?” Meg asks minutes or hours later, interrupting whichever reverie Jade’s jellyfishing through.