My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(49)

“A bear print, clear as day and twice as big, I tell you.

Because the mud was wet, there were even claws scratched into the ground two or three inches past the pads of the feet. A big-ass boar, I mean, and, judging by Samuels’s, um, condition, a pretty unhappy one. Rex Allen tried to make a joke about Smokey the Bear just doing his job, open flame and all, but I shut that down quick, got on the horn to the ranger station.

“Time their man got here—I’m talking about Seth Mullins here, that’s two L’s—they’d decided to let me in on the little secret that they’ve had a trash grizzly causing problems over towards the Wyoming line. These are those bears that start to like human food a little too much. And, know what? Right there in Samuels’s golf bag was a paper sack of some sort of pastries. Smelled them before I saw them, you know how I am when there’s a donut in the room.

“Anyway, I know it can get kind of stale around these parts, that a little mystery might juice things up nice-like, but all we ended up with, aside from a man getting stuffed in sandwich bags, was about five minutes of mystery, or however long it took me to walk from the remains over to the bear print.

“Only other tracks for the staties to find with their fancy degrees and thousand-dollar equipment were ours, and then the Mondragon girl left some bare feet tracks I guess, that’s ‘bare’ as in no shoes, not ‘bear’ as in… you get it. So, not counting all the tracks we could account for, and taking into account the one track from a bear we now knew was a problem case for the federal Forest Service—police work really isn’t that hard, is it, Meggie? Hard part’s—”

Jade pulls the earbuds down, has to lean over she’s breathing so deep.

So Banner Tompkins and Lee Scanlon and the rest of them are out after a rogue bear, then. A killer bear. A verified monster. “Grizzly, 1976, Alex,” she manages to dredge up, spit out. “Sometimes called a slasher with a bear, but really just Jaws on land, minus Quint.” Which is minus everything.

Still.

If it had been a Proofrocker getting portioned up for the freezer here, Jade would know that the prank that woke this slasher was some crime twenty years ago, maybe even Melanie Hardy’s drowning, which would probably put Jade’s dad on the victim list, which would be just fine, thank you.

What does it mean that an untouchable Founder had been killed, though? And, not just killed, but killed in a way that a bear could be framed? How long had it taken whoever was doing this to lure a bear in to cover their tracks?

More important, why? Is this some townie with a chip on his shoulder about who was pulling good hours at the construction site, who wasn’t? Is Terra Nova messing up the back porch vista a certain someone had been counting on staring into for retirement? If so—if either of those—then why now instead of months ago? Had it been last night because whoever it was knew Deacon Samuels would be out there alone, since he’d been alone out there before?

“Who are you?” Jade says to Indian Lake.

It’s a good reflective moment, and she’s milking it for all the drama it’s worth when her phone rings in her hand and she fumbles it away, drops her coveralls, tangles her feet in them and falls, her pages unrolling every which way at once, her elbow scraping on the asphalt so she can answer the phone with a sharp “What already?”

At first, nothing. Then, timidly, “Um, I think I know you from, from the ladies’ r—”

“You got the package,” Jade says, rolling over onto her back, the wash of stars opening up above her. “You found the —the… you found them both. The kid in the lake. The Foun— Deacon Samuels. You know it’s really happening.”

Again, silence.

“Do you need those pants back?” Letha Mondragon asks in a way that Jade can see her mouth, kind of smiling.

“There’s so much I need to tell you,” Jade says. “I’ll be your… what’s that Pinocchio dude called, with the love letters?”

“Cyrano de Bergerac?”

“Like, together, my knowledge, what I know, mixed with your… your everything.”

“What are you saying?”

“Something’s coming is what I’m saying. It’s already here is what I’m saying. You’ve seen it yourself, the proof anyway.”

Letha doesn’t respond to this.

Jade goes on: “I didn’t know it was going to cross the lake for… for Terra Nova, though. I’m sorry.”

“I have so many questions.”

“I’m the girl made of answers.”

“The bench,” Letha Mondragon says, and it takes Jade a moment to reel through all the benches in Proofrock, finally settle on the only one that could be considered the main one: Melanie Hardy’s memorial bench by the water, just up from the pier. To Letha, arriving by Umiak every morning for school last semester, it’s probably the only bench.

“Out in the open, good, good,” Jade says. “You don’t know if you can trust me yet. You’ve got to be careful, I might be the one doing all this. Shit, I should have thought of that.”

“My dad says—”

“Parents in slashers are either drunks or they want to put bars on your bedroom windows. Sometimes both.”

Letha breathes in and out, is maybe about to cry, here.