My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(61)

“I’m working at the high school this afternoon,” Jade tells him once he’s easing them from the parking lot.

Hardy stops the left turn he was making, hauls the wheel over the other way.

“Jade, never mind what your mom told us. If your dad has ever—”

“Letha Mondragon’s the one with the overactive imagination,” Jade tells him, using his own words against him.

“Some mother hen complex where she wants to take care of all of us. And I’m the least likely chicklet to survive, so that means I’m the first she has to save.”

Hardy sighs, says, “I think what you mean there is ‘hatchling,’ maybe?”

Jade slumps down in the seat, chocking her knees against the warm dash.

“And she’s right,” Hardy goes on. “This isn’t over.”

“I was just—”

“I’ve got some questions, I mean.”

Jade looks over to him but he’s watching the road with every last ounce of his remaining attention, as if he hasn’t driven this stretch of Main ten thousand times. He switches hands on the wheel, nods to himself that it’s finally right in his head, and says, “You knew about the Maruman at the old camp, meaning either you were there when or right after it happened, or you somehow got hold of Meg’s transcription.”

Jade doesn’t say anything.

“And if you were over there,” Hardy goes on, reaching into the backseat to plop something on the console between them, “I know what you were wearing.”

It’s her dad’s muddy boots from the porch.

“I would shoot myself in the face before touching his boots,” Jade says, elbowing them away to prove how gross they are to her.

“History of suicide attempts, yes,” Hardy says.

Jade opens her mouth to ask him why doesn’t he just haul her dad in, since they’re his boots? But that would just be setting a red herring up, wouldn’t it? Because no way could it really be Tab Daniels. Slashers, in their own way, are as pure as final girls.

“What?” Hardy asks, letting his foot off the gas so Jade can say whatever she was about to.

Jade shakes her head no, nothing.

“Anyway, that’s not even the worst of it,” he goes on, stopping in the hug-n-go lane of the high school with her for the second time this month. “You said there was a Dutch boy and a girlfriend. When we only know about the boy, whose dental work is actually turning out to be European, at least in the forensic report that just hit my inbox two hours ago.

Leading me to think you have some knowledge that we don’t.”

“They travel in pairs,” Jade tells him. “Common knowledge.

Casey and Steve in Scream. Barry and Claudette in—”

“ ‘They’ being… the Dutch?”

“I only said that because he was blond. Like on the paint cans.”

“So you were there.”

“I was at the party, yeah. Can I not go to parties with my ex-classmates?”

Hardy doesn’t like her answers, but neither can he take them out at the knees, Jade knows.

“Then I’m sure you know we made a list of everybody who was at the Tompkins place that night,” he says. “I don’t recall your name being on that.”

“I left early.”

“But stayed until the end, too? To see the color of that dead kid’s hair?”

“Was on my way out.”

“I’m sure the Koenig girl or one of the others can confirm this.”

“Tiff’s recall of that night might be… blurry.”

Hardy shakes his head, impressed—he must know Tiffany K was sloshed—but still, “So either you were at the party or you…” he leads off, using his fingers to pick words from the air, it looks like, “or you have unlawful knowledge about the events that led to that kid being there. Same as the golf club.”

“Would you believe a bus ran over my evidence, or is that too much like the dog eating my homework?”

“Excuse me?”

“Third option, I mean,” Jade says, opening her door, hanging a leg out for solid ground.

“I don’t—”

“I’ve watched too many horror movies,” Jade says. “I’m just making shit up left and right, because my dad did some unspeakable shit to me.”

Hardy just sits there, brake pressed in, eyes hidden behind chrome lenses.

“Are you saying that Mondragon girl was right about him?”

he finally asks.

“I’m saying something’s coming for us, Sheriff,” Jade says, stepping all the way down now. “I don’t know why, I don’t know who, but I do know when.”

“July Fourth,” Hardy recites. “Speaking of that.”

This stops Jade. Then she connects the necessary dots.

“You can beef up security all you want,” she says. “It won’t —”

“In hindsight, your letter is a credible threat to the proceedings that night,” Hardy says, using the official phrasing. “If you show up and try to self-fulfill your little prophecy, then it’ll look like I was negligent, just some country bumpkin law enforcement officer not paying enough attention.”