My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(74)
When the bodies are accumulating, there’s always room for one more, right?
Jade nods, says it aloud in the living room, like a test: “Right.”
Neither of the sleepers objects. Which she takes as permission to go on with this line of thinking. With… maybe one last smoke to keep her company.
She palms the half a pack of cigarettes from under the lamp and steps out onto the back porch, sits in the open door and chainsmokes two, then one more for good measure.
The plan, she’s pretty sure, should be to sneak over to Terra Nova tomorrow— today, actually. It’s after midnight, right?
Anyway, before Clate Rodgers burbled up from Indian Lake in chunks and smears, it was a lock that Theo Mondragon had to be the one behind all this. And he still could be. She could have Hardy all wrong—Theo Mondragon could have stowed away on the Umiak, been setting a death trap for someone else, for one of those two Founders who were going to have to be picked back up, and Clate just happened to get literally sucked into it. That Hardy didn’t stop it doesn’t mean he actually did it.
Theo’s got the more immediate motivation, anyway—his house, his literal castle — and since it’s not the millennium, motivations matter. Motivations are everything. Hardy has his daughter as an excuse to let Clate Rodgers get pulled into those whirling blades, but his motivation for Deacon Samuels is a harder nut.
Oh: unless he wanted a certain golf club, Jade remembers.
Do people really kill for golf stuff, though? She wants to say no, except… Jason did kill that one guy for littering, right?
But if greed or envy or gain is the motivation, then this is a giallo Proofrock’s in, not a revenge-driven slasher, and since this isn’t Italy in the sixties, she has to suspect there’s some other motivation, one that feels a lot more righteous.
And? She’s not supposed to have it all figured out yet, is she?
Doesn’t mean she can’t be trying, though.
Like she can help it.
So the plan now is to conk out for a few hours then hike around the lake to Terra Nova, maybe stop to wow over the Deacon Samuels stains behind the fluttering yellow tape at Camp Blood, and then she’ll either figure out she’s right, it’s Theo, or she’ll exclude him, easy as that, one-and-done.
Jade blows a clean line of smoke up into the night and cashes her butt on the sole of her boot, keys on another paper she wrote for Mr. Holmes, about how the reason final girls fall so much when running away is that they’re like those mother birds who flap away from their nests like they’re hurt, so as to draw the predator off of their babies.
She never turned that one in, though. She burned it half-written and flushed the ashes, because no mothers are actually like that.
What about Letha, though? Will she continually fall down on Saturday, so as to draw the slasher away from the floating masses? There will be lots of kids in the water that night, Jade knows. Lots of innocents.
She turns to go in, spinning at the last moment to catch the screen door, keep it from waking the living room, but then she stops: the smallest, saddest bottle rocket is tumbling down out of the sky. Which is to say: a lit cigarette.
“I’m telling your wife,” Jade says up to Mr. Holmes with a smile, and, when the cigarette spools a trail of smoke up out of the tall dry grass, she steps over and stomps it out, saving the whole town, probably. “And that’s how you do it,” she says to the idea of Letha, and then leaves Mr. Holmes up there to court lung cancer and fight bats.
The kitchen is empty, the living room still asleep.
Jade pads through to her bedroom to cue something up and crash, and— Shit. Really?
All her videotapes and clothes and posters are in two black trashbags on her bed.
Jade just stares at them, stares at them some more, and finally comes up with the only possibility: her dad heard about her OK Corral walk down Main with Hardy.
“But I didn’t bring him here,” Jade says, picking through the jumbled tapes, finally lucking onto Just Before Dawn. She can’t carry the whole bag around the lake to Letha as one last lesson, but she can at least leave her with that one. Technically —chronologically— Halloween should probably be next in her education, and that’s only if they skip over Black Christmas, but… this isn’t the full course anymore, is it? This is a crash course, a late-night cram session. And if Letha’s going to have to pick one final girl to follow, then don’t pick the one who hides in a closet, don’t pick the one who leaves the killer’s knife behind, don’t pick the one who has to get saved by a dude with a gun at the end. Pick the one who becomes rage, the one who climbs the front of that hillbilly slashing machine and jams her arm down his throat up to her fucking elbow, looking him in the eye the whole time.
Just Before Dawn, then. That and…
Jade reaches around under her bed, frees up the machete weaved into the mattress’s undercarriage. It’s from the flea market in Idaho Falls, still has the factory edge. Jade looks around for what else she might need, finally decides to change everything she’s wearing under her coveralls. Because who knows.
Instead of throwing the dirties in the laundry corner, she stuffs them back in the bag.
After that, the only thing left is to dig out the food coloring in the kitchen, dye her hair one last time in the sink, being sure to lock the door first.
The food coloring’s dark green, the result more aquamarine shading into turquoise, and temporary as hell. Still, it’s something, right?