My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(75)

On the way out the front door, a fresh sandwich in each pocket, two garbage bags glistening over her shoulder, she flips the living room off roundly, walks backwards off the porch still doing it.

School’s out forever.

Instead of trying to brave the trees and the muck in the pitch black—there is a rogue bear out there somewhere—Jade asks Terra Nova to wait until the light of morning, please. Maybe she can crash out in a storage shed in the staging area until then? Except, on the way there… of course.

The screen for the big July Fourth celebration is already inflated, for everybody to watch from the lake. They do it early like this now, since the time in sixth grade when they did it the afternoon-of, and had to keep the compressor running all through the movie because of some new holes in the vinyl, which kind of killed the whole “movie on the lake” charm. It was more like “movie nobody can hear over the air compressor.”

Jade doesn’t key on the screen just because it’s up, though.

It’s also glowing.

On-screen is the giant version of someone’s laptop screen, it looks like. Mac, not PC. Jade steps back into the shadows to watch, cues in that the two Founders who were getting dropped off earlier, they’re back on the deck of the Umiak now —probably with whatever cable or adapter they needed for the projector, it being a few years old, their ports all next-gen.

It is Mars Baker, and, Jade finally decides, Llewellyn Singleton. Their little laptop screen is glowing onto their faces, and they look for all the world like two twelve-year-olds hunched over a video clip between classes. Hanging a few feet back from them, hands on the rail, is Letha Mondragon, her eyes cupped in the Jackie O sunglasses and pale wrap pretty much mandated for someone who’s now found three dead people since moving to town.

When you’re mourning, grief-stricken, shell-shocked, sunglasses at night are cool. And… does Letha see Jade? Jade backs up farther, dropping her bags into the bushes, only keeping the machete, but hiding it along her right leg like’s proper.

Finally Letha’s black lenses move on to Main all at once, Jade’s eyes going with whether she wants to look or not. It’s just a cat crossing under the streetlight, but is there anything more perfect to spook things up?

Jade nods thank you to Letha for directing her to this next Jonesy, and then whatever Mars Baker and Lewellyn Singleton are trying to magic onto the big screen finally pops.

“Hunh,” Jade says. Also: of course.

It’s a slideshow of Deacon Samuels’s life. There he is in a silver hard hat, cutting a ribbon for some groundbreaking event. There he is on the cover of Golf Digest. There he is in a candid shot with Ladybird, his wife. There he is having fun in the swan boat, Indian Lake all around him like the place he’s been looking for his whole life.

The reason they’re testing this now, Jade figures, is that this is going to play before the movie on Saturday, right? It’s easier than inviting the whole town over to gawk through Terra Nova, breathe all the clean air up.

It’s funny, too: the Umiak right under these Founders, and part of the pier is cordoned off with Hardy’s yellow tape.

Because the fish probably haven’t eaten all of Clate Rodgers yet, have they? The bigger chunks of him had probably been the work of a few minutes: plunge an official fishnet in and back a couple of times and he’s gone, in a bucket, in cold storage, a big “do not drink / not margaritas!” sign taped on it.

And now the slideshow’s over and… another no-surprise: it’s a video of the remaining Founders. They’re down in some mahogany part of the yacht, it looks like. Lewellyn Singleton, Mars Baker, Ross Pangborne, and the chair of the board, farthest from the camera—meaning the center of the shot— Theo Mondragon.

Jade tries to look past the screen, past the Umiak, all the way over to the actual yacht, but comes back to the screen when whoever’s holding the camera moves in on the Founders.

Instead of the suits or high-dollar casual wear they’re usually wearing, all four look to be just in from a swim.

Towels around the necks, either actually or artfully mussed hair, and wearing… not “trunks” exactly. More plum-smuggler cycling shorts? Not banana hammocks—there’s legs to them— but not board shorts either.

And? They can each pull off shorts that tight, that unforgiving. Mars Baker, even, when he coughs into his hand, has a six-pack or thereabouts, and Theo Mondragon looks pretty damn sculpted, Jade has to admit before looking away.

Of course they’d turn the memorial for their friend into another way to lord it over the common folk, remind them of the pecking order.

This slasher can’t come fast enough.

Jade starts to turn away, not be drawn into the practice run for this spectacle—thanks for the warning, Mr. Holmes—but then the speakers crackle. Jade stops, her hands clenching into fists, but she’s listening now.

Sorry, Mr. Holmes.

Jade looks back over her shoulder and the memorial slideshow’s still over, but now what Mars Baker and Lewellyn Singleton are playing on the inflatable screen is an actual recording of Deacon Samuels. A Skype session that somebody apparently hit “record” on. Deacon Samuels has his golf cap pulled down low like the frat boy he must be, and he’s just lowering a disposable plastic cup but savoring whatever’s in it, meaning this is maybe the end of the day, except… is that trashy wood paneling behind him? Is that dim light hanging on a fake brass chain familiar?