My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(78)

“To every graduate!” Mars Baker adds.

“Just state?” Ross Pangborne says to all of them, the most scripted line so far, and Pangborne oversells it by a mile, but this is the “all in good fun” part of the programming.

“Wherever they want to go!” Lewellyn Singleton adds, like what the hell.

“The Deacon and Ladybird Samuels Memorial Scholarship Fund,” Theo says as farewell, and, because they can’t take it any higher after that, that’s when the Founders freeze-frame, arms over shoulders, smiling lopsided smiles, fizzing black and white, and THE DEACON AND LADYBIRD SAMUELS MEMORIAL

SCHOLARSHIP FUND burns in over them in a tasteful, dignified font.

This is how you buy a town in the mountains.

It’s gonna be a drunk night, Jade can already tell. More than usual. All those college funds will be getting turned into boats, into trucks, into vacations. Jade hates it, but, standing alone at the front edge of the trees, she has to blink away tears herself, even. Not of happiness, but of having been born too late: this starts with the class of 2016, not her and Letha’s class.

Jade laughs a sick laugh and shakes her head in disgust, trying hard to be bitter against all the Hawks just a year behind her, who now have access to the world. But some of that disgust is also for herself: this was so much easier when she could hate all of these Founders righteously, like Mr. Holmes.

Now it’s… it’s complicated. It’s bullshit.

Worse, what she has to take into account now—to use a Lewellyn Singleton banking term—is that one of these rich goofballs is the slasher? In theory, it’s great, it’s ironclad. Of course it’s one of them. In practice, though, after having actually seen them, heard them… no way could it be Ross, and not Lewellyn either. They could no more lop a head off than Bill Gates could. Any violence they do, it’s with keystrokes. It still could possibly be Mars, she supposes, but that’s just because he’s a lawyer, has to have a black heart, a hidden agenda, and the ability to think fourteen steps ahead. And the only reason Theo Mondragon would still be in the mix is that he makes the cycle so neat, so contained, so elegant—all in the family.

She’ll just have to go over there, see. And if it’s not Theo Mondragon? Then… Rexall? Except he’s always fourteen steps behind. It could always be Hardy and Holmes tag-teaming it Billy and Stu–style, she supposes. Or even her dad, out killing between beers, and then popping a beer to celebrate each death, and then probably sneaking a nip or two in the act-of. And of course there’s always Deacon Samuels. He was collected in bags, right? Meaning he was mostly identifiable by his golf clubs, so, if he could stage a body double for that bear, maybe to avoid the SEC or something, he could still be out there, could be the one doing all this.

The suck-thing about all this, of course, is that if Jade’s wrong about the Founders, then who else is she wrong about?

It’s like on cop shows: when the prosecutor turns out to have been bad, then all the people they sent up get released. Is Jade that prosecutor now? Does her mom deserve a second chance?

Her father? Is she the one with Michael’s babysitter goggles, except, for her, “babysitter” is all adults, and since she doesn’t have a machete in her hands, she uses her tongue, her accusations, her suspicions?

“But I do have a machete,” Jade hisses, and thunks it hard into the tree beside her, which makes her general area go halogen-white. She threads her sticky bangs out of her eyes to study the top of the tree, see if this is actually a streetlight.

When it’s not, she leaves her hand as visor, and peers around to the dummy light pinning her in place.

Hardy. Of course. In his Bronco.

She’s running before she even tells her legs about it, the machete still in her hand, the blade in the tree nearly pulling her shoulder out of its socket, both her boots actually airborne for a moment, like the cartoon she doesn’t want to be.

“Jade, wait!” Hardy calls through his speaker, but Jade can’t.

She falls ahead, the machete tearing away from the tree with a distinct horror-movie sound, and it’s all downhill from there.

The slope to Indian Lake lets her be faster than she is, faster than her own thoughts: What’s she going to do, swan dive off the pier, swim to Camp Blood? Ask Letha for asylum on the Umiak? Hope Hardy gives up, which is exactly what cops do when perps holding deadly weapons run?

More important, why is she even running? It’s Hardy, isn’t it?

Shit. Shit shit shit.

She wants this to be Scream so was trying to pair him up with Mr. Holmes, but the feeling she can’t shake is his voice coming out of the darkness outside the library the other night.

His shape walking in from Melanie’s bench, sparks trailing from his hand, Clate Rodgers a red smear on the surface of the lake. And he does have that backstory with his daughter dying probably fifty yards from where they are right now, and with someone Jade’s dad used to drink with, and he does have a brush with Stacey Graves, he did grow up with his aunt telling him that rhyme, he did find Deacon Samuels, he did set a fire that killed his own uncle or whatever, and with that airboat, he can skid up onto shore wherever he wants, be gone in an instant. Or, if you’re out on the water, he can be right there beside you before you know it, hardly even dragging a wake, his big fan turned off a hundred yards back, so he just coasts in, the only sound the soft whop-whop-whop of his blades spinning down.