My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(85)

At least having to be sure about each foot placement, having to track each trailing boot lace, it keeps her from dwelling too much on Mr. Holmes. She focuses hard on each next step, dials down and tries hard to think about what she’s not thinking about, as, in a slasher, that’s usually key.

What she comes up with is Cry_Wolf and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which means admitting the worst of all possibilities: Letha herself. What if the final girl is finding all these bodies specifically because she knows where she’s left them? Would that not be the best cover? What if Letha fought tooth and nail not to move out to the sticks of Idaho, and blames everyone in Terra Nova for her losing her friends, her social life, her favorite boyfriend?

Jade would allow this… except for Letha herself. Letha who made a hard phone call to Hardy to try to save the horror chick, the sad girl, the—the Ragman of Indian Lake, yes. Trick or Treat, 1986, Alex. Ragman’s peers hate him, are always crapping on him, but so what, he’s got metal, faster harder thrashier, and he finally wishes hard enough that he gets the slasher he so thought he needed.

And it tries to kill him too.

Figures.

But no, not Letha, not the final girl. There was a moment when the slasher was getting turned on its head like that, but that moment’s over and done with. And Letha is pure, anyway — too pure. She’s not going to be the so-called final girl Leslie Vernon’s dreaming about, swinging her own panties over her head. No, Letha’s bookish, she’s virginal or close enough and she’s got the long limbs of a girl meant to run through the syrupy colors of a Dario Argento sequence. Only, where she’s running, it’s right through the Golden Age, what she’s vaulting over, it’s the Scream Boom of the late nineties, and where she’s coming down to make her stand, it’s here, it’s Proofrock.

She’s a killer, yes, but not until pushed. Not until having her good-girl veneer carved painfully away.

Jade pads up to the control booth window, can’t see through the dark glass, shimmies around anyway, and then hears the door shut behind her and has to run, run, no balance, all forward momentum, the sky all around her.

She crashes to her knees on the other side breathing hard but smiling big.

This is why she loves coming around the lake this way instead of walking two miles down for the bridge: it’s always a close call, is always the best rush.

And, where she’s landed, she’s pretty sure, is in the last act, the third-reel bodydump. Somewhere out there Letha’s probably screaming about a corpse unfolding from the ceiling, and another crammed into a cabinet.

It puts a pep in Jade’s step, just on the off-chance she can see that from far way.

She keeps to the top of the chalky bluff above Camp Blood —no choice: it’s not like you can get to Camp Blood without looping around almost all the way to Terra Nova. Two or three minutes later she can see the yacht at its usual mooring, and then the Umiak in its shadow, no longer in floating impound.

Since it’s the first boat anybody takes, Jade assumes the rest of the boats are in their garages, even though all the Founders are, for once, because one of their own fell, here.

The long flat barge the construction crew drinks their coffee on, crossing before sunup each morning, is already back at Proofrock, Jade imagines, taking up ten or twelve berths, Terra Nova just renting out that whole quarter-mile of the shore.

And the houses over here, goddamn.

Somebody’s mixed some Miracle-Gro into those frames, those roofs, those driveways, all that landscaping. It reminds Jade more of a cartoon than a gated community: the outlines of the houses were there all along, all they needed was some great hand to tip a bag of ink over into the chimney, to let color leach down all the lines, find all the corners, fill in all the windows.

All ten are ready by August first, she has to imagine, and then realizes she’s just standing there skylining herself like an idiot, practically asking to be called out, asked what she’s doing over here.

Jade lowers herself slowly, tries to bore her eyes all the way across the lake to see if Hardy’s glassing for her, but Proofrock’s just shapes and shadows. Are students gathered at the flagpole in front of the high school already, for Mr.

Holmes?

Jade closes her eyes, isn’t going to think about that.

“Not everybody gets to live,” she says to herself, confident that, at fifty yards, her whisper will dissipate before cranking anyone’s head around.

Not that there is anybody.

Does that mean… has the crew moved on to doing the interiors of the houses now? It makes sense the insides of the houses would be last on the to-do list. You don’t hang sheetrock until that sheetrock’s protected from the elements.

Still: no one?

Jade pats her pocket for the second sandwich she knows is just as gone as the first. It’s less actually looking for it, more showing the world that she’s hungry, that it can deliver her some nuggets or a burrito or fishsticks if it wants. She won’t tell anybody.

In lieu of food, she lights another cigarette, her fourth from last, and then smokes it lying on her back, waving the smoke to tatters, hoping none of the smell wisps down between the houses. But surely some of the crew burns em if they got em.

A harsh clack! rolls her over, gets her studying downhill again.

It could have come from anywhere.

Shit.

Is this what a stakeout is? If so, isn’t there supposed to be coffee and pistachios? But it’s not like Jade can just stroll in and start asking questions, either.