My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(92)


When he’s satisfied he’s alone, he hauls Mismatched Gloves out through the front door. Unlike Cody, Mismatched Gloves is belly-down. It’s because his back is bristling with dull golden nails. His face dribbles down the stairs, and when there’s a snag in the forward motion, making Theo Mondragon have to chock up on a shin, it’s because the top row of Mismatched Gloves’s teeth have caught on a step.

Jade blinks her eyes against the tears trying to spill, hates herself for them.

What she knows but doesn’t want to have to think is that Mismatched Gloves and Cody and Shooting Glasses shouldn’t have sold their friend for eight hundred dollars each. That’s got to be why Theo Mondragon’s doing this, doesn’t it? He found out about the accident, the coverup. So the first thing he does is take care of Deacon Samuels, who really should have known better. And now he’s taking care of the only witnesses.

If nobody knows the story about your big wonderful house, then it can just keep on being big and wonderful, can’t it? Kill the storytellers, kill the story.

Except Jade knows it too. Second-hand, but still.

“Sorry, Letha,” she says, and then shrinks forward when the voice comes from behind her, crawling over every last inch of her skin: “For what?”

It’s Letha, standing in the doorway by the refrigerator, cupping a Yankee candle at her sternum, the shadows on her face upside down, the wrongness sending a jolt up Jade’s spine that she has to consciously not let show.

She does wonder if she maybe just peed a little, though. Or a lot.

“For trespassing,” Jade pulls out of the thinnest of thin air.

Letha steps in, says, “What are you looking at?” in a way that can either be charged honestly and innocently, which Jade so wants to believe, or can be charged with that cat-playing-with-its-food way, which would mean that Letha completely knew her dad wasn’t after wasps earlier. That she knew it was a different breed of pest getting taken care of. And yes, Mars Baker, a shotgun would have been more efficient. Good one, sir.

Shit.

“Looking for the bear,” Jade says.

“It’s still around?” Letha says in either real or mock shock, holding the candle away so she can lean over the sink and study Terra Nova in the dark, her dad’s disc of light just barely gone into the woods. Or, if not gone, then she doesn’t say anything about it.

“Don’t know,” Jade says. “That’s why I’m, y’know, looking.”

Every word that comes out of her mouth is stupider than the last.

“You’re running away, aren’t you,” Letha says then, turning around to fix Jade in her hundred-watt caring eyes. “The sheriff called over looking for you.” Letha sets the guttering candle down by the sink between them.

“C-called over?” Jade stammers.

“Um, yeah?”

“But—”

Jade pulls her phone out, like that proves the lack of signal.

“Oh, did he not turn that off?”

Letha gets her own phone up, shakes her head at how stupid this is.

“We—” she starts, then picks her words more carefully: “Some of the construction crew was spending too much time on their phones, and Instagramming stuff too. Mr. Baker said the floorplans for some of our houses could be in the backgrounds of their selfies, so—”

She leaves that hanging.

“So?” Jade prompts.

“Mr. Pangborne had a jammer installed? The yacht’s out of the radius, but all the houses are in it, or in them, however it works.”

“A jammer,” Jade repeats.

“Like an umbrella, except it blocks from the—”

“No, I get it,” Jade says. “Is that legal?”

“There’s no guarantee of service over here,” Letha says with a shrug. “It’s the wilderness, right?”

What do they call those jammers, though? She’s heard it online. A… a rape tent, or something? At least when they’re used to keep a victim from calling the cops.

Or, a potential victim.

“Hardy was warning you about me?” she says.

“No, no,” Letha says, crossing to Jade to touch her forearm, swat that possibility away. “He was worried that you might be in danger.”

“Figured he’d be busy.”

“I mean, his office called.”

“Meg.”

“Tiff’s mom?”

“You caught that machete last night,” Jade tells Letha.

“T was behind me,” Letha says. “It could have—she might have gotten hurt.”

“It’s for tomorrow night,” Jade says. “Hardy didn’t take it?”

“I told him my dad was putting it in the safe. He had to…

you know.”

“Take me to jail, lock me up for my own good, keep me from being a menace to society.”

“He really cares, Jade.”

“This too,” Jade says, unholstering Just Before Dawn. “I couldn’t throw it. That’s… it’s why I came over.”

She holds Just Before Dawn across.

“A videotape,” Letha says, like identifying a bug.

“Yeah, it’s the only way—”

“We don’t have a player on the yacht?” Letha says, kind of in apology.

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