My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(93)

Jade winces, says, “So—wait, does this mean you coudn’t watch Bay of Blood?”

“Bay of—oh, oh, yeah. No, I’m sorry. But I’ve still got it—”

She’s walking and talking, Jade’s wrist somehow in her hand now, like she’s been arrested in the kindest way possible.

“No, we can’t, your dad—” Jade starts, unsure how to say what she needs to say.

“He won’t mind,” Letha says, pulling, not stopping, “won’t even know I’ve got someone over. The yacht’s so crowded tonight, everybody’s here for the Fourth! And for, you know, Mr. Samuels. Anyway, my dad’s room’s all the way in the bow, we’ll be—”

“I can’t, I’ve got to—”

“Walk around the lake in the dark with a bear in the area?”

Letha asks, dragging Jade across the living room now. “I mean, if you want, I can call the sheriff, have him send a boat.”

“Or, or. You could—”

“My stepmother won’t let me drive the boat at night,” Letha says with ill-feigned disgust. They’re coming through the front door now, are on the porch.

Jade immediately clocks the inky black trees Theo Mondragon is about to come slouching out of in his burly-lithe way, the bulb in his headlamp off but still warm.

“Okay, okay,” Jade says ahead to Letha, giving up this futile resistance, stepping in alongside so as to get up the pier and into the boat faster, please. If Theo Mondragon really doesn’t know his daughter has a guest for the night? That can almost maybe work. Or, it can work one hell of a lot better than getting caught out in the open by him when his hands are still red.

“So where did you spend the day?” Letha asks in a making-conversation bid.

“Camp Blood,” Jade monotones, looking behind them at the candlelight flickering in the kitchen window like a beacon.

“That old—?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t it scary over there?”

“You tell me.”

“I know I’ll never go there again,” Letha says, doing a full-body shiver, the memory of Deacon Samuels apparently washing through her.

“I’m serious about tomorrow night,” Jade says.

“The—the slasher?” Letha’s lips are pressed together in a way that feels one hundred percent patronizing. “So from…

from Camp Blood,” she says, changing direction for them now that they’re up on the pier, “from over there could you see…

out onto the lake?”

The way she’s picking through her words, Jade can hear what she’s trying not to say, as she doesn’t want to say it if Jade doesn’t already know: “Mr. Holmes.”

Letha looks over, her eyes blinking fast and tragic.

“It’s funny,” Letha says, then takes Jade’s forearm in both of her hands, draws best-friend close, whispers, “not funny-funny, but… ironic, I guess?”

“What’s ironic?” Jade asks, not sure she wants to know.

“My dad was always saying he wished he had a BB gun for him,” Letha says, letting Jade assemble the rest in her head.

But Jade has pieces Letha doesn’t know she has: Mars Baker tracking that duck across the water for Theo Mondragon, saying he should have used a shotgun; Mars Baker saying that to a guy who just had a nail gun.

Jade looks back to the woods.

“The bear?” Letha asks, pulling Jade closer.

Jade shakes her head no. Well. The “bear” that killed Deacon Samuels, yeah. The one that, say, was out turning their handy-dandy jammer on when a certain history teacher buzzed over for the hundred and first time. No, Theo Mondragon didn’t have a BB gun or a shotgun handy, but he could pick up the only gun handy: the one that spits nails.

Why not fling a golden nail up into the sky at the annoyance Mr. Holmes most certainly was? It’s just a gesture. It’s not like the nails are arrows, it’s not like they’re made for flying. It’s not like they’re meant to rip through a Dacron wing.

But what if one did, right? A one-in-a-million shot? Isn’t that exactly the kind of shot someone like Theo Mondragon’s been making his whole life already?

And what if, for sixty seconds after that, Theo Mondragon stood alongside three construction grunts and watched the little kit plane he’d just shot founder in the air, finally nosedive into the lake, launching its old pilot out into the water?

What if Theo Mondragon had just accidentally killed someone in broad daylight, and done it in front of three witnesses? Probably what he’d do then was what Deacon Samuels had already done: stuff those grunts’ hands with cash, assure them it was an accident, it was just a joke that got out of hand, but someone of his station didn’t need the kind of media attention this could bring, surely they could understand, couldn’t they? And then… he probably didn’t sleep on it, probably didn’t sleep at all. Who would?

What he would do, though, what would make sense at two in the morning, would be to involve himself with the construction the next day, and maybe send everyone but those three back across the lake. So he, the quintessential businessman, taking risk analysis and cost-benefit margins into severe account, could take care of business. Nobody on the yacht would think twice about a nailgun going off in Terra Nova. Nailguns were always going off in the houses.