My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(94)

And—and from his angle, he’d have to do it, wouldn’t he?

If he didn’t, Shooting Glasses and Mismatched Gloves and Cody could pull this whole enterprise down. Pull his whole life down.

“What is it?” Letha says, peering over into Jade’s eyes.

“Just… thinking about that BB gun,” Jade says back.

“He would never get one, though,” Letha says. “He hates guns.”

Of course he does, Jade answers inside. All slashers do.

She stands up fast when a light’s bobbing through the trees.

When Letha starts to look back to see what’s got Jade’s attention, Jade hustles them ahead.

“Hungry,” she says. “Haven’t eaten since, since…”

As if she could.

Except then she does, two plates’ worth of smoked salmon and crackers and leftover potato skins warmed in the microwave, delivered back to Letha’s room because Jade says she doesn’t want to startle anybody in the tight halls, meaning: there are no other girls on this yacht in coveralls, with hair like all the crayons melted together at the bottom of the box.

The salmon is so good, too, and the potato skins themselves, being left over, have a sort of skin over them that’s the most wonderful rubbery sensation to bite through. Each time it scrapes against Jade’s gums, she almost has to wince in a delight so pure she feels guilty for it.

“More if you want it,” Letha says in her jaunty, nonjudgmental way.

What they’re drinking is sparkling grape juice. Only non-alcoholic beverages for final girls.

“What were you, um, doing out there?” Jade asks between bites and gulps.

Letha’s nibbling at the one potato skin she has on her plate, which Jade’s pretty sure she just forked over so Jade wouldn’t have to eat alone.

“In the houses?” Letha asks, which feels like a stall.

Jade chews, nods.

Letha shrugs, studies the wall of her grand bedroom, and the way she doesn’t answer at first makes Jade sure that she was part of the hunt, that she was flushing construction grunts for her father, that she was supposed to lure them out in the open.

“Looking for you?” she says at last, in a small voice, her shoulders up by her ears.

“Me?”

“The sheriff—he’s worried about you, Jade.”

“So he did call.”

“It was Tiffany’s mom the first time. I wasn’t lying about that.”

“He probably just thinks I’m a threat or something.”

“You could never—”

“So you came out with a candle to look for me?”

“The houses aren’t locked yet,” Letha says with a shrug.

“And… and you already left me those pants before?”

“So you… knew I could walk around the lake?” Jade says, following this logic.

“I couldn’t sleep, thinking of you over here without a blanket, afraid, alone.”

“Thanks?” Jade says, the word unfamiliar in her mouth.

“Not really tired, though, I mean—”

“And if my dad saw you,” Letha adds, no eye contact for this.

“He… doesn’t like trespassers?”

“He’s kind of really into privacy, I guess?”

“Hardy said someone was always calling Mr. Holmes’s plane in, yeah,” Jade says.

Letha tries to suppress her grin, ends up standing to take her earrings out at the dresser, tilting her head this way and that.

“It was kind of pervy,” she says.

“Pervy?”

“My stepmom…” Letha closes her eyes to get through the next part: “On the top deck, she’ll—she’ll lock the deck door and tan her… all of her?”

“No top,” Jade fills in, and about Mr. Holmes, “that dog.”

Letha’s dabbing some solution or formula onto her eyelashes now, blinking fast from it. “She doesn’t like tan lines,” she says.

“White woman married to a black man,” Jade fills in. “She’s trying to catch up.”

“She’s white?” Letha says, lilting her voice up like she might really have not noticed.

Jade waits a beat then looks away, kind of impressed. “She doesn’t want to peel out of her shirt in the bedroom and have literal headlights,” she says, doing bright beams in front of her chest with her hands, Letha clocking that in the mirror.

“Stop!” she says, giggling, and Jade wonders if this is what it’s like, having a best friend. One who’s so unselfconsciously applying moisturizer to her face now that it seems Jade and her must have been connected at the hip since kindergarten.

But then, “What’s that smell?” Jade asks.

Letha angles her head up to sniff, says, “Oh yeah—you’re not allergic, are you?”

“To what?”

“Lavender and melatonin,” Letha says, sitting down on her bed with one long leg folded under her. “A diffuser. Helps me sleep. It’s on a timer.”

“Flowers,” Jade says, patting her pockets for the charger still up on the second floor of the last house she was in.

“The lavender,” Letha says with a shrug. “Makes you think purple thoughts.”