My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(98)

Jade makes it through, does the count alone in her head, then dials back to Part III, is in and out until the headstand, which she suspects is not actually part of sex, but when Jason splits that guy from crotch to head, one side of her falls away with him, and—because all the camera angles and compositions are built around 3-D—Jade tracks it down. To her phone, awake in her hand somehow.

No, not somehow. Very much on purpose.

This is the decision she’s been avoiding, isn’t it? Cutting all her hair off hasn’t made her forget, though. Not quite. Even Jason hasn’t distracted her enough.

She can save a lot of lives if she just makes one phone call, can’t she? If she just touches one phone number?

It means… it means all her slasher dreams don’t come true, but—if they do? Is it really winning if everybody dies? More to the point: if she’d have nipped this slasher cycle in the bud already, by turning that pink phone in, would Mr. Holmes have ended up dying in Indian Lake?

That decides it for her.

She calls Hardy’s office. Not 911, where a dispatcher will answer, give her time to lose her nerve, but the actual office.

It rings three times, four, and on five—

“Fremont County Sheriff’s Office,” Meg says, as chipper as the day is long.

“Ms. Koenig?” Jade says, not speaking too loud.

“Um, who is this?” Meg asks back.

“I just want to report something.”

“May I have your name, please?”

“I saw a—I saw someone die. I saw him get killed, I mean.”

For a moment, nothing, then, so cheery, “And where are you, dear?”

“Across the lake,” Jade says, obviously. “Terra Nova.”

“And who is this?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s…”—quieter, much quieter—“it’s Theo Mondragon who did it.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s the one who did it. Theo Mondragon.”

“This is Jade Daniels,” Meg says, switching ears it sounds like.

“I’m anonymous,” Jade says back.

“We do have caller ID, dear.”

Jade closes her eyes in pain.

“I’m sorry,” Meg says. “But the sheriff left specific instructions for if you called. He said it would be your next…

what was the word? Oh, yes. ‘Gambit.’ Your next gambit.

That’s like a gamble plus a ruse, it means—”

“I know what it means.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Grady… he had said you have a vocabulary on you.”

Grady, Bear, Sherlock, Holmes, pirate of Indian Lake, Night Flier—some history teachers have as many names as A Bay of Blood, don’t they?

No: had. Some history teachers had that many names.

More important, “He talked to you about me?” Jade asks, fully aware this is giving away that it’s really her.

“He was proud of you,” Meg says, her mouth closer to the phone now, but all Jade can hear is that past tense.

“This isn’t a gambit,” Jade says. “This is… I saw it, you’ve got to believe me.”

“Was it like a—a slasher movie?”

“Just because… that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. If you don’t—a lot of people are going to die tomorrow night.”

“Sheriff said you would say that,” Meg says. “Something about ‘closing the beaches,’ I believe?”

Jade lowers the phone to the sheets, watches her thumb end the useless stupid idiotic doomed call, and she decides to just count the seconds until her phone dims to half-bright, then completely blacks out: fifteen, then thirty. But to be sure she does it again, gets a count of fifteen and thirty-two, so has to do it again to be sure, but this time—or maybe the next?— when the screen goes dark, it takes her eyelids with it. As she’s sinking, she tells herself it doesn’t matter, she’s safe. The door’s locked, the yacht’s still as a tomb, this blanket is soft and warm, the twins haven’t rung the alarm, and, most important, you don’t slash where you live. Theo Mondragon must know that, it’s basic stuff. All she has to do is be sure and wake before dawn, sneak out through the tangle of halls, be gone before Letha can insist on a group breakfast up on deck.

Jade’s first thought when she wakes back up, though, which feels like the same moment she was just in, is the thesis of another paper she wrote for Mr. Holmes: “The Strange Algebra of Horror.” Her lead-in example, and where she got the title, was that hurting the leg of a slasher, instead of slowing it down, it actually makes the slasher faster, just, now it’s got a scary limp. But her main push, with many examples, was that proximity to the final girl greatly reduces your likelihood of survival. Meaning a fly on the wall might just have a chance of slipping through alive—like, talking Friday s, Ted, the prankster in Part 2 who kind of by convention has to die and die hard. Except he goes out drinking on the town, is safe from all the carnage specifically because he increases his distance from the final girl.

Instead of, say, sleeping right alongside her.

Jade yawns a long luxuriant yawn, her jaw nearly popping out of place from it, and apologizes in her head to Mr. Holmes, as that paper must have been wrong, since, right now, Jade’s as safe as she can be. But… what was it that woke her up, here?