Through the window she sees him stepping into the one house she’s already been through.
Two minutes later he emerges, dragging Cowboy Boots— Cody, Cody Cody Cody—by his right heel, the rest of him wrapped in foggy plastic, Tina-style.
Theo Mondragon stands there casing the night for maybe thirty more seconds in which he pulls his own phone out, unlocks it, and stares into it, finally shaking it just as Jade did.
His doesn’t get a signal either. He smiles to himself about it, though, nods, slips the phone back into his pocket, and walks a straight line out from Terra Nova, a flashlight or headlamp coming on once he’s in the trees. It dims a few steps later, then fades completely.
Jade wants to follow, wants to know, but her legs don’t agree.
Instead she counts under her breath until he steps back into the clearing she can see: six hundred and forty-one. Which has got to be something like ten minutes, right? Does he know of a cave over here to stash a body in? Has nothing changed since 1872?
Jade steps back from the kitchen window, careful not to be a body-shaped shadow against the tall silver rectangle the refrigerator is.
But he’s not coming for this house. Not even close to this one.
He goes to the third or fourth house back, his headlamp— she can see that now—a disc of yellow light against the windows from room to room until he steps back out onto the porch to turn the light off, his chest heaving, breath steaming.
He’s just staring at the yacht.
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.