“My dad would never do that to her,” Letha says, still talking about Tiara’s big slow-motion fall. “Not to anybody.”
“Did you… like them?” Jade asks. “The Saw s?”
“I watched like this,” Letha says, doing her fingers over her eyes, still playing the horror wimp.
Jade breathes in deep once, twice, and on three she says it: “Is that Michael Myers?” When Letha leans forward to follow where she’s pointing—past the swan’s regally arched neck, to Hardy policing fireworks from the pier—Jade slips quietly over the edge, under the water, no splash at all for once in her life, she’s pretty sure.
Her gamble is that by the time Letha realizes she’s gone, she’ll spend thirty seconds or a minute standing in the boat, calling, before she dives in for a look around. But Indian Lake is big, and dark, and quiet, and it’s been swallowing bodies since forever.
Jade kicks to the side, reaches with her right hand and pulls ahead like gathering water into her hip bag, and then she does it again, and again, her lungs burning. When she finally comes up, she’s alone. Freezing, but alone, just a prickly-scalped seal bobbing in the water, her eyes barely above the surface.
She takes her apology to Letha Mondragon back.
Sure, she might have dreamed of and begged for a slasher to stalk into town one fine day, but that doesn’t mean she wants to pedal into the big crowd along side that slasher.
Except—it can’t be Letha, can it?
You’re being paranoid, Jade tells herself, tracing slow figure eights with her hands. Paranoid and stupid. This is why nobody hangs out with you. This is why everybody hates you.
There’s only about a quarter mile to go to Proofrock, now.
To Jaws.
After looking all around, certain no ostrich-size swans are about to glide up on her, Jade starts pulling for that glowing screen, trying not to broadcast her location with white water, praying she can get there before hypothermia sets in.
Halfway there, the dialogue of the movie is coming through clear. Quint’s just tacking that third barrel to the shark, and assuring Brody and Hooper that no fish can dive with three.
When Jade looks behind her this time, she has to admit that it’s to see if she’s dragging a yellow barrel, as idiotic as that would be. But she is a monster, as far as this town is concerned.
What she sees instead of a yellow barrel is the dull silver prow of a sudden and completely soundless boat, bearing down on her. Not sucking air in this time—no time—Jade slips under, instantly clamping her hands to her head to keep her hair from tangling in the propeller, but then just having bare scalp to hold.
It’s just a little trolling motor burring past, though. Jade watches it churn past inches from her face, a turbid cyclone of bubbles ensconcing the whirling blades. It’s like a free-range garbage disposal, gone feral in the lake—it’s the last thing Jason sees, in The New Blood. Jade rotates in the water, tracking it until the darkness swallows it away, and… and, and standing in the shadows of Banner Tompkins’s party a week and a half ago, she was right, wasn’t she? This—a trolling motor, a light little boat—is exactly what Theo Mondragon’s been using to cross the lake under cover of night. With it, and especially if he’s got the sides blacked out, he might as well be walking on water.
She comes up a second after the aluminum hull’s gone and gasps air in, her vision swimming from lack of oxygen, and from certainty, from relief.
It is him. Jade was—she was wrong about Letha, she was reading the moment wrong. But it doesn’t matter, now.
“Right on time,” she says to Theo Mondragon’s wake, and then watches as he does the impossible: stands up in the prow of the little boat like George Washington crossing the Delaware—the poster’s on Mr. Holmes’s wall, has been since forever, even after Jade used her pencil eraser to give him Little Orphan Annie eyes. In the poster, what George Washington has running down along his leg, ready for battle, is a long curving saber.
What Theo Mondragon has is the machete, the one Jade never bothered to tell Letha is the same model Quint uses to save the Orca. And, not only is Theo Mondragon standing up in the boat, his hand no longer to the steering control of the trolling motor, but the boat, unlike Washington’s… it’s sinking?
Because he took one of the boats with the crashed-in hulls, Jade can see now. If he was sure to keep his weight all the way in the back, then the nose of that boat would ride out of the water, the big hole up front in the open air. Theo Mondragon must have gambled the boat would wheelie up like that, anyway. And, like every stock purchase he’s taken a chance on, every merger, every takeover, every board meeting, his gamble is paying out.