The most recent is a video.
“What have we here…” she says, ducking out of Main Supplies, watching and walking, trying to beat the rush of elementary kids to the exit doors.
At first it’s just foggy nothing playing back at her, but then the phone’s camera figures out how to focus through whatever that is—that same sandwich bag?—and it’s a naked blond girl, flashes of a naked blond guy.
“Unauthorized Use of the Town Canoe,” Jade tells them, unwinding her earbuds and clocking the date: six days before her “attempt,” as the therapist in Idaho Falls calls it.
She guesses she’s lucky the town canoe had even found its way back by the time she needed it, right?
As for who these kids are, first, their English is all intoned funny, and second, around here they’d be Towhead 1 and Towhead 2—blond mops she’d have shared crayons with, freckled faces she would know. And she doesn’t.
“Sven,” Jade says then, turning backwards to push through the double doors, out into the sunlight. Inside Golding Elementary the bell rings, meaning Jade’s just ahead of the tidal wave of coughing and sniffing and yelling and crying.
It could wash right over her and she wouldn’t even notice.
The guy—Sven—has just gone over the side of the canoe.
Jade stops walking, stops breathing.
“What the bleeping bleep…” she says, looking around for if any of the parents in the hug-n-go lane have cued into the momentous thing happening on this phone’s screen. They’re just staring, waiting for her to move already, please.
Jade nods sorry, sorry, and steps along, scrubbing the video back to when Sven goes over, the pale soles of his feet there and gone.
The girl is all alone now, and, going by what Sven called her at the pier, her name is… ‘Throat Murder?’ ‘Thromudder?’
‘Crone Mother?’ Jade settles on the easier “Blondie.” As in, Just what is Blondie flinching away from?
Jade looks up, out to Indian Lake, as if she can see what was terrorizing this blond girl that night.
She rewinds again to Sven going over the side, memorizing every splash, every breath, every moment of this magical thing that happened after Proofrock was asleep, and this time through she flinches with Blondie, even turns around with her, trying to see over all sides of the canoe as well.
“This could have been you, horror girl,” she says to herself.
Same lake, same pier, same boat, almost the same night.
Now the girl is paddling away from something alongside the canoe, and now—no, no—she’s slipping over the side because swimming has to be faster. Meaning Jade can only hear now.
The girl’s scream splits the night in two and then cuts off just as fast, the silence after it quieter and deeper than any Jade’s ever experienced.
In Friday the 13th, it’s two blond counselors who get the blade to start the ritual, Barry and Claudette. In Proofrock, in whatever this is going to be called, it’s two blond out-of-towners. Two Netherlanders, Sven and Blondie.
“Thank you,” Jade says to them, kissing the screen then flinching back from the pink phone ringing against her lips.
She rubs the sensation away, and then, on the fifth ring, because the kids flowing past are watching her, wondering if she’s going to, she answers—holds it up to her ear, anyway.
It’s that same language from the video. The one word that’s the same, evidently, is “detective.”
That’s all Jade needs to hear.
Calmly, not in any kind of panic, just another wrong number, she hangs up, bends to attend to her right boot, and when she stands, she’s sliding the pink phone under her chunky sole. When she moves ahead with the surge of kids, she’s sliding the phone out into the road, into a puddle. It slurps the phone right in, but then the phone bobs up to the surface—the case must float, shit. It’s just hanging there like a flat cork, so pink, so obvious, ringing again now, two fourth-graders stopped by Jade to watch this unfolding tragedy.
“Oops,” the taller of the two girls tells Jade.
Jade’s just staring.
“Here—” the shorter one says, stepping forward to retrieve the phone for Jade, who’s evidently too heartbroken, too scared, but Jade, her palm stabbing out to the girl’s chest, stops her, a bus swishing by in that same instant, honking loud and long, close enough that the tips of the girl’s hair rub along the dingy yellow paint.
Behind Jade, a woman screams, the kind of scream that makes Jade feel like she just got punched in the gut, it’s from so deep.