What does it mean that an untouchable Founder had been killed, though? And, not just killed, but killed in a way that a bear could be framed? How long had it taken whoever was doing this to lure a bear in to cover their tracks?
More important, why? Is this some townie with a chip on his shoulder about who was pulling good hours at the construction site, who wasn’t? Is Terra Nova messing up the back porch vista a certain someone had been counting on staring into for retirement? If so—if either of those—then why now instead of months ago? Had it been last night because whoever it was knew Deacon Samuels would be out there alone, since he’d been alone out there before?
“Who are you?” Jade says to Indian Lake.
It’s a good reflective moment, and she’s milking it for all the drama it’s worth when her phone rings in her hand and she fumbles it away, drops her coveralls, tangles her feet in them and falls, her pages unrolling every which way at once, her elbow scraping on the asphalt so she can answer the phone with a sharp “What already?”
At first, nothing. Then, timidly, “Um, I think I know you from, from the ladies’ r—”
“You got the package,” Jade says, rolling over onto her back, the wash of stars opening up above her. “You found the —the… you found them both. The kid in the lake. The Foun— Deacon Samuels. You know it’s really happening.”
Again, silence.
“Do you need those pants back?” Letha Mondragon asks in a way that Jade can see her mouth, kind of smiling.
“There’s so much I need to tell you,” Jade says. “I’ll be your… what’s that Pinocchio dude called, with the love letters?”
“Cyrano de Bergerac?”
“Like, together, my knowledge, what I know, mixed with your… your everything.”
“What are you saying?”
“Something’s coming is what I’m saying. It’s already here is what I’m saying. You’ve seen it yourself, the proof anyway.”
Letha doesn’t respond to this.
Jade goes on: “I didn’t know it was going to cross the lake for… for Terra Nova, though. I’m sorry.”
“I have so many questions.”
“I’m the girl made of answers.”
“The bench,” Letha Mondragon says, and it takes Jade a moment to reel through all the benches in Proofrock, finally settle on the only one that could be considered the main one: Melanie Hardy’s memorial bench by the water, just up from the pier. To Letha, arriving by Umiak every morning for school last semester, it’s probably the only bench.
“Out in the open, good, good,” Jade says. “You don’t know if you can trust me yet. You’ve got to be careful, I might be the one doing all this. Shit, I should have thought of that.”
“My dad says—”
“Parents in slashers are either drunks or they want to put bars on your bedroom windows. Sometimes both.”
Letha breathes in and out, is maybe about to cry, here.
Jade is looking across the lake at the yacht, back at its mooring.
“It wasn’t a bear,” Jade says at last. “I think you know that, don’t you?”
“Somebody pinched the candle out,” Letha says, quieter, like this is just for Jade.
“It didn’t just blow out?” Jade asks back.
Letha doesn’t answer, and in that silence Jade stands and spins around, silently cussing at herself: whose side is she on here? Not her own, evidently.
“Never mind,” she adds.
“Okay,” Letha says back timidly.
Jade takes a step closer to the water, then another step, is standing in it up to her shins now, her printed-out pages floating around her.
“That candle being out could mean it’s somebody from over here,” she says, quiet as well now. “We’ve all been trained on not burning down the national forest since kindergarten.”
“Then—”
“But nobody over there would want to burn down their new house, either,” Jade says. “And… did the sheriff ask if you were wearing shoes when you—you…？”
“He didn’t ask,” Letha says with barely enough air to activate her larynx.
“We can’t do this over the phone,” Jade tells her.
“Three o’clock?”
Jade counters with lunch, which she can sacrifice for this. A thousand lunches, even. All the lunches she has left.
“Which light is yours?” she asks then.