But what could Rexall or her father tell her about Clate Rodgers that would even be useful, right? Doesn’t she already know?
This is always her favorite part of any slasher. It’s already been established, thanks to the bodies stacking up, that somebody thinks they’ve got a good reason to be doing this, however it is they’re doing it. Now the push is to figure out what the dead might have in common, where their paths might cross. After that it’s just a matter of thinking back to who was where when a prank or accident went down. Who had stepped out to powder their nose, see a man about a horse, make a call?
Or, before Scream, anyway, that’s how you used to be able to figure a slasher out. Until it was either Billy or Stu who had to be gone from the room long enough to don a certain mask.
But, it was just and only Hardy ambling down from Melanie’s bench, wasn’t it? Cashing his last smoke and then moseying down to what was left of the idiot that let his daughter die.
So it’s him, then?
He is as good a candidate as anyone to bring Stacey Graves back. Except for Christine Gillette—his aunt—he’s the only one Jade knows to have actually seen Stacey Graves. And, what a Prowler-y rush if the slasher’s a law enforcement officer, right? That would… it would be like Nancy’s dad in A Nightmare on Elm Street feeling so much guilt about breaking the law to kill Freddy that he ducks into the crusty fedora himself, doses the kids with something to make them think they’re dreaming, and goes about punishing the whole block for their big crime.
As for how Hardy could have done Clate Rodgers: with his airboat tied to the pier, he had every excuse to be ambling past the Umiak for whatever he forgot—his lighter for that all-important last cigarette, probably. And if Letha or Tiara called down to ask why was he tying them off, he could just say he didn’t know anybody was aboard, he just didn’t want it drifting away, a big pretty boat like that. What he wouldn’t be saying would be that, when you have the chance to dispense with the grown-up version of the kid you blame for your daughter’s drowning, you do that, even if you’re already involved in something larger.
When the bodies are accumulating, there’s always room for one more, right?
Jade nods, says it aloud in the living room, like a test: “Right.”
Neither of the sleepers objects. Which she takes as permission to go on with this line of thinking. With… maybe one last smoke to keep her company.
She palms the half a pack of cigarettes from under the lamp and steps out onto the back porch, sits in the open door and chainsmokes two, then one more for good measure.
The plan, she’s pretty sure, should be to sneak over to Terra Nova tomorrow— today, actually. It’s after midnight, right?
Anyway, before Clate Rodgers burbled up from Indian Lake in chunks and smears, it was a lock that Theo Mondragon had to be the one behind all this. And he still could be. She could have Hardy all wrong—Theo Mondragon could have stowed away on the Umiak, been setting a death trap for someone else, for one of those two Founders who were going to have to be picked back up, and Clate just happened to get literally sucked into it. That Hardy didn’t stop it doesn’t mean he actually did it.
Theo’s got the more immediate motivation, anyway—his house, his literal castle — and since it’s not the millennium, motivations matter. Motivations are everything. Hardy has his daughter as an excuse to let Clate Rodgers get pulled into those whirling blades, but his motivation for Deacon Samuels is a harder nut.
Oh: unless he wanted a certain golf club, Jade remembers.
Do people really kill for golf stuff, though? She wants to say no, except… Jason did kill that one guy for littering, right?
But if greed or envy or gain is the motivation, then this is a giallo Proofrock’s in, not a revenge-driven slasher, and since this isn’t Italy in the sixties, she has to suspect there’s some other motivation, one that feels a lot more righteous.
And? She’s not supposed to have it all figured out yet, is she?
Doesn’t mean she can’t be trying, though.
Like she can help it.
So the plan now is to conk out for a few hours then hike around the lake to Terra Nova, maybe stop to wow over the Deacon Samuels stains behind the fluttering yellow tape at Camp Blood, and then she’ll either figure out she’s right, it’s Theo, or she’ll exclude him, easy as that, one-and-done.
Jade blows a clean line of smoke up into the night and cashes her butt on the sole of her boot, keys on another paper she wrote for Mr. Holmes, about how the reason final girls fall so much when running away is that they’re like those mother birds who flap away from their nests like they’re hurt, so as to draw the predator off of their babies.