When you’re mourning, grief-stricken, shell-shocked, sunglasses at night are cool. And… does Letha see Jade? Jade backs up farther, dropping her bags into the bushes, only keeping the machete, but hiding it along her right leg like’s proper.
Finally Letha’s black lenses move on to Main all at once, Jade’s eyes going with whether she wants to look or not. It’s just a cat crossing under the streetlight, but is there anything more perfect to spook things up?
Jade nods thank you to Letha for directing her to this next Jonesy, and then whatever Mars Baker and Lewellyn Singleton are trying to magic onto the big screen finally pops.
“Hunh,” Jade says. Also: of course.
It’s a slideshow of Deacon Samuels’s life. There he is in a silver hard hat, cutting a ribbon for some groundbreaking event. There he is on the cover of Golf Digest. There he is in a candid shot with Ladybird, his wife. There he is having fun in the swan boat, Indian Lake all around him like the place he’s been looking for his whole life.
The reason they’re testing this now, Jade figures, is that this is going to play before the movie on Saturday, right? It’s easier than inviting the whole town over to gawk through Terra Nova, breathe all the clean air up.
It’s funny, too: the Umiak right under these Founders, and part of the pier is cordoned off with Hardy’s yellow tape.
Because the fish probably haven’t eaten all of Clate Rodgers yet, have they? The bigger chunks of him had probably been the work of a few minutes: plunge an official fishnet in and back a couple of times and he’s gone, in a bucket, in cold storage, a big “do not drink / not margaritas!” sign taped on it.
And now the slideshow’s over and… another no-surprise: it’s a video of the remaining Founders. They’re down in some mahogany part of the yacht, it looks like. Lewellyn Singleton, Mars Baker, Ross Pangborne, and the chair of the board, farthest from the camera—meaning the center of the shot— Theo Mondragon.
Jade tries to look past the screen, past the Umiak, all the way over to the actual yacht, but comes back to the screen when whoever’s holding the camera moves in on the Founders.
Instead of the suits or high-dollar casual wear they’re usually wearing, all four look to be just in from a swim.
Towels around the necks, either actually or artfully mussed hair, and wearing… not “trunks” exactly. More plum-smuggler cycling shorts? Not banana hammocks—there’s legs to them— but not board shorts either.
And? They can each pull off shorts that tight, that unforgiving. Mars Baker, even, when he coughs into his hand, has a six-pack or thereabouts, and Theo Mondragon looks pretty damn sculpted, Jade has to admit before looking away.
Of course they’d turn the memorial for their friend into another way to lord it over the common folk, remind them of the pecking order.
This slasher can’t come fast enough.
Jade starts to turn away, not be drawn into the practice run for this spectacle—thanks for the warning, Mr. Holmes—but then the speakers crackle. Jade stops, her hands clenching into fists, but she’s listening now.
Sorry, Mr. Holmes.
Jade looks back over her shoulder and the memorial slideshow’s still over, but now what Mars Baker and Lewellyn Singleton are playing on the inflatable screen is an actual recording of Deacon Samuels. A Skype session that somebody apparently hit “record” on. Deacon Samuels has his golf cap pulled down low like the frat boy he must be, and he’s just lowering a disposable plastic cup but savoring whatever’s in it, meaning this is maybe the end of the day, except… is that trashy wood paneling behind him? Is that dim light hanging on a fake brass chain familiar?
Jade turns all the way around, steps closer to be sure, then nods.
Deacon Samuels is in a room of the Trail’s End Motel just off the highway, three hundred yards from where Jade’s standing right now. To be sure, she turns, uses a tree to help tippy-toe, and, yep, there’s that big dying Indian sign that’s supposed to lure travelers in and, in the same way you warn coyotes by hanging their dead brethren on the fence, keep Indians out.
He stays there, though?
“And I just had this long wonderful conversation with the gentleman who runs the gas station, I believe his name was…
Lonnie, yes. Apparently his family has been here since before electricity, that’s the way he put it.”
Jade’s eyes skate over the water where the crowd will be bobbing on Saturday and she has to press her lips together, happy for Lonnie in his innertube, his name coming through the speakers. What Deacon Samuels isn’t saying anything about is Lonnie’s stutter, which would have made their conversation at the gas pumps… something a person on the cover of golfing magazine could be poking fun at. But he isn’t.