“I’m not running away,” Jade tells him.
“To say nothing of your attempt on Letha Mondragon’s life,” Hardy goes on, moseying ahead of her to the front office.
“I was giving her something, not trying to hurt her,” Jade grumbles.
“And if she hadn’t caught that something?”
“I knew she would.”
“More like you’re lucky she did,” Hardy says, presenting the hall to her.
“Bathroom?” Jade has to ask as it’s sliding by.
“In a moment,” Hardy tells her.
“Cruel and unusual,” Jade says.
“Shit, don’t get me started,” Hardy says back with a chuckle, offering her the perp chair on the other side of his desk and not taking a seat himself until Jade settles in. Her phone is plugged in on the edge of his desk, is pretty much the only thing she can see anymore.
“I really do need to pee,” she says.
“If you’d just used the thunder pot in there, we could avoid these little discussions,” Hardy says, taking a fancy silver pen up from its holder, rolling it across the back of his knuckles.
“But—kids these days, right? I mean that too, kids. You are still seventeen, little miss. And you were running away. I found your bags back in the trees. Much as this might seem personal, I do have a duty here.”
“Then this isn’t about… about anything I might have seen the other night?” Jade asks, careful with her phrasing.
Hardy creaks back in his chair, studying the much-studied ceiling, it looks like.
“And what do you think you might have seen?” he says.
“You want, I can get my recorder from Meg, you can give a statement. Or, no—you can get it. Know right where it is, don’t you?”
He angles his face down to hers, rubs his lips hard against each other like he just glossed them, is trying to spread it around, get it worked in proper.
“Nothing,” Jade finally says. “Didn’t see a thing, Sheriff.”
She’s not sure whether she hopes that’s the exact wording thirteen-year-old Clate Rodgers used once upon a time, or if lucking into that would be the worst possible mistake.
“Seen more deaths here in the last couple weeks than in the forty years previous,” Hardy says, leaning forward now, his elbows finding the desk. “Then I find the local horror fan running around at night with a machete that’s got a name scratched into the blade?”
“Jamie Lee Curtis.”
“Blue Steel, yeah. Don’t think Bogey’s in that one.”
Jade takes this, tries not to let it show.
“She’s kind of a final girl in that one too, you know?” she says, trying to keep it casual now. Just talking movies, not passing index card after index card of subtext back and forth, because pretty soon one of those index cards is going to have something to do with what she said to him the other day, about Melanie.
Hardy just watches her, probably waiting to see if she’s going to go on about JLC being forever the final girl.
That would be too easy, though. And she’s still got to pee.
“So that’s what you’re jamming me up for?” Jade says instead. “A weapon? Thought I was running away.”
“Not supposed to run with scissors,” Hardy says. “Think that goes double for machetes, don’t you?”
“You’ll be glad I gave it to her.”
“Because of… what were you saying?” Hardy asks back with a patronizing shrug. “Bear sketched it out for me a bit, yeah? Something about… Scooby-Doo?”
“It’s a Scooby-Doo build,” Jade spits back, disgusted.
“Someone in a mask. Probably her dad, okay?”
“Her being—”
“Letha.”
“ ‘Saturday,’ ” Hardy says, holding Jade’s eyes.
Jade spins away, stares out across the lake. Mr. Holmes is bucking the wind in his ultralight. “This is where I’m probably supposed to tell you to close the beaches,” she says.
“That’s from Jaws.”
“There’s gonna be kids in the water, I mean,” Jade goes on.
“They see worse on their videogames.”
“You know what I mean.”
“That they’re in danger.”
Jade comes back around to him about this but Hardy’s already staring into her soul.
“Bear also took me through what he says is probably your reasoning for… for Saturday.”
For the first time, Jade really hears that: “Bear.”