Chapter 18 Hailey
Hailey
There was an envelope peeking out from under the doormat; Hailey noticed it as she came down the stairs the next morning, after she took in the fact that the pee-damaged patches in the floor had been covered over with doll blankets and little mountains of toys.
Mabel’s or Gigi’s solution to yesterday’s catastrophe brought a lump to Hailey’s throat, and she stepped carefully around their efforts as she reached for the dropped piece of mail.
The specific brown shade of the envelope brought a flash flood of perspiration to her skin.
When she tore it open, Hailey found that there was not a check inside.
It was from Sunshine Enterprises, but this time it was a sort of invoice.
It gave the dates and the amounts of all of the checks they had received—four grand, then five, then six, then seven, then twenty-five—in a neat column.
Forty-seven thousand dollars paid out, the paper shouted at her, though a lot of that—more than half—could only just have hit their bank account.
They could still pay most of it back. All of it, if they scraped into their overdraft. (Private school was so damn expensive!)
Mack was in the kitchen making the girls pancakes on a weekday, trying to prove he was Father of the Year instead of a useless, soon-to-be-unemployed lech. Hailey kissed the top of Gigi’s head as she handed him the document.
She watched his eyes run down the length of the paper, then dart back to the top. He set the spatula down in the frying pan.
“I don’t get it. It looks like a bill, but for what? What is this minus forty-seven thousand?”
“Uh, maybe because we took forty-seven thousand?” This was worth abandoning the silent treatment for, Hailey decided.
After she’d gotten over the initial shock of her husband’s stupidity and betrayal, she’d boarded up her mouth like the derelict houses that peppered the not-distant-enough streets that surrounded Bratenahl.
Last night she hadn’t trusted herself to speak as she put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room; she had been too afraid of matching Mack strike-for-strike.
The impact of David Rainier would plow over his glorified teenage groupie, would destroy what was left of their marriage in a single nuclear explosion.
“Forty-seven thousand whats?” Mabel wanted to know.
“Eat your pancake,” Mack told her.
“We didn’t take it,” he said to Hailey. “It was paid out to us. That’s what this is saying. Look, right here. It says, ‘Statement of your Account.’ ”
“The account is negative. They obviously want the money back.”
“You don’t know that. We don’t even know who they are.
We don’t even have an account.” Mack turned the document over, just as Hailey had done two minutes earlier.
“There’s no address, no bank details.” Hailey already knew this; there was only the familiar logo in orange and yellow ink, of a sun rising (or setting?) over the horizon, above the date.
“I mean, how would we even be supposed to pay it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think this could get any weirder.
” Hailey watched Gigi dump half a bottle of syrup onto her plate.
Then she reached over Mack and took the spatula out of the frying pan; there was a black mark where it had melted onto the nonstick surface.
“I’m late. I’m taking this with me.” Hailey grabbed the paper from his hand.
“I’m going to see if one of our researchers can find this company.
” She left the kitchen so fast that she was in the car before she realized that she hadn’t said goodbye to her daughters.
* * *
Though it wasn’t even October yet and it was almost sixty degrees outside, there was a woman in a garish mink coat getting out of a Mercedes across from Hailey’s parking space. Hailey had one foot out of her own car before she realized that this woman was Rebekah Rainier.
“Now that’s what I call perfect timing.” Something in Rebekah’s voice was off; it grated even more than usual.
“Good morning, Rebekah.” This was just about the last thing Hailey needed; she had to force civility into her syllables. “Do we have a meeting? Come on up to the office, and you’ll have to give me a minute. I haven’t really looked at my schedule because I’ve been away—”
“Away fucking my husband?”
It felt like a semi had been driven straight through Hailey’s chest.
“What?”
“You heard me. You. Fucked. My. Husband.”
Hailey’s lungs seemed to collapse in on themselves.
She felt as if she was flying backward through the garage, even as she was frozen in place.
“Rebekah, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
” Fighting the paralysis in her legs, she backed toward the door that led to the elevators. Rebekah followed her.
“He called me, you know. David called me just to tell me that he’d fucked my lawyer. My lawyer, the one who’s supposed to be on my side. How could you be so stupid?”
“Listen to me, I—”
“I told you. I told you exactly what he was. You’re such a snot, sitting up there in your fancy office, thinking you know everything.
Are you going to tell the other lawyers that you screwed the guy who’s screwing all of them?
Was that your plan to get your money back?
” As Rebekah’s laugh echoed around the concrete, Hailey heard a car pull into the parking garage.
Someone was going to see them. Anyone could be listening.
She was torn between getting back in her car and running into the building.
Could she lock the stairwell door behind her?
Rebekah Rainier loose in the halls of Arthur, Clarke Hailey could see faint frown lines and an angry almost-wrinkle slashing its way down the center of her forehead.
“He set you up, and you played right into his hands,” Rebekah went on.
“And you go ahead, keep right on lying till you’re blue in the face, but I wouldn’t be surprised if David has proof.
I’d watch that back of yours, and maybe in the future stay off it. ”
Hailey turned away and ducked into the musty stairwell.
The heavy door swung shut of its own accord, and like a child, Hailey pushed her body weight against it.
No resistance came from Rebekah, though after a minute a man Hailey recognized from the insurance agency on the top floor appeared through the glass panel in the door.
Hailey had no choice but to let him in. If he’d heard the angry exchange, he didn’t let on.
Hailey felt she might suffocate on the elevator ride.
David had never called her. He hadn’t emailed or texted a single word since that night.
She’d been so wrapped up in Mack, so busy telling herself that she’d deal with David later, that she hadn’t considered what his own silence might mean.
Surely he was just being a gentleman, just waiting for her to set the tone of what had occurred between them?
Because Rebekah had to be wrong; there was no way that he had set her up.
Hailey was much too smart to have misread him, much too clever to let herself become a pawn in some millionaire’s divorce battle.
It was simply not a possibility.
By the time Hailey reached her office, she had decided to send him a text.
It was safer than email somehow, less official: Hello David, can we speak today?
Give me a call when you can. It was the first message between them—she only had his number in her phone from the day he’d called her at the pool—so should she sign her name?
She did not.
She took the statement from Sunshine Enterprises out of her bag and, taking a Sharpie from her desk, blacked out hers and Mack’s names and their address from the top of the page.
Then, casting a glance down the hallway to make sure Rebekah wasn’t in the reception area, she made her way past rock-star paralegal Marla’s desk, past Straus’s and Clarke’s offices, to the L-shaped corridor that housed the firm’s two researchers-for-hire.
Dennis—the one she was looking for, the only one who would do for this task—was hunched over a Dunkin’ Donuts mug, glasses fogged from the steam coming out of it.
He straightened at the sight of her, mumbled something that must have been hello.
If she’d met him on the street, Hailey would have put his age at no more than sixteen.
“I need you to do something for me, Dennis.” Hailey didn’t trust her voice with pleasantries; the shock of Rebekah’s assault was still ricocheting through her nervous system.
She set the statement from Sunshine Enterprises in front of him.
“Can you please find out everything you can about this company?”
Dennis frowned—God, he really was almost prepubescent—and Hailey nearly lost it as he googled the company right in front of her. There were fifteen million results.
They locked eyes. On some fundamental level Hailey needed him to be afraid of her, and, wrapped in the warm blanket of self-preservation that was his generation’s instinct, Dennis was not about to oblige.
“I need more to go on if you want me to narrow this down at all,” he said with a shrug.
“I’m aware of that,” Hailey snapped. “I was about to tell you—in strict confidence—that I need you to find out if there is a connection between a company by this name and David Rainier.” She put her hand out to stop him as he went to amend his google search.
“And let me be clear: I really need you to keep this line of investigation between us.”
He seemed to perk up a little at the subterfuge. “I don’t remember seeing this company name when we analyzed his financials.”
“No, I know. I’m just wondering about the amounts—can you match them up with money flowing through his accounts?”
“I can’t access a third party’s statements,” said Dennis flatly, but they both knew this was not true.
In the thick of Rebekah’s divorce proceedings, the kid had submitted two files of research on David Rainier to Marla and Hailey: one contained legally obtained material that was usable in court, the other was only to be used for reference purposes and never shared outside the firm.
Dennis, Marla had told Hailey back then, was a bona fide hacker.
At the time, Hailey had been unimpressed—what researcher his age wasn’t?
But now she really needed him to be something special.
“Maybe if you give me the account these were paid into,” he was saying, looking down at the statement. “If I had that, I could possibly—and I’m speaking sort of like hypothetically here—get the details on the payer.”
“They were checks,” said Hailey. “Does that matter?”
“Checks?”
“Yes, like paper checks.” She had a sudden recollection of an Instagram reel about teenagers struggling to dial rotary phones. “Checks that come in the mail and you deposit in your bank account.”
“Right. No, I don’t think it would matter. Although a check would have account numbers on it that we could trace, maybe a bank address—”
“I don’t have that. The checks were already deposited.
” Thanks to Hailey’s greedy husband and her busybody father, those serial numbers were now the property of National City Bank.
And as much as she hated to admit it, she just wasn’t sure that Mack was wrong to be wary of red-flagging the strange payments.
“And you say you don’t have the payee account details? Knowing who’s getting the money would help too.”
Hailey sighed. She took in Dennis’s unbrushed hair, his vegan Vans, and the Chipotle loyalty card tucked alongside his ergonomic keyboard.
“I have them,” she said, and wrote down hers and Mack’s full names and bank account number. Dennis’s eyes widened, but he said nothing.
“I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen if this gets around the office.
” Hailey almost laughed at her own ridiculousness, but he only nodded.
“And one more thing. There’s no way that whoever the sender is—whoever runs Sunshine Enterprises—will know you are looking into this, right?
” She lowered her voice. “They can’t see whatever it is you do to search through these accounts, right? ”
“There’s no way,” Dennis said. “That would basically be, like, impossible.” She saw that his eyes had come to rest on the –$47,000 at the bottom of the page. “Just a thought—What does it say on your bank account statements? It might give the bank this money comes from on there?”
“It doesn’t, I checked. It just says Sunshine Enterprises. No other information. It’s like the money is coming from nowhere.”
“That’s impossible too,” said Dennis. “I just need a little time.”