Chapter 20 Mack #2
Mack racked his brain; it seemed impossible that someone with this kind of wealth wouldn’t be known around town, but then again Bratenahl was not Mack’s town, not really. If this guy was anything to go by it might hold all kinds of secret characters, a thought that cheered Mack up a little.
“Quite a place you’ve got here, Gerry.”
“Eliot was a steel man,” Gerry said. “But then an academic like you probably knows that.”
“I’m an English professor. I know Hemingway and Kerouac, mostly. Not much local history, I’m afraid.”
“The steel barons were national history, I should think. They built a lot of this country.”
They’d walked the length of the house, under the overhang and past a five-car garage around to the back.
As they climbed one side of a pair of steep curving staircases toward a shady back terrace, Mack panicked that he might not get a proper look inside—he’d already decided that this adventure was his inroad with Hailey.
“Boy, those barons sure knew how to build houses. What a spot you’ve got here. ”
“Yes,” Gerry Baptista agreed. “They don’t build them like they used to. No offense, of course.”
Mack was too taken with the view to let this dig get to him.
The semicircular terrace on the back of the house curved in reverse of the shoreline, so it almost felt like you could step off into the steely lake and carry on walking through the sky beyond it.
Even in bleak November it was vast and breathtaking.
Beneath him, tucked among some trees, Mack could see a greenhouse.
Farther down toward the gray water, which was crashing onto the stone barricade at the edge of the lawn in angry waves, there was a dock and a boathouse with a decent-sized powerboat still in the water.
“You better get that out soon,” Mack said. He knew next to nothing about boats, but he had seen Lake Erie good and frozen in November before.
Gerry had already turned to go into the house, and so Mack (and Colman) trotted along behind him. The house had a warm, floral scent, and right away Mack saw heavy curtains and copious chandeliers.
“Are you married?” he asked Gerry as he followed him along a narrow hallway resplendent with crown moldings and elaborate wallpaper.
“Not anymore. Tried four times, and I figure that’s enough trying.”
“Ah.”
They emerged into a huge wood-paneled office with a window overlooking the lake.
An oak desk the size of a pool table stood opposite an actual pool table, and every surface was loaded with technology—laptops, desktops, speakers of all shapes and sizes, at least half a dozen screens alight and tracking financial markets. This guy was no sleepy retiree.
Gerry opened one of a dozen large cupboards; it revealed itself to be full of shoeboxes. “Size?”
“Eight and a half.”
He selected a box, opened it, and presented it to Mack; the shoes were bright orange and blue and about half the weight of the ones on his feet.
“This is great,” Mack told him. “Worth getting nipped for.”
“Best business decision I ever made,” Gerry said, nodding down at Mack’s feet.
Some petty inner voice stopped Mack from saying a direct thank-you for the sneakers, but Gerry took as good as he gave and didn’t seem to expect one.
“You want a pair for your wife? I don’t have as many women’s sizes.”
“No, really, that’s okay. She’s got more shoes than she knows what to do with. She doesn’t run much these days, anyway.”
“You should tell her not to be out on the lakefront at night. It’s not safe.”
“At night? No, I don’t think she goes out at night—”
“I saw her . . . a month or so ago now. Maybe she was on her way back from the club. I wouldn’t let a wife of mine walk around here after dark, is all I’m saying. Even the fourth wife, and I hated her the most.”
“Right, no,” Mack said. Maybe this guy had Mack linked up with the wrong Bratenahl female. When had Hailey ever gone for a walk at night? He made a mental note to ask her about it once they were speaking again.
“You’ll be at the Christmas party, I take it?”
“At the Shoreby? Uh, probably. Hailey always organizes that kind of thing, but I’m sure she won’t want to miss it.”
“Everyone goes,” Gerry said. “It’s a good party. I’m glad they’re letting people from the newer developments join the club. It needed fresh blood.”
Mack was not going to bite; whether or not he should be allowed into the Shoreby Club was not a hill he was prepared to die on. “Yeah, well, we love the pool.”
“I’m sure you’ll get a lot of use out of it. Probably best not to bring your dog again though,” Gerry told Mack, who once more had no idea what he was talking about. He was tired of humoring this old man, and he felt strangely claustrophobic in this giant place.
“Well, I better be getting back,” he said, and Gerry led him out a door on the far side of the study and through the rooms along the front of the house.
The largest was as big as a hotel lobby, with huge bay windows and an elaborate ceiling.
Its proportions dwarfed the sparse furnishings, and Mack felt his annoyance abate again.
This guy rattled around in here all alone?
“You can let yourself out the side gate, right?” Gerry said to Mack. “It’s been nice to meet you, son. Although I still say it’s a damn shame they blocked up the lakefront with that Magpie development of yours. I hope your house is worth it.”
“I sure think so,” said Mack, lying through his teeth.
* * *
Back home, Mack squished his way through the landscaping on the side of his house looking for the garden hose.
His shoes were muddy, and he figured a blast of cold water might feel good on his sore ankle.
It was a stupid place to install a hose, he realized; the bushes that grew in front of his basement office window had been trampled by people trying to get to the faucet, and there were footprints all through the soil.
As he bent over to rest the box with his new shoes on one of the less-damaged shrubs, something in the sandy-colored stone on the wall caught his eye: a crack.
A deep crack, rising up from ground level.
It didn’t keep to the lines of the mortar; it sliced right through the middle of at least a dozen of the bricks on the exterior wall of the house.
Mack took a step backward, letting the hose spray at his side.
A foot or so farther along, he found another crack.
This one didn’t stretch quite as high, but it was deep too, deeper than the first.
Mack could hear Gulliver howling at him from inside as he squished his way around toward the backyard and counted a dozen cracks of varying sizes in three different walls.
He was no Mr. Fixit (he’d had no one to teach him), but even he could see that the stonework around the base of the house was fucked.
The bricks were mostly decorative, though, from what he could tell, and he made the decision that he was more than okay with leaving them to crumble for now.
This didn’t need mentioning to Hailey; it would be summer before she noticed, and everything might be better then. Or it might be worse.
When he’d finished his survey and thoroughly flooded the flower beds, he turned off the hose and backed away onto the lawn, at which point he almost broke his neck on—of all goddamn things—a tacky plastic goat.
Betsy Wakefield was just pulling into her driveway as Mack, bleeding, barefoot, and still swearing, dug his house key out of the flowerpot by the front door. She did not wave hello.