Chapter 34 Mack
Mack
Twice he got as far as the car, the terrible pink-cased iPad placed carefully on the front passenger seat, like a grenade that might explode.
Both times he stopped short of starting the engine.
He thought of Mabel and Gigi, and of Hailey too, all of them shamed and abandoned while Mack went to jail for arson. Shamed and abandoned, or worse.
Because that tablet had shown him there might be worse.
A predator had Mack in its sights, and he could feel its gaze sizzling through every cell in his body.
Someone had hacked right into their daughters’ budding electronic world, and left behind proof of an obsession that Mack couldn’t begin to make sense of.
As he clicked around the Sunshine Enterprises social media accounts for some scrap of information about who might be capable of doing this to them, all he found, in between infuriating photos of sunsets and sunrises over every landscape imaginable, was his own existence under a microscope.
These accounts were about Mack, and Hailey too, and they were insidious.
Sunshine Enterprises’ first Instagram post was a link to Hailey’s divorce article from Cleveland Social; the second was a screenshot of an old photo of the two of them at some fundraiser she’d dragged Mack to.
Then there was a link to the piece about Hailey saving the man from choking.
Mack was featured too, his own short but shameful magazine mention, and then—and this almost stopped his heart once and for all—there was the black-and-white photo of him in his Thanksgiving best and his glowing Saucony sneakers, a ball of fire exploding on the screen next to him.
Frantic, he clicked on some of Sunshine Enterprises’ followers. They looked like dummy accounts, with names like Tornado Joe and Rainy Day. But how could he be sure? How private was this account? Would one link expose him to the media, to the police, to everyone he knew?
The social accounts were just the tip of the iPad iceberg.
Hailey, ever thorough, had meticulously clicked open horror upon horror: there was a National City Bank app linked to their personal checking account, every transaction there in black and white, including the deposits from Sunshine Enterprises.
This maybe—maybe—could have been some trickery of the Apple keychain, but there was no mistaking the text messages that had been loaded behind the innocuous little envelope icon.
These had been . . . curated. There was no other word for it.
There was one from Hailey to himself that Mack recognized from months ago: PLEASE can you call Simeon about the dressing room?
I’ve asked you three times. There was another he’d sent to Hailey: I’m guessing you’re home late again?
Were you planning on telling me? One that made his blood boil: Hi David, Please can you give me a call when you get a minute?
And his to Mackenzie Ewing: Don’t worry if you’re a few days late.
Just hand it in whenever. I got your back, little Mack.
Sunshine Enterprises had found the worst of them and was reveling in it, but it knew all about the best of them, too: the iPad was also full of photos of Gigi and Mabel.
There were the girls walking into school, in the playground, in their own driveway, on their grandparents’ front porch—recent photos, and Mack had not taken these, and neither had Hailey.
“What the fuck,” Hailey whispered to him. “Why would anyone do this to us? Why?”
Mack found at least a partial answer when Hailey—thorough to the very end—clicked on the weather app: the ten-day forecast for the Greater Cleveland metropolitan area in the middle of December was ninety-degree sunshine every day.
“Someone thinks this is funny,” he said to her. “Some prick is out there somewhere laughing at how scared this will make us.”
“But from how far away?” The dark had settled around them while they scrolled through the slings and arrows of their daily exchanges, and Mabel and Gigi had eaten dry cereal for dinner and fallen asleep on the carpet in front of the TV.
Mack heard the fear in Hailey’s voice, and as they scooped up the girls to take them to bed, it was all he could do not to press Mabel to his chest, to shout for Hailey to follow him and to run, screaming at the top of his lungs, out into the night.
Instead, once he had tucked Mabel in, he stood in between his daughters’ bedroom doors and spent a long time thinking again about the car and the police.
But it felt important that they stay together, so when he finally did force himself to move and found Hailey in the dressing room packing a bag, he panicked.
“Where are you going?”
“Not me, we.”
“Where are we going?” As angry as he still was with her, as much as he had to believe that this whole thing was her fault, he prayed that he was still a part of her we.
“My parents’. We can’t stay here.”
He watched as she pulled a dozen pairs of underwear from a drawer.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” She crumpled onto the carpet, and Mack did not even think to try and catch her.
“But that doesn’t even help, does it? This person has been to my parents’ house, Mack—those pictures!
They . . . He could be listening to us now—” She gestured toward the hall, where Mack had left the iPad.
“I don’t . . . I don’t even know where to start.
It’s everywhere! We can’t go to a hotel because the bank account—what if they’re tracking our phones? ”
“I know. I still think the police are our only option. I think we have to tell them about Rainier, that he’s doing this to you. To us.”
Hailey closed her eyes, and it made Mack’s heart beat even faster. “What?”
“We couldn’t find anything in David Rainier’s financials. He’s clean. I’m sorry, you were so upset I didn’t know how to tell you. It doesn’t mean he can’t be involved, but I don’t know how we’d prove it.”
Mack dug his fingernails into his palms. “Just call him. Call the prick and tell him you’re even, tell him to cut this the hell out, and let the firm write off the loss. Lose your job, so what. You can start over.”
“I tried that. I tried to call him off! I’m going to lose my job anyway. He has proof that I—that I—”
Mack turned away from her. “What kind of proof?”
“I don’t know. Dennis at work got into his phone—”
“What do you mean, got into his phone? How?”
“I told you, he’s our IT. He’s a hacker. I’m—”
“And you don’t think Dennis the hacker might have something to do with the fact that EVERY SINGLE PART OF OUR LIVES has been hacked?”
“Dennis? Why would Dennis, who works for me . . .” She kept going, but Mack wasn’t listening. Hailey was speaking to him in that way that he hated most of all, like he was an imbecile, like he didn’t have a master’s and a PhD and—
“Mack? Are you even hearing me right now?”
He was fighting with everything he had not to scream her down.
If he said what he was thinking, she might leave without him.
She might leave without him anyway, and he realized that more than anything he didn’t want that.
He let her finish. He nodded in all the right places.
Of course it wasn’t Dennis the hacker who was hacking into their lives, how could Mack be so stupid as to think it might be?
And actually, he realized, even if it were Dennis, or if it were David Rainier, or Mack’s dead father, or his favorite Starbucks barista, even if he could figure out exactly who it was doing this to them, what then?
Mack had no answer, and so, when Hailey had finished talking at him, he took out his tattered duffel bag and began to pack.
Then he unpacked, when Hailey decided that, thinking it over, they shouldn’t go anywhere. That it wasn’t safe to be out in the dead of night with two tiny kids on icy roads with probably a lunatic in hot pursuit.
They turned off the router and the Bluetooth on their phones, and then, when that didn’t feel like enough, they switched off the phones themselves.
Mack kept the landline cordless in his pocket, comforted by the old-fashioned heft of it, and then—feeling a lot more scared than he ever would have admitted to—he checked the locks on all the windows and the doors.
The inch-long gap he always left in his tiny office window to combat the heat of the furnace room felt like an open drawbridge, and as he tugged it closed, he knocked his marijuana plant from the windowsill.
The pot smashed on the concrete, and dirt went everywhere.
With the cold, judgment-filled eyes of his pioneer ancestors looking on, he grabbed the withered plant by its stem and closed the door on the mess.
Back up in the bedroom, he flicked on the fireplace and tossed the plant into it.
Hailey, who was sitting on the end of the bed with Gulliver next to her, looked on wordlessly as Mack’s minuscule cannabis crop was lost to the flames.
It was just about the least of his problems, but it still felt like he’d escaped from something; cultivation of controlled substances would not be on his rap sheet.
“We have to take back control of this.” Mack took in a deep breath that he hoped contained some trace of narcotic.
“I know you think I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital, but I’ve got to find out what happened to that boy.
It’s driving me crazy. How can I make any decisions about getting the police involved unless I know how bad it is? That kid is all I can think about.”
“But you can’t just think about that kid. He’s part of a bigger picture that we’re already too much a part of. We took the money, and you did what they wanted, and if anyone starts looking into any of this, we’re implicated up to our eyeballs.”
A thought slipped into Mack’s head then, like a rat into a sewer: What if Hailey knew more about that forty-seven grand than she was letting on?
She’d had an affair. What else had she done?
He studied her face; her skin was sallow, and there was makeup smudged beneath her eyes that gave her a witchy appearance that was entirely new to him.
He thought of someone else’s hands on the buttons of her shirt, of some guy’s lips—he shook this off.
The first check had come to him, hadn’t it? To Malcolm P. Evans.
“Implicated in what, exactly?” he asked her.
“I have no idea. I just—I mean, what does this person want? To destroy our family?”
“He’s not going to do that.” Mack stood facing her as the room began to fill with tendrils of acrid smoke; the goddamn fireplace was not remotely functional.
“You checked the back door too?” Hailey asked him after a minute.
“I checked everywhere.”
“I knew we should have gone for the security system. Everyone in Bratenahl has a security system. Everyone in Cleveland.”
It was another dig at Mack, one more than he was prepared to take. “Even if we had one, Sunshine Enterprises would probably have the code. Anyway, breaking into our house would be a whole other level.”
“Is it, though?” Hailey’s voice cracked, and Mack steeled himself for the continuation of her here’s-why-you’re-a-moron lecture. Instead she whispered, “You don’t understand. If it is somehow David Rainier. . . . He’s right here, Mack. Or at least he was. He lives in Bratenahl.”
“Who does? David Rainier? David Rainier lives in Bratenahl?”
“Yes.” He could barely hear her.
Mack’s mind went back to the sewer. It flashed through graphic images of his wife and some shadowy figure in a fancy suit, and then it plunged into the depths of conspiracy.
“Did he move here for you?”
“No! It isn’t like that. I told you—it was only once, and it was a coincidence that he was in Bratenahl. Or maybe he set me up. . . . I was drunk and upset about losing the firm’s money and frustrated with . . . he could have set me up just like he set you up.”
She was right about one thing: Mack had been set up. He turned away from her, grabbed a putter that had been resting against the wall, and used it to push the last remnants of his plant into the flames. He took another deep, toxic breath. They couldn’t go on like this.
“Okay, listen to me, Hailey: I know things aren’t great between us, but for right now we have to trust each other.
I trust you, even though . . . even though what happened, happened.
And you trust me, right? We have to plan what to do together, for Mabel and Gigi.
Nothing happens without each other. We decide every move together.
I won’t go to the hospital again, I promise. ”
All he could read in her eyes was exhaustion, but she let him put his arms around her and pull her toward him, and he was hit by another slap of strangeness: when he hugged her, Hailey felt small and bony and fluttery, like a bird, not at all like someone who knew what she was doing.
A single thought circled through Mack’s head as he lay down next to her, on top of the covers, and stared at a new crack in the ceiling for six hours: he was completely alone in this.
Then again, he had always been alone. How stupid to ever think otherwise.