Chapter 38 Hailey
Hailey
Still, it was two days before Christmas, and she had the girls to think of.
The four of them put on Santa hats and Christmas sweaters, and Hailey remembered to be grateful when Mack managed to spin the tree selection into something positive.
There was a crooked, pathetic seven-footer, the ugliest of what remained, that had a half-moon shape sliced out of each side where the rope it was tied with had broken a lot of the branches.
Only two thick ones remained, reaching out from the center of the tree like arms. Mack went with it: “Look at this poor tree,” he said to Mabel and Gigi.
“Left behind because he was skinny and scraggly. But see how he has no needles? That means the ornaments will show up better. The tree’s a gem. I’m surprised it’s still here.”
Mabel was sold immediately, Gigi not so much. “That tree is horrible,” she told Hailey. “It’s naked.”
“Think about it though, Gig. Santa Claus will be so proud of us for giving this tree a home,” Hailey said, “that he’ll probably leave you even more presents.”
“And hey,” said Mack, her coconspirator, “there’s about three feet of bare trunk at the bottom, so plenty of room to stack them up.”
He was doing okay today, looking brighter and less like he should be committed, but this was only because Hailey had a secret: in the rush to the tree farm, she had not told him about the phone call from the police detective bright and early this morning.
The detective who had told her with much annoyance that David Rainier had been in Switzerland for the holidays, that he had expressed what seemed like genuine shock at being questioned about a robbery—or sort of a robbery—in Bratenahl, and that it was pretty likely that Hailey had pointed the finger at the wrong guy.
Nor did this detective appreciate her trying to work out exactly how angry David had been at being accused; he was clearly not as worried about Hailey’s job security as she was.
As if that weren’t enough, about a half hour later, while Mack was searching for the bungee cords to tie the tree to the car, the man himself had finally, finally sent Hailey a message.
Seeing David Rainier’s name on her phone took her breath away.
It was a huge block of text, and her brain buzzed with possibilities even as she skimmed through it.
Hailey, I am sure you are aware that I have paid my Clarke all he wanted was for Hailey to go away so he could get on with building his city, and that’s what scared her the most. David Rainier was a jerk who had seduced her to prove a point to his wife, or maybe just to get laid, but the sickening feeling that she had been fighting for so long—that he had nothing to do with Sunshine Enterprises—was growing stronger by the minute.
At the very least, it was impossible that David himself had been rifling through their house not forty-eight hours ago—did that make her feel better?
With his money and his connections, he was a terrifying enough opponent, but without him in the picture, Sunshine Enterprises was almost otherworldly.
She studied Mack as he positioned the tree on the roof of the Cherokee.
He was smiling, really smiling with his eyes and lots of teeth, and she should have been relieved to see it but .
. . it wasn’t fair. He had cashed those checks, he had burned down a goddamned building and hurt a child, and now look: he’d just about escaped scot-free, while Hailey had almost drowned in guilt, thinking she’d opened the door to this nightmare.
But she hadn’t. There was no one else Hailey knew who would do this to them, who would send large amounts of money and bogus invoices and deranged threats.
Mack was the dodgy one, the one descended from a con man, the one with no family, the one with mysterious benefactors like that old woman in Florida.
Mack was the one who lusted after debutantes and had probably pissed off all kinds of rich people.
Lie down with dogs, Hailey’s father had told her when he’d caught her in bed with that quarterback of ill repute, and you’ll get up with fleas.
Too right. She checked the buckle on Gigi’s car seat and slammed the car door shut, narrowly missing Mack’s fingers.
“Hey!” he called out, but it wasn’t because she had nearly maimed him. He had been peering into the back of the car. “Are the bungee cords in the back seat with the girls maybe?”
“Oh God,” said Hailey. “Oh shit. I set them down.”
“Set them down where?”
“On the kitchen counter.”
He turned to look at her, and then he closed his eyes, and Hailey was surprised to see his mouth curl into a slow smile. He was laughing at her, or at both of them.
“Maybe they have some rope here they can sell us?” By the time she had finished her sentence, Mack had begun trotting back to the little hut where they had just paid forty-five bucks for the world’s ugliest Christmas tree.
Mabel and Gigi were already aware of the issue when Mack reappeared empty-handed, and so both were more than ready to cry at the thought of going home with no tree. Even this, Hailey thought, even this I can’t get right.
“We might have to come back,” she was telling the girls gently, but Mack would not admit defeat.
“Ladies,” he said to them, “Tree-y wants to ride inside the car with us. That’s what he told me.”
“Tree-y?” Hailey said as Mack opened up the back of the jeep. “Tree-y? Aren’t you supposed to be a writer?”
“Shut up, and make room for Tree-y,” Mack told her, and together they shoved the gangly tree in through the back of the car, until the top of it poked through the back seats.
Then they kept on shoving, and pushing and twisting and bending, until Hailey finally had to climb into the back seat and pull Tree-y’s armlike branches out over Mabel’s and Gigi’s laps.
“He’s hugging us!” Mabel cried as Mack and Hailey, sweaty and laughing, shut the trunk and got into the front seats. “Look, Tree-y is hugging us!”
Mabel and Gigi, with their rosy cheeks and Santa hats and car seats literally inside the Christmas tree, could not have been happier that Hailey had messed up and forgotten the cords. The whole car was already covered in needles and probably sap too, but it smelled like pure Christmas.
“Everybody hug with Tree-y!” ordered Gigi, and Hailey felt Mack’s arm reach across Tree-y’s head between them, and wrap around her back.
She twisted in her seat, and reached out her own hand through the tree toward Mabel’s knees.
Her other hand found its way over the top of Mack’s shoulders and around the side of his neck, coming to rest between his warm skin and the smooth nylon of his coat.
As they all leaned into Tree-y’s prickly embrace, Hailey inhaled the pine scent, and with it she got a hint of Mack too—detergent and toothpaste and the books in his office and Gulliver and—just him.
“Tree-y likes this family,” Gigi declared. “He said to me that he likes us very much.”
“I do too,” Hailey said, and in spite of everything and even though he didn’t seem to notice, she kept one hand on the back of Mack’s neck the whole way home.
* * *
Because of his scrawny trunk, Tree-y leaned dangerously in his stand.
They decorated him anyway, with all but the handful of ornaments that Mabel and Gigi took off into the study to play with.
The downstairs playroom was a wasteland; Hailey still had the headache from the drills that had blasted up the concrete the day before.
The section that Concrete Guy had excavated to get samples from could have been the Sahara for the amount of dust and silt that was spread around.
Mack was on the sofa drinking eggnog from the carton, and Hailey was pondering the best way to tell him about Rainier, the best way to let him know that she was not to blame.
He had to get it right away, she knew, or she would kill him, no matter how good he smelled.
If Mack didn’t take over this weight she’d been carrying around with her for months, if they had Christmas pretending everything was just fine and Sunshine Enterprises somehow miraculously went away—and she wanted it to, she did—but then Hailey was still left in charge of the bills and the debt and .
. . she would strangle him. She would. With the damn bungee cords she’d left on the kitchen counter.
His phone rang, and she went to get a drink while he answered it. She was still forming her rage into words when Mack began to shout.
“Who the fuck is this? Who is this!”
Then he was quiet.
He stayed that way for what felt like forever, listening. When Hailey said his name, he put his hand up to silence her.
“Yes.” Mack said finally. “I heard you.”
Hailey tried again, putting herself in his line of vision and mouthing Who? He shook his head and turned his back on her. He seemed to listen for a thousand years. He shook his head again and again.
“Yes, I understand. But you need to understand, I would never—”
The voice on the other end of the phone cut him off. Hailey stepped closer, slowly so that Mack would not back away, and she heard fragments of speech. The words sounded robotic.
“No,” Mack said in a whisper. “No fucking way.”
Then eventually he said, “Yes, I said that I heard you.”
“No,” he said, and then “Yes.”
Whoever was on the other end of the line must have hung up because Mack simply slid the phone from his ear and stared at it.
“Who was it?” Hailey asked him, but he couldn’t answer her.