Chapter 40 Mack
Mack
It was like a disease, like a cancer. There was nothing to go after head-on without destroying themselves in the process.
Hailey had told him that this was not David Rainier, and Mack had to believe her—the prick wasn’t even in the country, the prick was swanning around Switzerland.
But who else had they ever come across that could be capable of the threats Mack had heard with his own ears?
Who else had the time and the money to torture them this way?
He hadn’t even told Hailey the worst of it, how this weird, electronic voice—something straight out of a spy thriller, except real, except coming through right there in their family room—had talked about her parents and their plastic lawn junk, had used the full name of their babysitter, had dropped an address for Tilda’s family, which Mack could only assume was correct.
All of them, any of them, could die because of you, the voice had said to him. I could not be more serious.
And Mack would be in no position to stop this from happening, because he and Hailey would be incarcerated, right from the word go.
The money they’d taken would see to that: the voice had promised terrorism and human trafficking, it knew all about the account in Liberia and who else its account holder might have paid out to—drug dealers, arms dealers, people smugglers.
Mack was pretty sure that he believed it; he had no reason not to.
Police raids, the voice had said. Swift and decisive action, let me tell you.
How and why had this voice found them?
Hailey had a slightly different spin on a similar thought: “I told you to change your number,” was the first thing she said to Mack once they’d absorbed the shock of the call.
“Passwords aren’t enough. This is hacking; we need to start all over.
New devices, new phone numbers. I told you.
God I wish Dennis would call me back. I’m sure he’d say that too. ”
“So now it’s my fault? And you don’t think this guy would have found some other way to tell us what he wants?
” Of course Hailey had changed her number, had literally just taken possession of a new phone via UPS.
Mack had refused; his compromised messages and emails were the least of his worries. Or they had been, until now.
All around him the machinery of Christmas was cranking on.
In a repeat of Thanksgiving, Hailey wouldn’t cancel her parents, which to Mack was pure craziness—Pam and Eddie would be walking into a war zone tomorrow, as far as he was concerned.
But when the morning of the twenty-fourth dawned after another endless, sleepless night, he understood: Hailey had adopted a siege mentality, and their house was the Alamo, fortified with piles of wrapping paper and a hastily bought hunk of roast beef that looked way too small for the six of them.
“I told my dad to bring us a gun,” she said to Mack quietly, while Mabel and Gigi, still in their pj’s, were busy pressing sprinkles on a flaccid, uncut roll of store-bought cookie dough. “I told him about the break-in, and he’s happy to do it.”
“Did you tell him about the phone call?”
“No.”
“What about the girls? We said we’d never let guns around the girls.” But the words were empty; he wanted the gun as much as Hailey did. Maybe more. He wondered if Eddie would teach him how to fire it, or whether he would show Hailey instead.
It had snowed more overnight, and Mack found himself staring out windows, coffee cup in hand, looking for footprints around the house.
(There weren’t any, though he did notice that two of the window frames on the first floor were cracking, as were the walls around them. But let Simeon worry about that.)
Maybe Hailey had the right idea: If they were all barricaded in here, with new locks and a gun, how could anyone get to them?
Then they could reassess, once Christmas had passed—and the twenty-sixth too.
Then they could see where they stood, once they had disobeyed instructions, because there was no way, Mack realized, that this person was going to hunt down all their friends and family.
It just wasn’t possible; he’d never heard of such a thing, and he’d read a lot of crime novels. Hell, he taught a lot of them.
“Are you just going to stand around drinking coffee, or are you going to help me?” Hailey was trying to get rid of the concrete dust that had filtered through the air-conditioning vents; it coated the floors and the furniture in a fine white powder.
“I’m thinking,” Mack told her. “And does a little dust really matter now? Who cares if the house is clean?”
He’d known before he opened his mouth that this would be a red flag to a bull; Hailey had not been happy about letting the cleaner go, even though she knew they couldn’t afford it, even though Mack had promised to take over housekeeping duties since he wasn’t working.
“It matters to me,” she snapped. “I don’t want my parents and my kids breathing this in. I think we have enough problems, don’t you?”
You’re reckless! is what she meant—Mack could read between the lines. He could sense the shift; she’d decided now that everything was his fault, when in reality they had no idea who was doing this to them, or why.
His phone rang, as if to chastise them for fighting. It was an Ohio number, but it wasn’t in Mack’s contacts. He said hello and then held his breath.
The voice was normal. A man’s.
“Oh hey,” it said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Evans, actually, but her number seems to be disconnected.”
“Who’s this?” Mack’s words came out harsher than he’d intended, and the voice was taken aback.
“It’s Ben Stales. Simeon gave me this number. I’m calling about the concrete sample.”
“On Christmas Eve?”
“I don’t know about you, buddy,” said Ben Stales, his voice thick with contempt. “But it’s a workday for me.”
“Right. Sorry. Here’s Hailey.” Mack passed her his phone, and he did not wait around to hear the bad news. Instead, he went down to his stuffy, suffocating office.
Gulliver was in there, stretched out and frosted with cement particles. The door hadn’t been closed, and the dust was still thick in the air. Mack clicked on his computer, and saw a new message from Sandy Hollow, from Tilda: Can you talk today? It was from two days ago.
Shit! He had forgotten to call his mother! For the second week in a row!
Are you working tomorrow? Mack wrote back. I could call her then, or on your first day back? Sorry, it’s been wild around here.
He didn’t know why he was apologizing to Tilda; it was his mother, and she had no idea he was calling anyway.
He brushed the dust from his desk with his hand, shook it from the yellowed picture of his ancestors and from the envelope with his father’s death certificate, which had arrived from Florida, confirming what Mack already knew: Warner T.
Evers (aka Warner T. Evans) had died in Daytona Beach, of natural causes.
He heard a rustle in the furnace room and followed Gulliver out to investigate. It was Hailey, crouching over the big hole in the floor by the drain, inspecting the pipes in the glare of the bare light bulb.
“I see it,” she said into the phone, leaning back on her heels. “But how long will that take?”
Mack stood over her, and close up he could see that he was looking at steel beams, not pipes. Two feet below the basement floor there was a void, and the concrete inside it was stained a bright bloody red.
“What is that?” Mack’s heart began to accelerate; his imagination went into overdrive. Where was everyone they knew at that moment? What if this had something to do with the break-in? What if—
“Okay, thanks,” Hailey said. She didn’t sound happy, but she didn’t sound hysterical either, like she probably would if she were looking at a murder scene. “I’ll see you on the twenty-sixth. Do you think I should call my lawyer and have him come? Right, right . . . One step at a time.”
She handed Mack his phone over her shoulder, but she did not stand up. He waited, but she didn’t say anything. Then her shoulders started to shake. Mack’s heart, which had been reassured by the tone of Hailey’s voice, sped up again.
“Hailey?” He knelt over her, felt her flinch when his hands touched her back. “Hailey, what is it?”
“Rust,” she said.
“What?” His hands gripped her sharp narrow shoulders; he felt like he was hanging on for dear life.
“This red stain,” she said, and he could see tears dripping off her jawbone. “It’s rust. Iron.”
“I don’t think so,” Mack told her. “Rust is like a brownish color.” Even he knew this. “This looks more like”—he almost couldn’t bring himself to say it—“blood.”
“It’s red like that because of salt. The concrete guy thinks the steel beams have been exposed to chemicals . . . to salt and acid.”
“What? How?”
“He doesn’t know. He’s coming back after Christmas with another expert who can look at the metal.”
“This happened in the construction process?”
“They don’t know.”
“Could it have been—”
“I don’t know, Mack!” She got to her feet and backed away from him. “Stop asking me questions. I’ve told you everything he told me!”
Mack had a thousand more questions, like whether Simeon was just incompetent, whether this was a common thing Mack had just never heard of, but seeing Hailey cry twice in one week was more than he could take, so all he said was, “It’ll be okay. It’s just a house. They’ll fix it.”
“We can’t afford to have them fix it! Pretty soon we won’t even be able to pay the mortgage.
” Hailey was choking on sobs, and she looked just like Mabel when she cried, like a little girl.
“I worked so fucking hard for this house, Mack. I loved this house! I still love it, even though all this terrible stuff is happening and the ceilings really are probably about to start falling down on our heads.”
He didn’t know what to say; to him the house was everything they’d done wrong. He probably should have cared more that it was falling apart, but all Mack wanted was his family back the way it was before they’d moved here, the family he’d created because he’d never had one of his own.
“And I know you hate it,” Hailey went on, “and you hate me for building it. But I thought once we got here, once we had Christmases here and friends in the neighborhood, I thought . . . I thought you’d like it.
And now everything’s ruined.” She kept right on crying—deep, ugly gasps that made him want to run from her.
“It’s all going to be fine, and I don’t hate this house,” he told her, even though it probably wouldn’t, and he really did, more and more with each passing day.