Chapter 41 Hailey
Hailey
It was clear that Mack did not get it. How could the erosion of the materials that held their home together, the breaking down of the literal steel that kept their family anchored to the earth, how could that be fine?
It was not lost on Hailey that this was the second time in Mack’s life that buildings had crumbled around him, but when she pointed this out, he said she was nuts.
His father was dead, and anyway, he hadn’t been Don Corleone, Mack had kept repeating.
But that wasn’t what she was getting at: Mack’s father may have been a low-life con, but Hailey was beginning to understand firsthand that victims of faulty construction might be very, very angry.
Even decades later. So as soon as they got through Christmas, Hailey was going to call up this Irene Weigand herself and have a nice long talk.
She would have thought of this sooner, if David Rainier hadn’t blinded her to other possibilities.
“Now obviously this has no ammo in it,” he said. “But if it did, it’d be a lot heavier. And now you aim it like so, line up that dominant eye, and remember that it’s gonna kick back at you.”
Hailey took the handgun from him. It was already heavier than she’d thought it would be, and cold in her hands. She held it up as Eddie had done.
“How do you load it?”
Her father just looked at her.
“What’s wrong?”
Eddie Byers sighed and shifted his feet.
He pushed Hailey’s hand down gently until the gun faced the ground.
“You keep it like that unless you’re specifically aiming,” he told her.
“Even when it isn’t loaded.” He reached for a sip from the Coors Lite can he had perched on the patio step, even though it was only eleven thirty in the morning, and kept right on looking at her.
“What?”
“It’s just . . . after the display I witnessed here on Thanksgiving, I’m a little more hesitant about all this than I normally would be.”
Hailey laughed. “You’re worried that Mack is going to shoot me?”
“I’m more worried about the other way around.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad. He was the one bashing in doors with a golf club, if I remember correctly.” And worse. What would her dad say if he knew what Mack had done?
“I’m serious. Are you two getting along better?”
“I guess,” Hailey told him. “I don’t have any plans to kill him, if that’s what you’re asking. I told you, that break-in scared me to death. It scared us both to death.”
“I’m not surprised. This neighborhood . . .” He shook his head, and the flaps on his hat swung like elephant ears.
“What?” Hailey said again. “What’s wrong with this neighborhood, exactly? You’re telling me there’s never been a break-in in Akron? How come you need so many guns then?”
“I just don’t see the appeal of all this.” He gestured out over the yard with the hand holding his beer. “You got these big huge houses up here, surrounded on all sides by—”
“By what Dad? Water?”
“By bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods and a big ugly highway.”
“You can’t say that.”
He took a last swig of his beer; he set the empty can down next to the gun case.
“I can’t say that? I can’t say that the crime statistics are sky-high in East Cleveland, that you paid a whole lot of money to live somewhere where you can’t safely walk down the street ten minutes from your house?
God, it’s like you’re barricaded in here, except .
. . except no one’s ever in the gatehouse.
And even if they were, is that how you should be living?
I’m not surprised you were robbed; you’re here rubbing your richness right in the face of desperate people. ”
“I’m not rubbing anything in anyone’s face. It’s . . . it’s . . . Bratenahl is its own separate thing. It’s on the other side of an interstate, for God’s sake.”
“All I’m saying is, I’d go insane, trapped in here like this. Marooned in your mansion. It’s like The Shining. No wonder you’re all crazy.”
It’s Christmas, Hailey told herself. It’s Christmas, and you’re extra sensitive. Don’t take the bait.
“Please can you just show me how to put the bullets in?”
It was pretty straightforward, it turned out, and Hailey had already practiced it twice by the time the smoke alarm interrupted them.
She burst back into the house to find the kitchen hazy and suffocating, and, when she opened the oven, Hailey saw that the breakfast casserole she had thrown together for brunch was black on the top.
There was no one around; Mabel and Gigi were probably up in their rooms with their very recently delivered (guaranteed by 10PM on Christmas Eve for Prime Members!) presents, but where was her mother?
Her mother was supposed to be watching the casserole.
“Mom?” Hailey called, but the house was quiet. “Mack?”
She grabbed a dishtowel and swung it frantically at the smoke detector until her father reached up over her head and turned it off.
“Where’d everybody go?” he said, and for some reason the calm way he asked the question freaked her out.
“Mack!” she yelled again. “Girls? Hello? Anybody?” She was basically screaming, and she didn’t know why.
“Jesus Hailey, calm down,” her father said at the exact same time her mother appeared in the doorway. Pammy was wearing yellow rubber gloves and holding a cleaning rag.
“What happened in here?”
“Casserole?!” Hailey said. “Remember? Breakfast?”
“Oh shoot! I . . . I was wiping down the dining room—there’s so much dust I don’t know how we’re going to have dinner in there. Now, Lord knows I didn’t want to use any cleaning fluid, but I do think that table needs something more than water to—”
“Didn’t you hear the timer? Or the smoke alarm?”
“The girls have the music on in the other room and I guess I didn’t—you don’t have to yell at me, Hailey. It was just a mistake. I’ll just scrape the top of that off—”
“Okay, sorry. No harm done.” Hailey felt her father watching her. “But where’s Mack?”
“He went downstairs a little while ago.” Her parents’ eyes met in disapproval, and in her head, Hailey agreed: Why was Mack holed up down there on Christmas morning?
Even this shitty Christmas morning? Especially this shitty Christmas morning?
Lucky for him her father had already packed the gun away.
“Honey, is this something you need?” Pammy opened a gloved hand to reveal a small black object about half the size of a sugar cube.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I found it when I moved the stuff off your sideboard. I think it fell out of a plant. Could it belong to one of the girls? It looks like Lego.”
Hailey held the thing up to the light: it was not Lego. It had a tiny round circle in the middle of one side.
A lens.
Hailey’s feet were flying down the basement steps; her brain caught a snatch of her father saying “I’m telling you, Pam, something’s not—” but she was focused on nothing but Mack.
“Look, look, look at this!” She threw open the door to his office. “I found a camera. My mom did. Please, please tell me this is something you got.”
Mack was silent as he took it from her palm. He held it up, and her heart sank as she saw him find the lens and understand.
“Where was it?”
“In the dining room.” Over his shoulder, she could see pictures of houses under construction and cross sections of beams on his computer screen.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just trying to see what could make the steel erode like that, whether it was common.”
“Is it?” The Concrete Guy had already told her it was not.
“No.”
They both looked at the tiny camera.
“I am trying,” Hailey said very slowly, “not to completely lose my shit, but . . .”
“This is crazy.” Mack scrambled to his feet. “There could be more of those, you know.” He glanced around the room. “Anywhere in the house.”
Hailey took the camera and picked at the black plastic with her fingernail. There were no buttons on it—it was too small for that—but she scratched at the lens. “Is it feeding back to someone? Could we find them that way?”
Mack reached out and closed his palm around the terrifying object. “The break-in . . . this could be what that was about. We need to see if there are more.”
“That’s going to take hours.”
“So what, we sit here and have Christmas dinner while some nutcase—”
“No, no. I just . . .”
“You just what?”
“I think we take the iPad and go to the police.” Hailey saw the fear rise in his face, but she pressed on.
“I know it won’t look great, but if we take the Sunshine Enterprises letters and the iPad and this .
. . this . . . spy camera, maybe the police can at least help us understand what we are up against.”
He gave in easily; or maybe he didn’t even need convincing, maybe he had reached the same conclusion. “Okay,” was all he said. “Agreed. Now? On Christmas?”
Hailey nodded. “I think so.”
He drew a deep breath and opened his top desk drawer, then his gaze seemed to stall halfway to meeting Hailey’s. “Did you take the letters? The statements?”
“Why would I take the statements?”
“Fuck,” Mack whispered.
The pink iPad was still in there. Mack pulled it out and, with shaking fingers, powered it up.
They waited in silence until the screen blinked to life, and Mabel’s and Gigi’s sweet faces grinned out at them from a wholesome, child-friendly device with no trace of Sunshine Enterprises anywhere on it.