Chapter 56 Hailey
Hailey
They don’t look like cops,” Mack said, and even though she agreed, this did not make Hailey feel even a little bit better.
“Girls, can you go up to your room please?” Mabel and Gigi obeyed without questioning her, which was scary in itself, and then Hailey wondered if sending them off alone was the right thing to do.
“Go with them,” Mack told her. “Whatever this is, I’ll deal with it. Keep your phone on you.”
Hailey obeyed too; she made it as far as the landing.
Looking down from the window, she could see the tops of two heads outside the door, two big men in winter hats and bulky coats, not uniforms. The car that had been left at the end of the driveway was an unmarked van, the kind that she had warned Gigi and Mabel away from since their earliest consciousness.
“Mack,” she called out, her stomach twisting. “Don’t—”
He was already opening the door, and she strained to hear the muffled voices. He was letting them in, absolutely the wrong thing to do. Was their tone threatening? She couldn’t decide, she—
“Now?” Mack’s voice finally rose up the stairs; he had stepped back away from the door. He was in her sights now, through the bars of the banister, and she watched as he raked his hand through his hair. “I mean, I guess, why not? Now’s as good a time as any, right?”
When he called out her name, it made Hailey jump: “Hailey? Can you come down?”
He was letting these men deeper into the house. Hailey hurried down the stairs, heart racing, and then she saw that one of the bundled-up figures was Ben, the Concrete Guy. Not a cop, and not someone even worse.
“I forgot you were coming.” She fought to keep her voice from cracking. “I hope you had a good Christmas.”
“I did, thanks. This is Bruce,” said the Concrete Guy. “He’s our steel expert. He just wants to take a look at those S-beams.”
Hailey noticed that Mack put the deadbolt on the front door before he followed the three of them down the stairs. Then he went straight into his office.
She still, she realized as the men crouched over the crater in the floor, had not told him about his mother.
The Steel Man wasted no time. He climbed right into the hole and tucked himself in among the beams, illuminating splashes of bright red with his flashlight. Then he held up a hand, stained crimson.
“Yep,” he said. “This is exactly what I thought from the pictures.”
“Rust?” said Hailey.
“Rust. The steel is corroded. I shouldn’t actually be touching this,” he said. “It’s acid, probably combined with salt, based on the color it’s giving off.”
The Concrete Guy passed him a cloth from his pocket.
Hailey could only sigh; her adrenaline was running dry. “How would acid get in our basement?”
The Steel Man shook his head. “I wouldn’t like to speculate—”
“Had to be during the early construction process,” the Concrete Guy said. “Once the foundation was poured, there would have been no access.”
His voice was drowned out by the Steel Man scraping away at a beam with a small tool. The sound made Hailey want to scream.
“See, this is just dissolving under the friction,” the Steel Man said once the scraping finally stopped. “Which means, I hate to tell you, that the house will eventually fail. Not tomorrow, not next week, but it will fail. I give it a year or so, tops.”
“Fail?” Businesses failed, students failed, houses didn’t fail. “How could this happen?”
Words failed too: neither man answered her.
“I need to understand.” Hailey hoped Mack might hear her desperation and come out of his office. “How did acid get into our house? Did someone do this on purpose, is that what you are telling me?”
“Off the record,” said Concrete Guy, “I think it had to be. You don’t just have chemicals like this lying around on a construction site, so it’s not like there was some kind of spill.”
The Steel Man was nodding. “Vandalism is the only thing I can think of. Insurance’ll investigate, for sure, but my guess is someone poured a salt solution all over your S-beams during the construction process.”
“But why? Why would anyone—”
The familiarity of the question stole the oxygen from Hailey’s lungs. “Did you say salt? Like saltwater?”
“You know,” said the Concrete Guy, “this beachfront access argument around here is pretty heated. I just poured the foundation for one hell of a fence for somebody over on Lake Shore, and I know some folks used to be able to get down to the water this way, before they built your houses here. Maybe someone’s got a bone to pick with this particular development.
I’d check with your neighbors, see if they’ve had any issues that Simeon doesn’t know about yet. ”
“Okay,” Hailey said weakly, though she had the crushing feeling that she and Mack were all alone in this nightmare.
She went to him, after she’d closed the door on the two men and deadbolted it again. She stopped for a minute outside the office door. Which to tell him first, that someone had sabotaged their home, or that, not five hours ago, his mother had died?
“Mack?” she began, but the look on his face threw her. Had he checked his phone, somehow heard the news about his mother?
“I found the guy online,” he said quietly, turning in his chair so Hailey could see his computer screen. “I used his address and worked backward.”
“The guy you were supposed to run over?”
“Yeah.” With a shaking finger, Mack pointed to a photograph of a balding bespeckled man on his screen. “That’s him. I’m certain of it. Richard Ashman. He lives at 57 Deerfield Lane.”
“Him?” said Hailey, squinting at the picture of a beaming Richard Ashman in front of his place of business, surrounded by a group of his white-coated colleagues. “Why would anyone want to kill a dentist?”