Hailey was. How could she expect Mack to behave any better? Mack had looked her straight in the face and denied everything, but now she knew up close and personal how essential this tactic could become, when you were desperate enough.
Hailey could be—should be—at Mabel’s gymnastics lesson, taking over from Chenise. Instead, she’d asked Chenise to stay late and drop the girls home, and then Hailey had left work for no real reason, and now here she was. Squandering precious family time on a trampy Delta-Something with a penchant for posting Hemingway quotes to her Instagram. This nineteen-year-old and Mack were a match made in heaven.
Hailey got out of the car and shut the garage. Halfway to the front door she spotted a dark shape in one of the barren bushes on the side of the house. She went to investigate and found a pair of running shoes, brand-new, in the box. They looked expensive. Where had these come from? She tucked them under her arm and went inside.
There were muddy socks scattered around the front hall, and the mail was all over the floor at her feet. Gulliver blinked up at her guiltily; next to him was a sizable puddle of pee. It had run along the floorboards to one of the piles of toys that covered the patches in the floor, seeping into a My Little Pony’s tail and pooling around some Lego.
“Didn’t anybody let you out today, you poor thing?” Hailey said as loudly as she could. “I hope that person is planning to clean this up!” There was no response from Mack; he was too busy down in his office not working.
Hailey set the mysterious shoes on the hall table and started in on the mail. There was an envelope from Sandy Hollow that had to be a bill. She felt her irritation with Mack reach nuclear levels. There were a bunch of catalogues (CHRISTMAS IS COMING!they all shouted at her) and a rather insulting flyer about the beach access issue: ACCESSFORALL!HURONLANDING!COLDHARBORCLOSE!MAGPIECOURT!STOP STRANGLING OUR SHORELINE!NO MORE NEW DEVELOPMENT!She was opening the last piece of mail, a large envelope addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Evans, when the return address on the back caught her eye: Gray Skies Road. The logo on the letter inside confirmed a hunch that had sprouted: Sunshine Enterprises.
There was a heading at the top of the first page she pulled out, under the logo, “Payment now due,” and it was addressed to “Dear Malcolm and Hailey Evans.” Beneath this, it read, “Kindly commence with demolition of outbuilding located near 411 Fullerton Close, Bratenahl.” There was no sign-off and no signature.
Hailey reached again into the envelope and pulled out two glossy photographs of what appeared to be a large shed, and then a folded printout of a map showing its location. Hailey vaguely knew it; the spot couldn’t have been more than a fifteen-minute walk away. In the white space below the map, someone had handwritten an instruction in thick black ink:I want you to burn itto the ground.
“Mack!” Hailey shouted, as something squeezed inside her chest. “Mack!” Gulliver began to bark and run in furious circles at her feet. After a minute the sound of Mack bounding up the basement stairs rose over the click of the dog’s toenails. The sun had set all at once, and she could hardly see Mack as he entered the dark hallway.
“Jesus, Hailey, you scared the shit out of me,” he said, and she felt something almost like hatred for him.
“Look atthis!” She thrust the paper out in his direction, and the photographs slipped through her fingers to the floor.
Mack gathered them up at an infuriatingly slow rate, and then he crossed the room to switch on the overhead light. Hailey could have hit him; she didn’t deserve to be alone in this panic.
“I don’t get it,” he said finally,calmly, when he’d looked the stuff over. “I guess it’s a prank?”
“It’s not a prank. This company is telling us to burn down a goddamn building.”
She watched as Mack shook his head, could see him physically reject the notion that something might actually be serious. “It’s got to be someone just being weird. I mean, why would we burn down a garage? Because this company wrote a letter and told us to?”
“Because theypaidus to, you idiot.” Her contempt sucked the air from the room, but Hailey was okay with that. “This person might just be some weirdo, but they’ve also paid us forty-seven thousand dollars. Which we’ve taken.”
“You’re missing the point—” Mack was headed for the kitchen with the papers, and his path took him straight through the puddle of Gulliver’s pee. His bare foot slipped on the wet wood, and Hailey felt a fleeting flash of joy.
“God damn it, that fucking, fucking dog!” Mack hopped, dripping, the rest of the way to the kitchen on one leg as Gulliver fled the scene. Mack put the envelope and its contents on the countertop and swiped angrily at the sole of his foot with a paper towel.
“That fucking dog,” Mack growled again. “If I step in one more—”
“This is not about the dog,” Hailey said. “This is aboutcrazy. Some totally wacko...arsonisthas given us money and we’ve taken it. This is serious, Mack. It’s time to call the police.” They both studied the letter and the photos, and after a minute Hailey said in a softer voice. “And it’s here. In Bratenahl. I mean, this person iscloseby.”
“The postmark is in Kentucky.” Mack turned the envelope over. “It says Lexington here.”
She’d overlooked that somehow, had been too distracted by Gray Skies Road, by being instructed to commit a felony. “But then how do they even know about this shed? Why are they having us burn down something in Bratenahl if they’re not here?”
“I guess becausewelive here.”
Hailey looked from the photographs to the map. “It’s not an address you could find on a map. I mean, it’s ashed—”
“It looks more like a garage, actually.”
“It’s a shed. I’m pretty sure I’ve been past it before. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, the point is, we—”
“The point is, we’re not going to ‘burn it to the ground.’ ” Mack made quotation marks in the air with his index fingers as he said this. “We’re not, like, drunken teenagers with nothing better to do on a Friday night, Hailey.”
How stupid could he be, she wondered then, not to see a threat like this for what it was? Why was she always the one who had to know better?
“Look,” she told him. “I’m not going to argue with you about it. I put our researcher on Sunshine Enterprises today, but I really think now we have to at least go to the bank. Both of us. We’ll say there has been a mistake; they can trace the payments and wire the money back. Then we’ll call the police about these letters. Or maybe the bank will.”
“Fine. Okay.” He sounded willing, like he agreed with her. He had to, she supposed, because he was in the doghouse. But then he said, “There’s something I need to show you.”
