“Mommy, we need you.” Mabel appeared in the doorway, with Hailey’s father behind her, holding part of a Playmobil house.
“What’s that?” Eddie was an aficionado of poking his nose in, and in that moment Hailey longed to hand the letter over, to let him take charge and have him tell her it was not as bad as it seemed.
She did not do that.
“For Christ’s sake just give me a minute, all of you!” She thrust the banana bread—Haileyhatedbanana bread—at her bewildered mother, fled upstairs, and slammed the bedroom door behind her. The letter looked even more frightening in here, like it was worming its way deeper into their lives. Who would send this? She looked out over the lake and knew that there could only be one answer. All of this had started with the deterioration of Rebekah Rainier’s divorce.
Hailey pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. The wine was really hitting her now, and it took her a minute to scroll through her messages and find his number. It went straight to voicemail, which was pretty much what she had been expecting.
“Fucking stop this right now!” she screamed into the phone. “I know it’s you, David! You got what you wanted. You win, okay? You screwed your wife’s lawyer. Now leave me alone.I mean it,you total psychopath! Leave us alone before I call the police!”
Hailey ended the call and fought to slow the air being sucked into her lungs. She leaned back on her pillow and closed her eyes. It was only when she opened them again that she noticed Mack standing there in the doorway.
25.
Myfather was a newspaper man. Or a paperboy, as he liked to call himself. He started on a local desk covering dime-store openings and dog shows, and he worked his way up. Way up—you would recognize his name. He was known for convincing his sources to reveal everything, and then later, as an editor, for convincing his reporters to risk everything. He used to tell great stories around the dinner table, of journos tapping phones, hiding in bathrooms, posing as policemen. His foot soldiers, he called them, and the content war was a game to him:What could he make them do today in the pursuit of news? (My mother was long gone by then, thank God—she could never have countenanced such excitement!)
My father said that some of his bosses called him ruthless, that some of them professed to be horrified when they heard whispers of reporters stalking crime victims or shadowing celebrity children. They didn’t fire him, though, did they? And I’m sure they wished they had, because by the time I reached puberty he had bought the paper and relieved them of their jobs. Then he ran his empire the same way he’d conquered it. He lured the best writers away from the competition, swallowed smaller outfits whole, and invested in expansion with every penny he could get his hands on... including a few pennies that weren’t his own.
He taught me everything I know, and for a long time, I would have proudly called myself his protégé, though admittedly the apprenticeship was a difficult one. Being family, I was used to his quirks and his exacting standards, but when his underlings—secretaries, accountants, lawyers—started coming to me with reservations about his managerial style, things got tricky. “He’s using 401(k)s!” they cried, and “The world is changing, he can’t run a business like this anymore!”
I was an eager little beaver back then—still wet behind the ears and living in my childhood bedroom—so I was determined to make myself a useful intermediary. I sat my father down one night and presented him with several suggestions for modernizing the company. I gave him the names of some reputable and discreet consultants who might be able to help us to straighten things out. My father seemed to be taking it all in.
Then he said to me: “I had no idea you were such a pussy.”
I don’t remember much of what happened after that, only that my entanglement with the dental industry began immediately afterward.
The point is, my dad really didn’t appreciate people questioning the way he conducted his business, and neither do I. I wish those Evanses would just get on with it; it’s way too early in the game for things to get ugly.
26.
Mack
It was the irony that Mack couldn’t get over. He had never touched Mackenzie Ewing or anyone else, and here he was, about to swing for it, while this whole time Hailey had been the one playing around.
(Hailey!)
The betrayal hit him like a punch to the throat. His wife—his difficult, cranky, hard-to-manage wife—had been at it with another man. And he knew she’d done it, no matter how she tried to squirm her way out of that word he’d overheard. Mack had not been born yesterday; there was no way that “screwed” was meant in the metaphorical sense. He could tell from the tone of her voice, from the intimacy of her desperation.
From the guilt on her face.
“Let me make sure I understand this right. You screwed him, and now this guy’s paying us? Must’ve been good.” Mack wasn’t shouting yet, but he was close. “So what, you’re like a fancy prostitute now?”
He regretted this as soon as it left his lips. Hailey was silent but hysterical, gasping for breath, and his outrage melted. Really and trulymelted—to his surprise, Mack found that he was crying. Then he caught sight of the letter, and the dark cloud that threatened to swallow him whole became a tornado again, external and violent.
“What the hell—who is this asshole? What’s his name?”
Hailey shook her head, and the person shouting at her became not Mack but some stranger who had taken over his body: “I said what the fuck is his name! Tell me. Tell me, or I walk out of here right now and never come back. David something, isn’t it?”
He was surprised by how quickly Hailey caved in: “David Rainier.” Her voice was quiet and even in a way that did not match her eyes. “He’s Rebekah Rainier’s husband. He’ll stop now, Mack. I think... I think Sunshine Enterprises must be his fucked-up way of paying his bill. Please, let’s—”
There were footsteps on the landing, and then Hailey’s father called her name, and it was like a bucket of cold water had been poured over them. Mack took the letter from the bed and brushed past Eddie. Let Hailey try to explain the state of herself to him.
Down in his office, Mack took a pouch of tobacco and the jar of buds he’d been drying from the top shelf of his bookcase, and he rolled himself two fat joints. He lit one while he searched the internet for David Rainer.
(No,Rainier.)
Boy, could Hailey pick ’em. The guy had a real estate empire, a private jet, and a yacht. He looked like a total prick, and he had screwed Mack’s wife. Possibly multiple times.
