“Uh-huh.” The cop filled her lungs and rolled her eyes, and then she set her card on the coffee table. It readMaylee Briggs, Community Outreach, PCOS.“You got lucky this time, Mr. Evans. Lucky for you we’ve got better things to do. But I know these students were drinking underage at your home and I also know they were smoking weed with you. Next time, don’t give kids booze and drugs, okay? Let them get it for themselves.”
Her partner chuckled. Mack did not.
“Consider yourself officially warned. This is on file, and I don’t want to be back here again, you understand what I’m saying to you, Mr. Evans?ProfessorEvans?”
“Yes.”
“Man of few words, I see.” Officer Briggs and her partner stood up, and Mack led them numbly back to the front door. He felt like they’d just got there; he also felt like they’d been inside his house for a thousand years. There were so many things he wanted to ask them and to tell them that he was afraid to open his mouth at all, so he didn’t. Especially once he saw that the mail had just been put through the slot. One large white envelope in particular caught his eye as the officers stepped right over it. He could just about read the return address without his glasses on: Gray Skies Road.
Mack hugged the envelope to his chest as he watched the cops walk to their patrol car. Their conversation was pretty much drowned out by the sound of that constantly crackling radio, but he did catch it when Officer Briggs said to her partner, “Creeps like that are exactly why I didn’t waste my money on college.”
* * *
Relief had snuck up on Mack; even as he agonized over this injured boy, even as he held in his hands an envelope from Sunshine Enterprises with aPHOTOGRAPHS: DO NOT BENDstamp on the front, the abject fear that he was about to be led away in cuffs gave off an undeniable fizz as it left his body and was replaced with a strange feeling of lightness, at least until he slid his finger along the flap of that envelope.
He looked at the photographs first, and saw himself in the woods in black and white, his eyes glowing like a raccoon’s, almost as bright as the reflective strips on his Sauconys. His khakis and his Thanksgiving-dinner-appropriate button-down were muted, but he could almost watch his arms and legs move as he flipped through the dozen or so images. In all of the pictures his cigarette glowed unmistakably, and then that dot of light grew larger and larger, until the final photo was just a ball of fire engulfing the dark void of the shed. Mack had to look twice before he noticed the shadowy figures in the background, fleeing the scene on the opposite side from the camera: it took his breath away to see the teenagers, how close to the fire they had been. One of them carried the flames away with him, his arm aglow in a brilliant cloud that Mack could almost feel the heat of even now.
“What is it?” Hailey asked him from the doorway. Her face was ashen; the cops had freaked her out too. So his wife did care if he got hauled off to prison—Mack still had that going for him.
He held the photographs out to her and turned his attention to the letter that had come with them. It read:
Dear Mack and Hailey Evans,
Thank you for your cooperation so far. Shame about the bystanders, but sometimes these things can’t be helped.
Overleaf please find your revised statement. We’ll be in touch again soon about settling your account.
Again there was no sign-off, and no mention of the photographs of Mack committing arson and... assault? Manslaughter? He flipped the paper over, eyeballed the account statement, and passed it to his wife.
“But there’s no money off the total,” was what Hailey said after a minute. “We still owe forty-seven grand, even though you... you did what they asked for.”
Mack closed his eyes. He had seen it too.
“It actually says ‘Demolition of outbuilding near 411 Fullerton Close’ and then has zero as the value.”
“I saw,” Mack told her. “I guess burning down a building with someone in it doesn’t bring in much bacon these days, you know?”
When he finally opened his eyes, Hailey was staring at him. It was maybe the first sustained eye contact they’d had in days, since he’d screamed at her after the Shoreby party. She’s started in on him for running away—for running home—and so he’d given it right back to her:Stay the fuck away from me!is what he’d said, and she had listened. Charged silence had become their furniture, each of them afraid to ask the unthinkable questions that followed them everywhere. But the police visit had broken the spell, and the last of Mack’s anger had left the building with those cops. Hailey must have felt the same.
“I really thought that was it,” she said.
“Yeah, me too.”
“But...why? Why on earth would you do it?” It didn’t quite sound like an accusation, so Mack didn’t take it that way.
“I don’t know. I was so drunk. And so mad. I guess I wanted to see what would happen. And obviously I had no idea... I mean, that shed couldn’t have looked more deserted. If I’d been sober, maybe I would’ve known it was a setup. This guy is going to ruin me.”
The four feet or so between them felt more like four hundred.
“He must have known the kids were in there,” he continued. “He knew. Sunshine Enterprises knew, I mean. Otherwise why the camera, for some old shed?” He took the photos back from Hailey. “Whoisthis guy? Why is he doing this to us?”
Hailey leaned against the banister, her face in her hands. “We don’t know for sure it’s him, Mack. But David Rainier hates me because I was trying to help his wife.”
On the tip of Mack’s tongue wasYou helped her by screwing her husband?He did not say it, but of course Hailey could read his mind.
“It was only once, you have to believe me. I was drunk too, and angry and—”
“Angry at what?”
