“When did you have this last?” he said to her through clenched teeth. “Tell me right now!”
Mabel looked to Hailey for help. “Yesterday?”
Mack still did not look up. “Did you take it out somewhere? Out of the house?” He turned to Hailey. “Did we?” His voice got louder, and Gulliver came bounding down the steps and began to bark at Mack’s feet, but Mack kept scrolling, his face expressionless and terrifying.
“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Mabel asked Hailey, as if Mack wasn’t right there in front of them. Mack just wandered toward the stairs.
“Leave the Pollys, girls. Watch some TV for a minute. Daddy and I will be right back.”
Hailey turned onPeppa Pig, and then she went after Mack. He had stopped by the busted side door, his face still inches from the screen.
“What is the matter with you?” Hailey snatched the thing from his hands. “You’re scaring the girls to death.” Right away she saw that the iPad’s home screen, which had previously been a close-up of Mabel’s and Gigi’s smiling faces, had somehow been changed. Now it was a photograph of sunlight shining through a cloudy sky, and it only took another glance at Mack’s horrified face for the significance of the image to register. Dotted over the top of this hellish skyscape were the icons for new apps, apps that there was no way Mabel or Gigi could have somehow installed.
“Did you—”
“No.” Mack read her mind. “I haven’t touched this thing in weeks.”
With a shaking finger, he reached out and clicked on the new Facebook icon. When it opened to an account in the name of Sunshine Enterprises, Hailey felt like she might combust with fear.
33.
Bratenahl has always been home to fighters. At the turn of the twentieth century, when Cleveland was sinking into a pit of urbanization, this little strip of land fought to become its own separate village. Then for decades, Bratenahl fought to keep its school system separate—there’s that word again—from the schools of the rest of the Cleveland masses. Then came civil war over those two ugly apartment blocks, and of course these days there are the brawls about beach access, all that snarling over property deeds and natural shorelines. It’s a positive trait, I think: conflict like this keeps the mind sharp, when it otherwise might be pickled in privilege.
Once in a blue moon, though, an adversary comes along that’s completely out of your league. A bomb gets dropped that you never saw coming; resistance is futile. This has happened in Bratenahl before too.
In the late 1940s, when the Cold War was just starting, Cleveland was one of this country’s most important manufacturing hubs. In theory at least, it had become a prime target for a nuclear strike. The US Army’s solution to this vulnerability was the Nike Ajax, a new antiaircraft missile system that would protect the Mistake on the Lake from assured destruction by the Russkies. (It was named Nike for the goddess of war, by the way, not the sneaker company.)
But where to keep this snazzy surface-to-air defense system? Nike had to be somewhere close to the target city, but somewhere separatetoo, somewhere discreet where no one would think to look for fifty thousand pounds of metal casing and rocket fuel... did such a place still exist in Cleveland at that time?
It did! We know it did! And once Uncle Sam set his sights on this particularly strategic stretch of Erie’s southern coast, he didn’t give two shits who lived there, or how rich they were. The battle for the western end of Bratenahl was literally nuclear, and it was over before it began.
Boom! The thirty-four-room Tudor manor house at 8907 Lakeshore Boulevard, built in 1899, was razed to the ground by the US military.
Blam! They took out 9913 Lakeshore the same year. That place waspractically indestructible, they say. The army had to set fire to it—twice!—to finish the demolition.
Ka-bang! Down came “Orchards” at 489 East Eighty-Eighth. That was a hell of a house too, by all accounts, with a ninety-foot tower and views all the way to Canada.
Into this freshly cleared acreage, an entire military base was thrust upon Bratenahl’s shell-shocked citizenry, complete with twenty missiles in underground storage, a launching area, and barracks for over a hundred military personnel. There was a mess hall too, and admin blocks and outbuildings.
You have to admire the ruthlessness of Uncle Sam here, this ability to plow through the bullshit and take what was needed. Pretty quickly, though, the whole Nike enterprise came to not much: by the 1970s the panic was over, and the site was decommissioned and disassembled. Some of the smaller buildings, however, are still standing today.
(And some aren’t, but you knew that already.)
34.
Mack
Twice he got as far as the car, the terrible pink-cased iPad placed carefully on the front passenger seat, like a grenade that might explode. Both times he stopped short of starting the engine. He thought of Mabel and Gigi, and of Hailey too, all of them shamed and abandoned while Mack went to jail for arson. Shamed and abandoned, or worse.
Because that tablet had shown him there might be worse.
A predator had Mack in its sights, and he could feel its gaze sizzling through every cell in his body. Someone had hacked right into their daughters’ budding electronic world, and left behind proof of an obsession that Mack couldn’t begin to make sense of. As he clicked around the Sunshine Enterprises social media accounts for some scrap of information about who might be capable of doing this to them, all he found, in between infuriating photos of sunsets and sunrises over every landscape imaginable, was his own existence under a microscope. These accounts were about Mack, and Hailey too, and they were insidious. Sunshine Enterprises’ first Instagram post was a link to Hailey’s divorce article fromCleveland Social; the second was a screenshot of an old photo of the two of them at some fundraiser she’d dragged Mack to. Then there was a link to the piece about Hailey saving the man from choking. Mack was featured too, his own short but shameful magazine mention, and then—and this almost stopped his heart once and for all—there was the black-and-white photo of him in his Thanksgiving best and his glowing Saucony sneakers, a ball of fire exploding on the screen next to him.
Frantic, he clicked on some of Sunshine Enterprises’ followers. They looked like dummy accounts, with names like Tornado Joe and Rainy Day. But how could he be sure? How private was this account? Would one link expose him to the media, to the police, to everyone he knew?
The social accounts were just the tip of the iPad iceberg. Hailey, ever thorough, had meticulously clicked open horror upon horror: there was a National City Bank app linked to their personal checking account, every transaction there in black and white, including the deposits from Sunshine Enterprises. This maybe—maybe—could have been some trickery of the Apple keychain, but there was no mistaking the text messages that had been loaded behind the innocuous little envelope icon. These had been...curated. There was no other word for it. There was one from Hailey to himself that Mack recognized from months ago:PLEASE can you call Simeon about the dressing room? I’ve asked you three times. There was another he’d sent to Hailey:I’m guessing you’re home late again? Were you planning on telling me?One that made his blood boil:Hi David, Please can you give me a call when you get a minute?And his to Mackenzie Ewing:Don’t worry if you’re a few days late. Just hand it in whenever. I got your back, little Mack.
Sunshine Enterprises had found the worst of them and was reveling in it, but it knew all about the best of them, too: the iPad was also full of photos of Gigi and Mabel. There were the girls walking into school, in the playground, in their own driveway, on their grandparents’ front porch—recentphotos, and Mack had not taken these, and neither had Hailey.
