“I see it,” she said into the phone, leaning back on her heels. “But how long will that take?”
Mack stood over her, and close up he could see that he was looking at steel beams, not pipes. Two feet below the basement floor there was a void, and the concrete inside it was stained a bright bloody red.
“What isthat?” Mack’s heart began to accelerate; his imagination went into overdrive. Where was everyone they knew at that moment? What if this had something to do with the break-in? What if—
“Okay, thanks,” Hailey said. She didn’t sound happy, but she didn’t sound hysterical either, like she probably would if she were looking at a murder scene. “I’ll see you on the twenty-sixth. Do you think I should call my lawyer and have him come? Right, right... One step at a time.”
She handed Mack his phone over her shoulder, but she did not stand up. He waited, but she didn’t say anything. Then her shoulders started to shake. Mack’s heart, which had been reassured by the tone of Hailey’s voice, sped up again.
“Hailey?” He knelt over her, felt her flinch when his hands touched her back. “Hailey, what is it?”
“Rust,” she said.
“What?” His hands gripped her sharp narrow shoulders; he felt like he was hanging on for dear life.
“This red stain,” she said, and he could see tears dripping off her jawbone. “It’s rust. Iron.”
“I don’t think so,” Mack told her. “Rust is like a brownish color.” Even he knew this. “This looks more like”—he almost couldn’t bring himself to say it—“blood.”
“It’s red like that because of salt. The concrete guy thinks the steel beams have been exposed to chemicals... to salt and acid.”
“What? How?”
“He doesn’t know. He’s coming back after Christmas with another expert who can look at the metal.”
“This happened in the construction process?”
“They don’t know.”
“Could it have been—”
“I don’t know, Mack!” She got to her feet and backed away from him. “Stop asking me questions. I’ve told you everything he told me!”
Mack had a thousand more questions, like whether Simeon was just incompetent, whether this was a common thing Mack had just never heard of, but seeing Hailey cry twice in one week was more than he could take, so all he said was, “It’ll be okay. It’s just a house. They’ll fix it.”
“We can’t afford to have them fix it! Pretty soon we won’t even be able to pay the mortgage.” Hailey was choking on sobs, and she looked just like Mabel when she cried, like a little girl. “I worked so fucking hard for this house, Mack. I loved this house! Istilllove it, even though all this terrible stuff is happening and the ceilings really are probably about to start falling down on our heads.”
He didn’t know what to say; to him the house was everything they’d done wrong. He probably should have cared more that it was falling apart, but all Mack wanted was his family back the way it was before they’d moved here, the family he’d created because he’d never had one of his own.
“And I know you hate it,” Hailey went on, “and you hate me for building it. But I thought once we got here, once we had Christmases here and friends in the neighborhood, I thought... I thought you’d like it. And now everything’s ruined.” She kept right on crying—deep, ugly gasps that made him want to run from her.
“It’s all going to be fine, and I don’t hate this house,” he told her, even though it probably wouldn’t, and he really did, more and more with each passing day.
41.
Hailey
It was clear that Mack did not get it. How could the erosion of the materials that held their home together, the breaking down of the literal steel that kept their family anchored to the earth, how could that befine? It was not lost on Hailey that this was thesecondtime in Mack’s life that buildings had crumbled around him, but when she pointed this out, he said she was nuts. His father was dead, and anyway, he hadn’t been Don Corleone, Mack had kept repeating. But that wasn’t what she was getting at: Mack’s father may have been a low-life con, but Hailey was beginning to understand firsthand that victims of faulty construction might be very,veryangry. Even decades later. So as soon as they got through Christmas, Hailey was going to call up this Irene Weigand herself and have a nice long talk. She would have thought of this sooner, if David Rainier hadn’t blinded her to other possibilities.
Now she looked on as her own father, bundled up in a down jacket and a trapper’s hat, demonstrated how to aim the 9mm pistol he’d just taken out of its carrying case.
“Now obviously this has no ammo in it,” he said. “But if it did, it’d be a lot heavier. And now you aim it like so, line up that dominant eye, and remember that it’s gonna kick back at you.”
Hailey took the handgun from him. It was already heavier than she’d thought it would be, and cold in her hands. She held it up as Eddie had done.
“How do you load it?”
Her father just looked at her.
