“The girls have the music on in the other room and I guess I didn’t—you don’t have toyellat me, Hailey. It was just a mistake. I’ll just scrape the top of that off—”
“Okay, sorry. No harm done.” Hailey felt her father watching her. “But where’s Mack?”
“He went downstairs a little while ago.” Her parents’ eyes met in disapproval, and in her head, Hailey agreed: Why was Mack holed up down there on Christmas morning? Even this shitty Christmas morning?Especiallythis shitty Christmas morning? Lucky for him her father had already packed the gun away.
“Honey, is this something you need?” Pammy opened a gloved hand to reveal a small black object about half the size of a sugar cube.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I found it when I moved the stuff off your sideboard. I think it fell out of a plant. Could it belong to one of the girls? It looks like Lego.”
Hailey held the thing up to the light: it was not Lego. It had a tiny round circle in the middle of one side.
A lens.
Hailey’s feet were flying down the basement steps; her brain caught a snatch of her father saying “I’m telling you, Pam, something’s not—” but she was focused on nothing but Mack.
“Look, look,lookat this!” She threw open the door to his office. “I found a camera. My mom did. Please,pleasetell me this is something you got.”
Mack was silent as he took it from her palm. He held it up, and her heart sank as she saw him find the lens and understand.
“Where was it?”
“In the dining room.” Over his shoulder, she could see pictures of houses under construction and cross sections of beams on his computer screen.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just trying to see what could make the steel erode like that, whether it was common.”
“Is it?” The Concrete Guy had already told her it was not.
“No.”
They both looked at the tiny camera.
“I am trying,” Hailey said very slowly, “not to completely lose my shit, but...”
“This is crazy.” Mack scrambled to his feet. “There could be more of those, you know.” He glanced around the room. “Anywhere in the house.”
Hailey took the camera and picked at the black plastic with her fingernail. There were no buttons on it—it was too small for that—but she scratched at the lens. “Is it feeding back to someone? Could we find them that way?”
Mack reached out and closed his palm around the terrifying object. “The break-in... this could be what that was about. We need to see if there are more.”
“That’s going to take hours.”
“So what, we sit here and have Christmas dinner while some nutcase—”
“No, no. I just...”
“You just what?”
“I think we take the iPad and go to the police.” Hailey saw the fear rise in his face, but she pressed on. “I know it won’t look great, but if we take the Sunshine Enterprises letters and the iPad and this... this...spycamera, maybe the police can at least help us understand what we are up against.”
He gave in easily; or maybe he didn’t even need convincing, maybe he had reached the same conclusion. “Okay,” was all he said. “Agreed. Now? On Christmas?”
Hailey nodded. “I think so.”
He drew a deep breath and opened his top desk drawer, then his gaze seemed to stall halfway to meeting Hailey’s. “Did you take the letters? The statements?”
