45.
I’m not going to lie; I was a little annoyed about the cameras.
They cost me ten grand, believe it or not, and they’d survived the weekly maid service and the kids playing and the workmen crawling all through the place, but now, thanks to Grandma and her penchant for violent cleaning, I’m going to miss the season finale of my favorite show.
At least the one in Mabel’s ceiling fan lasted long enough to provide supporting material for the pep talk that all my contractors need at the eleventh hour. And if the contorted faces and sweaty outstretched palms I got to watch live all day long are anything to go by, knowing they’re being watched has made these Evanses scared. Really, really scared, and probably ripe for turning on each other.
I just wish I could be there to see it.
46.
Mack
Mack plucked the insect-like camera from Mabel’s ceiling; it had been stuck to the inside of the sloped blade of the fan with some kind of adhesive. This time he didn’t even look at it. He checked Mabel’s room again, ransacking toys and books and the fucking crown moldings that had cost them thousands in carpentry costs. He tugged at the windows to be sure they were locked. Once he’d repeated the same process in Gigi’s room, with a bewildered Hailey hissing whispers at him, he charged downstairs and out the front door. He shoved his feet in his snow boots and, instead of putting this spy camera with the others, threw it onto a plowed patch of the moonlit driveway and stamped on it. It was surprisingly robust, but he stamped and stamped until he could feel the hardness of the pavement radiate through his shin.
He knew Hailey was watching him, heard her cry his name from somewhere far away, mingled with the sound of Gulliver barking, but all he could think about was destroying this thing. This teeny, tiny,minusculething. He knelt and checked on it: it looked like the lens might have cracked—it was hard to tell for sure in the dark—but this was not enough for Mack. He put it back down, swapped legs, and stamped some more. He lost track of what Hailey was doing; she’d disappeared into the garage.
“Mack!”
He tried to angle his body to keep her away. He knew she was right to stop him, he was destroying evidence, he had lost his mind—
Hailey had a hammer in her hand.
Mack froze.
“Let me!” She squatted in the driveway, and he held Gulliver back as he watched her strike the tiny device with remarkable precision. It flattened like a pancake on her first go, but Hailey hit it again and again, even though the impacts must have reverberated through her bones like they had through Mack’s. She let out some guttural blend of a scream and a growl with her final strike, and then everything was still.
“Holy shit,” said Mack after a long minute. “You killed it.” They stood over the splintered remnants of the camera like hunters around a felled deer. “I hope someone on the other end watched that live.”
“Maybe it’ll scare him away from us.”
“It’ll definitely scare him away fromyou,” Mack told her. “I should have thought of that myself.” He glanced at the tool in her hand, “except I would have had no idea where to find the hammer.”
She fought the laugh. Her cheeks were flushed, and as she shook her head at him, he saw that the fury in her eyes had lessened. The ghost of a smile that followed dimmed the millions of permutations of worst-case scenario that had been playing out in Mack’s head, and he had maybe two seconds of peace: someday this would all be behind them. Someday it would be a crazy story that would feel like it had happened to other people, and they might even laugh about it. If they were still speaking to each other.
Then Hailey whispered, “Why?”
Mack had no answer to that question either. He heard her try again: “I just don’t understand... Do they really want us to kill someone?”
“Seems like it. The voice on the phone was pretty specific.”
“Someone in Richfield.”
Mack was silent. They had been over this part too, over and over and over again, both of them swearing they knew no one in the tiny Cleveland satellite too far south to be called a suburb. Richfield was basically farm country, scattered with a few fancy housing developments, from what Hailey could remember. They were scared to google it, which was ridiculous, when you thought about it, because it wasn’t like Mack was ever in a million years going to drive there and kill someone, some nameless, faceless guy who liked to jog in the freezing cold.
“What if it’s a hate crime?” said Hailey suddenly. “What if this man you’re supposed to hit is—”
“Does it matter? I’m not actually going to kill anyone, am I? And neither are you.”
He said this too loudly, saw Hailey glance over at the lights in the Sinclairs’ windows.
“The voice on the phone said this person deserved it,” Mack whispered. He hadn’t told her this part, though he wasn’t sure why.
“What does that mean? What could someone do to deserve being mowed down by a car?”
“There’s no point in talking about it anymore.” Mack tried not to think about the other secret he’d kept from her, the threat of more desperate people out there just like the two of them. “We’re not going to do it.”
Fresh snow began to fall around them, and Mack had just started to fixate on how wide open the front door was when he saw that it was glowing in a strange blue light.
