What to pack: one suitcase each, clothes for warm weather. This was easy to decide, because they had a cover story to buy themselves some time: The Evans family were officially off to Florida to make arrangements for Mack’s mother.
Hailey tested this first on Colin from the bank. He seemed all right with pushing the meeting back; if he was about to sic the feds on Mack and Hailey, he didn’t let on. (But then he wouldn’t, would he?)
Her parents were harder. Hailey pretended the tears on the phone were for poor Leonora, that her desperateI love you so muchto Pam and Eddie was because, in the face of death, she now appreciated her own wonderful parents. (And she did, so much that she thought it might kill her. But the thought of their safety, and the possibility of them having to watch their daughter’s life be destroyed in front of their eyes, made her ruthless.)
Mack and Hailey spread the story far and wide: messages to the firm, to Tech, to school and day care. Hailey even tipped off the Bratenahl grapevine, so that if the police came knocking, the neighbors would know exactly where to point them.
She stood at Betsy Wakefield’s door, house key in hand. A babysitter answered; Hailey could hear cartoons and smell Kraft macaroni and cheese. It felt impossible that for other people, this was just a normal day.
“She’ll be back in a few hours,” the twentysomething sitter told Hailey when she asked for Betsy. “Maybe come again?”
“Well, you see we’re off to Florida in a few minutes,” Hailey said, and she felt a boost when one of Betsy’s daughters appeared—a child was even more likely to pass on the story. “My mother-in-law died. Just this morning.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” said the babysitter, as the Wakefield kid edged around her to get a look at Hailey.
“Thank you, yes. She’d been sick a long time. And, well, our trip is obviously last-minute, and I just wanted to leave a key for Betsy. Just in case anything goes wrong with the house while we are in Florida. Maybe she could check on it for us if we have to stay down there for longer than expected? We have to arrange the funeral and go through my mother-in-law’s things... It could take a long time.” While she spoke, Hailey kept an eye on Betsy’s daughter. She was listening, taking it all in. This was good.
The sitter was hesitant, unsure as to whether she could agree to this on Betsy’s behalf, but finally she nodded and reached out for the house key Hailey was holding.
It hurt to let go of it.
“I’ll make sure Mrs. Wakefield gets this,” the babysitter said, closing her palm around all of Hailey’s hopes and dreams. “She’ll be back soon. She’s just at an appointment.”
“She’s at the dentist,” Betsy’s daughter chimed in. “She’salwaysat the dentist.”
Hailey wasn’t listening, though; her eyes were on Mack, who had begun loading suitcases into the Cherokee. “Tell your mom I said we’ll get together when I get back,” she told the little girl, and she was already halfway down the Wakefields’ front path when she finished her sentence: “Tell her we’ll go for coffee.”
63.
No one bothered to tell me they’d gone.
It was only when I found a random key on the windowsill by the front door that Arabella finally remembered to fill me in, to let me know I was supposed to be keeping an eye on their house.
(I can do that for you, Hailey, it’s no trouble.)
The grandma in Florida died, apparently, but I know they aren’t down there picking out hymns and a casket. There’s no trace of them yet, not since they bought four plane tickets and a pet passport to São Paulo, but they’ll pop up eventually. It’s tough, building a whole new life, and most people slip up at some point.
Even me. Eighteen months ago, I tried to buy four acres to build my own piece of Bratenahl paradise. I had plans drawn up for a house, with a ninety-foot tower and views all the way to Canada. But just as I was about to close on the deal, the landowner figured out that he could make more money by carving up my plot into smaller ones. And then who should come along sniffing for a land grab? Mack and Hailey Evans and their crafty realtor, that’s who. They outbid me by $47,000 for the prime lot—on the corner, view of the lake, best one in the development. I would have coughed up another couple of million to keep my estate intact, but I never even got the chance to counteroffer.
So, it had to be a longer game: two plots while I waited for the third to come available again. One horrible little gray house of my own, easy to build and easy to tear down when the identical monstrosity next door finally crumbles and I can wall off a decent chunk of land—though not quite the size of my original vision, thanks to the riffraff on the other side of the street. In the meantime, I’m tossed in among the neighborhood masses, forced to endure afternoon tennis matches and midmorning Botox parties. (I myself don’t partake of the face poison, by the way. I just like to watch the needle go in.)
Amid that real estate clusterfuck, though, I really thought I had found myself a consolation prize: right from the beginning, right from the moment they first staked their plastic flamingo into the best plot of land left in Bratenahl, I recognized that Mack and Hailey Evans had bitten off more than they could chew. It’s a most important quality in a potential contractor: Get ’em when they’re starting out, my father used to say of his reporters, when they’re hungry and desperate. Maybe Mack and Hailey were too desperate, maybe that was the problem. Maybe I should’ve known better than to choose a couple who were about to have the ceiling fall in on them—and not metaphorically, either.
Unlike my dad, though, I don’t give up when the going gets tough. And even if I never find those Evanses, even if they do manage to keep running forever, I wasn’t bluffing: As the good Dr. Ashman would tell you if he were still with us, there are plenty of others out there, just like them, with just the right amount to lose.
64.
Mack
The sight of the envelope, still white and crisp despite having been smashed into the PO box, sent Mack’s heart racing. He set Gulliver down on the hot tiles and tugged away at their first real piece of mail in at least a year. He yanked the slim package from its too-tight surroundings, shredding both sides in the process. There was no return address on the back, and Mack’s hands shook as he flipped it over. The sight of their innocuous, anonymous address carefully spelled out in familiar handwriting washed over his body like a wave.
The looping, orderly scroll belonged unmistakably to Pammy Byers, and Mack began to breathe again. They had been expecting this; he should have known. He had been on the furtive phone calls, had agreed with Hailey to compromise their secret (carefully!) for the sake of her parents’ sanity. In his hands, Mack was holding one end of the thinnest of threads that connected the two of them to their old lives. He took a quick glance around the empty postal building, then slid his thumb along the end of the heavy envelope and tipped the contents out onto the dusty counter next to him.
There was a long note from Pammy that he didn’t read, and a couple of flat pieces of metal on a string—some kind of wind chime, by the looks of it. There were three packets of grape Kool-Aid, which any interested customs guy would definitely have thought was poorly disguised cocaine. Mack took another furtive look around before he turned his attention to the last of the Pammy Byers booty: a copy ofCleveland Socialmagazine.
The glossy cover photo of the brilliant autumn trees on Lake Erie’s southern edge filled him with a mixture of revulsion and nostalgia. September was the Bratenahl Issue, and Mack couldn’t decide whether Pammy had sent it out of desperate hope, or utter madness. The landscape was a world away from his current surroundings. Had he ever lived there, really?
He had tried it on, for sure. He had never wanted it like Hailey did, but still, he had accepted fresh towels from the Shoreby pool attendant and signed on to pay school bills higher than the GDP of a small country. In the end, though, it was Bratenahl that didn’t want Mack. It had chewed him up and spat him out, and that was okay. He was fine with it, and now here he was in the tropics, with the warm sun on his back. Right then he resolved for the millionth time to write that novel: he would be a Hemingway for the twenty-first century, one with a pen name, whose true identity would only be discovered upon his death, leaving a legacy for future generations who could come and visit the tiny apartment where he wrote his masterpiece... More importantly, of course, Mack had his family around him, and they were all safe, and that’s what mattered.
