Page 20 of How to Fake a Haunting

“Lainey Taylor, so nice to see you!”

Morgan Tallow glided across the driveway and took my hands. I allowed her to squeeze them for several seconds before pulling away.

“Hi,” I said through gritted teeth, earning me a look of warning from Adelaide. Be nice, the look said. They’re here now, and you’ve got to deal with it.

“Laineeeey,” Joe Tallow crowed, as if greeting an old friend as opposed to someone who’d avoided him like the plague anytime he’d approached society headquarters. I tried not to stiffen when he pulled me in for a hug.

When I stepped back, Adelaide was halfway up the walkway.

“Come on,” she urged. The Tallows followed. I brought up the rear as if I were approaching a guillotine. Treat this like any other meeting on behalf of the preservation society. Polite and to the point.

Ten minutes later, we were seated around the kitchen table. Adelaide had made tea. I took a sip and burned my tongue.

“Okay,” Adelaide said. “Lainey, where should we start?”

“Wait,” Morgan cut in, and Adelaide and I snapped to attention. Had Morgan already discerned there was something suspicious going on?

“Let me just say that Joe and I are thrilled you asked to meet with us,” Morgan said. “I know we’ve been at odds over the years, but all we’ve ever wanted is to give the guests who come to your beautiful mansions and gardens access to experiences and stories they otherwise wouldn’t have.”

I froze, hands wrapped around the scalding mug. Goddammit. Why did Morgan have to be so nice? There was no chance Kathy was letting them do their campy tours; it felt wrong to lead them on like this, no matter the potential gain.

“Morgan, can I be honest—”

Adelaide cut me off. “Yes, can we be honest? We feel the exact same way.” She smiled at the ghost hunters. My stomach dropped. There goes that.

Morgan returned the smile, glanced at Joe, and then turned back to us. “Okay, then. Glad we’re on the same page. So, what would you like to know?”

Adelaide pulled a notebook and pen from her colorful cardigan and opened to a fresh page. “What types of things have you seen in your work, and what are the various ways hauntings have manifested for the two of you over the years?”

Joe and Morgan exchanged another glance.

Morgan brushed a lock of glossy blond hair over one shoulder.

“We’d be happy to tell you about things we’ve seen.

But if it’s okay, I’d like to tell you a little story first. About how we got started in this field and why I’m so keen to spend my life exploring the paranormal. ”

“Of course,” Adelaide answered for both of us.

“Thirteen years ago,” Morgan began, “not long after Joe and I got married, we started trying for a baby. Nothing happened for a while, until it did. Once I was pregnant, I started seeing a little boy. Like you, we live near the mansions, and that’s usually where I’d see him.

On the grounds of Chateau-sur-Mer. Along the Cliff Walk.

In the cemetery between our house and the Breakers. ”

She paused, a faraway look in her eyes. “I saw him often in the cemetery. His black hair and big dark eyes. I’d call out to him, but he never responded.

He was always just out of reach, out of earshot.

” She trailed off, but no one spoke. I had the sense that, while this was a well-trod story, it was not one often exposed to light, to the air.

“The baby I eventually gave birth to was stillborn,” she continued a moment later.

“I’d had early-onset preeclampsia that’d gone undiagnosed.

My son’s blue skin and silent lips didn’t distract from his dark eyes and hair.

He was ethereal in his paleness. Ghostly.

But beautiful.” Morgan smiled sadly, and something clenched in my chest.

“When the universe of my grief became a mere galaxy and I was finally able to get outside, to walk, to stand the sight of the trees, I searched for the little boy. In every cemetery, at every mansion. It didn’t matter; I never saw him again.

Except in my dreams. Dreams in which my son was defined by his realness, his presence, as he traipsed across garden paths and along sand dunes, as opposed to the void his death had torn open.

Not long after, I told Joe I was quitting my job; I wanted—needed—to find ghosts for other people.

Because the knowledge that I’d seen my son, even a finite number of times, even from afar—that knowledge saved me. ”

It was like a gong had been struck in the kitchen, the air molecules around us set into teeth-rattling vibrations.

I forced my dry throat into action. “God, Morgan, I’m so sorry.

” She’s not a huckster after all. She’s grieving.

All this time, I’d been judging her without knowing anything close to the truth.

Adelaide echoed my sympathies. “How awful for you both. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not telling you for your condolences.

I’m telling you so you know that I understand—that I’ve always understood—your hesitancy in bringing us on board for tours at the mansions,” Morgan said.

“By virtue of my connection with the supernatural being so personal, so paramount to who I am, I don’t expect others to forge that connection easily.

Or ever. My own husband doesn’t believe in ghosts, so why would I fault anyone else for their reservations? ”

“Wait,” I croaked and looked at Joe. “You don’t believe in ghosts?”

Joe laughed. “What can I say? I’m a skeptic. Can’t believe in anything I haven’t seen for myself. But I love my wife, and I understand her need to do this.” He shrugged. “What else am I going to do, if not support her, after everything she’s been through?”

“But what about the EVP recordings on your channel?” Adelaide asked Joe.

“Apophenia, cross-modulation, expectation, or wishful thinking,” Joe answered matter-of-factly.

Adelaide was nonplussed. “Apo-what?”

“Apophenia. The tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things. Seeing patterns in meaningless data, detecting shapes in unexpected places. It’s a psychology term, used to describe the human tendency to see connections and patterns that aren’t really there. ”

“And cross-modulation?”

“Without getting too technical, cross-modulation is the intermodulation distortion caused by multiple carriers within the same bandwidth.”

“In English, hon,” Morgan prompted.

“Basically, it’s the EVP recorders picking up unwanted frequencies.”

I looked to Morgan to see how she would react to her partner, with whom she’d weathered the loss of a child, dismissing her beliefs to a series of scientific—and, from my perspective, perfectly reasonable—explanations.

But Morgan gazed affectionately at Joe and said, “He keeps me honest. Honest and hungry.” I stared back and forth between the two of them, enthralled by their dynamic.

Morgan turned to me. “So, back to why you asked us here. What sorts of phenomena do you want to know about?”

“Oh, um . . .” Shit, think of something!

Adelaide jumped to my rescue. “When you’ve been called to investigate a haunted house, what signs are usually reported?”

Morgan nodded, as if she’d expected this question.

“There are a few things we see over and over again,” she said.

“Pressure on a person’s chest, auditory hallucinations, or, and this is probably the most common, the simple feeling that something is wrong.

Most of our calls are from people who feel besieged by an overwhelming sense of dread. ”

“And what have you uncovered as the cause of these signs?” Adelaide asked.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Joe said without hesitation.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning?” Adelaide and I exclaimed in unison.

“Yep. Prolonged exposure to a gas leak can manifest as apparent psychic phenomena. Carbon monoxide was even found to have caused one man’s vision of a strange woman dressed in black rushing toward him from another room.

Chronic exposure can lead to the kind of hallucinations often associated with a haunted house. ”

“But,” Morgan broke in, “for every case caused by a chemical leak, we’ve had half a dozen others not solved by a call to the gas company.

Not to mention all the other paranormal experiences people have recounted.

Black flies swarming the windows. Feeling as if they’ve been covered by a heavy blanket.

Foul odors. Children’s toys moving around the house.

Footsteps in the basement, the creak of doors in the attic, shoe- and footprints left in carpets where no earthly person had walked, warping floors and walls and ceilings. ”

“The warping floors are almost always attributed to a hidden water leak,” Joe pointed out.

“Almost always,” Morgan echoed, and winked.

“Have you come across any instances where the phenomena had been faked by the house’s occupants?” Adelaide asked, and I forgot my dismay at the Tallows’ increasing likability. This question was way too close to home.

Joe and Morgan exchanged a look. “Yes,” Morgan admitted. “But only once was it good enough to fool us.”

“Five years ago,” Joe jumped in, “a woman called, claiming she and her husband had a poltergeist. Our first visit was amateur hour: taps left on in the bathrooms, a burning smell permeating the house, faces in the family’s framed photographs scratched out with a knife, claw marks dug out of the walls.

Anything that was easy for someone to stage, this couple had done. We were confident it was a hoax.”

“But they insisted something was going on,” Morgan said, “and they begged us to come back.” She cast her eyes downward. “I convinced Joe to give them one more chance.”

Joe put a hand on Morgan’s arm. “She can’t say no to people in need.”

“That’s when they hit us with the Prince Rupert’s drop.”

“What’s a Prince Rupert’s drop?” Adelaide asked, and I leaned forward, engrossed by their story in spite of myself.

Joe’s hand remained on his wife, as if tethering himself to the present.

“It’s a bead created by dripping molten glass into cold water, causing it to solidify.

The solid droplets can handle extremely high residual stresses, which give rise to counterintuitive properties, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer or a bullet on the bulbous end without breaking, while exhibiting explosive disintegration if the tail end is even slightly damaged. ”

“In English, hon,” Morgan said.

“Right, sorry. It’s a piece of glass that looks like a tadpole. You can smash the thicker part, the tadpole’s head, with as much force as you want—I’m talking sniper bullets—and nothing happens. But if you break, or even scrape, the tail, the whole thing explodes.”

“Whoa,” Adelaide said, and I suppressed a groan. She sounded like a kid who’d just found out what happened to ants when you directed sunlight at them through a magnifying glass.

“So, this couple invites us in, gives us a couple of cold drinks, and while we’re standing there, sipping lemonade and listening to how they’re being assailed by physical disturbances, large objects moving, chairs stacking themselves, et cetera, my glass explodes in my hand like I’d been holding a firecracker.

The sound was electric. At first, I didn’t even realize what had happened. ”

Morgan paused, looking stricken. “Glass went everywhere. One of the shards tore through Joe’s eye and damaged the retina.” Her voice grew low. “They couldn’t save it. His eye.”

My gaze flicked from one of Joe’s eyes to the other. Now that I’d heard what had happened, I thought the left eye might be the glass one, but it was impossible to be sure. “My god,” I breathed. “How terrible. Joe, I’m so sorry.”

He waved his hand. “It’s all good. Like I said, this was years ago.”

“Now he says the scariest thing in any house we’re called to is him,” Morgan joked. She brushed light fingertips along the corner of her husband’s left eye.

So I was right about which one was the glass one. Still, it was remarkable how unnoticeable it was.

“How’d they do it?” Adelaide asked. “How’d they make the glass explode?” I froze. Would the Tallows think it strange Adelaide wanted to know?

But Joe merely smiled. “Morgan figured it out. Tell ’em, hon.”

“While Joe was in the hospital, the couple swore what had happened was the work of the poltergeist,” Morgan said.

“I went back, desperate for answers. While I was taking EVP readings in the basement, I came across a package for a glassworks company in the recycling bin. After googling the company—and seeing their most popular product—I figured out what they had done pretty quickly.”

“Gotta hand it to them for originality.” I was surprised to see that Joe looked like he actually meant this.

“Turns out, the husband had inserted a Prince Rupert’s drop into a boba straw.

One of those extra-fat straws, you know?

For bubble tea? When I bent the straw’s top portion, the drop exploded, along with the drinking glass, giving a pretty darn convincing impression of paranormal activity.

Well, I imagine it would have looked convincing, if I hadn’t been losing my eye at that exact moment. ”

Adelaide looked too appreciative of the hoax, and I kicked her under the table. She rearranged her expression into one of sympathy.

“Anyhow, that was our most impressive ‘fake haunting,’” Morgan said.

“Though there’ve been plenty more along the way,” Joe added. “Morgan usually has a feeling from the first call of how legitimate they’re going to be.”

“Yeah?” Adelaide asked. There was something in her voice I didn’t like. She glanced at me long enough to smile widely, as if to broadcast that what was coming next was entirely innocent, a real spur-of-the-moment idea.

“Joe, Morgan, this has all been so fascinating, but could I turn the tables a bit? Could I ask . . . What’s your professional opinion about this place? Any ghosts?”