Page 25 of How to Fake a Haunting

I clutched the letter so hard, the paper creased beneath my fingers. Someone knew about the haunting. Or do they know something worse? a voice in my head asked. Another secret you’ve been keeping?

No. No way. Adelaide was the only one I’d told, and she’d understood my reasoning, the ramifications if anyone ever found out. Understood that I’d pushed what had happened into the farthest reaches of my mind, never to be thought of, let alone spoken of, again.

The letter had to be about the haunting . . . so what should I do with it? Rip it to shreds? Run it to my car? Burn it in the sand beneath Bea’s swing set? But there was no time to decide because the door opened, and there was Cal, squinting in the midmorning sun.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m”—I returned the letter to the envelope and slipped it into my back pocket—“not doing anything,” I said coolly.

“I decided to go into the office, so I came to grab my computer.” I gestured over my shoulder.

“Where’s your car?” I leaned closer, my fear that he would discover the note replaced by shock at his appearance. “Jesus, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

Cal’s eyes were bloodshot and sunken, and he appeared to have lost ten pounds in half as many days. I’d seen him leave for work every day this week from my vantage point in the office, but I hadn’t noticed he’d let his beard grow long; his hair, too, was in need of a cut.

He wrung his hands continuously and shifted where he stood, his neck jerking and then correcting itself, as if he were tempted to keep looking over his shoulder. He looked a decade older than his thirty-eight years.

“Callum,” I said, and my shock wasn’t feigned, “what’s going on? Why aren’t you at work?”

“I took the day off to bring the car to the shop. I, uh, spilled something on the seat and needed to get it detailed. I guess it’s good I took the whole day because I’m not feeling well.”

“How’d you get back to the house?”

As if in response, the door opened wider. Rosalie Taylor stood beside Callum in a camel-colored pantsuit, her hair perfectly coiffed and her lips a very bright shade of pink. “He called me,” Callum’s mother said.

“Rosalie,” I choked out. “How are you?”

She smiled in her indifferent, regal way and gestured me into my own house. “Come in.”

As I crossed the porch, I had to stifle a gasp.

A bloody handprint was wrapped around the door handle, marring its metallic finish.

Was this the work of Adelaide, knowing Callum was home?

Or had the blackmailer left it as some sort of threat?

At any rate, neither Callum nor Rosalie had noticed, and I breathed a small sigh of relief.

Composing myself as best as I could, I followed them to the kitchen.

If Adelaide had something else planned, Rosalie could not be here.

I scanned the room quickly but found nothing out of place.

There were also no bottles or glasses on the counters, and no rings of condensation glinting in the sunlight coming through the window over the sink.

I searched Callum’s face, but it was impossible to divorce the signs of intoxication from whatever I was seeing there .

. . acute stress reaction from extended haunting?

I was still stressing about the possibility of Rosalie seeing something related to the haunting when she said, “I can only stay a minute, Callum. I have a hair appointment, and then your father and I are having lunch with the D’Agostinos at the country club.” I relaxed, if only slightly.

She walked to the cabinet above the refrigerator and removed a bottle of bourbon. Rage exploded inside me, as potent as if I’d thrown back my own shot of whiskey. “You’re not feeling too ill to join me for a cocktail, are you, Callum?” Her eyes flashed. “You know I hate to drink alone.”

“What time is it?” I asked, knowing it was nine thirty but unable to help myself.

Rosalie smiled stiffly, exchanged the bourbon for champagne, and pulled the orange juice from the fridge. “Better make it a mimosa.”

I was swallowing a scoff when Callum surprised me by shaking his head.

A wild thought occurred to me: Maybe Callum wasn’t drinking.

Maybe the haunting would have the opposite effect of what we’d anticipated.

Maybe instead of drinking to the point of insanity and running out on Bea, reality falling to pieces all around him would get Callum to stop drinking.

Get him to an AA meeting or a mental health center, to examine his own head and heart.

What would I do, if that were the case? Would I end the haunting, stop pursuing divorce and sole custody?

Would I stay with the man whom I was actively pushing over the proverbial cliff into madness?

I considered Adelaide. In her eyes, the haunting was only a success if it reduced Cal to a shell of himself, stripped him of everything.

I wanted that too, so far as it meant triumphing over Cal in a courtroom.

But the only thing that really mattered was Beatrix’s safety.

If I could be guaranteed that, guaranteed of my daughter’s happiness, I’d happily accept a sober Callum, if not as a husband, then as a co-parent.

“Can I get by?” Cal asked his mother, stepping past her as she mixed her drink and pulling me from my thoughts. Rosalie moved forward to give him more room.

“Cal,” I said, and stopped. I had no idea what I was going to say.

Maybe that I was sorry he didn’t feel well?

Which was the truth, in a bizarre way. I’m sorry you pushed me to do the things that have you feeling so miserable.

But Callum opened the freezer and removed the bottle of vodka, and any chance of saying anything fled with my sympathy.

“I’m not sure where that bourbon even came from,” he said, his tone conversational, as if he were discussing a box of crackers and not the very thing that was tearing my family apart.

He filled a glass with ice, and stuck a straw—one of Beatrix’s twisty ones—into the glass with the unconscious movements of a sleepwalker.

“What adult drinks with a straw?” Rosalie asked, raising an eyebrow.

Callum rolled his eyes. “We keep them in the house for Beatrix, so I use them. Big whoop.”

I watched him take the first sip, my cheeks burning.

How could I have been so stupid? How could I have felt sorry for him, even for a moment?

There was only one person to blame for the state of things, and it was not me.

I would not be sorry for doing this to Callum, for haunting his thoughts, his life, his dreams. His dreams were supposed to be my dreams. Our dreams. Dreams for our family, for our daughter.

He’d made his bed. He could fucking lie in it. Drown in it.

Die in it.

“You shouldn’t drink if you’re not feeling well,” I said woodenly.

You weak, selfish piece of shit. Then, far more loudly and emphatically, in a voice neither he nor his mother could ignore, I said, “In fact, you shouldn’t drink at all.

Not with your history. Not with everything that’s been going on. ”

It was like I’d set off a bomb in the kitchen. Callum’s face went white, with the exception of two small splotches of color in his cheeks. Rosalie lowered her glass from her mouth and stared at me as if I were a spider she’d just found in her salad.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Rosalie asked.

Don’t back down from her. “It means we all know Callum has a drinking problem. I’m sick of being the only one who tries to do something about it.

In fact,” I said, and even though I wasn’t backing down, was about to do the opposite of backing down, my voice wavered slightly, “I’ve told Callum that if he doesn’t stop drinking, I’m going to see a lawyer. ”

Rosalie’s eyes took on the gleam and hardness of galvanized steel. “Huh,” she said. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” She looked at her son. “See a lawyer for what?”

“For a divorce,” I said, forcing my voice to remain steady. “And custody of Beatrix.”

“Huh,” she repeated. “Callum, you’ve never mentioned this before.”

“I didn’t . . . I don’t . . . I mean, I didn’t think that if—” he stammered, but she cut him off.

“If you had mentioned it, I would have told you not to worry. We have lawyers too.” She turned her steely gaze back to me.

“The best in Rhode Island. I imagine you’d get a vastly different outcome from what you desire, so that’s something to think about.

” She didn’t say how she’d go about making this “vastly different outcome” a reality, but from the look on her face, I didn’t doubt she could accomplish it.

She drained the rest of her mimosa and set down the glass beside one of the pillar candles Adelaide insisted I leave on the island. “I’ve always thought you were a good mother, Lainey,” Rosalie said. “But so am I. And a good mother does what’s best for her child, no matter the circumstances.”

Every inch of my body thrummed with adrenaline. Panic squeezed my heart, and I pressed my toes against the bottoms of my shoes to keep from sprinting out of the kitchen. Still, I held her eye, refusing to look away.

Rosalie stared back at me another moment, then walked out of the kitchen.

She left the house through the front door.

I heard the engine of her Mercedes start a moment later.

She’d parked on the street, which explained why I hadn’t seen her car.

I turned to face Callum. He looked indifferent to his mother’s little speech.

A moment later, he picked up his glass and followed the same path Rosalie had taken out of the kitchen.

He walked up the stairs and into his bedroom, shutting the door behind him. The house fell into silence.

I stormed through the kitchen and slammed the front door behind me so hard the birds in a nearby bush tittered in alarm and scattered to the sky.

I remembered the bloody handprint at the last second before I stepped off the porch and spun to face it, my hand already going to my bag for something to wipe it with.

But the bloody handprint was gone. Nice, Adelaide, I thought distractedly.

I walked to my car half blind with rage and shaking with fear. Fuck going to work. Fuck Rosalie Taylor. Fuck the blackmailer. None of them were going to ruin this for me. No one was standing in the way of my future with my daughter.

I was going to find Adelaide, and we were going to do some experimenting. It was time to raise the stakes. We wouldn’t just illuminate the crypt of Callum’s mind, where ghosts brooded over drinks and guarded the grime on the windows. We were going to explode it.

We were going to raise this haunting to the next fucking level.