Page 26 of How to Fake a Haunting

Saturday morning dawned cool and stormy. Callum had planned to host several work colleagues at the golf club, but after more than an hour of torrential rain, he started making calls.

“I know, I know.” His voice was gravelly. “I’ll cancel the tee time. If it was a drizzle, that’d be one thing, but it’s supposed to pour the next five hours.” There was another minute of small talk and complaining about the weather before Callum hung up.

“No golf today?” There was an edge to my words, as sharp as the teeth of a coil-spring trap.

Callum stared for a moment, as if surprised I’d spoken to him at all. “Yep,” he finally said. “Too wet out. Think I’ll play video games for a bit.”

I bit my bottom lip. If it was too wet to golf, there was no point bringing up the deck rail again. I’d be lucky if the damn thing got fixed before Bea left for college. “I’m going to get Bea ready,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Ready for what?”

“She’s going to my parents’ house, remember?”

Stupid question. Of course he didn’t. In the past, I’d have followed this by baiting him, asking if he wanted Bea to stay with him instead, get some daddy-daughter time on the books, knowing he didn’t want to.

He’d play along for a minute but would default to his usual selfishness.

It used to make me feel guilty, but after the last few weeks, guilt was no longer within my repertoire of emotions when it came to Callum.

Neither, apparently, was the ability to even consider leaving Beatrix with her father.

And that was saying something, seeing as I’d never forgotten the time I’d left the two of them alone for the weekend to go to a museum curators’ conference in Boston.

When I’d returned, I discovered Callum had refused to speak with Bea for an entire day because she’d dumped paint into the Yeti cooler he took with him to the golf course.

My almost-forty-year-old husband giving my then-three-year-old daughter the silent treatment because she’d pulled an—admittedly destructive but ultimately harmless—attention-grabbing stunt.

“You didn’t tell me Bea was going to your parents’,” Cal said.

As predictable as the decay of a precious artifact. “I did,” I said, and set my coffee cup in the sink. “I’m going to drop her shortly. Then I have to run out to do some errands.”

Callum nodded absently, not yet reaching for the controller.

When I stopped on the landing, I heard him go to the kitchen and make a drink.

I also heard him grumbling about his phone being dead despite having charged it, and couldn’t help but smile.

Adelaide and I had agreed we needed to take measures to keep Callum from compiling evidence where we could; I’d been creeping into his room every night since to pack dust from the dryer vent into his phone’s charging port.

Before continuing up the stairs, I drafted a text to send to Adelaide when Bea and I left for my parents.

C not golfing. Bea and I are leaving now. Can initiate Flypocalypse earlier than planned.

I was slipping the phone into my back pocket when it rang. The number on the screen wasn’t one I recognized. I hurried into my office to accept it with a terse, “Hello.”

“Lainey?”

The woman’s voice on the other line was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Yes.”

“This is Morgan Tallow.”

“Morgan, hi.” Why the hell is Morgan calling?

“Is this a good time?”

“I have a few minutes.” I sat down on the daybed.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

The silence persisted long enough that I had to look down and make sure the call hadn’t dropped. “Morgan?”

“Yeah, sorry, Lainey. I’m, well . . . I’m trying to figure out the best way to say this.”

My grip around the phone tightened. “Say what?”

Another pause, and then, “When Joe and I analyzed the data we got from your house, we saw some anomalies.”

“Anomalies?” Already, the skepticism had crept into my voice, along with a hint of anger.

“Cold spots, radiation spikes, dips in lighting, jumbled sounds among radio frequencies, disruptions in electromagnetic waves.”

“You found all that.” It was a statement, said in the same tone used when questioning the number of drinks Callum had consumed in my absence.

“None of the findings were all that significant on their own. Honestly, they weren’t even significant when taken together. It was when we looked at where in the house the anomalies occurred.”

“Oh yeah, and where was that?”

Morgan was quiet for a moment, picking up on the coldness in my voice.

I didn’t care. I’d let my guard down, allowed them to distract me with their friendly demeanors and personal stories.

I’d been warned to avoid Joe and Morgan Tallow from the day I’d started with the Preservation Society, and now here I was, listening to Morgan Tallow get ready to tell me my house was haunted.

“The anomalies occurred in those exact areas where I shot video: the reflective surfaces. The greatest variances occurred directly in front of the mirrors, specifically, the ones in the bathroom, foyer, and primary bedroom.” Another pause, during which I almost told her where she could stick those video recordings, but Morgan started speaking again.

“And that was before we watched the actual footage. Lainey, there are things in the mirrors. Shapes. Not accounted for by you or me or Adelaide.”

“Shapes.” Again, it wasn’t a question but a declarative confirmation of the word, of just how gullible she thought I was.

“I know how you feel about all this stuff, that’s why I was afraid to call you. Joe made me call you, actually. One part of the footage . . . well, there’s a—”

“Morgan, I have to go,” I said. “Thanks for coming by the other day, but I’ve got all the information I need.”

“Wait, Lainey, hear me out. We’re worried that—”

“Goodbye,” I said, and hung up.

I sat there for a moment, keyed up, my thoughts flying.

Should I tell Adelaide I was right, that the Tallows were, in fact, the hucksters I’d always thought them to be?

I was actually awestruck at their nerve.

Had their story of losing a child even been true, or was it all a ploy to foster sympathy and forge a connection? I stood, shaking off the call.

There was too much going on to harp on Joe and Morgan’s bullshit. I needed to get Bea out of here and occupy myself for the afternoon while Adelaide worked through the next stage of the haunting. I saved Morgan’s number in my phone. If she called back, I wanted to be sure I knew to reject it.

I found Beatrix in her room, playing in the fairy garden I’d given her for her third birthday.

The garden had been a surprise, handcrafted and sneaked into her room while she’d slept.

When she’d woken to the sight, along with the half-dozen tree decals I’d adhered to her walls, she’d gripped my arm and exclaimed, “Something magical happened!” It was one of my favorite memories, and one Callum had slept through, waking to watch her open the other gifts I’d picked for her and contributing nothing but disappointment.

“Hi, hon. What’s happening in the fairy garden today?”

“It’s a ghost garden now.” She opened the door to a small wooden house. Inside was a tiny mirror, no bigger than a thimble, and opposite it, a brightly painted butterfly. “The butterfly knows the ghost-girl lives in the mirror.”

Ghost-girl? “Is that so?” I said with forced nonchalance. “How does she know that?”

“The same way the tortoises know that the gnomes turn into horses at night.” She shrugged, as if to say, Duh, and I took the opportunity to change the subject.

“You ready to go to Gram and Papa’s?”

Bea turned away from the raised planter, her face breaking into a huge grin. “Can I wear my dragonfly dress? The one with the shimmery skirt?”

The word dragonfly bounced in my brain like a fly against a windowpane.

Fly. Adelaide’s flies. We need to hurry.

But no, I hadn’t sent the text; Adelaide wouldn’t release the flies until we were out of the house.

I found Bea’s dress in the closet and laid it on the bed.

“You get dressed. I’m going to let Daddy know we’re about to get going. ”

“Okay, Mommy.”

I scooped Bea’s bag off the floor and headed for the stairs, the beeps and trills of the video game floating through the house.

The day’s rapidly evolving plans—from Callum’s rained-out golf game, to the unwelcome call from Morgan, to Beatrix’s strange comments—had me feeling a little queasy, and I walked to the kitchen for some water.

At the sink, I filled a glass but set it on the counter and pulled my phone from my pocket. I still wouldn’t hit send on the draft to Adelaide—not when Bea might drag her feet getting into the car and delay our departure—but I wanted to text my mother and let her know we’d be there soon.

I tapped out the message, sent it off, and picked up my glass. I was drinking deeply and feeling a little better, a little more in control, when something bobbed in and out of my periphery. A small shadow, floating up and down . . . a line of black that zipped through the air like a falling star.

I turned and saw it instantly. A fly. It crawled along the windowsill.

As I watched, it crawled in the opposite direction and then flew up to the vent in the wall.

It disappeared momentarily, and when it returned, it was followed by a second fly.

Then a third, black legs like black thread skittering over the wall, its narrow body and papery wings making my skin crawl.

At first, the flies came from the vent slowly enough that I could make out each one as it emerged.

In five seconds, there were five. In ten seconds, there were twenty.

Then the individual bodies were swallowed by a writhing wall of black, as if the vent were ejecting an endless sheet of crepe that ripped into a thousand different directions as it fell.

There was a tiny tempest of buzzing that grew to a crescendo, like cicadas hidden in the trees.

The buzzing quickly became a black cloud of panic that descended over my brain.

I never sent the text! The flies shouldn’t be here!

I had to get Beatrix out of the house.

Now.