Page 28 of How to Fake a Haunting

I was pulling into my parents’ driveway, wondering how I was going keep up the charade with the flies, when the answer arrived via text:

Leaving for Monty’s…staying till Monday, when I’ll call an exterminator. I’m not staying in a house full of fucking flies, even if you don’t believe they exist.

If Callum were leaving now, that was perfect.

I could drop Bea and call Adelaide, tell her to meet me at the house with the arsenal of flytraps and cleaning products she’d already purchased.

Our original plan was to set up everything in the house while he slept, but that was when the number of flies was far less.

Now I had another burning question for Adelaide, in addition to why the hell she’d unleashed the flies early: Were we going to need twice as many traps to make them disappear?

Inside, my mother had everything with which to bake cookies spread out on the counter, and I lost Bea to the pull of sugar canisters and chocolate chips within seconds.

I kissed her cheek and told her I’d call to check on her later.

My mother waved me off and told me to take whatever time I needed to go about my errands.

“Get a pedicure if you have an extra half hour,” she said with a wink. “You deserve it. We’ll be fine here, won’t we, Bea?”

“Sure will, Gram,” she said through a mouthful of chocolate chips. I blew them a kiss as I slipped out the door.

Back outside, I didn’t even wait until I was in the car to call Adelaide. The phone rang and rang; I got her voicemail.

“Call me back as soon as you get this. Cal was freaked out enough to leave, at least temporarily. I’m heading home now to rid the place of as many flies as possible, but Adelaide, what the fuck?

Why did you release them so goddamn early?

And why were there about ten times more than we’d originally planned? ”

It occurred to me that I was leaving a voicemail full of incriminating evidence about the haunting, but it was too late now. I’d have to make sure Adelaide deleted it. I backed out of the driveway and kept talking:

“Call me back, okay? I’ll stop at your place on my way home to see if you’re there.”

I hung up and headed in the direction of Adelaide’s. I called several more times on the way but got no response. Where the hell was she that she wasn’t picking up?

Five minutes later, I pulled up in front of Adelaide’s pastel-purple Victorian, a house as over the top as Adelaide, left to her by her maternal grandmother.

I called her cell again. There was still no answer, but Adelaide’s Prius was in the driveway.

Annoyed, I threw the car in park and stomped across the yard.

Adelaide never used the front door, so I circled around to the side.

But when I got within sight of the side door, I saw there was someone else here.

A truck, pulled all the way to the top of the slightly curved second driveway.

A truck I recognized. A truck with Wildlife Extraction Services emblazoned across the sides.

What the hell was Todd doing here? Adelaide was done with the dead-animal portion of the haunting. Maybe the extra flies had come from him? Questions pinged around my brain as I reached for the door.

Through the open blinds over the door’s top pane, I saw them, the jerky movements of their bodies, before I realized what I was seeing.

Todd, leaning over Adelaide on the parlor love seat, hips moving rhythmically, his hands woven through her fuchsia hair.

My own hand flew to my mouth, and I stumbled backward, embarrassment tempered by shock.

Without thinking, I dropped to the ground and crawled away from the door as fast as possible.

Todd’s truck blocked my path, and I rounded the front bumper.

I stopped, breathing hard. What the hell had I just seen?

Was this a new development, or had Adelaide been sleeping with him for a while?

I thought of the day we’d met with Joe and Morgan, and the reason Adelaide hadn’t wanted to go to her house.

That explained why she’d changed the subject so fast when I asked her who the guy was.

Why hadn’t she told me? I couldn’t wrap my head around how this had come about, and what this meant for me, for her, for the haunting.

I had convinced myself that, at least for now, Adelaide and Todd didn’t matter—I had to rid the house of evidence while Callum was out of it regardless of Adelaide’s present circumstances.

I was climbing to my feet beside Todd’s truck, mentally cataloging the supplies I needed at Home Depot, when something caught my eye.

I stepped closer, blinking through the steadily falling rain.

I adjusted my position, leaned closer to the window, and saw it.

There, on the console, was an open box of notebook paper. Plain sheets. With matching envelopes.

In a very distinct shade of pale sky blue.

I arrived back at the house with flytraps, bleach, and paper towels in tow to find that not only was Callum gone, so were a great deal of the flies.

Sure, some remained, mostly centered around vents and doorframes, but the majority had been reduced to handfuls of crinkly, desiccated bodies jamming up the windowsills like sticks in a dam.

I kept spinning, looking for them, listening, but no swarm materialized.

There were flies on the floor, and while the corpses were plentiful, their numbers were far more in line with what Adelaide had purchased than with the multitudes that’d descended a few hours earlier.

Still, I hung traps and dumped dustpans and paper-towelfuls of flies in the garbage, all while thinking of what I’d seen at Adelaide’s house.

I wiped the walls and doorframes with bleach, mopped the hardwood floors and vacuumed the carpets, wondering if I’d imagined the distinct shade of blue paper in Todd’s truck or if he truly was the blackmailer.

Could he and Adelaide be in on it together?

I was vacuuming the kitchen a second time when a sound came from above me, chasing away my dark and distrustful thoughts.

I shut off the vacuum and listened, but there was nothing. Probably my imagination. But as I was about to switch on the vacuum again, something moved above me. Not quite a groan but a scrape . . .

It sounded like it was coming from the attic.

I froze, straining to hear from two floors below. There was nothing for a while.

Then the scraping came again.

“Well, I can be pretty damn certain that’s not Adelaide,” I said aloud, but my stab at sarcasm didn’t make me feel any better. I made my way to the stairs on silent feet.

I’d missed a swath of dead flies in a corner and could see their vein-threaded wings glinting like the droplets of rain on the windows. I paused, listening. The sound came again. But this time it was farther away, still in the attic, but on the other side of the house.

I climbed the stairs and crept partway down the hall, peering into the shadowy chamber of my office.

Desk. Bookcases. Daybed. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The scraping came again, from behind me this time, rising almost to a shriek, like steel wheels along steel tracks.

Bea’s room. I crossed the hall and pushed open the door.

The ceiling fan whirred and the closet stood open, but Bea’s room was empty. What the hell was going on here? What was that damn sound? Had an animal gotten trapped inside the walls and was trying to get out?

I walked to the closet and looked up; the trapdoor was closed.

Another scrape, short and dull, like a brick skidding against concrete.

Then, from far off, three short, twangy guitar notes, like a trio of ghosts, floated to me on the air from behind the plaster.

It was the familiar song again, the one from the night of the thunderstorm, the one I couldn’t place.

“That’s it,” I hissed, and climbed on top of the organizer. I pushed the trapdoor open and pulled myself into the attic.

Wriggling forward on my stomach, I peered around the now-quiet space.

Like my previous time up here, I was overcome with the wrongness of the color, the immovability of the air.

Today, that immovability felt even more intense, as if the air were a blanket of gauze .

. . or as if I were viewing everything through the membranous wing of a fly.

Aside from that, the attic was empty. Still. Abandoned.

I pulled myself all the way up, vaguely aware that this was a bad idea, that if Callum came home to grab something, saw my keys and phone on the table, and went looking for me, he’d find the closet ajar and wonder what the hell I was doing.

Still, I needed to know, to discover the source of the scraping; when taken with the guitar notes, I had to assume Adelaide had set up additional layers to today’s haunting beyond Flypocalypse.

I stepped forward onto the adjacent joist and looked around.

I found the voice recorders first, one at either side of the shallow alcove where the roofline converged with the floorboards.

But the recorders were off. There must be another device stuffed down into the walls, set to play intermittent notes of music, or grating shrieks reminiscent of the opening of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I navigated the treacherous sheets of plywood to the midway point of the attic, but what I found behind the pile of insulation were Adelaide’s fuzzy slippers.

There was also a bottle of water, a cordless iPhone charger, and a small, thin blanket.

I recognized it as the blanket Adelaide took to the beach with her in the summer.

So this was where Adelaide relaxed while up here, if a word as strong as relax could be used.

I grimaced at a pile of rodent droppings in the corner.