Page 35 of How to Fake a Haunting

I awoke to my phone’s vibrating alarm in the middle of the night but lay there for several minutes, listening to Bea’s comforting, rhythmic breathing.

When I knew I could delay no longer, I gritted my teeth against the pain in my wrist and slid from the bed.

The mattress in my parents’ guest room was new and mercifully quiet.

I dressed—in all black as opposed to my usual white—and crept down the stairs, shoes in hand, then went to the window at the back of the house.

Sliding it open and climbing through it onto the deck took no more than thirty seconds.

After that, it was another minute to the road.

Two minutes after that, headlights spilled over the rain-slicked pavement, and Adelaide pulled up beside me.

She was dressed in a vinyl rain slicker, strands of fuchsia hair poking out from beneath the hood.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

We didn’t say much after that. Everything had been said on the phone when Bea and I had still been in the hospital. Apologies. Explanations. Plans. Goals.

“I have to tell you something,” Adelaide said suddenly.

So maybe everything hadn’t been said. “What’s that?”

“It’s about Todd.”

I turned to look at her so quickly, the muscles in my neck twinged. Adelaide saw the anxious expression on my face and shook her head.

“I had nothing to do with the note. But I decided I couldn’t say with nearly as much certainty that he had nothing to do with it either. So, I ended things with him. I wanted you to know.”

I sighed and stared out the windshield. “I thought it’d feel good to hear you say that, but it doesn’t.

Not entirely. Maybe it’s because without Veronica, and the fact that she obviously has a ton of respect for you, I would never have known that Rosalie was already on her way to squashing the DCYF report.

” I glanced at Adelaide. “It took guts for her to do that. I’m sorry things didn’t work out between the two of you.

And I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Todd. Maybe he was great too.”

“Maybe he wasn’t,” Adelaide countered.

I stayed silent.

“Do we need to go over the plan again?” Adelaide asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to overthink things. Besides, we’re at the cul-de-sac.”

“We can talk in the woods.”

“No way. Too risky. We’ve got this,” I said, more to convince myself than her.

She handed me a pair of plastic bags and two rubber bands, and we went to work covering our sneakers.

Adelaide swapped out her rain jacket for a thin black sweatshirt and donned a backpack.

I pulled a second backpack over my shoulders.

Trekking through the woods at two in the morning should have been tough, but Adelaide was beyond proficient at navigating the route in the dark.

We made it to the fence behind my pool in under ten minutes.

We were both in all black, but it hardly mattered.

There were no lights on around the garage or over the deck, nor were any of the ground-floor interior lights on inside the house.

We rounded the back of the property, Adelaide holding the ladder over one shoulder. Aside from the soft rustling of the bags around our sneakers, I don’t think any nocturnal creature could have been any quieter.

Adelaide propped the ladder against the house below Bea’s bedroom and agilely climbed the rungs.

Once inside, we removed the bags from our sneakers, stuffed them to the bottom of the trash can in the corner, and took off our shoes.

We slipped off our backpacks and unzipped them.

From mine came two towel-wrapped bundles and a small insulated cooler.

The six candles at the bag’s bottom I left for removal downstairs.

Adelaide also left supplies in her backpack, but she did unearth one item, obscured with a towel, and placed it by the doorway.

Then she climbed up the organizer in Bea’s closet and disappeared into the attic.

She was gone for less than a minute, and when she dropped back into the closet, her movements as natural as a cat’s, she gave me a thumbs-up.

“Let’s go down,” she mouthed.

I picked up the cooler. At the top of the stairs, I left it by the banister.

We crept downstairs and into the kitchen, where we again shrugged out of our backpacks.

Adelaide checked that the Echo was plugged in and the volume was all the way up.

I swapped the six candles from my bag for the six candles that had been sitting at the center of the island for the last month.

Adelaide removed another towel-covered item from her backpack and walked it into the playroom.

In the living room, I found the remote and followed the instructions on a frayed piece of notebook paper.

I met Adelaide in the kitchen, where she returned the towel—now free from the item beneath it—to her backpack. We consulted the checklist on the other side of the frayed paper and found it complete. Adelaide took a lighter from her back pocket and lit the candles. Then we crept back upstairs.

At the top, we exchanged a look. This next part would be the most difficult. I took a breath. Adelaide raised an eyebrow.

“Serial killer confidence,” she whispered.

“Serial killer confidence,” I whispered back, and picked up the cooler.

Quieter than flies, quieter than disappointment or suppressed rage, we tiptoed past Callum, asleep in his bed, and into his bathroom.

I climbed onto the vanity. Onto the wall above the mirror I pressed three small adhesive-backed hooks.

Adelaide gave me a thumbs-up to let me know they were obscured by the light fixtures.

She reached into the cooler and lifted out the bag.

I held my breath, praying the thin material of the bag wouldn’t burst. I managed to take it from her hands and lift it above the mirror, where I suspended it from the three small hooks.

It was large enough to hang down slightly below the top of the mirror, but that was what we wanted.

Once I was confident with its position, I gave Adelaide my own thumbs-up.

She went to the closet and reached above the washing machine for the line of fishing wire she’d threaded through the peephole earlier.

She walked it the short distance across the bathroom and handed it to me.

I attached the tiny adhesive at the end of the polyethylene line to the bag above the mirror.

Its trajectory from the peephole to the bag was perfect.

Not loose enough for Callum to notice, and not taut enough to break the bag.

I gave everything a once-over, including pressing one last time on the adhesive of the hooks, then climbed down.

Adelaide switched the flashlight off. We tiptoed out of the bathroom and walked down the hall into Beatrix’s room.

“Ready?” Adelaide mouthed.

I wasn’t, but it was now or never.

“Ready,” I mouthed back to Adelaide.