Page 37 of How to Fake a Haunting

With Callum gone, ridding the house of evidence took less time than I expected.

We tackled the blood in the bathroom together, wiping it away before it could dry.

Downstairs, I scraped spatters of wax from the walls and floors while Adelaide swapped out the magnetized candles, cleared the television settings, shut the pantry, and packed up.

The magnets, cooler, and stuffed bears went into the backpacks, and the trash into a garbage bag.

We left the house as we’d found it, minus Callum sleeping in the bed upstairs.

On the return trek through the woods, Adelaide shouldered the telescopic ladder while I carried a trash bag of fishing line and blood-soaked rags. She pulled the Prius over at the same place she’d picked me up, on the corner of my parents’ street.

“I’ll get rid of everything tomorrow,” she said. “You better get some sleep.”

“Ha,” I said. “I’ve got enough adrenaline pumping through me to not sleep for a week.”

We stared at each other for several seconds.

“That was—” Adelaide started, as I said, “I can’t believe—”

We both stopped. A moment later, we broke into uncontrollable, eye-watering laughter.

“I can’t believe it,” I tried again. “I mean, I really can’t believe we pulled that off.”

“I’ll be honest,” Adelaide said, and ran a hand through her hair. I noticed that, for the first time since I’d known her, her fingernails were absent of any polish. “I can’t believe we pulled it off either.”

I gasped. “Adelaide Benson. What happened to having the confidence of a serial killer?”

“Oh, I had it all right. I think that’s the only reason we were successful. Still, I thought this was our ‘Ted Bundy pulled over for driving a stolen car’ moment. That our luck was up.”

I nodded. “I almost didn’t get the magnets onto the ground in time,” I admitted.

“And seeing that teddy bear kind of freaked me out.” I studied her face, looking for any sign that she knew what I meant.

I’d believed what she’d said in the car on the way over—that she hadn’t had anything to do with the blackmail note.

But the bear looked practically identical to the one . . .

I let the thought trail off. Of course it was ridiculous. Teddy bears all looked generally the same.

“They’re pretty creepy, right?” Adelaide said. “The eyes give them a bit of that uncanny valley thing.”

“The song, too,” I said, unable to stop myself, though I still didn’t know where the hell I knew it from. “That song gets under my skin, even though it’s weirdly upbeat.”

“I think it has something to do with how it’s recorded on the stereo mix. One guitar is panned to the right channel while the other is panned to the left. Or something like that.”

“That must be it.” I paused. “Is that why you chose it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The guitars panned to different stereo channels. Is that why you chose the song?”

Adelaide shook her head. “That first night, I’d picked out a different song to mess with Callum.

I can’t remember which one now, but when I went to play it, the Alexa app glitched, and it randomly played ‘What’s Hidden in the Dark’ instead.

” She shrugged. “Kind of weird, but it ended up working out. As for subsequent hauntings, I figured, why mess with a good thing?”

“Makes sense,” I said, but it didn’t. Not at all.

More sense than seeing a faceless figure in the mirror after Callum ran out of the bathroom?

I pushed this thought away too; we’d pulled off a multilayered, high-stakes juggling act in the middle of the night, and my brain had simply continued producing jump-scare content before fully calming down.

Either that or my eyes had retained an afterimage of Adelaide in her mirror mask from the afternoon after Flypocalypse.

Retained . . . and exaggerated it. I didn’t linger on the idea that an afterimage retained this long was surely pathological in nature.

We stared out the windshield. The horizon was no longer fully dark but lined with a dull glow of hazy green. Not morning yet, but close. I looked at the clock and groaned: twenty after four.

“Here’s to hoping Beatrix sleeps in for once in her life.” I opened the car door and climbed out. “Talk later?”

Adelaide nodded. “Do you think you’ll get a message from Callum saying he’s never setting foot in that house before lunch or after it?” She grinned.

I grinned back. “The sooner the better. I’ll let you know.” I reached for the door, but Adelaide put a hand on my arm. I turned and saw she had taken something out of the middle console. A small cardboard box. She held it out to me.

“This is for if you don’t get that message.”

I stared at the box. “What is it?”

She gestured for me to open it. Sliding my fingers between the cardboard, I worked the top portion free. Beneath it was a thin layer of foam padding. And beneath that . . .

“A Prince Rupert’s drop,” I whispered, staring at the glass droplet with its long, delicate tail.

From end to end, it measured about two inches.

Joe Tallow’s words echoed in my mind: 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 end, the thing explodes. “Why?” I asked her.

“If Callum is hanging on after tonight, he’ll be hanging by a thread.

This could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

” She considered her words. “Or, rather, this”—she waved a hand over the droplet—“will be inside the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

” She gave me a funny look. “Remember the boba straws I wanted to put in your cabinet? So Cal would get used to seeing them?” She shrugged.

“Well, I did. In case you changed your mind. There were already a bunch of twisty straws there, so it was kind of perfect.”

My annoyance at her nerve took a back seat to awe at her ability to think five steps ahead.

“Of course you put boba straws in my cabinet,” I said, and laughed, still staring at the droplet.

It was hard to believe something this small and beautiful could be destructive.

I’d been so mad when Adelaide had suggested we use this.

Now, my fingers itched at the prospect of sending Callum packing once and for all.

“If he comes back tomorrow”—Adelaide looked at the clock—“or, I guess today, use this. Don’t wait. We have to strike while the iron’s hot. We started slow, but this is the grand finale.”

I nodded. “All right.”

“And Bea won’t be there, so you won’t have anything to worry about.”

I nodded again. She was right.

I repackaged the droplet and tucked it under one arm, opened the door, and climbed out.

Dew dampened my sneakers as I crossed the yard toward my parents’ house.

Sneaking in through the window proved as easy as sneaking out.

I made it up the stairs and into the guest bedroom without waking anyone in the house.

I placed the cardboard box on the top shelf of the closet and climbed into bed, prepared to lie awake the rest of the morning, haunted by a face that shimmered like air above pavement hot enough to burn.