Page 40 of How to Fake a Haunting

A second crash came from upstairs, followed by a shout. An image of Callum at the housewarming party six years ago, candleholder clutched in his hand, flashed through my mind. I ran up the stairs, crossed the hall, and threw open the door.

Every light in the room was on, and the effect was like being on a stage.

A glass was overturned on the nightstand.

The comforter and sheets were pulled from the bed and strewn on the floor.

The armoire doors hung open, and even the plants Bea had given Callum for Father’s Day were knocked akimbo, soil ground into the cream-colored carpet.

This was nothing, however, compared to what greeted me in the bathroom.

Callum stood at the center of the room, his back to me.

He was naked except for a towel, and his hands holding the towel around his waist were bloody.

No, not just his hands. His whole body was drenched in blood, his usually light-brown hair dark with it.

The white towel was stained red, and red-tinged water dripped onto the white tile.

The shower curtain had been ripped from the rod and lay in a bloodstained heap in the corner.

There were red footprints—and handprints—smeared across every surface.

“Callum?” I whispered.

Slowly, he turned to face me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what happened?” I scanned his body looking for a cut. “Are you hurt?”

Callum gestured weakly over his shoulder.

“It was . . . there. It came from there.” Against all that red, I saw that his teeth were more yellow than white, and he smelled awful even through the metallic scent of blood, all stale breath and rankness, as if the booze had pickled his organs and fermented in his veins.

“What came from where?” I looked around the bathroom. Was there a goddamn animal in here or something?

“The blood.” He looked inquiringly at the shower, as if he still wasn’t quite sure what had happened.

I stared, realization dawning. Realization but not understanding. “The blood came from the shower?” I asked. My mouth felt unbearably dry.

Callum nodded. “Well,” he said, “that should do it, then.”

I squinted. “What should?”

“That should do it for proof. If you needed any more of it, any other indication that the house is haunted”—he gestured around us—“the faucets, the shower . . . they’re raining blood.”

For a moment, I couldn’t move, couldn’t process what Callum had said, but then my brain connected his words with what I was seeing before me.

Adelaide. Adelaide must have gone back to the plumber, and together they’d figured out how to splice the water line with pig’s blood from the butcher.

I remembered Chris’s words: There’s absolutely no way to do this .

. . most laypeople don’t know the difference between a gas line and a water line.

I don’t want you getting carbon monoxide poisoning because you did something stupid.

So how had Adelaide done it? And why hadn’t she told me?

The butcher-shop smell overwhelmed the unpleasant odor of my husband, and I swallowed hard against the sharp tang coating my nostrils and the back of my throat.

I watched Callum, expecting him to do the same—to cough, gag, wipe at his skin frantically with the towel.

But he only stood there, stunned into silence.

As he stood, I found my eyes drawn not to him, but to his reflection.

Something was happening. The room had a strange sense of pressure to it, like the air had become corporeal.

In the mirror, the air was tinged beige.

No, lilac. No, it oscillated from one color to the other, like the curling, shimmering mouth of a conch shell.

But that wasn’t possible. Air didn’t shimmer.

But the mirror did. And as I watched, it shimmered until Callum was gone, replaced by the horrible figure I’d seen several times now, shoulders hunched, hands wringing, the place where its face should have been an open chasm of distortion reflecting into infinity.

I opened my mouth to scream, but the figure was gone as quickly as it appeared. I blinked. Had it been there at all? What the fuck was happening?

“Did you say something?” Callum asked me. He turned to stare at the mirror. Had he seen the figure too?

“I didn’t say anything,” I said dazedly.

I needed to pull myself together; Adelaide must have gone to great lengths to pull this off.

I pictured her rummaging through the basement, hefting buckets of blood, splicing water lines and patching everything together so it looked the same as when she’d started.

How had she known what the hell she was doing? Hell, maybe she hadn’t.

I don’t want you getting carbon monoxide poisoning because you did something stupid.

Chris’s words rang in my head again. Carbon monoxide poisoning.

Someone else had given us a similar warning.

No, not a warning. An explanation. Joe. Joe Tallow explaining that prolonged exposure to a gas leak can manifest as apparent psychic phenomena.

Carbon monoxide was even found to have caused one man’s vision of a “strange woman dressed in black” rushing toward him from another room. Chronic exposure can lead to the kind of hallucinations often associated with a haunted house.

Oh my god.

I kept my face neutral while thoughts sliced through my brain.

Could Adelaide have nicked a gas line? Was there carbon monoxide seeping into the house?

Our bodies? Had the faceless figure I’d seen in the mirror been a hallucination?

But how could that be when the first time I’d seen it had been weeks ago?

Bea had been frightened by it even before that.

But one thing all the sightings had in common was that they’d occurred after Joe and Morgan Tallow had come to the house .

. . after we’d heard—after Adelaide had heard—that carbon monoxide could cause phenomena consistent with a haunting.

A chill, like ice water, spread down my back.

Was Adelaide systematically poisoning us?

Was that why the haunting had become so effective .

. . so real, not just to Callum but to me as well?

We had carbon monoxide detectors, but how long had it been since I’d checked them?

And if the leak was intentional, Adelaide could have disabled the devices.

Callum had turned from the mirror back to me. I forced myself to focus. The quicker I extracted myself from the bathroom and this surreal situation, the quicker I could call Adelaide.

“You had too much to drink, didn’t you?” I asked, making myself sound as patronizing as possible to cover the fear and disbelief coursing through me. “You’re drunk, and you cut yourself in the shower. It’s as simple as that.”

His expression curdled into an incredulousness that wasn’t misplaced. With that amount of blood, the cut would have had to have been a stab wound. Still, I squinted at the bathroom with a sneer on my face. “Make sure you clean this up.”

“I’m not cleaning anything.” There was something in his voice I’d never heard before. Something like finality. Then, as if to drive home what I’d heard in his tone, he said, “I’m done.”

“What do you mean, done?” My heart thundered in my chest. Was this really about to happen?

“I mean, I’m going to wash up as best I can and go to a hotel. I’m not sleeping here another night. Maybe not ever again.” He put a hand on the door. “If you’re crazy enough to stay here, have fun in this bloody haunted house of death.”

I stared, unable to speak as he walked out of the bathroom and into his bedroom.

As soon as he abandoned the blood-spattered space, it was like the spell had been broken.

I hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

I kept walking, through the kitchen and into the playroom, giving the bear still wedged in the window a wide berth, then slipped out the slider and onto the deck.

Glancing up, I checked to make sure the windows in Callum’s bedroom were closed.

Then I walked to the section of the deck farthest away from the door—and the windows—before pulling out my phone.

I thought again about my theory. I didn’t really believe Adelaide had been poisoning us for over a month, did I?

And if I did, could I outright accuse her of it without irrefutable proof?

No, better to act as if only the first part of my realization was true and that I was worried whatever she’d done to run blood through the water line had released gas into the house inadvertently.

The phone rang and rang. On the seventh ring, it went to voicemail.

I considered hanging up, then changed my mind. It would be easier to relay my suspicions in a voicemail. My words came out rushed and ragged in my ears:

“We did it, Adelaide. We fucking did it. He’s leaving for a hotel. Tonight! First thing Monday, I’ll call the lawyer. Maybe we’ll even file. I’ll get the locks changed.” I was getting ahead of myself, but I couldn’t help it. I forced myself to take a breath.

“I prepped the Rupert’s drop,” I continued, envisioning the elegant slip of glass waiting in the straw like a snake in tall grass.

“I thought that was our secret weapon. Though, if he does make himself one last drink, a little poltergeist activity can only reinforce his decision. But it was the blood in the shower that put him over the edge. How in the hell did you do it? Chris said there was no way to rig the water line without going to the source.”

I remembered how adamant Chris had been, how certain.

What had changed? But the better question was, What did it matter?

“I guess the blood in the shower was like the extra flies,” I continued, “the less I knew, the better. I mean, how many times did you go rogue on me?” I started counting on my hands.

“There was the mirror mask. The teddy bear.” Something occurred to me, and I paused; if the bear was Adelaide’s doing, why had Todd left one with the note?

I squeezed my eyes shut. It was hard to keep everything straight.

“The bloody handprints,” I rattled off, returning to my message.

“The metallic shrieks on hidden recorders that ripped through the house. And now the blood in the shower. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad,” I added quickly.

Unless you tried to poison my entire family.

“You were right all along. It was your brazenness that got us here, got Callum to leave when no amount of threats or begging would.” I felt the tight, wry smile on my lips.

“Your serial killer confidence knows no bounds.

“But”—I lowered my voice to just above a whisper—“remember what Chris said about messing with things in the basement? Is it possible that maybe something went wrong down there? That there could be a gas leak in the house contributing to Callum’s .

. .”—and now my, I thought but didn’t say—“delusions?”

There were a dozen more questions I could have asked, but I needed to wrap this up. “Call me as soon as you get this,” I said in a rush, then lowered the phone and ended the call.

I leaned against the house and closed my eyes again, thinking about being able to tell Bea she could come home, that she could stay home, with her books and her stuffies and her fairy garden and her swing set, and that she would be safe—after I made sure there wasn’t a goddamn gas leak, of course.

I was wondering if I should have posed the question to Adelaide’s voicemail as to whether I should be ridding the hot water heater of evidence, when I caught movement in the grass by the arborvitae.

It was fully dark now, and while I couldn’t make out any defining features, I could see that the figure was tall, too tall to be Adelaide.

I backed farther into the shadows and watched the figure approach.

They came up the stairs to the deck, but instead of going to the door, they stopped and looked around. When no one appeared, the man—for I was sure it was a man now—crept to the window and grabbed the bear. He turned the stuffed animal over, looking for something.

The note.

Turn around, I thought. Turn around, Todd, and let me see your face.

And he did turn, but not toward me; rather, he turned toward the door. There was enough moonlight to see the back of his head . . .

. . . and the phoenix tattoo inked there, its black-and-orange feathers fanned out like fire.