Page 7 of How to Fake a Haunting

I pulled into a cul-de-sac two neighborhoods from my own after dropping Bea with my mother on the other side of town.

Sometimes it still hit me: the surprise of living so close to my parents.

They’d settled in Newport after retiring.

Not long after, my dad had suffered his first heart attack.

I’d come after grad school, loath to be more than fifteen minutes from them should my mother need me.

I’d met Callum at a fundraiser for the American Heart Association in Providence, thrown—unsurprisingly—by his parents.

My dad had been doing okay over the last several years, though his commitment to exercise, cholesterol medication, healthy eating, and better sleep was still a bit shaky.

Adelaide was already leaning against her Prius, parked halfway off the road beside a grove of trees. “Cal’s at golf?” she asked after I’d pulled in behind her.

“He teed off five minutes ago. We have a solid five hours to figure things out.”

“Let’s go, then.” Adelaide walked toward the trunk, and I noticed the compact aluminum ladder leaning against it.

“What’s the—” I started.

“Uh-uh,” Adelaide interrupted. “Don’t get going with your questions already. I have no idea how loud the ladder is when retracting or whether it will even reach your windows, but we’ll figure it out.”

Adelaide strode into the woods beyond the cars, carrying the ladder over one shoulder. I followed but couldn’t help but ask a couple of questions.

“You’re going to walk all this way every time you need to sneak in?”

“It’s not like I can leave my car in your driveway while I’m creeping around your attic, haunting the shit out of Callum, now can I?”

“What happens when you need to get back to your car in the dark?”

“There are these things called flashlights, Lainey, believe it or not. I doubt your attic’s that well lit, so I’ll already have one on me.”

“What if someone sees your car parked here every night and calls the cops?”

Adelaide gestured around us. “I like to hike in the woods.”

“With a ladder?”

“I’m an avid birder.” Adelaide shrugged and shooed a mayfly from her face. She grinned, but I frowned, and she relented. “Relax, okay? I’ll dress in hiking clothes and wear a backpack; I’ll be transporting whatever supplies I’m going to need on any given evening anyway.”

Adelaide repositioned the ladder on her shoulder and zigzagged through the woods, following what couldn’t exactly be called a path but was at least somewhat clear of brambles and branches.

Less than ten minutes after we abandoned our cars, we came to a stone wall at the top of a hill that buttressed my neighbor’s house to the north.

“Well, shit,” I breathed. “I had no idea this is where we’d come out.” Adelaide let out a little harumph, clearly pleased with herself.

We kept to the trees, following the stone wall down the hill on the other side, hopping over it into my yard at the bottom. “There’s certainly enough tree cover for this,” I said.

Adelaide repositioned the ladder again. “Which means I should be able to find a place to stash this so I don’t have to lug it back and forth every time.”

We cut behind the pool, obscured by the cypresses and arborvitae that separated my property from my neighbors’ on one side and a stretch of fruit trees—and more arborvitae—along the fence on the other.

“Your yard couldn’t be more well suited for secret missions,” Adelaide mused in response to the greenery.

“I wanted trees that would grow so tall no one could see into our yard, remember?” We circled the far end of the pool and came within sight of the back porch. “Unfortunately,” I added, “I think that’s where the convenience factors end.”

We regarded the house, with its second-floor windows: two in Bea’s room—or what had been the nursery when Adelaide first saw it—at the front, two in Callum’s room at the back. Bea’s windows loomed over a gravel-filled rose garden, and Callum’s over a small concrete patio we never used.

“There are windows on the other side of the house, of course,” I said. “To my office. But they’re over the driveway. And, well, the front walkway. You’ll have to go in through Bea’s room. It’s the safest. That’s where the entrance to the attic is anyway.”

Adelaide shrugged. “Sounds good. But with how drunk Callum always is, and how heavy a sleeper, I could probably go in through his bedroom in a pinch.” She leaned the ladder against the house, released the strap, and lifted each step, locking it in place as she went.

When the top rung met the bottom of the second-floor window, she locked the last step in place and tested the base.

“It’s pretty shaky,” I observed.

“It’s a twenty-three-foot telescopic ladder.

Of course it’s shaky. Look how far apart the steps are.

” Adelaide gave the ladder one final jiggle and started up.

When she was halfway to the window, the ladder bowed beneath her.

She continued her ascent. At the window’s base, she placed both palms against the glass and pushed up, But the window didn’t budge.

“You left this unlocked like I told you to, right?”

“Of course,” I called up. This is way too dangerous. What the hell are we doing? “Come down! This isn’t going to work.”

“Sure it will,” Adelaide called back. She spit on her hands and rubbed them together, then placed them on the glass and pushed.

This time, the window flew open, and Adelaide was thrown off-balance.

She lost contact with the ladder, and the ladder lost contact with the house.

Adelaide’s arms remained out in front of her like a magician frozen in the act of unveiling a trick.

“Shit!” I cried, and pushed against the ladder’s base.

For a moment, nothing happened, and then the top of the ladder returned to the side of the house with a clatter.

Adelaide drew in a shaky breath but said nothing.

After pushing the window the rest of the way up, she crawled inside.

When she turned and poked her head out, she was grinning.

“Come on,” she called.

I grabbed the ladder and climbed, cursing under my breath.

No way I could refuse to test the method Adelaide would be using dozens of times over the next few months—that is, if we got that far.

Adelaide was the one taking all the risks.

The least I could do was not shy away from the logistics at the plan’s inception.

I made it up the ladder and through the window without calamity. It unnerved me to be standing in the familiar space of Bea’s room after entering the house in such unusual fashion. Adelaide, however, had already crossed the room and opened Beatrix’s closet.

She slid a handful of hangers to one side and peered down at a pink-and-turquoise dollhouse on the closet floor. “You’ll need to clear this out in case I can’t get to the ladder fast enough and have to hide.”

I refrained from pointing out yet again the infinite ways this whole stage-a-haunting idea could go wrong. “Right.” I forced an air of normalcy into my voice. “I’ve been meaning to donate that. She’s got too much stuff as it is.”

As soon as I said the words, a twinge pulled at my chest. Bea was already moving away from the interests and characters that had defined her toddlerhood: Paw Patrol and Gabby’s Dollhouse, PJ Masks and Gigantosaurus.

She was into horses now, and art, particularly painting and beading.

Time went by so fast, trite though the sentiment may be, and would continue to fly as Beatrix grew older.

The thought of missing out on half of all the memories that remained to be made with Bea filled me with heartsickness and panic, though not as much as the thought of losing her completely to some horrible accident at the hands of her father.

“Lain, you with me?” Adelaide looked concerned. “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

I swallowed, shoving down my fear for Bea and my anger at Callum. “Not at all,” I said, my voice hard. “Let’s get the hell on up to the attic and see what we’re dealing with.”