Page 9 of How to Fake a Haunting
“Quick, what should we do?” I asked.
Adelaide was already making her way over plywood and joists like an Olympic hurdler. When she reached the trapdoor, she crouched before the descending roofline, then lowered herself onto a piece of plywood.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s a vent here,” Adelaide said, inching herself closer to the wall, “with a tiny opening above it. I think I can—” She paused, the toes of her shoes creasing against the plywood as she pushed herself forward.
My heart crashed against my rib cage. “Is it Cal? Can you see him?” Then, more to myself than to Adelaide, I said, “What the hell is he doing home? He never leaves the golf course early.”
Adelaide pushed herself away from the wall, then worked her way to a seated position and scooted forward, dangling her legs over the hole to Beatrix’s closet. “Did you forget about something?” she asked with a hint of irritation. “An appointment, perhaps?”
I scrunched up my face. “I don’t remember any appointment.”
“With Wildlife Extraction Services? You know, to get a bunch of dead animals so we can freak Callum out?”
“What? No. That was supposed to be on Monday. Mondays I work from home, and Cal’s in the office.”
“Well, the dude—what did you say his name was? Tim? Todd?—is here now,” Adelaide said and leaned forward, ready to drop onto the perilously stacked chairs.
“I’m going out there to talk to him. Take a few more pictures of the different vents, will you?
I need to see what type of screwdriver we need to pry them open. Then come out and join us.”
I started to protest, but Adelaide was already lowering herself through the trapdoor. A second later, she disappeared completely.
“Dammit,” I said, my annoyance quickly replaced by unease and the sensation that insects were scuttling up my spine despite the preternatural stillness of the attic.
I picked my way over to a vent, snapped a few photos, crossed to a second vent, took a few more, then decided I’d had enough.
That strange sense of stagnant air and an off-color patina persisted.
I could take more photos later, after we talked to Tim-slash-Todd, though I was pretty sure a regular old Phillips head would do the trick in opening the vents.
I wondered how Adelaide was faring. Calling a wildlife relocation company under the guise of animal removal only to pull a bait and switch and ask whether they’d be willing to sell the carcasses of the opossums and raccoons they removed from other residences seemed an unlikely endeavor at best. We’ll tell them we’re starting an Etsy shop, Adelaide said when she’d presented the plan to me.
That we make jewelry out of the bones, claws, teeth, and hides.
No way this would work. Though, if anyone could pull it off, it was Adelaide. I was halfway to the trapdoor when something happened to the air. It was no longer immobile—immovable—but shifty. Shifting. Breathing.
“Hello?” I said, which was foolish. There was no one up here besides me.
Why, then, did I have the distinct, prickly feeling of being watched?
I stood on the plywood floor, trying to keep my breathing steady.
I listened, hoping that instead of another instance of the walls sighing around me, I’d catch a snatch of conversation from the driveway, some concrete reminder that Adelaide and Tim-Todd were not far off.
There was only silence. I risked a look behind me, and as I moved, something moved with me across the attic.
My breath caught in my throat. Adrenaline narrowed my vision down to slits.
The figure stuttered, its movements jerky, like some fish-belly-white thing from a horror movie, all sharp angles and long, dark hair, a specter that pulled its way out of a stone well or a staticky television screen or a . . .
. . . broken mirror.
Staring at me from across the room was my own reflection, fragmented and distorted, caught in the jagged shards of the mirror that had once hung in the upstairs bathroom before Callum had smashed it with a metal candleholder in a drunken stupor.
I let out a shaky exhalation, the rapid retreat of adrenaline leaving me woozy.
Why was the mirror up here? Even as I asked myself the question, a vague memory took shape: hauling the mirror into the attic the morning after the housewarming party.
I’d wanted to get it out of sight as quickly as possible but had been strangely unwilling to throw it away.
I approached the broken remnants of the past warily, almost superstitiously, for hadn’t this mirror foretold the future?
Hadn’t it seen what Callum would become before he had?
Before I did? Or, perhaps not before he’d discerned his fate; maybe Callum hadn’t seen a spider that day after all, but a glimpse of himself . . . the self he was destined to become.
The thought left me even more disoriented, and I abandoned the mirror to pick my way back across the attic, moving from joist to joist before dropping to my hands and feet and crab-walking to the trapdoor, and the escape offered beneath it.
I dropped onto the top chair with far less coordination than the move required. The makeshift structure jerked beneath me but somehow remained upright. I slid from Bea’s art chair onto the closet floor, where I lay for several seconds, breathing hard and brushing dust and spiderwebs from my hair.
I realized I could hear Adelaide and Tim-Todd talking. I stood with a groan and hurried outside to see how she was handling our bizarre request.
“No, no, I understand,” the man was saying. Ah, so it is Todd, I thought, reading his name, along with the words Owner and Sole Employee, Wildlife Extraction Services on the side of his truck. “But I’ll need to check with the town to see if I’m licensed to do that,” he finished.
Adelaide put a hand on his arm and smiled.
“Todd, I totally get it,” she said. “But this is a short-term thing, and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never be asked to do this by anyone ever again.
” She laughed as if they were sharing a secret.
“Do you really want to jump through hoops, maybe even have to pay some sort of fee, all for what amounts to a quick favor for some local artists and a bunch of extra money in your pocket?”
Adelaide saw me and gestured for me to come over. “This is Lainey Taylor. My partner in this jewelry-making endeavor.”
I shook Todd’s hand. He was handsome, with thick brown curls and kind eyes. At present, however, those eyes were jumping around, searching for a way out of this interaction.
“Whatever you find,” Adelaide said, apparently returning to some previous thread of conversation.
“Woodchucks, beavers, squirrels. Hell, even a deer. A deer would be great. Lots of, um, material there to work with. And we don’t even care how mangled they are,” she added.
“In fact, the more mangled, the better.”
Pump the brakes. You’re making us sound insane.
“Are you married?” Adelaide asked suddenly. “Girlfriend?”
Todd looked taken aback by the question, posed so soon after Adelaide’s grisly proclamation. “Uh, yeah, a girlfriend,” he stammered.
“We’ll give you jewelry for her,” she said. “It doesn’t even have to be animal-bone jewelry. We make regular jewelry too.” She smiled sweetly and nodded, as if she were a hypnotherapist goading a client along; he nodded back with wide, unblinking eyes as if the procedure had worked.
“So how often do you get calls for them? The dead animals?” Adelaide asked.
“Uh, once a week, maybe. I can drop them off here?” He shot a look at the house as if he wasn’t quite sure how he got here.
“I’m going to give you a different address, actually,” Adelaide said. “My place.” She winked at him, and he blushed. “It’s about five miles from here. Does that work?”
Two minutes later, Adelaide and I were standing by the front garden, waving as Todd drove away.
When he’d gone, I turned to her. “Why do we need dead animals again?” It was the same question I’d asked two days earlier, when we’d been working through the details of stage one over the phone, and she’d prompted me to call the wildlife removal service in the first place.
“Cal leaves for work when it’s still dark.
What could be more disorienting than finding the smashed-up carcasses of animals stuck in your grille or smeared over your tires when you go out to your car early in the morning?
At first, he’ll wonder if he was too drunk to remember hitting them the night before, but eventually, he’ll realize something is up.
Something creeeepy.” She drew the word out like she was hosting Fright Night Theater.
“At the very least, he’ll get a nasty little shock at five a.m., after what I aim to make a fitful and nightmare-disturbed sleep. ”
“And what exactly are you going to use to smear carcasses across his tires?”
Adelaide considered this for only an instant before her face lit up. “I’m not sure, Lain. But I bet they have something at Home Depot. Come on. Let’s get that ladder off the side of your house and go for a ride.”