How to Fake a Haunting, page 10
“Most women”—he paused and corrected himself—“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, you get what I’m saying?”
“We get it,” Adelaide said, because Chris was waiting for a response. The smile pasted on her face looked more like a grimace. “Thanks for your time and the expertise and all that.” She stood. “I guess we’ll have to look into the fake blood capsules after all.”
Chris walked us out, insisting we could call him with additional questions. “Let me know when your movie is done,” he said, all traces of his patronizing manner gone. “And good luck with the festival. I’ll look for you. Maybe you can give me a shout-out in the credits.” He winked.
Adelaide’s grip on my arm grew tighter as she pulled me out of the shop.
Chapter 18
Adelaide strode to her Prius at a breakneck pace, and I hurried to follow.
“That guy was an asshole,” I said once we were inside the car. “How do you know him again?” When she didn’t answer, I added, “Today was such a bust.”
“Maybe.” Adelaide put the car into reverse. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. “But maybe not. There’s one other thing I have scheduled for today.”
“What’s that?”
Adelaide pulled out of the lot and stepped on the gas. “You’re not going to like it.”
My stomach tightened. “What am I not going to like?”
Adelaide stared straight ahead, not answering.
“Adelaide. What am I not going to like?”
“Well . . .”
Still, she said nothing, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed her arm.
“Hey, I’m driving here.”
“Tell me what I’m not going to like.”
“All right, all right,” Adelaide relented. “We have a meeting at your house at noon.” She grimaced. “With Joe and Morgan Tallow.”
My mouth dropped open, but Adelaide pressed on. “You know, to drum up some new ideas.” She merged onto the narrow road that ran along the river, avoiding my stare.
“What do you mean, ‘drum up ideas,’ Adelaide? Ideas from Joe and Morgan Tallow? Are you nuts?”
“Hear me out, okay? We pretend we’re reconsidering their proposal for haunted tours at the mansions and ask them what they see when they encounter haunted phenomena, how it manifests, et cetera. After we’ve gotten what we can out of them, we thank them, tell them we’ve decided we’re not going forward with the tours, and send them on their way. After that, we’ll have all new material, and we can come up with some really kick-ass hauntings!”
“You realize we cannot just meet with Joe and Morgan Tallow, right? I cannot tell them we’re considering their proposal.” I frowned. “And why my house? If Callum came home, we’d be screwed. Why not your house?”
Adelaide’s cheeks flushed until they were almost the same color as her hair. “I sort of had company last night. He’s still there.”
I stared. “Who?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’re talking about the Tallows.”
I was too mad to focus on Adelaide’s unexpected confession. “We are talking about the Tallows. The Tallows. If Kathy found out—”
“She’s not going to.”
“But if she did, we’d be accused of putting the mansions’ integrity in jeopardy.”
Adelaide rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think that’s kind of bullshit in the first place? Spiritualism and the occult have their place in the history of the Gilded Age. Joe and Morgan are—”
“Joe and Morgan are going to take advantage of us. You have to call and cancel.”
“Have I led us astray yet? No. So will you trust me? I’ve been reading their research online, and I think we can get some really great, really wild ideas from them.”
The twisting in my gut wrung tighter. “You said yourself, with all the novels and horror movies out there, why would we ever want for inspiration?”
Adelaide’s hands tightened around the wheel. “Because that’s all fake. Everything we’ve done to Callum, I mean, who knows if that’s how an actual haunting would manifest. It’s just some shit Hollywood came up with to look good on camera. To elicit screams. We want to elicit madness.”
She pried her eyes away from the road long enough to give me a discerning look. “If Joe and Morgan Tallow have witnessed even one thing that was real, and we can get them to tell us about it, imagine what that could do for our arsenal against Callum.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’ll tell us they’ve seen things that are real. And I’m sure it’s the same shit they post on their YouTube channel to get followers.”
The sun filtering through Adelaide’s hair patterned the console red. She stared out the windshield.
“I don’t think we should be bringing anyone else into this. First the wildlife guy, then Chris, now Joe and Morgan Tallow? We’re casting too wide a net. It can only lead to trouble.”
We rode in silence while I fumed. After what seemed like an eternity, Adelaide stopped at the last red light before my neighborhood. “Have you forgotten why we’re doing this?” she asked softly. “The endless little deaths Callum subjects you to, your need to protect Beatrix? Think of this meeting with Joe and Morgan as one step closer to getting past all that.”
Would it bring me one step closer to getting rid of Callum? Or one step closer to losing my job and having to rely on Callum’s income to support my daughter? I resisted the urge to scream. Why was everything so goddamn difficult? We were on my street now. I stared at the lines of sage along the neighbor’s property, their sky-blue blossoms bursting out from the waving stalks while resignation and dread swirled within me.
“Forget books and movies,” I tried one last time. “Let’s pretend something came up and go back to your place. We’ll get online, look at the historical records of demons, possessions, that sort of thing. That makes way more sense than dragging two more people into—”
“We’re already here.” Adelaide checked her makeup, threw off her seat belt, killed the engine, and opened the door. “And so are they. Come on.”
Panic clogged my throat like bloom-choked stems. The Tallows’ dust-caked Mazda had pulled up beside Adelaide’s Prius. Short of a black hole opening up beneath me, I was going to have to face them.
I climbed from the car, all the trust I’d put in Adelaide settling like a weight at the bottom of my stomach. Praying what we were about to do wasn’t going to turn my career into the same sort of living nightmare to which we were subjecting Callum, I turned toward the Tallows and pasted something like a smile on my face.
Chapter 19
“Lainey Taylor, so nice to see you!”
Morgan Tallow glided across the driveway and took my hands. I allowed her to squeeze them for several seconds before pulling away.
“Hi,” I said through gritted teeth, earning me a look of warning from Adelaide. Be nice, the look said. They’re here now, and you’ve got to deal with it.
“Laineeeey,” Joe Tallow crowed, as if greeting an old friend as opposed to someone who’d avoided him like the plague anytime he’d approached society headquarters. I tried not to stiffen when he pulled me in for a hug.
When I stepped back, Adelaide was halfway up the walkway.
“Come on,” she urged. The Tallows followed. I brought up the rear as if I were approaching a guillotine. Treat this like any other meeting on behalf of the preservation society. Polite and to the point.
Ten minutes later, we were seated around the kitchen table. Adelaide had made tea. I took a sip and burned my tongue.
“Okay,” Adelaide said. “Lainey, where should we start?”
“Wait,” Morgan cut in, and Adelaide and I snapped to attention. Had Morgan already discerned there was something suspicious going on?
“Let me just say that Joe and I are thrilled you asked to meet with us,” Morgan said. “I know we’ve been at odds over the years, but all we’ve ever wanted is to give the guests who come to your beautiful mansions and gardens access to experiences and stories they otherwise wouldn’t have.”
I froze, hands wrapped around the scalding mug. Goddammit. Why did Morgan have to be so nice? There was no chance Kathy was letting them do their campy tours; it felt wrong to lead them on like this, no matter the potential gain.
“Morgan, can I be honest—”
Adelaide cut me off. “Yes, can we be honest? We feel the exact same way.” She smiled at the ghost hunters. My stomach dropped. There goes that.
Morgan returned the smile, glanced at Joe, and then turned back to us. “Okay, then. Glad we’re on the same page. So, what would you like to know?”
Adelaide pulled a notebook and pen from her colorful cardigan and opened to a fresh page. “What types of things have you seen in your work, and what are the various ways hauntings have manifested for the two of you over the years?”
Joe and Morgan exchanged another glance. Morgan brushed a lock of glossy blond hair over one shoulder. “We’d be happy to tell you about things we’ve seen. But if it’s okay, I’d like to tell you a little story first. About how we got started in this field and why I’m so keen to spend my life exploring the paranormal.”
“Of course,” Adelaide answered for both of us.
“Thirteen years ago,” Morgan began, “not long after Joe and I got married, we started trying for a baby. Nothing happened for a while, until it did. Once I was pregnant, I started seeing a little boy. Like you, we live near the mansions, and that’s usually where I’d see him. On the grounds of Chateau-sur-Mer. Along the Cliff Walk. In the cemetery between our house and the Breakers.”
She paused, a faraway look in her eyes. “I saw him often in the cemetery. His black hair and big dark eyes. I’d call out to him, but he never responded. He was always just out of reach, out of earshot.” She trailed off, but no one spoke. I had the sense that, while this was a well-trod story, it was not one often exposed to light, to the air.
“The baby I eventually gave birth to was stillborn,” she continued a moment later. “I’d had early-onset preeclampsia that’d gone undiagnosed. My son’s blue skin and silent lips didn’t distract from his dark eyes and hair. He was ethereal in his paleness. Ghostly. But beautiful.” Morgan smiled sadly, and something clenched in my chest.
“When the universe of my grief became a mere galaxy and I was finally able to get outside, to walk, to stand the sight of the trees, I searched for the little boy. In every cemetery, at every mansion. It didn’t matter; I never saw him again. Except in my dreams. Dreams in which my son was defined by his realness, his presence, as he traipsed across garden paths and along sand dunes, as opposed to the void his death had torn open. Not long after, I told Joe I was quitting my job; I wanted—needed—to find ghosts for other people. Because the knowledge that I’d seen my son, even a finite number of times, even from afar—that knowledge saved me.”
It was like a gong had been struck in the kitchen, the air molecules around us set into teeth-rattling vibrations. I forced my dry throat into action. “God, Morgan, I’m so sorry.” She’s not a huckster after all. She’s grieving. All this time, I’d been judging her without knowing anything close to the truth.
Adelaide echoed my sympathies. “How awful for you both. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not telling you for your condolences. I’m telling you so you know that I understand—that I’ve always understood—your hesitancy in bringing us on board for tours at the mansions,” Morgan said. “By virtue of my connection with the supernatural being so personal, so paramount to who I am, I don’t expect others to forge that connection easily. Or ever. My own husband doesn’t believe in ghosts, so why would I fault anyone else for their reservations?”
“Wait,” I croaked and looked at Joe. “You don’t believe in ghosts?”
Joe laughed. “What can I say? I’m a skeptic. Can’t believe in anything I haven’t seen for myself. But I love my wife, and I understand her need to do this.” He shrugged. “What else am I going to do, if not support her, after everything she’s been through?”
“But what about the EVP recordings on your channel?” Adelaide asked Joe.
“Apophenia, cross-modulation, expectation, or wishful thinking,” Joe answered matter-of-factly.
Adelaide was nonplussed. “Apo-what?”
“Apophenia. The tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things. Seeing patterns in meaningless data, detecting shapes in unexpected places. It’s a psychology term, used to describe the human tendency to see connections and patterns that aren’t really there.”
“And cross-modulation?”
“Without getting too technical, cross-modulation is the intermodulation distortion caused by multiple carriers within the same bandwidth.”
“In English, hon,” Morgan prompted.
“Basically, it’s the EVP recorders picking up unwanted frequencies.”
I looked to Morgan to see how she would react to her partner, with whom she’d weathered the loss of a child, dismissing her beliefs to a series of scientific—and, from my perspective, perfectly reasonable—explanations. But Morgan gazed affectionately at Joe and said, “He keeps me honest. Honest and hungry.” I stared back and forth between the two of them, enthralled by their dynamic.
Morgan turned to me. “So, back to why you asked us here. What sorts of phenomena do you want to know about?”
“Oh, um . . .” Shit, think of something!
Adelaide jumped to my rescue. “When you’ve been called to investigate a haunted house, what signs are usually reported?”
Morgan nodded, as if she’d expected this question. “There are a few things we see over and over again,” she said. “Pressure on a person’s chest, auditory hallucinations, or, and this is probably the most common, the simple feeling that something is wrong. Most of our calls are from people who feel besieged by an overwhelming sense of dread.”
“And what have you uncovered as the cause of these signs?” Adelaide asked.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Joe said without hesitation.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning?” Adelaide and I exclaimed in unison.
“Yep. 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.”
“But,” Morgan broke in, “for every case caused by a chemical leak, we’ve had half a dozen others not solved by a call to the gas company. Not to mention all the other paranormal experiences people have recounted. Black flies swarming the windows. Feeling as if they’ve been covered by a heavy blanket. Foul odors. Children’s toys moving around the house. Footsteps in the basement, the creak of doors in the attic, shoe- and footprints left in carpets where no earthly person had walked, warping floors and walls and ceilings.”
“The warping floors are almost always attributed to a hidden water leak,” Joe pointed out.
“Almost always,” Morgan echoed, and winked.
“Have you come across any instances where the phenomena had been faked by the house’s occupants?” Adelaide asked, and I forgot my dismay at the Tallows’ increasing likability. This question was way too close to home.
Joe and Morgan exchanged a look. “Yes,” Morgan admitted. “But only once was it good enough to fool us.”
“Five years ago,” Joe jumped in, “a woman called, claiming she and her husband had a poltergeist. Our first visit was amateur hour: taps left on in the bathrooms, a burning smell permeating the house, faces in the family’s framed photographs scratched out with a knife, claw marks dug out of the walls. Anything that was easy for someone to stage, this couple had done. We were confident it was a hoax.”
“But they insisted something was going on,” Morgan said, “and they begged us to come back.” She cast her eyes downward. “I convinced Joe to give them one more chance.”
Joe put a hand on Morgan’s arm. “She can’t say no to people in need.”
“That’s when they hit us with the Prince Rupert’s drop.”
“What’s a Prince Rupert’s drop?” Adelaide asked, and I leaned forward, engrossed by their story in spite of myself.
Joe’s hand remained on his wife, as if tethering himself to the present. “It’s a bead created by dripping molten glass into cold water, causing it to solidify. The solid droplets can handle extremely high residual stresses, which give rise to counterintuitive properties, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer or a bullet on the bulbous end without breaking, while exhibiting explosive disintegration if the tail end is even slightly damaged.”
“In English, hon,” Morgan said.
“Right, sorry. It’s a piece of glass that looks like a tadpole. 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, the whole thing explodes.”
“Whoa,” Adelaide said, and I suppressed a groan. She sounded like a kid who’d just found out what happened to ants when you directed sunlight at them through a magnifying glass.
“So, this couple invites us in, gives us a couple of cold drinks, and while we’re standing there, sipping lemonade and listening to how they’re being assailed by physical disturbances, large objects moving, chairs stacking themselves, et cetera, my glass explodes in my hand like I’d been holding a firecracker. The sound was electric. At first, I didn’t even realize what had happened.”
Morgan paused, looking stricken. “Glass went everywhere. One of the shards tore through Joe’s eye and damaged the retina.” Her voice grew low. “They couldn’t save it. His eye.”
