How to Sell a Haunted House


 
 
 
 Fiction by Grady Hendrix
 
 Horrorstör
 My Best Friend’s Exorcism
 We Sold Our Souls
 The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
 The Final Girl Support Group
 BadAsstronauts
 
 Nonfiction by Grady Hendrix
 
 Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction
 These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 BERKLEY
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Grady Hendrix
 Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
 BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Hendrix, Grady, author.
 Title: How to sell a haunted house / Grady Hendrix.
 Description: New York: Berkley, [2023]
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022026268 (print) | LCCN 2022026269 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593201268 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593201282 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
 Classification: LCC PS3608.E543 H69 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.E543 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220606
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026268
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026269
 International Edition ISBN: 9780593547731
 Cover design by Emily Osborne
 Interior art: abstract paper background © Zeitgugga6897 / shutterstock.com
 Book design by Laura K. Corless
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 pid_prh_6.0_142242126_c0_r0
 
 
 
 Amanda,
 You are with me everywhere,
 I see you where I go,
 You surround me always,
 Even though
 I know
 Exactly where I buried you.
 
 
 Chapter 1
 Louise thought it might not go well, so she told her parents she was pregnant over the phone, from three thousand miles away, in San Francisco. It wasn’t that she had a single doubt about her decision. When those two parallel pink lines had ghosted into view, all her panic dissolved and she heard a clear, certain voice inside her head say:
 I’m a mother now.
 But even in the twenty-first century it was hard to predict how a pair of Southern parents would react to the news that their thirty-four-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant. Louise spent all day rehearsing different scripts that would ease them into it, but the minute her mom answered and her dad picked up the kitchen extension, her mind went blank and she blurted out:
 “I’m pregnant.”
 She braced herself for the barrage of questions.
 Are you sure? Does Ian know? Are you going to keep it? Have you thought about moving back to Charleston? Are you certain this is the best thing? Do you have any idea how hard this will be alone? How are you going to manage?
 In the long silence, she prepared her answers: Yes, not yet, of course, God no, no but I’m doing it anyway, yes, I’ll manage.
 Over the phone she heard someone inhale through what sounded like a mouthful of water and realized her mom was crying.
 “Oh, Louise,” her mother said in a thick voice, and Louise prepared herself for the worst. “I’m so happy. You’re going to be the mother I wasn’t.”
 Her dad only had one question: her exact street address.
 “I don’t want any confusion with the cab driver when we land.”
 “Dad,” Louise said, “you don’t have to come right now.”
 “Of course we do,” he said. “You’re our Louise.”
 She waited for them on the sidewalk, her heart pounding every time a car turned the corner, until finally a dark blue Nissan slowed to a stop in front of her building and her dad helped her mom out of the back seat, and she couldn’t wait—she threw herself into her mom’s arms like she was a little kid again.
 They took her crib shopping and stroller shopping and told Louise she was crazy to even consider a cloth diaper service, and discussed feeding techniques and vaccinations and a million decisions Louise would have to make, and bought snot suckers and diapers and onesies, and receiving blankets and changing pads and wipes, and rash cream and burp cloths and rattles and night-lights, and Louise would’ve thought they’d bought way too much if her mother hadn’t said, “You’ve hardly bought anything at all.”
 She couldn’t even blame them for having a hard time with the whole Ian issue.
 “Married or not, we have to meet his family,” her mom said. “We’re going to be co-grandparents.”
 “I haven’t told him yet,” Louise said. “I’m barely eleven weeks.”
 “Well, you’re not getting any less pregnant,” her mom pointed out.
 “There are tangible financial benefits to marriage,” her dad added. “You’re sure you don’t want to reconsider?”
 Louise did not want to reconsider.
 Ian could be funny, he was smart, and he made an obscenely high income curating rare vinyl for rich people in the Bay Area who yearned for their childhoods. He’d put together a complete collection of original pressing Beatles LPs for the fourth-largest shareholder at Facebook and found the bootleg of a Grateful Dead concert where a Twitter board member had proposed to his first wife. Louise couldn’t believe how much they paid him for this.
 On the other hand, when she suggested they should take a break he’d taken that as his cue to go down on one knee in the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and propose. He’d been so upset when she said no that she’d finally had pity sex with him, which was how she came to be in her current condition.
 When Ian had proposed, he’d been