The pipes told me before anyone else did.
I was lying on top of the covers at twelve minutes after seven on a Saturday morning in August, with the window open and the swamp cooler not yet on, half awake and listening to the house, the way you do in a house you've only owned for five months and haven't learned yet. I heard the shower running at the far end of the hall, which was unusual for my fifteen-year-old on a Saturday before noon, and I heard the low hum of the water heater in the mechanical room under me, and then I heard a sound I didn't have a name for.
A thunk, deep in the wall, like somebody had dropped a bowling ball on the other side of the drywall. Then a shudder that ran along the copper from the bathroom to the kitchen. Then a long, sucking gurgle, the sound a drinking straw makes at the bottom of a milkshake. Then nothing.
Then my daughter screamed.
It wasn't a spider scream. I've heard those. Pia has a spider scream that goes up at the end like a question. This one went down. It started high and dropped into something lower and scared, and it had words in it, and the words were "Dad, Dad, it stopped, Dad, it's burning, it's burning, I can't get it off."
I don't remember getting down the hall. I remember being outside the bathroom door with my hand flat on it, and the door being locked, and the fan still roaring on the other side, and steam curling out under the gap at my feet.