Page 10 of Ghost Business (Boneyard Key #2)

Six

Tristan’s favorite part of establishing a new location of Ghouls Night Out was engaging with the locals.

Chatting up business owners and finding out what made a community tick while he passed out business cards, scattering them around town like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed.

He wanted to get the word out that he was adding value to their community, bringing in tourism and hopefully additional income for everyone.

The goal was to become a familiar, friendly face, smoothing the way for his tour to set up shop.

It was a tried-and-true tactic that worked almost every time.

It wasn’t working in Boneyard Key.

It had at first. Shop owners had accepted his card, even looked at it with some interest. Nick had let him put one on the bulletin board at Hallowed Grounds, which felt like a particular score.

He’d stuck it to the center of the board like a promise.

Staking his claim. The folks at the Chamber of Commerce had been friendly and welcoming, letting him leave a stack of cards with them.

But then things changed. Slowly. Painfully.

Over the next couple of weeks goodwill drained from the people around him, like a balloon with a pinhole losing air.

On his next visit to Hallowed Grounds, he noticed that his card had disappeared from the bulletin board.

Nick shook his head, his face stony, when Tristan asked if he could leave another one.

“I think you’ve done enough,” he said, in a voice that would brook not an ounce of an argument. He folded his arms across his chest. “You know we already have a ghost tour here, right?”

“Surely there’s nothing wrong with some friendly competition?” But Nick was immune to Tristan’s easy charm and friendly smile.

“You don’t compete with Sophie,” was all he said.

Nick didn’t seem like the most gregarious guy on a good day, but this was next-level.

Today, the way that Nick had squinted at him when handing him his coffee made Tristan feel wary.

Like there was a nonzero chance that the drink had come with a little extra spit, as a treat.

Oh, well. Spooky Brew was closer to his condo anyway.

On a Tuesday night Tristan found himself at The Haunt, ready for another round of fried chicken.

As he settled himself at the bar, it didn’t take long to notice the chill.

Not from the air conditioning—it was a warm evening in early March—but from the fellow patrons.

More than one squinty-eyed look was shot his way.

There was an old woman at a table by the door.

Her hair was white and curled in that Queen Elizabeth style.

She spooned up a bite of clam chowder with a hand that shook a little, enough to send the soup swaying but not enough to spill.

Across from her was a blond woman, about Tristan’s age if he had to guess.

Her ponytail hung over her left shoulder as she stabbed gently at a giant salad.

They were related—it was evident in the shape of their faces and the curves of their smiles.

But then the younger woman raised her head, and their gazes collided.

Tristan took a sip of his beer and offered a polite smile—nothing flirty, just friendly—but the narrowing of her eyes said he’d offended her personally.

She spoke to her elderly companion, who raised her head, gave Tristan a measured look, then turned back to the younger woman with a dismissive shake of her head.

Something about that shake of her head reminded Tristan of Nick’s stony expression, and it clicked. His business card, instead of paving the way for him, had been a line in the sand. With him on one side, and Sophie on the other. And Boneyard Key had chosen Sophie.

On the one hand, he could understand. She was cute—the skip his heart made just now thinking about how cute she was confirmed that. But she’d made inroads in this town with a speed that Tristan had never seen in his life. How had she fostered such loyalty so fast?

Then Tony dropped off his order. Tristan had learned that fried chicken at The Haunt was a religious experience.

But the plastic basket in front of him was a sacrilege.

A shriveled chicken breast and a leg that looked like it came off a Cornish game hen.

The usually crispy-hot fries were limp and soggy, as though they’d been shown the deep fryer as a vague threat on the way to Tristan’s table.

Tristan looked from his food to a table across the way, where a woman was working her way through a massive leg that looked like something out of a Renaissance festival.

Enough was enough. “Tony.” The word came out a defeated sigh, and the bartender paused. “Level with me here. Please. I thought we were good.”

“We were.” Tony emphasized the second word, and the shake of his head belied his words.

“Then what the hell?” He picked up the chicken leg as though it were Exhibit A. “I’m a nice guy, I tip well. Why am I getting the scrawny pieces of chicken?”

“Sophie.”

Realization dawned quickly. “Oh, man. She got to you too, huh?” He shook his head. “Seems like the whole town is on her side.”

“Of course we are.” Tony crossed his arms across his chest, his face as stony as Nick’s had been. Damn, this was bad. “We look after our own around here.”

“Seriously?” Tristan was incredulous. “I get that she must have gotten here a few weeks before I did, but that doesn’t make her a local.”

Tony looked at him as though he’d grown a second head. “A few weeks? Dude, she’s lived here her whole life.”

“Her…” All he could do was blink. “Her what?”

“At least since…” Tony cast his gaze toward the ceiling, thinking. “The earliest I remember her from was second grade. She used to swap me her Cheetos for my apple juice at lunchtime.”

“Second grade…?” None of these words were computing. “But she just started doing this ghost tour thing, right?” He had a bad feeling, even as he asked the question, and it only got worse when Tony shook his head again.

“A while now,” he said. “Five, maybe six years? And she’s real good at it too.”

Tristan nudged his plastic basket of technically edible dinner away from him. Even if the food had looked good, he wasn’t hungry anymore.

—

“Five or six years ?” Eric sounded as incredulous as Tristan felt, which was a comfort. Thank God, it wasn’t just him.

“I know!” He turned his oven on before rooting in his freezer. There had to be a frozen pizza in here somewhere.

“How did we miss it?” From his phone on the counter came the sounds of Eric typing furiously, probably googling ghost tours in Boneyard Key for the millionth time, as though Sophie’s big brown eyes and glasses and dark curls would suddenly show up on an internet search.

Been doing this for years now! , her cheerful expression would say.

“Nothing!” Eric confirmed, as though he needed to. “Has she never heard of a website? Social media? How does she stay in business?”

“This isn’t a social media kind of town.

” Tristan tore open the frozen pizza wrapper with a little more force than was strictly necessary.

The pizza bounced onto the cookie sheet, shedding plasticky cheese and pepperoni in its wake.

“There’s a bulletin board at the coffee shop and a couple grandmas at the Chamber of Commerce.

” He reassembled the toppings on his pizza and slid it into the oven.

Then he dropped onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar and picked up his phone.

“Bottom line is we screwed up.” He took a deep breath and scrubbed a hand through his hair.

Eric wasn’t going to like this next idea.

“Maybe we should pull out. Cut our losses.”

“No.” The word was emphatic, and Eric’s eyes went wide. “Admit defeat? Are you kidding me?”

“It’s not about admitting defeat. It’s about stepping on toes. Come on, if we’d known about Sophie and her tour, would I even be here right now?”

“Well, no. But…”

“But what?” Tristan was already mentally packing his things. It wouldn’t take long; he always traveled light.

Eric sighed. “But it’s too late. You’ve been there what, almost a month now?

The Boneyard Key script is done. The first tour is in two days, and online tickets are selling at a steady clip.

We’re ready to go. If we pulled out now we’d have to refund all those tickets.

Finding a new location and starting over again would set us back a couple months. At the very least. And we—”

He got it now. “We don’t have that kind of time.” Tristan blew out a long breath and closed his eyes.

“Not if you want to get out from under your dad by October. It’ll take too long to get established somewhere else.” Eric looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry, but if you want to make this work, it has to be full steam ahead there in Boneyard Key.”

“Yeah.” If there was another option, Tristan couldn’t see it.

“Don’t worry.” As always, Eric was the voice of optimism. “You have this down. You’re going to crush it, as usual.”

He was obviously aiming for a pep talk, but all Tristan could hear was crush it . Crush Sophie. He didn’t feel good about that.

After hanging up, and while he let his almost-burned pizza cool on the stove, he wandered into his bedroom.

Eric was right—Tristan didn’t have much of a choice at this point.

What did he really owe Sophie anyway? What did he owe anyone in this town?

This wasn’t personal. It was business. Just business.

And if he wanted to keep his own business going, he had to do this tour on Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday.

And then do it all again next week, and the week after that, all the way through the summer.

In the bedroom closet, Tristan reached for the black leather hatbox that he’d stashed on a high shelf. Setting the round box on his bed, he threw the latches and opened the lid. It gave a slight creak as he raised it. Inside was a charcoal top hat, nestled against the silk lining of the box.

For a long moment Tristan looked at the hat, remembering the day he’d first put it on.

My Fair Lady , junior year. The costume designer had found it in some kind of rummage sale, astonishingly pristine considering its age.

It was as though the hat had been waiting patiently for Tristan to be born, to attend Princeton, to minor in theatre, and to be cast as Freddy Eynsford-Hill.

It had taken some work to sweet-talk the costume shop manager into letting him keep the hat.

(Well, buy the hat. If there was one thing he had learned from his father, it was that money talked.)

The hat had become a mainstay in his ghost tour costume, first on campus and then out in the real world. Tristan couldn’t explain it, but there was something special about that top hat and how it fit on his head. It was his power. It gave him confidence; it gave him a voice.

He put it on now and looked at himself in the mirror, that twinge of guilt fading away. This might be Sophie’s town, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t room for more than one ghost tour. Tristan Martin was here now, and Ghouls Night Out was about to take over Boneyard Key.

He aimed a crooked grin in the mirror. “May the best ghost tour win.”