Page 13 of Ghost Business (Boneyard Key #2)

Eight

Tristan knew this much: Boneyard Key wasn’t big enough for two ghost tours.

He did his best. He’d never planned a route more meticulously, doing everything he could to not run into Sophie and her tour. But it was like two people trying to brush their teeth at the same time in an airplane bathroom: constantly bumping shoulders and never enough room.

The first couple weeks were awkward, the way they always were.

But Eric did a little fine-tuning of the online advertising.

A few ads boosted in the right places had resulted in decent-size groups, and the audience only built from there.

Now he was leading sold-out crowds through Boneyard Key on Saturday nights.

Friday was slightly less crowded, and Thursdays had been a joke—they’d cut those pretty quick.

Tristan’s heart always beat a little bit faster on Friday nights as he adjusted his cravat in the mirror by the door.

No matter how many tours he’d led at this point in however many cities, every Friday felt like opening night.

He ran an anxious hand through his hair, making sure it lay just right even though it was going to spend most of the night underneath his top hat.

Then he shrugged into his tailcoat. How long was he going to be able to wear this costume in the Florida heat?

Actual pants were bad enough, but the dress shirt / waistcoat / cravat / coat combo was an insane amount of layers.

He was going to sweat himself to death in July.

On the walk to the pier, he calmed his racing heart by reminding himself that he knew the script inside and out.

He could do this. It was easy to pretend that the trickle of sweat on his lower back, creeping toward his waistband, had everything to do with Florida’s humidity and nothing to do with this new beginning.

So much was riding on this Boneyard Key location becoming a success, but he couldn’t afford to think about that right now.

The seventeen people waiting for him at the pier wanted a fun Friday-night outing, and he was here to provide that.

He adjusted his top hat, settling it firmly onto his head, and turned on his LED lantern. Showtime.

He led the group down Beachside Drive, his nervousness falling away as he slipped into his character as a nineteenth-century gentleman—or maybe he was a ghost?

He liked to keep it ambiguous—tipping his hat to the ladies, walking backwards while facing the crowd, glancing over his shoulder occasionally so that he didn’t run into anything.

“Now, right here—” He stopped at random in front of a closed-up storefront, barely glancing in the window.

It didn’t matter what kind of shop it was.

This was a Florida tourist town; odds were good that it was one of the many T-shirt shops Sophie had joked about his first night in town. The night they’d met.

Sophie. The fleeting thought of her brought with it the usual twinge of guilt, along with the usual quickening of his heartbeat. Tristan willed them both away. Plenty of time to think on her later.

“Right here,” he said again as he refocused, “we have one of the friendlier spirits in town. You ever hear the phrase ‘work yourself to death’? Well, the entity here took it quite literally. A few decades ago, this very shop was the local pharmacy…” His voice trailed off as he took in the shop window he’d chosen tonight.

Mostly T-shirts, some flags, a fine selection of trucker hats.

The most prominent T-shirt read I Went to Boneyard Key and All I Got Was Ghosted .

He hadn’t seen that shirt yet, and now that he had he couldn’t wait to add it to his collection.

Regroup, Martin. Regroup. “You know the kind,” he said smoothly.

“Kindly old pharmacist, soda fountain in the corner? Even a jukebox. The pharmacist loved his job. So much that one day, he just keeled over at work, right there behind the counter. His death was, of course, mourned by the whole town, but as time marched on, the pharmacy went away, replaced by the shop you see here. No one told the pharmacist that, though. They say on certain nights you can see him inside, behind what used to be his counter. Employees come in the next morning to find a bottle of aspirin next to the register. But the thing is”—he paused for dramatic effect—“this place doesn’t sell aspirin.

That’s old Mr.Middleton, still trying to help out. ”

He gave a grin and a tip of his hat, leading the group down the street.

A couple people lingered behind, cupping their hands around their eyes, peering inside the window, trying to get a glimpse.

There was nothing to see, of course. Tristan had made that story up, back in college after a late-night viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life .

It was just specifically old-fashioned enough to be a good story, but generic enough to tell in every town.

In fact, he’d probably stopped in front of a different shop when he’d told the story the weekend before.

It didn’t matter; it was all about entertainment.

And entertain he did, all the way down Beachside Drive, past The Haunt, pausing in front of a shop on the corner that sold crystals and other New Age trinkets.

The sign out front said Mystic Crystals .

It was a great building—one of those Sears kit houses that were so common in the early twentieth century.

Tristan had spotted a few of those here in town: solid, square buildings with covered front porches and squared-off columns.

But the tourists weren’t here for a lesson in architecture.

“This may look like an unassuming shop, but it houses a terrible secret.” He gestured with his lantern, pitching his voice low as though telling a campfire story.

“As you can see, it used to be a private residence. In fact, it was home to Boneyard Key’s most prominent doctor.

A genial old sawbones, but his wife was the jealous type.

Every time he headed out on a house call, she was sure he was cheating.

One night it got to be too much for her.

You know the phrase, ‘physician, heal thyself’?

Turns out, there’s no healing thyself from poison.

“In fact, when he—” Tristan turned back to the house and his voice simply stopped working.

When he’d started his story, the house had been dark, the shop obviously closed up for the night.

But now there was a light in an upper window.

A greenish glow, surrounding a shadowy figure that had suddenly appeared in the window.

While his jaw went slack and his group gasped behind him, the figure slowly raised an arm.

In greeting? In censure? Tristan didn’t want to stick around to find out.

In fact, he wanted to pack his stuff and get the hell out of town.

“Now if you’ll follow me…” Tristan mentally shoved down his fight-or-flight response. “We’ll cross the street here and head back up Beachside Drive.” His voice sounded too loud, too tinny in his ears, and his heart beat so fast, so loud, that it made his breath shudder.

“Did you see that?” A man Tristan’s father’s age turned around, keeping his eyes on the house and its green, glowing occupant. The two teenage boys with him scoffed.

“It’s a trick, Dad.” The kid sounded bored, but the apparition had at least gotten him off his phone. “This guy probably set it up. Ghosts aren’t real.”

That’s right , Tristan reminded himself and his spiking blood pressure. Ghosts aren’t real . He surreptitiously took some deep breaths as they headed up the street, and once they reached the vacant lot next to the Chamber of Commerce, he was feeling back to normal and ready for his next story.

“This particular plot of land is haunted. There have been three separate buildings here over the last hundred years, and each one has burned down.” Was that true?

Probably not. He didn’t care. “The townsfolk here finally got the message, and now they keep the land vacant. These coffee and ice cream carts are open during the day, but as you can see, they’re on wheels, so maybe the ghosts don’t count them as permanent structures.

It seems that we found a loophole, making everyone happy: both the living and the dead! ”

A couple of chuckles in response to this story.

Okay. Good. Tristan felt back in control.

They continued up the street, and mentally Tristan was rubbing his hands together in glee.

It was time for his favorite part, which was one of the reasons he saved it for last. The yellow house at the end of the street, before the bend in the road that took them back to the pier.

The first time he’d walked past that house he’d fallen in love with the little balconies off the bedrooms, and it had been so easy to spin a story about a pirate and his lady, who watches for him from the balcony that faces the Gulf.

“As I’m sure you know, the Gulf of Mexico isn’t too far from Cuba and the Caribbean. And what was the Caribbean full of in the olden days? You Disney fans will know this one.”

Silence. Damn. He thought the Disney reference would have been a good giveaway.

“Fish?” someone finally ventured.

“Hurricanes?”

“Pirates!” a young boy in the back finally shouted. Tristan pointed at him.

“Yes! Got it in one!” Well, they got it in three, but Tristan wasn’t going to quibble.

“This particular one was called Reed Bonney, known far and wide as Reed the Ruthless.” Tristan had used parts of this story before, particularly on his tour in the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where memories were full of Blackbeard and a pirate ghost story was expected.

But whereas in those places he told a story of a terrifying pirate who met a satisfactory—if gruesome—end, here Tristan wanted to tell a more romantic story.

Maybe he was getting more sentimental in his late twenties. Sue him.

“But this pirate had one weakness…”

“Rum!” the same boy shouted, even though this wasn’t an audience participation portion of the tour.

“Women!” That came from a man in the crowd, who was presumably the boy’s father. He looked down at the kid with an indulgent smile. “What do you know about rum?”

“Well, you’ve got it right,” Tristan said to the man.

“But not just women in general. There was one particular woman, who he had been madly in love with, though she was married to another. Her name was Arabella, and she lived in this very house. Reed the Ruthless and Arabella would meet in secret, under the light of the full moon, and they would—”

“ Bullshit! ” The word was a shriek, from behind him, and for the second time that night Tristan was startled into silence.

His mind whirled to impossible things: Had the green ghost from the crystal shop followed them?

Did the yellow house have a ghost too, and now he’d pissed it off?

Neither of those things seemed likely, and yet…

Slowly he turned around, and…oh, no.

Sophie.

Standing right there on the sidewalk, a gaggle of tourists behind her. They’d obviously come from the north side of town, and now the two tour groups had practically collided on the sidewalk in front of this little yellow house.

While Sophie glared at him, her mouth set in a tight, thin line, Tristan grasped for his ghost tour guide character.

Hard to do when he’d been scared shitless twice over the course of ten minutes.

“Excuse me, milady,” he finally managed while Sophie tried to set him on fire with her mind.

“I don’t think I heard you correctly.” He tipped his hat in her direction, and from the way her mouth screwed up and her nostrils flared, that was the exact wrong thing to do.

Sophie’s dark eyes practically blazed from behind her glasses.

“Bull. Shit.” She enunciated the hell out of the word, turning it into two, as though maybe he hadn’t heard her the first time she’d screamed it.

His ears were still ringing. “What is wrong with you? There’s no pirate here. There’s never been a pirate here.”

He laughed, a loud, forced sound, trying desperately to drown out her words and save face in front of his group. “Oh, I know that . If you’ll let me finish the story, you’ll hear that it’s not the pirate, but Arabella who—”

“I’ve heard the story.” Her voice was ice, her words little chips flying in his direction.

“You…you have?” Confusion made him drop all pretense at character. “When?” He certainly would have remembered if Sophie had been in the audience.

She didn’t answer either of his questions. “There’s never been a pirate,” she said again. “There’s never been an Arabella. You’re leading these people through the town and you’re telling them lies . You should be ashamed.”

Tristan blinked. He wanted nothing more than to defuse the situation, but the laugh he forced up from the depths of his chest was awkward at best. “We’re all just out here for some fun, and you—”

“Bullshit!” she said again, with a vehemence that said she’d just discovered the word, and she wanted to use it as many times as possible.

“Your tour is bullshit! Your stupid top hat, that’s bullshit too.

Everything about you…” She waved a hand in a circle, encompassing his costume, his lantern, his entire being. “You. You especially are bullshit.”

“I’m bullshit?” Now that the adrenaline had drained from his bloodstream, this was getting funny. The more flustered Sophie appeared, the more times she said the word bullshit , the more ridiculous she looked. As long as he stayed calm, he’d have the upper hand in this. “Is that even a sentence?”

“Not really,” said the dad behind him, and oh.

For a few seconds there Tristan had forgotten that it wasn’t just him and Sophie, facing each other on the street like gunslingers about to duel at high noon.

But now he looked over Sophie’s shoulder at her group.

More than half of them had their phones out, trained on the two of them.

He glanced over his shoulder; five pinpricks of light showed that some of his group was filming too.

This fight, this showdown of the ghost tour groups, was likely to be all over social media by the end of the night.

Sophie yelling at him could go viral.

Tristan couldn’t believe this.

It was fucking fantastic.