Page 7 of Ghost Business (Boneyard Key #2)

Five

Sophie was halfway up Beachside, her ghost tour group in sight in front of Hallowed Grounds, when she saw him.

Tristan.

That couldn’t be right. There was no way he was still in town.

Tourists stuck around for the weekend: three or four days at best. He’d been here for a good time, not a long time, as her friend Cassie would say.

And from the way he’d checked out when she’d started talking about her ghost tour, Sophie was pretty sure she was neither of those things.

She dug her list out of her pocket—she’d barely glanced at it when Nick had handed it across the counter to her earlier that afternoon. Thirteen people—nice and lucky—and now her eyes skidded on name number nine. Tristan Martin.

She looked up again, and like he’d been conjured from her wild delusions, there he was: artfully messy blond hair and sage-green T-shirt, leaning against a streetlight with his hands shoved in the front pockets of his jeans.

No jacket, even though the sun had long since set and it was easily in the low seventies.

He was definitely from up north; his blood was a lot thicker than hers.

Sophie shoved the list back in her pocket and tugged the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands.

Tristan chatted with a middle-aged couple, laughing at something one of them said. Sophie had forgotten about the power of that easy laugh of his. She wanted it directed at her. She wanted his attention.

And she got it. His gaze snapped to her when she was still a couple doors down from Hallowed Grounds, and his smile changed, widened, from generically polite to more pointed. He was smiling at her , not just smiling in general. She already knew him well enough to tell the difference.

She usually greeted her guests all at once, gave them the rundown of how long the tour was going to be, and collected their cash. But this time her feet took her right up to Tristan, who straightened at her approach.

“Well, hello again.” Her voice came out not at all shaky. Good for her.

“Hey.” There was that lazy smile again, the one she remembered from The Haunt: open and friendly, yet somehow intimate.

“You’re still in town.” Sophie was always great at stating the obvious.

“It’s the oysters,” he replied. “Can’t get enough of them.” He shook his hair off his forehead while Sophie laughed. “I thought I’d see what your whole ghost tour thing is about.”

Sophie’s cheeks warmed. He’d remembered her too. And he didn’t think what she did was stupid. Amazing.

She clapped her hands together to get everyone’s attention.

“Thank you so much for coming, everyone! My name is Sophie Horvath, and I’m going to be your tour guide this evening as we take a little walk through the town of Boneyard Key.

First things first: I’m going to collect the fee, fifteen dollars each, please.

If you need an ATM there’s one right there on the corner.

Once that’s out of the way, we’ll get started.

” She’d been doing this for years now, and this part never got less awkward—demanding money for her services.

Which was ridiculous, right? Fifteen dollars a person for a personal walking tour? A bargain!

She was immediately surrounded as everyone handed her their money. Tristan was last, and she tried to wave him off when he handed her a twenty.

“Don’t be silly.” He pressed the bill into her hand. It crinkled as he closed her fingers over it. “I’m a paying customer, so I expect the whole experience.” He shot her a wink that was so fleeting she might have imagined it.

“You got it.” Her cheeks were starting to hurt from smiling.

She turned to the rest of the group to start the tour.

“The tour takes about an hour, give or take, and covers about a mile and a half in total. There’s plenty of benches and places to take a break if anyone needs it, and I have lots of stories to tell to pass the time if need be. ”

Thank goodness for muscle memory. Thank goodness her six years of leading this tour meant she knew exactly where to stop and what story to tell.

She barely remembered stopping outside of I Scream Ice Cream for the story of the spirit that kept the ice cream cold in the back.

She vaguely registered that they’d made it all the way down to the fishing pier, where the moon on the water made Cemetery Island just barely visible off the coast. All she was aware of was Tristan.

He hung at the fringe of the crowd, somewhere in the middle, his attention hyperfocused on her.

Which made sense; she was the tour guide.

If she wasn’t commanding attention, something was wrong.

But his gaze was like a laser, and she could feel it on her even when she wasn’t looking in his direction.

Sophie was looking in his direction a lot.

“Boneyard Key was founded in the 1840s, but not in this exact location.” She tore her attention away from Tristan to gesture across the water, to where Cemetery Island was a dark blur.

“The original settlement was on that barrier island, a small fishing and clamming community called Fisherton. Everything changed when a hurricane hit in 1897.” She nodded solemnly in reaction to murmurs from her audience.

“It was one of the biggest ones on record, and it wiped out most of the town. The families that opted to stay moved inland, establishing a new settlement here.”

She moved then, turning to lead the group off the pier and toward the street.

“The island is worth a visit, if you have time. Jimmy has kayaks for rent right over there, and it’s a pretty easy trip if you’re into that kind of thing.

” Sophie was not into that kind of thing, but she didn’t judge those who were.

“You can still see some of the foundations of houses, and tucked way in the back is the old cemetery that’s still standing today. ”

There was a group of college-aged women in the tour, phones out, probably filming the whole thing for social media or something. One of them spoke up now. “Was the old town haunted too?”

Sophie could see Tristan’s eyebrows crawling up his forehead, as though he considered the question a dare.

She fought the urge to make an oh, please face back at him, focusing instead on the tourist with her cell phone.

“It wasn’t. Not that we can tell, anyway.

There are a lot of theories about Boneyard Key and how the hauntings started, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that it was caused by the Great Storm of 1897.

Big storms, especially in those days, meant big casualties.

The families that stayed behind—we call them the Founding Fifteen—found themselves suddenly able to communicate with loved ones that they’d lost. And as time went on, more and more people were able to communicate as more and more spirits stuck around. ”

They continued down the street and back to Beachside Drive, where she paused at the Starter Home—an old stilt house that had been slowly but surely disintegrating into the ocean over the years.

There wasn’t really a story to the place—not that Sophie had ever been able to find, anyway.

When she was a kid it had been recognizable as a house, with most of a roof and three of its four walls.

Now two of the walls were gone, and only a tiny corner of the roof clung to the top.

One day a good storm was going to come along and the whole thing was going to fall into the Gulf, disappearing forever.

Sophie didn’t want to think about that day.

Now they were at her favorite part of the tour, moving further down the street and around the bend to a beach cottage that was painted a cheerful yellow, its picket fence lined with cabbage roses.

It always had a haunted history, but it wasn’t until Cassie had moved in last summer that Sophie had learned that the story behind the house, which the whole town had accepted as fact, was wrong.

There was nothing like learning the truth from the ghost herself.

“The Sarah Hawkins House was built in 1899 by William Donnelly, shortly after Boneyard Key was established here. Soon after Donnelly left for points north, deciding he’d had enough of Florida.

And after that storm, who could blame him?

” She paused as a couple of the tourists chuckled, the way they always did at that little joke. Because hurricanes were hilarious.

“His niece, Sarah Blankenship, had been looking forward to living here—just her and her cabbage roses—but then she met C.S. Hawkins. Mean Mr.Hawkins , we like to call him these days.” She pitched her voice low, as though she were telling a spooky campfire story.

Tourists loved that kind of thing. She chanced a glance at Tristan; he was nodding along, his eyes all but invisible from the force of his smile.

Not that the Hawkins story was funny. It was essentially a tale of emotional abuse: a husband who held on to control of his wife, even after his death.

Even after her death. But everything was all right now; they’d evicted Mr.Hawkins, and now Cassie and Sarah Hawkins shared the home together.

Cassie may not have counted on having a ghost for a roommate when she’d bought the place, but she seemed fine with it these days.

Sophie kept the story light, focusing on the happy ending with the ghostly roommate.

That was the kind of thing tourists wanted to hear.

They were in the homestretch now, back down Beachside Drive, past the Chamber of Commerce and to the spot where she told the story of the Beach Bum near the break in the seawall, and finally to Hallowed Grounds, where they’d started.