Chapter Nineteen

Roman

I had to admit that not having to run from my bed took some of the sport out of going to sleep each night, but I settled happily into the house, feeling much better being closer to Lorelei and Bitsy. The first few nights had found me getting little rest, however. Though I had been excited about the idea of the haunt when I first came up with it, I was now feeling like a failure because I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I didn’t want to directly copy the experiences that I had had with my cousins when I was younger, but I was having trouble coming up with anything else.

Late one evening after another fairly fruitless planning session with Bitsy, during which I felt any sort of bond that we had been forming slip away even further as she got more and more frustrated with me, I found myself wandering through the farm. I hoped to get a feel for it, to get more familiar with the landscape so that I could come up with an idea. Time was getting away from us quickly and even though I had already brought in construction teams to start raising buildings, demarcating trails, and continuing the clearance of the corn maze that Brock had started, there would soon be little more that they could do until we had a concrete idea.

As if my pleas to the farm had actually been heard, an idea seeped into the back of my mind and I headed back to the house, ready to sleep. Maybe this would get us started and on our way.

The next morning, I followed Bitsy around the farm, helping her with her chores as much as I could, but seemingly mostly getting in her way. Finally, she stopped, tossing a spade to the ground, and stared at me.

“Go over that again,” she said.

She took off her gloves and wiped away the sweat already beading on her face in the late July heat.

“I was saying that maybe we don’t have to come up with the idea for the haunt completely by ourselves. The whole point of us building this is so that the people of Whiskey Hollow will want to go to it and will spend money too, right?”

“Right,” Bitsy said, sounding unsure of whether she was really following the plan that I was laying out for her.

“OK. So instead of us making something up completely out of the blue and surprising them when they come here, we get them involved from the very beginning. We give them a couple of basic scary ideas and let them tell us how they think that we should implement them in the haunt.”

“But how are we going to do that?”

“Did you know that Nia used to write horror stories when she was in high school?”

“She did?”

“Yes. A couple of them were actually pretty good. I personally have a theory that she did it mostly because the football team liked to read them, but I prefer not to dwell on that too much. The point is, I can have her send me a few of them if she’ll give us permission to use them. Then I can edit them up and get them ready. We’ll share them with the people of Whiskey Hollow and ask them to tell us what they think. They can choose which idea they like the most, give us suggestions for how they think it would work in the haunt, and offer up some of their own ideas. Then we can use that as the theme of the haunt. Not only would it help us to design the most effective haunt, but it would also get people talking about the attraction early. This will build up hype and help ensure bigger crowds when it opens. Even people who are terrified of the ideas that we come up with will want to come just so that they can prove that they aren’t completely terrified.”

“That could actually work,” Bitsy said.

I smiled, finally feeling like we were getting somewhere.

“Perfect. I’ll get in touch with Nia and have her send me her favorite stories. I’ll pick the two best and start revising them. You go to the newspaper office and find out how we can get the stories printed. Make sure that you have them include in the article that they shouldn’t write their names on their responses.”

“Why not?” Bitsy asked. “I thought we wanted to know what they thought.”

“We want to know what the Hollow thinks, not what each individual person thinks. Keeping names and identifying information off will be like when I review proposals for my hotels without the coversheet. It maintains neutrality.”

“Neutrality? You are planning on publishing gory horror stories in a tiny little Hollow so that the people who live here can come up with the idea for the haunt, and you think that your biggest concern right now should be neutrality?”

She laughed and I gritted my teeth slightly. The longer I spent with Bitsy, the more infuriating she was becoming. She refused to open up to me at all, seeming to have totally shut down when I needed to go back to work for those couple of weeks before Lorelei’s birthday, and the more frustrated she got, the more stubborn and critical she got. I had to convince myself that it wasn’t always going to be this way. This was going to work and she was going to come around. Eventually she was going to see why I was doing this for her, and I wasn’t going to feel like I was running into stone every time that I tried to get a little closer.

Even as I thought this, though, I knew that in reality, I was little better. There was still so much of my past that I hadn’t told her, and the harder it was to get to know her, the more I felt myself getting pulled back into my old mentality, wondering if she was worth it, telling myself that I didn’t have to go through this. I could just go back to my life and live it. The more I felt those things, the more I closed up as well. I knew I needed to fight them, to remind myself of why I was here. It wasn’t just the baby, though giving her the father I never had was more important to me every time I saw her. This was also about Bitsy and how much I felt my life had changed from that first moment that I met her.