Page 32 of Trick or Tease

I forced a smile, hoping it looked more genuine than it felt. “I’m sure you are.”

“It’s what I live for, you know? The challenge, the adrenaline rush when everything comes together perfectly. There’s nothing quite like it.”

I nodded, even though I couldn’t relate to that kind of ambition at all. My idea of satisfaction came from seeing the corn maze take shape, or watching families laugh together at our pumpkin chunkin’ competition. Small victories, maybe, but they mattered to me.

“Well, before you go back to conquering the corporate world, let us show you around what we’ve been working on tomorrow. I know Billy would love to give you the full tour of the improvements we’ve made. The corn maze, the cider booths, all of it.”

He shrugged. “Sure, I can do that.”

“Maybe you’ll be surprised by what us small-town folks can pull off.”

“I’m sure I will be,” he said, though something in his tone suggested he was just being polite.

12

GARRETT

The next morning, my head felt like it had been used as a punching bag. I’d forgotten how potent that cheap beer could be when you had too many of them, and apparently I’d had several too many. The bright sun felt like needles in my eyes as I squinted across the farm. My sunglasses were doing nothing to shield my poor eyes.

I did spend most of my days inside an office. The windows were tinted so the sunlight I did see was filtered. I usually went into the office when the sun was just waking up and left long after it had gone down.

And that was pretty typical seven days a week.

I couldn’t believe they had me trudging through dirt and dried cornstalks in my good shoes to look at their little hobby project. My Italian leather was going to be ruined, and for what? To pretend I was interested in whatever half-baked scheme they’d cooked up to squeeze a few more dollars out of families looking for cheap entertainment?

I understood the nostalgia but come on. We’d been doing punkin’ chunkin’ on the farm for as long as I could remember. Dad started it when Billy and I were kids, just a fun weekend thing where neighbors could come by, launch some pumpkins with our homemade trebuchet, and drink cider. It was cute. Wholesome. The kind of thing that made for nice family memories.

But turning it into some kind of business venture? I couldn’t see how they expected to make any real money from it. It seemed like small potatoes. They might make four figures. And I was making eight and nine figure deals. We couldn’t be more different.

“Just wait until you see what we’ve done,” Billy said, practically bouncing on his feet despite what had to be an equally brutal hangover. “It’s going to blow your mind, man.”

I seriously doubted that, but I nodded and kept walking. The least I could do was humor them before I went back to civilization.

Where there used to be one rickety wooden launcher that Dad had built in his garage, there were now four of them. Four actual trebuchets, each one looking professionally constructed and painted in bright autumn colors. They were spaced out across the field in a neat line, each with its own loading area and what looked like safety barriers.

But that wasn’t what made me pause.

The big empty field where we used to just watch pumpkins splatter randomly in the distance wasn’t empty anymore. Scattered across the expanse were maybe a dozen plywood cutouts, each one painted to look like classic movie monsters. There was a Dracula with his cape spread wide, a green Frankenstein’s monster with bolts in his neck, a werewolf mid-howl, and what looked like a mummy with trailing bandages. Some zombies in painted poses. I spotted what might have been a witch stirring a cauldron as well.

They looked like something out of a cartoon, bright and colorful and completely ridiculous.

“What the hell is all this?” I asked.

Sabrina grinned, her earlier irritation with me apparently forgotten in her excitement. “Targets,” she said proudly. “Now people can actually aim for something instead of just launching pumpkins into the void. If they manage to hit one, they win prizes.”

“Prizes?”

“Small stuff,” Billy explained. “Candy, little toys, maybe a free cider or something. The point isn’t the prize, it’s the challenge. These things are not easy to hit.”

I studied the setup more carefully. The targets were spread out at different distances, some closer, some farther away. The trebuchets looked like they could generate some serious power but aiming them with any kind of precision would be nearly impossible for most people.

“It’s mostly luck,” Sabrina admitted, following my gaze. “But that’s part of the fun. And we can have multiple people launching at once now, so we can get more people through. We can even set up competitions if people want to go head-to-head.”

Despite myself, I was impressed. This wasn’t the amateur-hour operation I’d been expecting. Someone had put real thought into the logistics, the spacing, the whole customer experience.

“How many people can you accommodate now?” I heard myself asking.

“On a busy day? Maybe four times as many as before,” Billy said. “Instead of one family waiting around for twenty minutes while another family takes their turn, we can have multiple groups going simultaneously. Plus the competition aspect means people stick around longer, buy more food, more cider.”