The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers (the little red hen ebook TXT) 📕

was gone that long. It seemed like hours.” Lara tugged at the bushes without much enthusiasm, feeling she needed another coffee. “The place was indescribable.”

“Well, try.”

Lara studied a leaf with a ladybug on it.

The bush rattled from Audrey picking on the other side of it. Then there was a pause. The berry bushes were still, her mother thinking.

“When I was six, I first saw him in the field. He was with a woman—your mother, Margot. They were talking about whether I was ‘the one.’ Sylvie told me never to tell anyone.”

“You should have told me,” said Audrey.

“I know I should have, but Sylvie—Cecile—whoever—specifically said to tell no one. Also, the day you showed me the spell, I should have told you that he’d been at the gala the night before.”

“At the Rivoli gala?” Audrey shrieked, pulling the bushes back so she could see Lara’s face.

“He said I needed to come to Paris. If I did, he’d give me answers about Todd.”

Audrey laughed and shook her head. “Of course, he’d never do anything without something in return. I told you that I wanted no part of him. I wanted us to be normal.”

“He called you a clever little minx.”

“Did he, now?”

Lara could hear the contempt in her voice. “He honored his part of the deal,” she said, plucking at clumps of ripe indigo berries, the smell of them wafting up as she pulled them from their stems. After years of doing this, she was fast. Lara tossed the berries into her bucket and pulled two lawn chairs down from the tractor and unfolded them. “It’s just you and me out here, so can I ask you something?” To be safe, Lara had decided to keep the fact that Cecile was hidden inside her a secret from everyone. “Did you read Cecile’s diaries?”

“I did.”

“At the circus I found out that Esmé likes to kill the men we love… a sort of revenge against Cecile. She started with Émile. Then there was Desmond, Peter, and Todd.” Lara bent down to pick at a blade of grass and let the last name hang in the air. She didn’t want to be looking at her mother when she asked her what she knew she had to ask. “Do you want to tell me something about Peter Beaumont?”

Lara gazed over to find her mother staring up at the sun coming down through the trees. The cicadas—the soundtrack of a Virginia summer—were fading in and out. Audrey looked to be absorbing everything—the story, the sun—like it was precious. It was such a serene setting, the green hills lush and ripe.

“He and Jason were in the band together. They were best friends. I met Jason first, but when Peter walked in a room…” She paused, lost in thought. “I’ve never loved anyone like that in my life, Lara.” She looked over at Lara. “Never.” She took a deep breath, like she needed it to keep going. “But Peter was a wandering soul, untamed. Not unlike Todd.”

Audrey stopped to let that sink in. As if a layer of an onion was peeling away, Lara was seeing a side of her mother that she’d never imagined. Her mother picked at something on her shorts. Lara was sure nothing was there, it was just giving Audrey something to do as she unpacked her history, something she’d tightly stored away from everyone.

“I knew from the beginning that he was wild. For the summer that year, it had been a bit of a triangle—Jason, Peter, and me—but I knew they were going to Los Angeles after Thanksgiving. I’d be left here.” Finally, Audrey put her hands on her hips. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time—forever—but I didn’t want to ruin any part of your relationship with Jason. You clung to him so tightly. Peter is your biological father, Lara, not Jason. The day before he went missing, I had told Peter that I was pregnant. Honestly, when he disappeared, I just thought he’d bolted. Like you, I was confused. And until Todd went missing, I think some part of me always thought Peter had left to avoid the responsibility. We didn’t know what to think. Jason and I were both devastated. The police were involved, of course, but they always thought he’d just up and left. His mother pushed them for years, finally getting him declared dead in the early 1980s.”

“You didn’t think it was like Desmond Bennett? No one did the math?”

Audrey laughed. “You have no idea what it was like back then. Simon and Cecile were so secretive about Mother. Now, knowing what you’ve told me, it was probably Desmond disappearing that undid Mother—along with Althacazur. I’m sure he didn’t help.”

“Why didn’t either of you tell me that Peter was my father?”

Audrey lowered her sunglasses and met her daughter’s eyes. “I never told Jason. I didn’t see the point—and I still don’t.”

Lara inhaled sharply. Jason Barnes was not her biological father. Worse yet, he didn’t even know it. There were things that Lara had clung to about her identity. That Jason Barnes was her father was one of them. She’d inherited her musical talent from him, she’d thought, but it hadn’t been him at all—it had been Peter Beaumont. Then she remembered the way he’d looked at her as she’d played Peter’s song. Like he’d seen a ghost.

“Are you sure?” Lara, too, sank in her lawn chair. “That he’s my father?”

“Have you ever seen a photo of Peter? I mean everyone always said that he and Jason looked like brothers, but I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration. You look like Peter.”

She’d seen the one photo. The one Jason had shown her when they’d closed on the radio station. Something had pulled her to Peter that day, but she’d thought it was just that he was the focal point of whoever had taken the photo. She’d been wrong. It had been something else, a familiarity.

Audrey stood and began tugging furiously at another patch of bushes,