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

the bed and touched the rumpled sheets. His hands went from the bed to the nightstand drawer. He flipped a few things over. Hair scrunchies and bookmarks. He pulled the stand away from the wall. Nothing. He lifted the mattress. Nothing again. Well, it was doubtful Marla would hide anything under the mattress, given that she wasn’t an adolescent boy. He went to the tall dresser and opened each drawer, sliding his hand to the back. Lingerie, T-shirts, jeans, and scarves. Nothing. He caught his reflection in the closet mirror and couldn’t bear to watch himself behaving this way. This idea was madness.

He opened the other closet door and reached back, deep into the shelves where Marla kept her shoes. Shoes, shoes, pair of boots. He made his way down through her sweaters and at the very bottom spied several pairs of her running sneakers. He had to get down on his knees and reach back behind them. His hand touched something soft. He got on the floor and pulled out an old running shoe. He tried to remember when she’d last worn this particular pair. His eye caught something in the toe of the shoe. He reached in and touched it. It wasn’t an it, it was a them—a set of keys. On the chain was a Mustang logo, as well as an old Ford key and a Jeep key. He had seen its twin on Lara’s key chain many times. Todd Sutton’s missing car keys.

“Fuck.” Ben sat down on the floor and threw the keys away from him as if they’d scalded him. He hadn’t really thought he’d find anything here. This whole excursion had been an exercise in proving that he was wrong about her.

Ben gathered himself up, careful not to touch anything. That he was even thinking all this about her sickened him. They’d been together for ten years—ten years. True, she could be cold and prickly at times, but she was no killer—and no way was she was the hundred-year-old daughter of a daemon. He stopped and laughed. Despite everything that he knew from France, the idea that his Marla could be Esmé was crazy. I have to be wrong. I need to prove I’m wrong.

He got up and looked out the window at their small yard, which had become a palatial garden since last October. She’d thrown herself into its creation: elaborate urns and benches, exotic perennials and shrubs. Until today, he’d never noticed bags of lime in their basement. When had he been in the basement last? October or November? He hadn’t noticed bags of anything. This was a curious detail, the lime.

Lost in thought, Ben wandered down the stairs and out the back door into the garden, where he grabbed a shovel. Perhaps the only outcome of all of this would be that he ended up looking very foolish, but Marla had some explaining to do anyway, didn’t she? Those were Todd Sutton’s keys hidden in a shoe in her closet. He scanned the garden, trying to figure out what she would have done if she’d wanted to bury someone. Spying the location where she’d put the cement bench that he knew she’d ordered last fall, he went over and shoved it away, surprised at its weight. The length was about right, and there were telltale signs of an extra layer of fresh lime mixed with the surrounding plants and soil.

He couldn’t imagine how she might have dug a deep-enough hole, but then he hadn’t been focused on this house and garden all those weeks after Todd Sutton’s disappearance. He’d been down at Cabot Farms with Lara. He dug quickly but soon became winded. About three or four feet into the ground, Ben stepped into the hole to get a better angle. After many more shovelfuls, the blade hit something that sounded like stone but wasn’t. Ben’s shovel ripped free a layered piece of denim from what appeared to be a corpse. He pushed some dirt away to find a gray Chuck Taylor sneaker.

It was the sneaker. The one that Lara had described multiple times in police reports. He’d noticed that sneaker on every man since, looking up to see if it was attached to a man who looked like Todd Sutton.

Oh Jesus. Ben leaned against the opening he’d dug. He rubbed his jaw. This is real.

Struggling to process everything in front of him—the physical evidence as well as the crazy tale of the circus that he’d read—he crawled out of the hole and began to pace. Just as he was about to return to the house to call Doyle on the kitchen phone, he heard the iron gate shut.

“What are you doing here?” She was wearing a pair of jeans, a black Lacoste polo shirt, and espadrilles.

Ben followed her eyes to the pit he’d just dug in their garden. “I should ask you the same question.”

Her hands were in her pockets. Her long chestnut-colored hair hung below her shoulders, and her clear blue eyes were bright. She looked exactly like the woman he’d known all these years. She peered into the hole, expressionless.

Ben pointed to the grave. “That is Todd fucking Sutton, Marla.” He moved toward the kitchen door.

“Where are you going?” Her voice had risen a degree, but no more.

“I’m calling Doyle.”

“You don’t want to do that.” Her movements were slow, animatronic almost. “You have to listen to me, Ben. It’s very important.” She took a step toward him, and he instinctively stepped back. “It was an accident. You didn’t know how Todd Sutton could be. Let me explain.”

He wanted to listen, really, he did.

She started to speak several times but stopped. “Let’s just go inside.”

“I’m fine right here.”

She stammered her explanation. “We’d had a thing for a bit, but I’d broken things off with him. He could be violent. The afternoon of his wedding, he came by the house around one, wanting to get back together. He didn’t want to marry her, you know.”

“He came here,” said Ben, pointing