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

some point, the glass at the top of the pestle had fallen out and been replaced by a wad of kelly-green tape.

Their desks sat in what used to be the candy aisle. As a kid, Lara and her friends raced to this very spot to grab a small paper bag and fill it to the top with Swedish Fish, salty pumpkin seeds, SweeTarts, and her favorite, the now unpopular fake Winston candy cigarettes.

Growing up, it had been nice having a somewhat famous father. His band, Dangerous Tendencies, had cut two studio albums in the late 1970s. He still had a lot of fans who wrote him, so they’d created a weekly syndicated radio show on music of the ’70s across twenty-seven radio stations in the US, Europe, and Japan. It was a lucrative contract and gave her father a new fan base. Advertising was up and between the two of them, the radio station venture was beginning to work. The station still hadn’t turned anywhere near a profit yet, so she was making payroll with the money she had left from her grandfather’s inheritance. She calculated how long she had to turn around the business—about fifteen months.

While some radio stations had cushy budgets and their on-air talent didn’t have to load reel-to-reel tapes or handle the production of their own shows, 99.7 K-ROCK was assembled on a shoestring. From the tattered purple velvet sofa in the waiting room to the records housed in the old display donated from the long-closed G. C. Murphy store where she used to go and buy Donna Summer albums with her allowance money, everything looked like it had been patched together. It made you feel that one wobbly old switch could feasibly shut off the station, sending the place into some sort of silent history. Yet there was a faded elegance to the building that Lara admired. Everything had earned its place here. Even her. It was this station that had saved her in her darkest hours.

The day she’d closed on the business, she and Jason had come here together, sitting amid the dust, the faint smell of old antiseptic and drug compounds still clinging to the space. He took out a photo and slid it across the floor to her. It was an old photo of a band—three members. It was a funny pose, like they were preening for an album cover. Even before he’d pointed Peter Beaumont out to her, she’d known who he was. The trio was assembled down near the Kerrigan River against the rocks—but the man crouching in the middle was pulling the photographer’s eye to him. Jason and the third man were neatly assembled around the subject—orbiting him even—but it was clear they were supporting characters. Lara realized just how powerful a photo could be to sum up things that people couldn’t articulate. Her father could have spoken for hours about Peter Beaumont and wouldn’t have been able to explain this. Peter had been the focal point of the band. From the photo, she knew he was talented, too. His shoulder jutted out, just a bit, displaying a type of youthful cockiness that comes with knowing you have talent. He wasn’t as tall as Jason, who hunched a little in the picture, but they looked like they could have been brothers.

“You were lost without him,” she said.

“It just didn’t matter without him,” he said, correcting her. “It had been his dream, not mine. Hell, I’d have probably been a mechanic had I not met him.”

“And now?”

“Some days I feel like an imposter living in his dream. Survivor’s guilt they call it, I think.”

Lara knew that feeling well. “It’s strange, isn’t it? The spaces they leave for you to fill.”

He laughed. “My life has been a poor attempt at trying to live the life he didn’t get to.”

“So you think Peter Beaumont is dead?” They had never discussed it. She knew this was the first time he was able to broach the subject of his former bandmate.

“I do,” he said. She heard a snap and saw that he’d opened a green bottle of Tanqueray. He pulled out two glasses and a tiny bottle of Schweppes tonic. “Everything I did was designed to fill the vacuum,” said Jason, as if he could read her mind.

“And Todd?” It was the natural next question. Peter and Todd were now lumped together forever on Wickelow Bend. She’d watched his mouth tighten, but he did not answer her. Instead they both drank to the future.

Five years from now with a bit more reflection, she wondered what life would be like for her. How would she shift herself to feel less incomplete? Looking around the radio station, she thought she was off to a good start with that question. The old Lara Barnes, the one who would have married Todd, wouldn’t have needed to buy a radio station. This one did.

Lately, she’d also begun to think of the man in the field. That boy is not your destiny.

As a child, she’d had a wild imagination. She’d been born with only one kidney and had been sickly, so some part of her had never been convinced that the man had been real; perhaps he was just an imaginary friend created by an overactive mind. Still, what he had said, real or not, had been on her mind lately. Had they known her fate? They’d certainly seemed to allude to it. These were the things you thought of in the middle of the night when you were alone at a radio station. It wasn’t a healthy shift, that was for sure.

She waved to Bob Breen, the drive-time announcer sitting in the sound booth, the glow from his cigarette lighting the darkened space. She was sure she’d told him that he couldn’t smoke in here anymore, but she’d likely have to add a sign near the clock—all the on-air talent watched the clock. She checked her own watch: fifteen minutes until she was on air. Her father began to