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

Lara considered the cuff before waving goodbye to Del. It was a two-block walk to her house.

A light rain began to fall as they walked toward their respective homes. They stopped at the street where he went left and she went right and continued to make small talk about the state of the sidewalk repair. Lara remembered she didn’t have to be at the station early the next day, so that was good.

“I must be doing a really poor job of this.” Ben’s face was getting flushed.

“Of what?”

“Hitting on you.” He put his hands in his pockets.

“Oh.” Lara laughed, pressing her hand to her face.

“And I’m getting wet, so if you’re going to reject me, do it quickly so I can get inside. This carnival gala thing on Saturday. Do you need a chaperone?”

“I could use a chaperone, Mr. Archer. As the chief of police, you’d probably be an acceptable one.” Lara wasn’t sure if it was too soon to start something new. She didn’t know if there was a time line for women like her, but she knew that with Ben Archer she didn’t feel like a tragedy. She weighed them both in her mind: Todd and Ben; Ben and Todd. But it wasn’t as though she had a choice. One was gone and one was standing in front of her. Maybe it was time she started living again.

“What color is your dress?”

“Why?” She laughed. “Are we matching?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “You’ll just be wearing a mask. I want to know who I’m looking for.”

“Blue,” she said. “My dress is blue. And I’ll find you.”

Kerrigan Falls, Virginia

July 24, 1982

As a kid, Lara had loved to run across the field that connected the old Lund Farm, now owned by her grandfather Simon Webster, to the one that belonged to her great-grandmother Cecile. Like bookends, two generations of her family were connected by one sloping field. It took four minutes of a full-on run to make it from porch to porch, a timetable she often tested to make it to dinner on time at one house or the other.

In those days, Audrey and Jason were still living with Simon. Her grandfather’s house was nearly a museum to the memory of Margot. Simon didn’t like it when things were touched, and Lara seemed to explore the world with her fingertips—candied fingertips. As Cecile was much more forgiving with the furniture, Lara spent most of her childhood at her great-grandmother’s. Simon disliked noise as well, so Jason converted Cecile’s garage into a makeshift music studio where his bandmates came to jam at all hours, the sound floating through the open window screens.

Summers were blissful with the lush fields and the wavelike chorus of the locusts. Like their own personal amusement park. Lara and her friends wandered around the old circus equipment—trailers and rides—rotting in the field, eventually finding one of the old circus tents in one of the trailers, its canvas ripped but salvageable. Jason helped them stretch it out over the field and found the old poles to get it set up.

Shortly after the tent had been raised, Lara was twirling her baton, imagining she had an audience for her arm rolls and fishtails. It had been a year since she’d seen the mysterious man and woman.

She was working on her timed thumb tosses, counting the number of times she could flip her baton over her thumb and catch it with a quick wrist motion, Cecile’s egg timer set for one minute. Lara counted aloud. As the timer went off, she’d done fifty-two tosses. There was a clapping and she looked up to see the man standing there at the entrance to the tent. This time, he was solo.

“It’s really you?” He was dressed in a gold costume, kind of like Elvis. To her surprise, she realized how much she’d been looking for him in the last year.

“Did you fear that I was a figment of your imagination?” He leaned against a post, and she had a notion to tell him not to do that. All the posts in the tent were wobbly.

The little girl nodded. “I was beginning to.”

Through mirrored sunglasses, he looked up at the sagging canvas. “I see you put up the old circus tent. Tell me, do you like it?”

“I love it.” From the opening in the tent, she kept her eye on the horses beyond her—they were good judges of character. But they simply stood there watching the man, their tails swatting flies.

“That’s good.” The man stepped into the tent. It was a shabby beige-and-blue thing with uneven poles and a sag in the back that Jason had tried to fix by wedging an old tree branch under it. “The circus is in your blood, you know.”

“I do know that,” she chirped. Lara was confident as only a sheltered seven-year-old could be. “My family owned this circus.”

“Yes,” he said. “Remember the woman who was with me before? That was Margot, your grandmother. This circus was named for her.”

Remembering the beautiful young woman, Lara made a face, thinking of Simon Webster, who was an old, grumpy man. They said he had been married to Margot, the woman from the posters, but that seemed impossible. “She’s not that old.”

“Well, she’d dead, ma cherie. She doesn’t age anymore.” The man smiled and put his hands on the back of his brown pants. “That was a fine circus, but that wasn’t the only circus that belonged to your family, you know. There was another once.” He had a rise to his voice like he was about to tell her a story. “It’s a magic circus, and it belongs to you.”

“Me?” This was news to Lara. She stood up straight. Now he had her attention.

“It’s true.” The man did something with his hands, and the circus tent seemed to perk up a little like extra poles had been added or an invisible hand had pulled it up. Color washed over it, brightening the blue and beige silks.