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

as North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. A heartbreaker if I don’t say so myself. Saw him once.” She raised her eyebrows at the memory.

“Thanks, Esther.” He turned the knob on the door.

“Oh,” said Esther, catching Ben just before he left. “Funny thing about Dez Bennett. He was the boyfriend… well, rumored love interest, really… of Margot Cabot. You know, the blonde from all the circus posters around here. Legs like Betty Grable.”

“No,” said Ben, suddenly frozen in the doorway. “I didn’t know that.”

Ben stepped out of the records office and into the hallway. Not only did he have three missing men, but they all seemed connected to Lara’s family.

When he got back to the station, Ben found Doyle playing a video game. Ben dropped a file on his desk. “Anytime when you’re finished.”

“I’m about to lose a troll.” Doyle pushed away from the chair, defeated. “I just got killed.”

“Do you really think you should be playing this in front of me, Doyle?”

“Dunno.” He shrugged. “What else do we have to do?”

“Funny you should mention it.” Ben pointed to the file he’d just placed on the desk.

Doyle picked it up and started leafing through it. “Holy shit. How old is this thing?”

“Nineteen forty-four. It’s on a man named Desmond Bennett. Nineteen years of age. He disappeared on October ninth, 1944. They found his car on Duvall Road the next day.”

“That’s fucking weird.”

“Even weirder is that, according to Esther Hurston, Duvall Road was the former name of—” Ben let the sentence hang to see if Doyle was paying attention.

“I’ll take a guess and say Wickelow Bend?” Doyle smiled.

“You got it.”

“So we’ve got three men, missing on the same day, in the same manner, at the same location, every thirty years?”

“Yeah, I’m starting to think it’s a ritual killing of some sort. Do we have any known witch communities?” One thing that Ben had been relieved about was that the appearance of another killing thirty years earlier seemed to rule out Jason Barnes as a potential suspect.

“I don’t think so.” Doyle looked at his computer.

“Can you find out more about Desmond Bennett? Maybe ask over at the paper?”

“You can’t make a call to Kim Landau yourself?” Doyle chuckled.

“I’d prefer not to.”

“I see.” Doyle winked.

“No, you don’t see, Doyle. You see nothing.”

“Uh-huh.” Doyle shrugged, noncommittal. “You had a call by the way, some real estate agent.”

“Shit,” said Ben aloud as he looked down at the note on his desk. Abigail Atwater had called him back and she was on her way to the house.

Five Victorian houses separated his house from the one where he’d grown up, each sporting some oversize American flag for the July Fourth holiday. Ben ran past them all, spying the magnetic sign for ATWATER ASSOCIATES on a black Cadillac SUV. He was too far away to see if Abigail Atwater was in the car or not.

All the houses on Washington Street looked as though a child had gone through a Crayola box to paint them. Next to Ben’s house stood Victor Benson’s stately old two-story lemon-yellow Victorian with periwinkle-blue accents and a wraparound porch. On the weekends, Vic and his wife would sit on their porch swing and drink wine. Ben’s was a natural brick home, but Marla had painted it two years ago so that both the brick and grout were now a vibrant fire-engine-red color.

“It’s really a showplace, isn’t it?” called Victor Benson from his own porch. “Your wife…” He paused, realizing his mistake. “… well, she really has a green thumb.”

“I guess so,” said Ben. The house was Marla’s domain now. Every corner of the porch had a pot with flowers spilling out of it.

Victor Benson’s gray-white hair was styled like a game-show host’s. He was perpetually tan and talked about golf courses like Torrey Pines that he played regularly, as if Ben knew what he was talking about. “Thanks to her, your property value just shot up,” said Victor. “I see Abigail Atwater just went in.” He let the comment hang. He was Kerrigan County’s Century 21 Realtor and seemed more than a little irritated to find his biggest competitor going into his neighbor’s house. Ben hadn’t thought of using Vic, thinking his neighbor was too close to them.

“I need to have you over for an estimate,” said Ben. “I’ll call you.”

“You know my number.” Victor waved, giving Ben a look like he didn’t believe him.

Since he’d last been to the house, Marla had turned her attention to the garden. Last year, he had offered to hire a landscape architect, but she’d looked irritated at the suggestion. As he went to open the screen door he saw ten firebush plants and a small stack of flagstone tiles waiting on the front porch for her attention.

He had never spent much time in the garden, but from the porch he could see that the small patch of land between their house and the Benson’s Victorian was now thick with flowers, rows and clusters of boxwood topiaries, geraniums, black-eyed Susans, blue salvias, and azalea bushes, blooms and bulbs in clumps of greens and reds and yellows and purples. The flowers were in full bloom, and he was sure that the bees would soon follow.

As he got to the door, he saw Abigail Atwater standing in the foyer, punctuating her conversation with her pink nails. “You have my card,” she emphasized.

“I do,” said Marla from inside the house. He could see Marla flicking it. “I’ll talk with Ben and we’ll get back to you when we’re ready to sell.”

“This really is a stunning home,” gushed Abigail. “It’ll go in a minute.”

He heard Marla’s laugh. It was a laugh that told him he was in big trouble.

As Abigail opened the door she said, “Well, look who it is.”

“Yes,” echoed Marla. “Look at him.”

“Sorry,” said Ben. “I should have warned you.”

Marla raised her eyebrows in silent agreement.

“Well, I told your wife here that I’d be thrilled to get this baby on the market.” She leaned in. “I’m not surprised you’re not going