The Ladies of the Secret Circus

by Constance Sayers

  “You may.” She smiled. “I have my sources.”

  Of course. “Then you also know that the state police thought it was a professional job.” At this point, since she knew what was found in the car, it didn’t matter. “By professional, they meant it could have been some type of hit, but they couldn’t rule out that Sutton himself just wiped the car clean and fled. After all, he did restore cars for a living. In the end, the state police’s report was inconclusive, but like I said, you know this already.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  He ignored her question. “The conclusion from them is that people sometimes simply disappear. Often there are underlying issues that you didn’t know about.”

  “Drugs?” So, she had read the notes from the state police.

  “Yes. If he had gotten in bad with the wrong people—owed them money, perhaps—then they’d send professionals… that could explain the car.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “No,” he said. “I do not believe that Todd Sutton was cooking up anything in his garage.” Privately, Ben agreed with the state police that there was a logical explanation for these disappearances. It just required good, old-fashioned police work to solve it.

  “But it doesn’t explain the other case. Was that car wiped clean as well?”

  Peter Beaumont’s car was, indeed, wiped clean, but Michelle Hixson did not appear to have that information and he wasn’t going to enlighten her further. “I think they are connected cases, Miss Hixson, but I don’t think they’re supernatural. Beyond that, I cannot say more. Anything else that you need?”

  “I need a good photo of both Todd Sutton and Peter Beaumont.”

  “I can get you those.”

  “We’re also having a sketch artist draw an aged composite of Peter Beaumont. Maybe someone has been living next door to him for thirty years.”

  “Anything that I can do to help.” Ben nodded.

  She stood up and gathered her things. He was pretty sure that she’d already been to see Kim Landau. As she shut the door behind her, Ben stared at the time line on the board. He felt like an idiot. A small-town police chief, he was in over his head with these cases. She knew it and he knew it; he just didn’t want to read about it.

  As he always did when he stood in front of this board, he studied the details to see if there was something he’d missed. Todd Sutton had gotten up around eight that morning and then played nine rounds of golf with Chet. After golf, he bought a chicken sandwich at Burger King at eleven forty-one A.M.; the receipt was found on the floor of the car. Although he’d eaten and drunk in the car, no DNA was found there—a near impossibility. Sutton returned to his house around eleven fifty A.M., placing his golf clubs in the garage. Before getting ready for his wedding, he did an odd thing: He told his stepfather, Fred Sutton, that he would be heading to Zippy Wash to clean his beloved Mustang. Lara Barnes had rented a vintage car for the wedding, so the couple wouldn’t be using Sutton’s car for the ceremony, making the trip to Zippy Wash seem like an excuse to get away for some time. Was it nerves? Did Sutton meet with someone? When Fred and Betty Sutton departed for the church around three thirty P.M., Todd’s tuxedo was still draped on the bed. Assuming he was running late, they took it with them to the church. At four thirty P.M., when the ceremony was about to begin and there was no sign of Todd, they began searching for him. His car showed up the following morning at five o’clock on Wickelow Bend.

  If Sutton did go to Zippy Wash, there was no evidence of it. Assuming he did go, he paid with coins and was not spotted by the cashier on duty. While the car had been wiped clean, it was messy, wrappers strewn all over the seats. Sutton had probably never made it to the car wash or he’d never intended to go. The last people who admitted to seeing Sutton were his mother and stepfather. Over the next two days, there had been “sightings” of him—Dulles Airport being the most famous, but it had not been credible. Ben had seen the security tapes himself and the man had not been Todd Sutton.

  Next to Todd’s time line was Peter Beaumont’s. Peter Beaumont had practiced with the band the night before, then failed to show up at a concert at the Skyline Nightclub. Jason Barnes noted that they delayed the band’s start for an hour and finally had to go onstage without him. Jason and the bass player had to alternate as lead singer for the night. Unlike Todd Sutton, Peter Beaumont’s whereabouts the day of his disappearance were a mystery. No one admitted to having seen him for twenty-four hours. He lived with his mother, who was on vacation in the Finger Lakes with her boyfriend at the time.

  But there was one specific link between the two cases that had been nagging Ben for months now. Jason Barnes had been the bandmate and best friend of one victim and the prospective father-in-law of the other. Physically, Jason Barnes could have committed a crime in either scenario. He was a young man when Peter went missing and older, but still physically able to dispose of a body, at the time of Todd Sutton’s more recent disappearance. Ben hated to think of Lara’s father this way, but it was the only connection he could find between the two men. He sighed. That wasn’t a satisfying theory. Why would Jason Barnes harm the man who was his possible ticket to stardom?

  “Oh, Lara.” He sighed and ran his hands over his face, hoping, for her sake, he was wrong.

  His phone rang. It was Doyle in the next room. “Kim Landau is hot to find you. She wanted you to call her when the lady from the Post left.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Nah, she said to call her.” He paused. “That you’d have the number. Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Have her number?”

  He sighed. “I do.” He was sure that if he could see Doyle’s face, it would have a smirk on it like a sixteen-year-old boy.

  He picked up the phone and punched in Kim’s number.

  “Doyle said Michelle Hixson was already there.” Kim didn’t even wait for hello.

  “She was.”

  “A bit tenacious, don’t you think?”

  “A bit is being kind.”

  Kim laughed. “In preparation for her interview, I think I found a clue that might help you. I didn’t mention this to Michelle Hixson. Meet you at the diner in five?”

  “Sure.” He wasn’t sure if he was going to regret this or not. Right after he and Marla had separated, he’d made the mistake of sleeping with Kim Landau one time. It had been nothing short of a disaster. Recently, she’d sent him signs that she was interested in being more than a onetime fling. At the gala last week, she’d cornered him at the bar and pressed him about him spending time with Lara. He’d been trying to steer their relationship back to the professional, but he groaned every time he saw her phone number pop up on his mobile.

  He walked the two blocks to the diner to find Kim scanning the lunch menu in a prime booth near the window. An institution since 1941, the historic Kerrigan Falls Diner was known for its red velvet cake and wide array of pancakes, which it served all day. One of Ben’s great pleasures in life was eating buttermilk pancakes at eight in the evening. While the food wasn’t always great, the location across from City Hall ensured it was always bustling.

  “Don’t get the croque monsieur.” He slid into the booth.

  “That’s exactly what I was going to get.” She looked up, perplexed. Kim Landau was a beautiful woman with dark-auburn hair, blue eyes, and an upturned nose. She reminded him of Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. There was an intensity about her, though, that had always unsettled him. The day after they’d slept together, she’d called him six times. He’d felt trapped, pursued, and as a man who was just getting out of one relationship he wasn’t in a hurry to tie himself down to another—at least not then.

  He turned the menu toward her and pointed. “Stay away from the tuna, too.”

  “What are you getting, then?” She folded her arms in front of her.

  “Cobb salad, maybe the onion soup if it’s good today.”

  She glanced down at the menu. “Grilled chicken sa
ndwich?”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay, not great. So, what was so urgent?” He didn’t mean to sound harsh, but he also didn’t want to lead her on. Getting to the point was the best strategy.

  She gave him a sly smile. “I hear Lara is in Paris with Gaston Boucher.”

  He put his arm up on the booth. “Yes, they went to see someone at the Sorbonne about a painting that’s been in her family for years.”

  She raised her eyebrow and gave him a pitying glance. “Is that what she told you?”

  What was going on today? He laughed, loudly, placing his folded hands on the table. “She didn’t tell me anything, Kim. I talked to her last night. And Gaston is dating Audrey.”

  Cocking her head, she looked at him like he was pathetic. “Oh, Ben.”

  This was going to be a short lunch. Flagging the waitress down, he ordered drinks and food together with encouragement to hurry because he had a meeting in thirty minutes. The waitress winked at him. Within minutes, she’d brought them a Heinz Ketchup bottle, a Diet Coke for Ben, and a sweet iced tea for Kim as well as a soup spoon and some crackers.

  He crushed the cracker pack in advance of the soup. “Kim, what was so was urgent?” To his delight, the waitress plunked the onion soup down in front of him.

  “Well.” She leaned in. “In preparation for Miss Hixson’s visit, I was looking through some old files on Peter Beaumont’s disappearance.”

  “She thinks we’re hillbillies, by the way.” Ben opened the crackers and then dumped them in the soup. He tasted it. As expected, it was tepid. “She kept talking about my one deputy. We’ll be made fools in the pages of the Washington Post again; I just know it.”

  She rested her hand on his. He stared down at it before sliding it away. “Do you remember Paul Oglethorpe?”

  “The old guy? The one who covered the town council meetings?”

  She tugged at her black twinset, arranging herself. “The one. Back in 1974, he was the main news reporter. One of the notes he left in Peter Beaumont’s file was for your father.”

  “Really?”

  She reached in her pocket, pulled out a weathered piece of paper, and slid it across the table. It was the kind of paper that came from a tablet they issued to kids at school, now turned a caramel color from age. Written in pencil was: Tell Ben Archer to look into the other case. Connected.

  “It was in the Peter Beaumont file. On top.” She tapped the table with a perfectly manicured fingernail. “No one had been in that file since the 1970s.”

  “Thank you,” said Ben, sliding the paper across the table. “I’ll check my father’s files again.”

  “So.” Kim leaned in, whispering. “Since you’re alone this week, you could take me to dinner to thank me. Maybe the fireworks tomorrow?”

  “I’m on duty tomorrow.” It wasn’t a lie. He and Doyle would be working the Fourth of July parade on Main Street.

  “Well,” she said. “I didn’t tell Michelle Hixson about the lead, you know… out of loyalty to you.”

  “Kim—”

  She cut him off. “Is this where you tell me it’s not me, it’s you?” She was a beautiful woman, there was no doubt, but there was something off about her that had always unsettled him. It felt like a feral neediness that he just wanted no part of. He took four bites of the Cobb salad and began itching for the check, trying to catch the waitress’s eye.

  “Look,” he said. “We’ve known each other a long time. What happened between us was nice, but…” And then he stumbled over what to say next.

  She leaned in like she was expecting him to finish the sentence.

  “I’m with Lara now.” This wasn’t entirely true—in fact, it was a damned lie—but he wished it were true so that had to count for something. The other night on her porch when she’d told him she thought she’d seen Todd Sutton, he felt like an idiot to wish for anything more. He wasn’t sure when things had changed for him from Lara just being a case—a phone number he called because it was part of the job—to someone whose voice he couldn’t wait to hear. That wonderful rough, gravelly voice. And the way Lara laughed, a full laugh. “I’m sorry if I led you to believe anything else. Truly, I am.”

  Her face fell a little, but she tried to cover it up. “It’s a little soon after Todd, don’t you think?”

  Ben contemplated her question and the suggestion made him furious. “It’s been nearly a year, Kim.”

  “Has it?” she said, gazing off into space like she was adding up the months. “And here I was hoping you’d save me from another boring Sunday night with my cats.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Are you sure I can’t change your mind?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Lara Barnes is a lucky girl.” Her tone had changed abruptly, and she picked up her purse. “I think you’ve got this, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a weak smile. “I’ve got this.”

  Kim Landau was out of the booth in one swift motion; only her perfume lingered.

  Ben pondered what she’d said about Lara. In his mind, Lara Barnes was far from a lucky girl. What had happened to her had been cruel and devastating.

  “I think I’m the lucky one,” he said to the empty booth.

  When she’d called last night, Lara had sounded shaken. Immediately, he regretted not having gone with her… not that she’d invited him. When he heard she’d been chased through the Père Lachaise, he had the urge to get a ticket and fly to Paris, but she’d assured him that Gaston Boucher and this Barrow gentleman were taking no chances. Still, he found that Lara often thought she could handle things and sometimes got in over her head without realizing it. He thought of her house and how she’d just leapt at the chance to buy it with no idea how to fix it up, as well as the radio station that she’d plunked down a fortune for. Lara was impulsive. And if she was thinking she saw Todd Sutton, then she was certainly stressed. Had he pushed her toward seeing things by moving too soon and asking her to the gala as his date?

  When he got back to the office, he pulled out the Peter Beaumont case files again. There were four thick files that appeared to be in chronological order. Ben sat down with a hot cup of coffee and began slowly scanning each piece of paper, looking for a note or scrap of paper that referred to another case. Looking at his father’s handwriting after all these years, he felt a pang of nostalgia.

  There was more background in his father’s files on Peter. Attached was a photo of Peter Beaumont—the bad 1970s film exposure gave his features a yellow wash, but you could tell he’d been tan. It was a summer picture. Peter was laughing, his sun-bleached long hair contrasting with darker-blond sideburns. Ben studied the photo—something about the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  In another pen from another time, a phone number had been quickly jotted down. Looking it up in the file, Ben saw that the number belonged to Fiona Beaumont; his dad had added Kinsey to the name, along with got remarried. Ben checked “Fiona Kinsey” in the old Kerrigan Falls phone book, finding an F. Kinsey listed at 777 Noles Street. He called the number, trying to do the calculation on Fiona Kinsey’s current age. She had to be seventy-four, seventy-five years old now. It was a long shot that she was still alive, though according to the 1997 phone book, she was.

  On the sixth ring, Ben was just about to hang up when a woman answered. “Hello.”

  “Is this Fiona Kinsey?” Ben was sorting through the small pile of photos of Peter Beaumont. He spied a snap of Peter’s high school graduation ceremony. It showed a woman with long blond hair and an ultra-mini skirt that was the fashion of the day. The woman was older than Peter, but she looked more like an older sister than a mother. A cigarette dangled from her right hand as she mimed moving the tassel on Peter’s cap with the left. Flipping it over, he saw FEE AND PETER written on it.

  “Yes,” said the woman. Her voice was nasal and suspicious.

  “My name is Ben Archer,” he said. “I’m—”

&nbs
p; “I know who you are,” said the woman flatly. “I knew your father.”

  “Yes,” he said, caught off-guard by her bluntness. He could hear what sounded like a grandfather clock ticking in the background. “I was wondering if I could come and talk to you about your son?”

  There was a long pause. “I’d prefer that you not.”

  Ben cleared his throat, trying to buy time to figure out what to say next. “May I ask why?”

  “Mr. Archer,” she said, like it was too painful to expend the energy to speak. “Do you know the number of people who have stood on my doorstep asking to talk to me about my son? And do you know what all the talking has gotten me? Nothing. I’m an old woman. I’m blind and I have liver cancer. Terminal. Peter is dead and I will see him soon enough. At this point, there is nothing that you can tell me or that I can tell you. Peter’s gone. Where or why doesn’t matter anymore, at least not to me, so please do me the courtesy of staying away. I liked your father. He did what he could, but he failed my son. We all did. Some things, Mr. Archer, are just too late.”

  The weight of her words fell heavy on him. Ben tapped on the photo with his forefinger. From his father’s notes, he could see that he’d tried every angle on the case, but she was correct. His father—and the police department—had failed.

  Until now, Peter Beaumont had simply been a name to him—a bookend to Todd Sutton, but this woman’s pain was contagious. It came through the phone lines and wrapped around him like a kudzu vine.

  “Can you at least tell me what was he like? I didn’t know him.”

  The woman sighed. He could hear the groan of an old chair being pulled across the floor—what he imagined to be a kitchen floor—then the heavy sound of someone settling into it, both bone and breath.

  “Honestly, Mr. Archer, there are things that I remember as clear as day. Him dragging that old Fender guitar with him everywhere, knocking it against doorframes and car doors. He had an old strap, never a case for it, and just slung it over his shoulder. An old boyfriend of mine had given it to him—the thing was already battered when he’d gotten it and it didn’t get any better. Beautiful guitar, too; it’s a shame. Peter hated getting his hair cut, hated wearing shoes as a kid, and until he left us…” The last word hung on her. “… well, he was always barefoot. He had beautiful feet. I know that’s a strange memory, but it’s one of the things I remember about him that final summer, tan and running around barefoot, getting stung by bees with that beautiful tumble of long, shaggy dirty-blond hair, just like his father. Every week, I recall me telling him to get a haircut, even giving him money for it, which of course he pocketed, but then he and Jason Barnes would spend it on records. I also remember trying to look young enough to be his sister and never being a good enough mother to him. Those are things I remember, Mr. Archer.”