The Ladies of the Secret Circus

by Constance Sayers

  “Hey, boss.” Ben could hear the sounds of a video game in the background. Doyle must have been home.

  “What is so urgent? You called me three times. You could have just written something down.”

  “I thought this was something I should tell you in person.”

  “Then why aren’t you here? In person?” Ben hated this tone in his voice, but Doyle drove him nuts.

  “I’ve got a cold today. Anyway, you asked me to check on Desmond Bennett.” A whistling noise plus Doyle’s cursing indicated that he’d probably lost another troll in his video game.

  “And?” Ben arranged things on his desk. Doyle must have been sitting here because everything was out of place. He imagined that Doyle tried out his chair to see how it felt every time Ben left the station.

  “You’ll never believe who Desmond Bennett was engaged to.”

  Ben waited for the answer, but he heard a crackle on the line followed by the sound of Doyle’s thumb on the space bar, thumping loudly.

  “So before Margot Cabot married Simon Webster, she ran off with Desmond Bennett, but she was only seventeen and Cecile wouldn’t sign the parental permission form for them to marry. In fact, it was through Desmond Bennett’s disappearance that Margot met Simon. He covered the story for the newspaper.”

  “Interesting. Anything else?”

  “We had a murder while you were gone.”

  “What? Who?”

  “I’m kidding, boss. But I had to get a bat out of someone’s apartment on Jefferson Street. Hope I don’t have a case of rabies,” said Doyle, laughing. “I should be better tomorrow.” He added, “Oh, and in fucking crazy details, this may be nothing, but Desmond Bennett was famous in his day so there was a lot of coverage on him; I left the newspaper clipping about his death on my desk.”

  Ben walked over and picked up the article. Desmond Bennett was as handsome as Esther Hurston had described him. He put the photo of Peter Beaumont down next to Desmond Bennett, looking for likenesses. Turning over the photo of Peter Beaumont, he flicked the paper. And he realized the answer had been right in front of him all along.

  Checking his watch, he knew what he had to do. With his hands in his pockets, Ben walked up the hill. He spotted the still-empty spot where her car had sat all night. It was leaking oil. It was one of those days that looked like a storm—a bad one, too—was about to break open. It had been unusually humid, and so Ben found himself wishing to hear a rumble overhead that might cool things down.

  He hadn’t broken into a house in a long time, not since he was a kid, but he still knew how to spring a basement window free by jostling it. With a few strategic knocks, the window gave way easily, as always. Ben shimmied through the open window and landed on the dryer. He slid off the dryer and onto the basement floor.

  It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He didn’t want to turn on the lights, so he wandered around until he reached the area he knew to be the stairs. Ben ascended slowly, step by step. He reached the top and held his breath when it occurred to him that she might have pulled the latch to the basement door, locking him downstairs. When he turned the knob, though, the door opened freely into the kitchen. When the light shone in, he noticed several large green-and-gray bags stacked nearly three feet high on the basement floor. He left the door open and walked back down the stairs to see an additional four commercial bags of lime sitting against the basement wall.

  Lime.

  He walked upstairs and headed toward the hall. The long hallway led to the foyer and the staircase. To his surprise, at the foot of the stairs were three suitcases, a matching black set stacked in order from largest to smallest, the canvas giving way like they were packed full. If he hadn’t been sure before, this incriminating detail was evidence enough of the fact that she was going to flee.

  Yet he had to be sure. Walking back down the hall, he found the picture frame exactly where he recalled it had been. The subject was the Kerrigan River, at the bend near the old mill where it took its wildest turn, the grainy photo like a time capsule from the 1970s with its overexposed, undersaturated look. Pulling out the photo from Peter Beaumont’s police file, he held the two next to each other. The tree, the hue of the photo—they were a match. These had been snapped minutes apart.

  He studied the rest—black-and-whites—all in matted frames. An old photo of a demolition derby stopped him dead in his tracks. Looking closely at the photo, he could see a car with the beginning of a number painted on its door. The car design dated it back to around 1943. Next to it, he held the newspaper file picture of Desmond Bennett’s car. The two scenes matched perfectly. Taken together, this arrangement was assembled like a trophy wall.

  As he’d scrutinized the photos of Dez Bennett and Peter Beaumont, what had been similar had not been the men. It had been the photographer.

  In 1938, Marla’s grandmother Victoria Chambers had lived in this house. It had not occurred to him until now that for all Marla’s love of history, he’d never once seen any pictures of her own family members. Most of the photos around the house were newer black-and-whites that Marla had taken herself, except for this cluster near the steps. But for someone who loved old photos—and someone who claimed to be so devoted to her family—there was not one single snapshot of anyone from Marla’s family. In fact, Marla’s mother had just died when he met her. Yet she didn’t have a single photo or album of her parents. He racked his brain recalling the odd ways that Marla avoided having pictures taken of herself through the years. Wedding photos? Nope. They’d eloped. He recalled once taking a Polaroid; she turned her head and it didn’t come out at all.

  From Cecile Cabot’s diaries, he remembered that Cecile and Esmé could not be painted or photographed. The best way not to be the subject of a photo was to be the photographer. The other night at the gala—had Marla had her photo taken? No. At the last minute, she’d pulled him into the photo, replacing her.

  Laughing to himself, he realized how brilliant it had been. She was always behind the camera, never in front of it. Now he felt downright stupid. He’d been so taken with her when he’d met her. She’d been sophisticated. He’d been so desperate to hang on to her. He had asked her about her mother once, and she’d become weepy, so he never pushed it. Why didn’t I push her? Because she was a damsel in distress.

  An unfamiliar noise startled him, and his heart raced. He was about to sneak back down to the basement when he heard a latch open and then something drop. It took him a minute to realize it was the mailman. He peered out into the living room to see a neat stack of mail with a rubber band sitting on the floor in front of the door, just below the mail slot.

  In the foyer, he padded past the mail pile and up the stairs. He was committed now. If Marla came home, he’d be trapped upstairs with no way out. He walked by the back bedroom—the spare where he had stayed at the end of their marriage. The room had undergone a transformation. It was as though she had erased every inch of the room that Ben had ever touched. Even the bed had been repainted white. The curtains were blue, the rug navy blue, and the room was now wallpapered in a floral pattern so busy that it would have caused him many sleepless nights.

  “Jesus,” he muttered out loud.

  He walked down the hall and into the master bedroom, not exactly sure what he was looking for. The bed was unruly and unmade, which was also highly unusual. He sat down on 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 down to the ground. “To this house?”

  Marla looked confused. “Of course… this house. He was trying to convince me to run away with him, but I said no. That’s when things got out of hand between us. He was trying to drag me toward the car when I pushed him and he fell and hit his head. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, Ben. It was a terrible, terrible accident.” She put her hands to her face. “Please, Ben. Listen to me. We can just cover his body and go on with our lives like nothing happened. Ben, look at me.” Marla’s blue eyes were shiny, tears brimming. “You have to believe me.”

  Her face was so beautiful and hopeful. In the years he’d known her, Ben had memorized every line, shadow, and angle of her face by heart. He’d worshipped this woman, throwing himself headfirst into their marriage. How easy it would be just to believe her and toss the dirt back over Todd Sutton, like he’d never seen a thing. But this explanation was simply bullshit.

  He inhaled audibly, almost a wheeze. “I want to believe you, Marla, really I do, but it’s just because I don’t want to believe that I was married to someone who could do that.” He wasn’t dealing with a simple murder anymore. If she’d done this to Todd Sutton, then he wasn’t dealing with a mortal woman. “What I’m really thinking, Marla, is that men have gone missing since 1944.” He rubbed his face with his hand, sure that he’d gotten dirt all over it. “And damn if the last known location of Desmond Bennett’s car was right here on this street.”

  “How on earth would I know about a murder in 1944?”

  “Not only did you kill Todd Sutton, but you also killed Desmond Bennett and Peter Beaumont.”

  She laughed out loud. “Do you hear yourself, Ben? You sound crazy.”

  “Really? When Todd Sutton is right here in our flower bed? Peter Beaumont is probably over there in those fucking azalea bushes, isn’t he? We pulled Desmond Bennett’s file from the archives. Doyle just told me that Dez was last seen on this street in front of this house.”

  “So? I wasn’t even born yet.”

  “We’ll get to that.” He held his finger up. His voice was growing louder as he was getting worked up. “I might not have noticed that little detail about Dez Bennett—it’s a big street—except for the photo of Peter Beaumont. You got sloppy, Marla. There’s a photo in our hallway of the Kerrigan River from around 1974. The twin of that picture is in Peter Beaumont’s police file. I kept thinking there was something familiar about Peter Beaumont, but it wasn’t his face that was familiar, it was the photo. For years, I’d walked past the next one you’d taken, on that very wall in our hallway.”

  “My mother took that photo, Ben. I have no idea when it was taken.”

  “And there is another one of the derby next to it. From the look of the cars, I’d say it was 1943 or 1944. What were those photos, trophies? Cut the shit, Marla.” Her jaw tensed and he knew he was right. It propelled him on with the dramatics of an evangelical minister. “I thought, isn’t it odd how nostalgic Marla is about her family homestead? Yet for the life of me, I’ve never seen one fucking photo of any member of her family. Not one. Then it really dawned on me. I’ve never seen a photo of you. Not even a photo from our wed
ding.” He laughed to himself, like he’d just figured out the trickiest joke ever. “Then the entire thing clicked. It isn’t money keeping you from selling our house, it’s the goddamned corpses rotting in our flower beds. You didn’t kill Todd Sutton by accident. Don’t insult me. And I see you’re leaving—fleeing, actually—aren’t you? Your bags are packed.” He looked down at the hole in the ground. “I can’t say I blame you.”

  She was silent, seething, her arms folded in front of her.

  “I got a call last week from Lara Barnes. She’d been chased at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. That Monday, I believe. Where were you, Marla? If I recall, there were a few papers on the front porch when I walked by. I thought that was odd, but then we aren’t married anymore so I didn’t think it was my business.”

  “Not that it is any of your business, but I was leading a group of historical society kids on a white-water rafting tour. I told you that.”

  “Where?”

  “What?” She balked.

  “Where was the tour, Marla?”

  “West Virginia.”

  “Where? I’d like to check.” He pulled out his phone. “Who can verify it, Marla? One name. Give me one name and I’ll admit I’m crazy. My bet is that you were actually in Paris.” Ben stood up and stepped back into the grave. With renewed energy fueled by anger and hurt, he began to dig furiously. “How did you do it? All these years? I want to see what you’ve done. And when I’m finished here, I’m going to start digging over there.” He motioned toward a big cluster of bushes. “Or you could save me the trouble and just point.”

  Tears began to roll down Ben’s cheeks with every scoop of earth. He wiped his arm on his coat as he continued digging. He shoveled until Todd’s body was fully uncovered. The body was twisted unnaturally, like he’d been tossed carelessly into the pit. Ben was thankful that he couldn’t see what remained of his face due to the mass of long, tangled dark hair. The sight sickened him.

  “Jesus,” he said as he crawled away from the hole and vomited beside the stone walkway. He heard the sound of a power tool—perhaps an electric saw—starting up two or three houses down from theirs. A normal house with normal sounds. It was oddly comforting. And the whirring of the saw was also the last sound he heard before he felt a stab of pain in the back of his head and everything went black.