A KILLER BLACKOUT (Alethea, The Circus Sleuth Book 1)

by Jenna Coburn

That actually made her wrinkle her brow; it was more than odd. “That can’t just be a coincidence,” she continued Westley’s line of thought. “Do you think…someone gave them drugs?” It was the only explanation she could come up with off the top of her head.

  “It certainly might be a possibility,” Westley agreed. “Once we have the full report on Larry Patrick, we will know. Both Braden and Pierce would, in all likelihood, metabolized all of it by now.” Staring off to nowhere in particular, Alethea considered the implications.

  “So they drank together and someone put something in their drinks. Then that same person proceeded to murder one of them and pin it on someone else,” she reconstructed. Absentmindedly, she took in the circus lights. There wasn’t a big show on tonight, so most of the folks probably just had a relaxed evening.

  “That’s what we might be looking at unless someone is putting on a convincing show,” the FBI agent answered, a bit more careful in his hypotheses. “We’ll keep you in the loop, Miss Thwaite. We owe you that much by now.”

  She smiled happily, even if he couldn’t see it. “Thanks, Agent Westley. Have a good night.”

  “A good night to you as well, and greet your family,” he replied and hung up. She wasn’t sure that greeting would’ve been too well-received. After all, most of the circus folk saw some clear lines drawn in the sand; that’s also the impression she had gained from Virgil and America. The thought made her grimace.

  But it was no problem. She’d just have to solve this and fix it all. The drug thing was a lead, too, after all. If someone had drugs, someone else supplied them. She wasn’t too deep in Sparta’s criminal underbelly, and in all probability, the police would have a much easier time locating a dealer. Moreover, if she found the right person, they didn’t exactly keep a register.

  For now, these thoughts were just idle fancy. While the sun hadn’t quite disappeared behind the horizon as of yet, the day was mostly over. She needed to grab a bite, a shower, and some sleep; she hadn’t had much of that the night before, and one could only go so far on one cup of coffee.

  She faintly remembered a solemn vow that she’d not rest until the case was solved, but she had been caught up in the moment then. Only for safety’s sake, she’d make the rounds before turning in. If there was something weird brewing, she would have to know.

  Virgil’s trailer was just beyond the entrance for good reason. She knocked on the door, and as she expected, he was there, still in that same spot. It looked like he hadn’t moved, even though old men supposedly need to go to the bathroom quite frequently. She thought about relating her impressions, but it wasn’t the right moment.

  “Good evening, Letha,” Virgiliu greeted. Unlike the last time she’d been there, he left it at that. Still, it wasn’t because he seemed tired or anything; he just calmly smiled at her, expecting her to have something important to report.

  She sat down opposite of him, leaning back, sighing, letting her shoulders sink and just sprawling out. Just in time, her stomach growled. Virgil poured her tea; the cup had already been on the table. A small, grateful noise escaped her, followed by more articulated thanks.

  “So there’s a guy who was with Braden and Larry at Spoony’s Bar, and I found him because of bathroom graffiti. He seems a bit dickish, but I guess he’s not actually in on anything, and he’s apparently also lost his memory. Now I’m wondering if someone drugged them,” Alethea expertly summarized.

  After a few deep gulps of tea, and while Virgil was still nodding sympathetically, she put her head back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m still wondering why someone goes through all this effort. It’s…Larry Patrick was just some guy. I mean, I don’t know much about him, but if there was something to know, I probably would. He lived in a hotel, but probably because his wife kicked him out for the night, and that’s why he was drinking—something random like that.”

  She raised her head again to look at Virgil. “And while this Pierce Jewell has a bit of an abrasive air about him—although, I mean, I kind of just went up to his room and annoyed him, but still—he’s just not….” Alethea’s voice trailed off, because there was something on the old man’s face—a look she couldn’t immediately place.

  “Pierce Jewell, you say?”

  “Yeah, that’s the man’s name. He lives in the Sparta City Hotel, too.”

  Virgil’s eyes narrowed. “What a peculiar thing, that…I actually know a man with that name. We crossed paths a long time ago, and we didn’t part on the kindest of terms.” That woke Alethea up again, and she sat up straight; the circus director saw it, but waved it aside. “It can’t be related, Alethea. That story was a long time ago. He’d not go through such an elaborate effort to perhaps get revenge for some ancient slight.”

  “Hm,” she replied and pressed her lips together. She kept on eyeing Virgil as if doing so would make him spill; it didn’t quite work. “Spill,” she commanded finally. She spoke it like it was a magic word.

  The old man shook his head. “I’ll not go over that with you; it’ll put ideas in your head.” He was right—that was exactly what she hoped for. “And to be honest, if any of us two would have reason to take revenge on the other, then it’d be me who’d strike out against him.”

  Alethea provoked him with her raised eyebrow, and now that he had started, Virgiliu couldn’t easily stop. And he was only telling her a tiny part of it, wasn’t he?

  “Many years ago, I met Pierce—provided it’s the same one—as a young man with money and ideas. He wanted to invest into businesses, but not just into anything. I convinced him to invest into the circus. Only, it didn’t work out like I wanted. He pulled his money out from under me at the worst possible moment, and I cursed myself for not putting up a better contract. It was all just…deals, back then. Just words, you see?”

  There was no anger or resentment in the director’s tale. While he may at one time have considered Jewell to be somewhat of an enemy, the years had eroded such feelings. The connection was there, but it was quite flimsy—an old man might come across many people in his time, especially if he was of the traveling sort.

  “It just seems like a coincidence,” Alethea remarked. “I wonder what he is doing in this town,” she added more for herself. The simple answer she could give herself was business. And still, his proximity to both the victim and the circus made her feel that there was something more about it all. Perhaps Jewell was, even without him knowing it, the key to breaking this open.

  Virgil took a sip of his own tea, and there was a pause in the conversation. Behind his eyes, he seemed to replay the memories he had of what happened many years ago. “Back then, you know…back then people might have believed I could kill him,” he said in a small voice. It was an admission that Alethea didn’t quite expect. She put her hand on his old leathery fingers.

  “You’re not that same person anymore,” she reassured him. He looked into her eyes, and it became apparent that he had resolved to tell her the important part now.

  “He ran away with my girl, you know,” he confided. “I didn’t think it was even possible. I guess I was blind. She was younger than me—a lot younger, as you may have already realized—but I…I was blind. Ah, there is no way to have love where there is none.” She pressed down on his hand. The last sentence made her wonder what he meant.

  “That’s the reason why, Letha,” he smiled wearily. “A person can think and do many things if they lose someone like this.” He thought for a second. “If their trust is betrayed like this.” There still was that shimmer of the ancient wound—the wanderer Virgil had revealed one of many he must have sustained in his time. Injury upon injury, adding to the weight that this aging back bore. Yet he rarely showed it; he was a showman, but not in that way.

  The intimate moment was gone as fast as it had come upon them. He became the same mysterious director who always had a smile for his people. Who always had a solution, and whose past was filled with adventure, not suffering. “But that’s just an old story,” Virgiliu
concluded, while Alethea was still chewing on it.

  She felt that she had all the puzzle parts; it was like an instinct. The only problem was putting them together. But if she could only do that, the next lead would bring her directly to the person responsible. “Thank you for telling it, Virgil. It’s much appreciated.” Her smile was warm. He nodded.

  “And I think it’s important. I can’t quite put it together right now, but I know it’s important. Isn’t that always a cool thing to say for a detective?” She made her voice sound as deep as she could. “I don’t believe in coincidence.” She bit her lip and looked off into space. “Or was it, ‘There are no coincidences?’ Anyway, you get the gist.”

  “I do, Detective Thwaite,” Virgil answered in his business voice.

  “Well, I gotta go now! I’ll put some notes and photographs and maps and newspaper cutouts all over my walls and put fixing pins in them and connect them with different colors of string.” She brought the flat of her hand down on the table, a little too hard perhaps, and jumped up and out of the trailer.

  After taking a few deep breaths, she went in the direction of the other domiciles. She wasn’t really going to go all Beautiful Mind over this, but she still had some dot-connecting to do. And then she ran into Rob and Tony.

  “Good evening, guys,” she greeted probingly. “How’s it going?” They seemed a little less dangerous to her sanity now; both of them were sitting down near the fire. They were actually roasting marshmallows.

  “This is the best day in camp I’ve had so far, ma’am,” Antony said in a happy sing-song voice. He stuffed a mostly burned marshmallow into his mouth. Some of the sticky sugar got caught in his mustache, and planned to stay there for some time. It joined the remains of earlier marshmallows.

  “My bunkmate is a pig. He puts his potato peelings all atop the portico,” Robby complained. He was putting marshmallows on his stick; there must’ve already been a dozen on there, but that did not deter him. “Oh, how his grinder grinds on my nerves equally as it grinds on the taters, themselves.”

  Alethea usually tried to get out of it by stating the facts. “That’s a story,” she claimed. With a cough, she put her hands behind her back. It was too early to leave them to themselves again. Also, they usually shifted to a more normal mode after a short period of time.

  “We’re eating marshmallows because we had no ice cream,” Antony explained. “The day was not as best as I made it appear, ma’am.”

  “Alas, ‘tis true. We were trying out a new performance in front of some of the others, but then things went downhill. Everything got out of control. I heard a crash and a screaming cat, and then we had to improvise.” Rob sighed deeply. “Turns out the cat was just faking it, by the way,” he said as an aside to Tony.

  “I don’t love it when a plan doesn’t come together,” he said. “Look, no cigar.” She coughed. That went a bit far out, even for her. Antony mimicked Rob’s earlier sigh. “We need to work on our improvisation skills; that was our conclusion. We tried to safe it, but it wasn’t the same.”

  “Hmm,” Alethea remarked to make sure they knew she was still listening. That’s when it hit her, and when she hit both of them on their shoulders in an overexcited pat. “Guys! I just had an excellent idea! Thank you so much.”

  “Shucks, ma’am, we always stand ready to help the law,” Tony replied with a smile that was as bright as hers. “Verily!” Rob exclaimed. The other two looked at him with doubt in their eyes. He shrugged. “Good luck with the case, Letha?”

  “Thanks, Robby. Antony.” She turned around on her heels and went straight for her trailer; and while whipping up some quick dinner, she considered the case. Without them knowing, these clowns had given her the perfect push into a new direction. What if things didn’t all go in favor of the killer?

  The more she thought along those lines, the more the circumstances began to make sense. If things had gone haywire, then the result they were looking at might not be the one that the killer had planned for.

  The venomous Indian cobra belonged to Virgil, the circus director; the venom had been taken from him and used to murder someone. Virgil was old and well-travelled enough to have a few enemies, and he had a motive to kill another man, who actually interacted with the victim and lived right across from him. If there had been a switch-up—the grandfather of all switch-ups—then this thing made a lot more sense.

  Sitting down at her table, Alethea started eating eggs, sausages, bread—it was basically breakfast, and it wasn’t necessarily the healthiest of meals, but she didn’t care right now. Her mind was occupied. Theories were nice, but they were of little value if she couldn’t prove anything, and if they didn’t actually lead anywhere. The killer was still afoot even if she had come a step closer to explaining the circumstances.

  Examining a piece of scrambled egg and piercing it with her green-eyed stare, she tried to scry the secrets of the universe. “Who was there first?” she said in her best interrogator voice. It didn’t answer. She ate it. “That’s what you get,” she mumbled. If her thinking was right, then there had to be another person, someone who, in all likelihood, wanted to hurt both Pierce Jewell and Virgiliu Ardelean.

  She put the dirty dishes in the sink, took a few seconds to stretch herself, pulled up her jeans, checked her face in the mirror, and finally went over to the Thwaite family trailer. It was past their dinnertime, and so Elyse was reading some sort of space adventure fantasy—Alethea wasn’t sure what she was into, exactly—and their parents sat in front of the TV. It wasn’t exactly big, but nothing in the trailer was.

  “Season’s greetings,” she channeled Tony. Both Caryn and Creighton looked at her, and there was some awkward silence before a common ground that allowed for conversation could be recovered.

  “I actually made some progress with the investigation,” Alethea put forward as she sat down on the cushion next to them. There was a short pause. It was the kind of sentence that needed a short pause; by saying nothing but implying she could say something, she’d test if the audience was actually interested. Of course, they were. Especially Caryn, who silently urged her on.

  “After what they found in Braden’s trailer turned out to be Virgil’s snake venom, I also heard that there was a third man present in the bar with the victim, Larry Patrick, and Braden. I found out who the guy was….” When telling her parents about this, she felt like leaving out the details. “And he’s, well, in a way he’s an old enemy of Virgil’s.”

  Neither of the Thwaites reacted yet. From the way they knew their daughter, she took another one of those dramatic pauses she’d seen in her TV shows. And sure enough, Alethea completed the point she wanted to make. “I think that there’s someone who wanted to kill that man and blame it on Virgil. Only, for some reason they mixed up their victims and Braden got caught up in it.” The reality was a bit more complicated—at least, if there really were no coincidences.

  “It sounds like you’re doing well,” her father complimented. “I mean, that’s a lot for just one day, isn’t it?” He looked at his wife, who seemed to agree.

  “I so hope they find the real guy. I mean, we can’t afford a good defense, and Braden’s just…I mean…you know how young men can become in jail.” Caryn painted everything black, but her daughter tried to smile it away.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she reassured. “My next step will be to find out what exactly Pierce Jewell, that’s the other man’s name, is doing. If there isn’t a motive for killing Patrick, there’s probably a motive for killing Jewell, if my guess is correct.” Alethea noticed that she sounded way more confident than she was.

  “How are you going to do that?” They both asked the question at the same time, only her father’s voice kind of petered out. Alethea clapped her hands together.

  “Well! That’s a question for tomorrow, I think. I’ve been out and about all day, and I really could use a car, and it’s time to go to bed. I’ll probably meet Agent Westley tomorrow to talk this thing over with
him. I’ve only known him a day, but he seems like a good guy.”

  “Don’t forget that he took your brother away,” Caryn reminded her. Alethea rolled her eyes.

  “Wow, Mom, it’s like we both stepped into a time machine right now.” She actually felt like she had a flashback. There was a fire burning behind her eyes, and she had the thousand-yard stare. Shaking it off, she stood up. “Good night, guys.”

  They wished her a good night, too, and so the veritable detective turned in to her warm, comfortable bed, stared at the ceiling and contemplated the possibilities. Hopefully, she didn’t wake up dead tomorrow. It would throw a wrench in her plans. But from what she could tell, the killer had enough of it. Perhaps they were even feeling rather guilty.

  It certainly couldn’t be a good feeling to murder an innocent man. Not that Pierce Jewell would have deserved to die, or Virgil deserved to be blamed for a crime, but if their plan had worked, they’d probably be much happier with themselves.

  Alethea closed her eyes and slowly drifted off to dreamland, where she saw a well-dressed FBI man eating his way through the bureau’s budget.

  Chapter VII

  It was good to have a restful sleep after the night before. While Braden was still in jail, the progress Alethea had made let it all seem a lot less dire. And just after she woke up, she found a message on her cell phone.

  “Dear Miss Thwaite, thank you again for your support of the investigation. If you would join me for breakfast again we can talk about the state of the case. I am interested in your perspective. Today I decided that I would venture to the Beef Storm Steakhouse, for I heard that they have an excellent breakfast menu. If you would accompany me, I should be able to pick you up at 9:30 a.m.”

  This man wrote his instant messages like he was writing a polite telegraph. Then again, no—those were curter than this. Also, what was the Beef Storm Steakhouse? Who called their restaurant that? She hadn’t been awake for five minutes, and she was already baffled by Holden Westley, most special of special agents.