The Ladies of the Secret Circus Constance Sayers (e books free to read .TXT) 📖

on the hunt for something, usually related to music. In those days, Lara followed him around like a bad shadow. This particular widow greeted them at the door in her housecoat and curlers, then led them through a maze of boxes and too-big furniture. As they navigated the tumbledown house that smelled of piss and old newspapers, Lara stuck close by her father, clutching his hand until her fingers went numb. At a clearing in the clutter, the woman presented Jason with a battered black guitar case.

While everything about the house was decayed, her father popped the case, and tucked in the worn red velvet was the most beautiful and well-tended guitar that Lara had ever seen. Lacquered and black with a big silver shield on the front, this instrument—as Lara would learn—was known as a resonator guitar. What she was looking at was, in fact, a 1937 Dobro. Her father seemed to sway at the sight of the instrument before he rubbed his hands together and coaxed it from its velvet cradle. He placed it on his lap, adjusted it briefly, and borrowed a worn finger pick from inside the case—one the guitar knew well. Jason didn’t even need to tune the guitar first, just wanting to hear what the instrument sounded like. When her father played the first few notes, Lara fell in love. It was a deep metal sound, rich yet spare, and she could hear the physical transitions from the strings and the melancholy sound of the minor chords. Her father’s smile told her the guitar would be going home with them that day.

As they drove down the dirt path out of the house, her father looked back at the guitar case. “You know about Robert Johnson?”

Lara shook her head.

“Robert Johnson had been an okay guitar player in Mississippi, getting gigs in juke joints and bars, but he was nothing great until he went away to Chicago and came back like a year later with skills he didn’t have before.”

“Maybe he practiced.” Lara was sure of things in those days, and practicing had been drilled into her head from her mother and Cecile. From riding horses to playing the piano, they believed in the power of practicing.

“Maybe so,” said Jason. “But the legend said that he’d gone to the crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and sold his soul to the Devil to play so well. Guitars are mysterious things, Lara. The strings hold things; so does the instrument. The man who owned that guitar—well, his energy is still in that instrument. I only want to try to honor it.”

“So it’s haunted?” Lara’s eyes were wide. She chewed on the end of her ponytail, an occasional habit to quell the nerves.

“I guess so, in a way,” he said, pulling down his aviator sunglasses and adjusting the truck’s sun flap.

Like an artifact in a museum, that guitar still sat in the radio station, along with ten others, including Rickenbackers, Gibsons, and Fenders.

Morrison’s own father had purchased a headstone for his son. Lara read the Greek inscription—KATA TON DAIMONA EAYTOY—which means “according to his own daemon” or “true or faithful to his own spirit,” depending upon how much lore you wanted to attach to it. Much like the music legend of Robert Johnson, another idea that circulated for years was that, having faked his own death, Jim Morrison was still alive somewhere. These were great stories, but she wasn’t sure either of them had much truth. It was funny really; if anyone should have been a believer after all she’d seen, it should have been her. She took a picture of the grave, for her father.

From there, Lara walked up the hill toward section 85 to see Marcel Proust’s grave, noticing the broken columns of people who died violently, usually young. As she turned left on Avenue Transversale, one of the main tree-lined boulevards of the cemetery, she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye. Turning slowly, she pretended to be consulting a paper in her hand. There standing fifty feet behind her was a woman with a low blond ponytail, bangs that looked to be a wig, and cat’s-eye sunglasses. When Lara turned, the woman immediately attempted to look occupied. Lara glanced to her right, but there was nothing behind her. Something about the woman’s stance suggested purpose, not a leisurely stroll. Lara thought she must be getting paranoid, so she continued to walk up the hill toward the crematorium at a faster clip, winding around the random headstones, then the writer Molière’s grave, before ducking into the row early and making a fast right turn that led in a circle down the hill and took her back to Jim Morrison’s grave.

Tucking behind a tall obelisk gravestone, Lara discovered that the woman had also made the same hard right turn and appeared to be searching for her along the trail. The peacefulness of the cemetery was now broken as Lara started down the hill, climbing among the gravestones, staying low so the woman wouldn’t spot her. She was sorry she hadn’t gotten a better look at her, but wasn’t sure it was worth the risk to try to do so. At the bottom of the trail, Lara was dumped back out onto the main boulevard. She made an immediate left, heading back toward the front entrance, using the rows like a maze. When she got down to the front entrance, she turned to see that the woman was about two hundred yards behind her and walking at a near run. She wasn’t going crazy. This woman was following her, and she now knew that Lara was aware of her. This realization only seemed to embolden her.

She is coming for you. Was this the woman Shane Speer and Althacazur had warned her about?

Once she was through the gates, a sudden adrenaline rush kicked in and Lara ran down Boulevard de Ménilmontant. As she stopped for breath, she could see that the woman was trying to keep pace,