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

He sighed. “We’ll talk about it later.” But it was always the same. She wanted the house. Solely. It was to be divided, but she kept stalling on repairs so it couldn’t be listed and now she was saying she was strapped, but from the look of the plants she was buying he wasn’t sure that was the case. He supposed that he could push the issue, but given the public nature of his job, he hadn’t wanted to do that. And she was banking on his silence.

“I have to go.”

“You just got here.” Marla’s expression was unreadable. Over the years, he’d found that he could never predict what she’d do. She was always cold, aloof, a stranger. Truth was, they’d jumped into a quick marriage and both felt compelled to make it work when it had become clear that they were different people. He was shocked that it had lasted ten years.

“Jesus, Marla.” He lowered his voice, not sure why. “I’m ready to move on.”

“So I see—the entire town sees.” Her voice was cool. “Lara Barnes. Interesting choice—a little young for you. But then you do love a damsel in distress.”

He turned and waved goodbye to her, knowing that she was still leaning against the counter feeling victorious that she’d driven him out—again.

As he walked back to the police station, he thought that there hadn’t been any one thing that had broken them up. They’d just grown apart and moved like strangers through the house with nothing to say to each other. The last time they’d had sex, he noticed she kept her eyes closed—she wasn’t there, or at least she didn’t want to be there. And he found he didn’t want to be with a shell of a wife.

That began a slow move to the spare bedroom, starting with him sleeping on the sofa, then the spare room so as not to wake her as he researched all night. Marla seemed to have the same thought, because she asked him to leave the following month. It had been a shock to him that his stuff was leaving first in suitcases and then black trash bags. The first night in his new apartment, he didn’t even have a sofa or a mattress, and he’d ordered a free pizza from a coupon he’d gotten with his phone hookup.

But then Todd Sutton went missing and he’d thrown himself fully into the case. To see someone like Lara aching for Todd made him realize that he could have that kind of love, too.

Lara. Was Marla right in that he liked a damsel in distress? He dismissed the thought, but he remembered Marla in the months after her mother died and him piecing together her life. Then he did it again with Lara.

He’d just walked back into the office when his office line rang. Ben picked it up. “Archer here.”

There was a pause and a crackle. “Ben?” The voice sounded far away. “This is Gaston Boucher. I’m with Lara Barnes here in Paris.”

“Hey, Gaston.” Ben started tearing open the morning’s mail, sorting the junk from the essentials while he cocked the phone on his neck, but he stopped. Something was wrong or Gaston wouldn’t be calling. “What is it?”

“Well…” The man stammered.

“Well, what?” Ben felt his stomach lurch and his blood pressure drop. He almost didn’t want to hear the next thing out of Gaston’s mouth.

“Lara’s gone missing.”

“Gone missing?” The police chief in him knew the importance of the next question even if Gaston didn’t. “How long?”

“Twenty-four hours now.”

Ben booked the first flight he could get out of Dulles to Charles de Gaulle and hadn’t slept at all. The worst had been the waiting. He’d carried only a duffel bag with the few things he grabbed—an extra pair of jeans, two shirts, a polo, and underwear, but then time slowed and he waited at the gate, on the airplane, and in the taxi line. Now that he was here, he needed to be doing something. Expecting to be furious with Gaston and Barrow, he found that both men appeared not to have slept or showered in days.

“Espresso?” Gaston suggested.

Ben shrugged him off. “No. We need to get out and find her.”

“You’ll never last without it.” Gaston pushed the tiny cup toward him. “And you need to last.”

“We’ve tried to find her.” The other man, Edward Binghampton Barrow, removed his reading glasses and pushed the composition books toward him. “We think she may have been contacted by Le Cirque Secret. If that is the case, then she isn’t ‘in’ Paris anymore in the literal sense.”

“What does that mean?” Ben took a sip from the tiny cup after stirring sugar in it with a tiny spoon.

“The circus is in another dimension,” said Barrow.

Ben laughed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” said Gaston. “We searched her room. There was an envelope with her name on it, but it was empty. We think she had a ticket.” It seemed to Ben that this was a well-worn discussion between the two men.

Barrow shook his head. “She knew we’d never let her go alone. Lara had no intention of telling us. If history repeats itself, there was only one ticket—and it was for her, alone.”

“I never would have allowed her to go alone.” Gaston rubbed his face, his gray stubble showing.

“There was no ‘allowing’ Lara to go. No one controls her. She had to go,” said Barrow, who now seemed to be an expert on Lara after just a few days. “You can’t get a ticket to Le Cirque Secret—not after all these years—and not go.”

Ben could tell that tensions were high between the two men, but he wasn’t sure the argument was helping Lara.

“You’d have let her go, if you’d known?” Gaston had sunk back into the chair, but now he leaned forward, like he was readying for another round.

“Yes,” said Barrow. “The scholarship required it.”

“There is no fucking scholarship here, Teddy,” said Gaston, his voice rising. “We’ve left her alone in a daemonic circus.”

“Daemonic?” Ben