The Ladies of the Secret Circus Read online

“You were lost without him,” she said.

  “It just didn’t matter without him,” he said, correcting her. “It had been his dream, not mine. Hell, I’d have probably been a mechanic had I not met him.”

  “And now?”

  “Some days I feel like an imposter living in his dream. Survivor’s guilt they call it, I think.”

  Lara knew that feeling well. “It’s strange, isn’t it? The spaces they leave for you to fill.”

  He laughed. “My life has been a poor attempt at trying to live the life he didn’t get to.”

  “So you think Peter Beaumont is dead?” They had never discussed it. She knew this was the first time he was able to broach the subject of his former bandmate.

  “I do,” he said. She heard a snap and saw that he’d opened a green bottle of Tanqueray. He pulled out two glasses and a tiny bottle of Schweppes tonic. “Everything I did was designed to fill the vacuum,” said Jason, as if he could read her mind.

  “And Todd?” It was the natural next question. Peter and Todd were now lumped together forever on Wickelow Bend. She’d watched his mouth tighten, but he did not answer her. Instead they both drank to the future.

  Five years from now with a bit more reflection, she wondered what life would be like for her. How would she shift herself to feel less incomplete? Looking around the radio station, she thought she was off to a good start with that question. The old Lara Barnes, the one who would have married Todd, wouldn’t have needed to buy a radio station. This one did.

  Lately, she’d also begun to think of the man in the field. That boy is not your destiny.

  As a child, she’d had a wild imagination. She’d been born with only one kidney and had been sickly, so some part of her had never been convinced that the man had been real; perhaps he was just an imaginary friend created by an overactive mind. Still, what he had said, real or not, had been on her mind lately. Had they known her fate? They’d certainly seemed to allude to it. These were the things you thought of in the middle of the night when you were alone at a radio station. It wasn’t a healthy shift, that was for sure.

  She waved to Bob Breen, the drive-time announcer sitting in the sound booth, the glow from his cigarette lighting the darkened space. She was sure she’d told him that he couldn’t smoke in here anymore, but she’d likely have to add a sign near the clock—all the on-air talent watched the clock. She checked her own watch: fifteen minutes until she was on air. Her father began to gather up his stuff, finally satisfied with his albums.

  At seven, Bob pushed back from the table and was quickly off. Lara heard the door shut behind him as she climbed into the chair and wheeled up to the control desk. She thought that she was probably one of the few DJs who didn’t like the sound of her own voice. Her vocal cords sounded as though they’d been run over with sandpaper. “Smoky,” they called it. Pulling her blond hair into a ponytail, she swallowed hard as she pressed the MIKE button and turned up the volume, then pushed the STATION ID button at the top of the hour.

  99.7 K-ROCK played the deep or obscure tracks on an album, not just popular “top 40” songs, except for three hours each Sunday night when she’d play punk and new wave—Bauhaus, Television, the Cure, the Slits, Concrete Blonde, and House of Love. The college kids would call her and beg her for the Ramones and the Violent Femmes—always the Femmes. Lara laid out her first hour of songs, something she liked to do, although a lot of on-air talent chose songs on the fly.

  First up was a Led Zeppelin two-set. She placed “Achilles Last Stand” on turntable one, turned the knob to the CUE setting, and set the needle on the track. Then she pressed the START button. The turntable belt wound the record slowly until she heard the beginning chords of the song. When she detected the first few notes, she hit the STOP button, rotating the record backward with her fingers until the vinyl made a growling noise at the opening chords. She repeated the ritual with “How Many More Times” on turntable two.

  Lara activated turntable number one. The song melted perfectly into the fading chords of the station jingle. She flipped the window blind and stared out into the road. Enough cars were still going down the hill at this hour to cause a small traffic jam, but they would thin in the hours to come. Perhaps it was the loneliness of the job, but Todd was never far from her thoughts when she was locked in the radio studio.

  She kept looking at the phone, hoping to see it blinking, almost willing it to do so. She supposed she could enchant it to ring, but there would be no one on the other end. If Todd was going to contact her anywhere—if he could contact her—it would be here. When she’d worked the midnight-to-six shift, he often called to check up on her, worried about her locked alone spinning records. But her father had been right: Just as with Peter, there had been no sightings of Todd. Christmas had come and gone, Valentine’s Day, his mother’s birthday—all points when everyone had thought he’d call. Despite his abandoned car being found, his credit cards had never been used. Like Peter Beaumont, he’d simply vanished.

  Always, she scrutinized the final moments she’d seen him. They’d taken on mythic status, like a collection of valuable missing jewels. She’d combed through every minute, every word, gesture, and movement, looking for something that would provide the key. What had she missed?

  Thinking back now, she couldn’t recall the last image of him. When she thought about the moments in her life—the defining ones that had truly mattered—how much did they really add up to? For her, maybe ten hours in a total lifetime? Was that a lot or a little? She didn’t know. But that moment. That was the one.

  It had seemed so ordinary, almost pedestrian at the time. If only she could have stopped herself from sliding into the driver’s seat and glancing at him so briefly, before backing her car out onto the road. She was so focused on the road ahead of her, the life in front of her, that she didn’t stop and absorb that final image of him standing in his driveway. It had been her biggest regret.

  Seeing her father tonight made her nostalgic for a Dangerous Tendencies album. Normally, she didn’t play Jason’s records—his music was saved for his own show—but “The One I Left Behind” was her favorite of their songs. Sliding Tending, the band’s debut album, out of its battered paper sleeve, Lara placed it on the turntable, flipped the knob to the CUE setting, and then carefully set the needle on the vinyl groove for song number three. As she wound the disk backward, something odd happened. She picked up tones. Is it a song? It was definitely a song. Usually, the backward cue sound was pure garble that resembled a warped tape, but tonight she heard the beginnings of a perfect guitar intro.

  That was impossible.

  “I am definitely hearing things.” She inhaled loudly and restarted the record until she heard the song start and positioned her hands on the record, stopping her fingers. Finding the start spot, she swallowed hard then wound her hand backward. Again, instead of dissonance, soft guitar chords echoed through the cue in the sound booth. She kept the rotation going steady, standing up so she could get a good angle above the turntable. Finally, after thirty seconds of winding, she heard a man’s voice begin to sing.

  You said I didn’t know what I wanted,

  That I didn’t know about love.

  “What the fuck?” Her hand froze. She stepped back from the turntable.

  Moving quickly, she flipped the switch on the reel-to-reel tapes. The station could run on the four tape machines passing off songs to each other as if on autopilot, so she wouldn’t have to worry about the sound board for now.

  She pushed through the booth and out into the office, searching through drawers for a tape recorder. She found the one she was looking for, but when she hit the PLAY button it was dead. Finally, she grabbed Jason’s guitar and ran back into the booth. Cuing up the record again, she repeated the process. The song was still there. She located the notes on the guitar and played the melody, repeating the record rotation until she had it. The song wasn’t familiar. She tabbed the notes quickly on a piece of scrap paper so she wouldn’t lose
them.

  As she heard the door open for the overnight person to relieve her, she tried the record once again. This time the familiar warble had replaced the guitar opening.

  The song was gone.

  After gathering her purse, Lara walked at a clipped pace down Main Street toward the restaurant two blocks away. The dress shop on the corner had closed a month before, leaving a vacant glass space with the bodies of naked plastic mannequins, legs and arms akimbo and piled in a corner like a crime scene. She was rattled.

  What had just happened in there? It was clearly backmasking—recorded messages in an album that could only be heard when the song was played backward. Musicians did it occasionally, for effect. Famously, the Beatles did it in the song “Revolution 9”; listeners could hear “Turn me on, dead man,” which led to the whole “Paul Is Dead” conspiracy. As a kid, Lara was sent to church camp with Caren. On the first morning, after singing rousing versions of “I’m in the Lord’s Army,” the kids were served cookies and Hawaiian Punch and told how rock musicians were coding secret messages to the devil in their albums. Dutifully, the boys in the group pledged to offer their AC/DC and Led Zeppelin records for burning. When Jason heard that Lara needed to take some records to be destroyed at a camp activity, he never allowed her to go back.

  But the song she’d just heard on that album did contain a recorded message that could only be heard when the album was played in reverse. Yet Lara had played that song hundreds of times and knew the sound had never been there before. And even if Tending had used it, backmasking was pressed into the vinyl and couldn’t just disappear as that song had.

  No, the song had been a message for her.

  One of the two restaurants serving dinner until eleven, Delilah’s was busy. Lara perched herself on a pleather barstool near the door. Soon she was swirling a glass of Chardonnay the color of concentrated piss. It was some tart, shitty vintage, “fruit forward” they called it, probably from a box in Delilah’s giant fridge that would give her a headache in a few hours. Rubbing her neck, she thought a good night’s sleep was soon in order.

  “Poor girl. Didn’t anyone warn you. The wine here is awful.”

  Lara smiled at the sound of his voice, a hint of his deep Virginian Southern drawl coming through in the word wine. She turned to face Ben Archer. “What are you having, then?”

  “Well, certainly not the wine.” Rolling up the sleeves on his crisp white dress shirt, he scanned the menu.

  “How on earth do you fold those?” She reached over and tugged at one. “They’re like plaster slabs. Can I hang them in my house?”

  “Oh, shut up,” he said, smirking. Unbuttoning the other cuff, he struggled as the fabric crunched. “It’s heavy starch, I’ll have you know, the Southern gentleman’s wardrobe staple.” He laughed, satisfied with the length of the sleeve.

  “Where’s the uniform?”

  “I’ve got court this week.” Next he began to tug at his necktie, twisting in an attempt to free himself.

  Lara recognized the striped blue silk tie as one of his recent birthday gifts. Two weeks ago he’d turned forty—a cause for much celebration by everyone but him. There had been a party, an awkward affair with people from the courthouse and others who knew him casually. At his party, Ben had been gracious, but he seemed like he was dying to leave before the cake was wheeled out. His secretary (yes, they still called her that) had been the one to spot Ben’s driver’s license and notice the milestone date, which had led to a phone tree (they still had those, too). Since he was also newly divorced, his party had been filled with widows and divorcées who’d brought presents with them—house plants, beer mugs, golf balls (even though Ben wore a police uniform most days and never golfed), as well as neckties in every hue of blue.

  She pushed her wine away and turned her stool toward him. “You don’t have to wear them all, you know.” She kept her hands on her glass, but the desire to touch the tie to feel the quality of silk under her fingers was strong.

  “The hell I don’t.” He leaned in, and she felt his breath on her neck. “They watch.”

  Lara snorted and wine came out her nose. He wasn’t wrong. As if on cue, Del—Delilah’s owner, who was serving as bartender—put her hand on her hip. “Nice tie, Ben. Who got you that one?”

  “Pepper Maguire, I do believe.”

  They’d have been better off tucked away in a quiet booth, but they always sat at the bar. She had never been self-conscious about their friendship, until recently. Lately Lara had noticed people glancing up over their salads or craning their necks to get a glimpse of them together. She wondered if they’d been doing that for months and she just never paid attention.

  At a nearby booth, Lara could see Kim Landau, the Kerrigan Falls Express reporter, watching them. She and Ben avoided each other in that charged way that people who’d accidentally slept together then regretted it later did. “I saw Marla earlier today.”

  “And how is my former half doing?” Ben glanced up as Del slid his usual drink, a Jameson straight, in front of him.

  “She was picking up a photo at Gaston Boucher’s.”

  “Well, he does do all of her framing.” Ben took a sip of his drink. “And not at a discount, either, might I add.” He shook his head. “She has a framing habit.”

  “She is a photographer.”

  “Well, wedding photography isn’t that lucrative.”

  “I hired the other photographer in town,” said Lara, considering what he’d said. “It was an early night for him.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Ben glance over at her, not sure what to make of her comment. She laughed, so that he’d know she was joking at her own expense. “The bastard charged me for the full booking anyway.”

  “You’d have thought he’d have given you fifty percent off.” He flashed her a smile, and it was as if everything came into focus. His tousled brown hair had gray flecks that had become more pronounced in the time she’d known him.

  She took a too-big sip of her wine and watched Ben talk. He was boyish with soft blue eyes—you could almost picture his sixth-grade photo. In fact, there were youthful versions of Ben in photos all around Delilah’s. The walls were decorated with local photos from the town’s past, grainy 1970s snaps, sharp black-and-whites where people dressed too formally and posed in awkward clumps. Near the wooden hostess station, there was a photo of a young Ben Archer from the 1982 Kerrigan Falls High baseball team lineup, kneeling and holding his glove in his lap.

  Since Todd’s disappearance, Ben Archer had been her lifeline to any details on Wickelow Bend or the case. In the weeks after the non-wedding, the mere sight of Ben Archer in her driveway had made her pulse quicken—hoping some thread of evidence of Todd’s whereabouts would come to light. They worked together to formulate new and wild theories about the disappearance, often talking well into the night.

  His apartment was only five houses from Lara’s Victorian. Often they both worked late and then hit Delilah’s for a few drinks. After missing each other or arriving just as the other was leaving, a few months ago, they began making plans to show up at the same time. Now their dinners had become a habit.

  Del interrupted again and launched into a description of the special: Southern mac and cheese casserole with ham and shrimp.

  After they’d ordered, Lara leaned in conspiratorially. “You never told me about the funeral.”

  Over the weekend, Ben had gone to his college roommate’s funeral in Charlottesville. The roommate, Walker, had only learned he’d had stage four pancreatic cancer two weeks ago.

  “Well, it was a keen reminder of my mortality.” He hesitated. “His wife propositioned me at the luncheon.”

  Lara’s eyes went wide. “No!”

  “She did.” He nodded shyly. It was rare that he was divulging something like this to Lara.

  “How?”

  “How?” He looked perplexed and his eyebrow raised.

  “I mean, did she let her hand wander while trying to secure
a cucumber sandwich?”

  He shook his head and took a sip of his Jameson, wincing as it went down. “No. She put her hand on my ass.”

  Lara doubled over laughing. “Ewww, her husband was just buried.”

  “I know,” he said gravely.

  “So?” Lara pressed. “What did you do?”

  “Oh, nothing.” He shrugged a little too vaguely for Lara’s liking.

  As the conversation went on, he continued to gloss over the details of what had actually happened after the wake. That he’d slept with the widow was a real possibility. As their mac and cheese arrived, Lara had begun to care about this detail—it needled at her—and the vexation surprised her.

  Over the hour that followed, Lara found herself noticing things about Ben Archer that she’d never paid attention to in the nine months that she’d known him well. There was a growing energy she felt, like the first flicker in a tinder nest. For the first time, she hadn’t asked him for news on Todd. To her surprise, she was living in this moment. It was so unexpected that it only made the attraction she was feeling more interesting.

  Well, that and the wine.

  They traded favorite Hitchcock films (hers North by Northwest, his Vertigo), favorite James Bond films (his Dr. No and hers a tie between Diamonds Are Forever and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—to which he claimed there could be no tie for a favorite James Bond film, so she hesitantly chose Diamonds). He challenged her to recite the fifty states in alphabetical order (a rare skill she possessed from the song “Fifty Nifty United States”) and wrote out each of them on a napkin, insisting she’d missed one. (She hadn’t.)

  As the evening wore on, Lara found that she cared about his answers to these mundane questions. With all these details, she was connecting the dots that formed Ben Archer. Stories he’d told her in passing—usually when she was crying and blubbering on about Todd—came flooding back to her as patchy memories. In her head she tried to reassemble them, because they mattered now. What had he told her about his first girlfriend? Where had he proposed to Marla? As she watched him talk, she strained to recall every detail from seeing Marla earlier today and wondering how she measured up to his rather stunning ex-wife. She racked her brain to remember their every conversation. In the early days, she cared less about his stories and more about how they related to Todd. But tonight, over dinner, their relationship began to shift. And she’d allowed herself this change.