Tightrope (Burning Cove #3)(16)

Willa folded the paper and got to her feet. The Abbotsville disaster had been the final straw for the Ramsey Circus. Already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the show had collapsed a few weeks later. It could not survive without its star attraction, the Flying Princess. In the wake of the mysterious death of the rigger, the rumors that had circulated through the circus world had crushed any hope that Amalie Vaughn could continue to perform. After Abbotsville, no aerialist would work with her.

By rights, Amalie Vaughn should have been living in some decrepit boardinghouse trying to eke out a living as a lunch-counter waitress. Like me, Willa thought. Instead, the Flying Princess was living in a posh seaside resort town and running her own business.

While I sit here drinking rotgut coffee and trying to land another job.

Willa opened her purse and took out her wallet. She had just enough money for a train ticket to Burning Cove. When you were down on your luck, you turned to family. They had to take you in.





Chapter 9


His name was Eugene Fenwick. He was sitting at a lunch counter in a farm town in California, hunched over a plate of meat loaf and lima beans, when he saw the front-page story. He lost interest in the killer robot when he got to the end of the piece and saw the name of the woman with whom he had been obsessed for months: Amalie Vaughn. The flyer who had murdered Marcus.

The Flying Princess was only about four hundred miles away, living in a fancy coastal town while he was sweating in the hot sun of the northern portion of California’s Central Valley, picking crops and doing odd jobs.

For a couple of minutes the rage threatened to overwhelm him. He almost gagged on the meat loaf. He forced himself to swallow and take a couple of deep breaths. Gradually the mad fury subsided.

He had joined a circus when he was a kid, working as a roustabout until he learned how to rig the trapeze and high wire acts. He’d considered himself a pretty good rigger until he met Marcus Harding.

Marcus had possessed an instinctive feel for calculating loads, counterbalances, and tension. He could figure out the best anchor points. He knew how to make the pretty aerialists and the handsome catchers fly and he knew how to make the high wire performers seemingly walk on air. Harding had movie-star looks and a build like Johnny Weissmuller. He had no trouble getting the beautiful flyers into bed. It was just a game to him.

But Marcus had been crazy for thrills. Crazy in other ways, as well. He’d had another name at one time and been a catcher in a trapeze act, but after he’d dropped a flyer, no one would work with him.

He had changed his name to Harding and started drifting, following the trains that took the circuses, carnivals, and aerialists to towns across the country. Like Eugene, he got by picking up rigging and roustabout work wherever he could get it.

Once, when the two of them were sharing a bottle of cheap whiskey, Marcus had confided that he’d deliberately let the pretty flyer slip out of his grasp. It had been an impulse, he said. But the look of shock on the flyer’s face as she realized she was going to fall had excited him like nothing else he’d ever experienced.

What made it even more thrilling, he said, was that he had been having an affair with her. Watching her fall had been a thousand times better than the sex.

The flyer had survived because there had been a net but Marcus told Eugene that he’d often wondered what it would be like to drop an aerialist who was working without a net. The problem was that it meant he would have to work without a net, as well. He no longer wanted to take that kind of risk.

Eugene had started to think about all the pretty flyers who had refused to sleep with him, and he, too, began to wonder what it would be like to watch one fall all the way to the ground.

He’d also started drinking, and his rigging had gotten sloppy.

One afternoon on a hot summer day in a small midwestern town, a flyer he had hung went down. She had landed safely in the net but the boss had figured out fast that she had fallen because of a failure in the rigging. Eugene and Marcus were both fired.

Broke, they had ridden the rails across the country to the West Coast where no one knew them. Throughout the journey Eugene had remembered the exhilaration that had come over him when he’d watched the flyer go down. If there had been no net, she would have died.

“She would have looked like a broken doll,” he’d said to Marcus.

Marcus had laughed. “Yeah. A broken doll.”

As the train racketed toward the West Coast they had begun to plan a new game, a way to get the thrills that were to be had watching flyers go down. They knew that they would have to be careful. Rumors and gossip traveled fast in the circus world. They had to make sure that they were never suspected of the disasters.

The new game had gone well for a while. Three flyers had fallen to their deaths and no one had ever suspected Eugene and Marcus.

Then came Abbotsville. Everything went wrong. It was Marcus who had died. The Flying Princess had lived.

Now that bitch was living in a town where Hollywood celebrities vacationed.

And here he was, stuck in Lodi.

Not for long.





Chapter 10


The muffled scream jolted Amalie out of the falling dream. Hazel’s shriek ended in an abrupt manner that was more terrifying than the fearful cry. There was a heavy thud overhead.

Amalie found herself out of bed and on her feet before she fully comprehended what had awakened her. Heart pounding, she reached into the bedside drawer and took out the pistol that she kept there.