Tempting the Ringmaster (11 page)

The fire had to have been an accident. Right?

Chapter Nine

It was still dark when Belle got back to the fairgrounds. The world was a purple haze lit only by the stars twinkling overhead and the floodlights that someone had moved into position around the still smoldering big top. The fire trucks had vanished along with the ambulances, and all that remained was the carnage.

It was like a war zone.

Fire and water. Soot and ash. Tattered cloth and the crumpled remains of the Gates family trailer—the side pulled open like a tin can.

The entire place smelled like burning chemicals and terror. Someone had opened up the repurposed trailer that the circus used as a schoolroom and the kids were all inside stretched out on quilts and in sleeping bags. Most of the kids were asleep, but Petra Jarvis was staring out the window. Her pale face glum and sullen; soot streaked her hair. She’d been crying.

Men and women huddled together in small bunches. They all turned to look at Belle as she passed. Their eyes were wide with fear and uncertainty. They didn’t say a single word…
Not until she passed Clown Alley and Keith Aldridge.

“What’s going to happen next, Belle girl?” the clown king asked, and there was no anger in his voice, just the pain of a man who’d seen his entire world come falling down around his ears. His normally fussy clothes had been ripped and stained in the melee, and he hadn’t bothered to change. His feet were bare and covered in mud. “What are we going to do?”

“Whatever we have to.” Belle wrapped her arms around the man, squeezing him tight. There was a moment’s pause, and then Keith was hugging her back. Tears ran down his face and fell onto her shoulder.

“We saved the trailers,” Keith finally said. “Most of them. That Gilly of
yours…” There was a short pause. “I don’t like him, much. He’s a little too respectable for my taste, but he was right about turning the hose on the trailers. When the firemen got here, they did the exact same thing.” His face paled slightly. “They told me if I hadn’t done it then the whole place might have gone up.

That was good to hear.

Belle took a deep breath, trying not to think about how bad the damage might have been if Graham hadn’t been there to help, if he hadn’t called the fire department, if he hadn’t told Keith what to do, if he hadn’t raced into the burning trailer to haul Turtle Gates from the rubble.

Then she was crying too. The two old friends stood there for a few minutes, clinging to each other in the darkness. When all the tears were done and Belle couldn’t cry anymore, she cleaned her face on the hem of her shirt and finished the short walk back to her classic silver airstream.

She’d inherited the trailer from her father and it was as much of a home as she’d ever known. When she’d been younger, she’d slept on one of the bench seats around the table. As a teenager, Barnaby had given her the bedroom and laid out his pallet on the floor.

The trailer was just a bunch of metal and plastic.

Vintage—but not in a good way—and irreplaceable.

She stripped off her clothes and climbed into the shower, intent on allowing the hot water to beat down against her skin until she felt clean again, but the scent of smoke wouldn’t wash away no matter how cold the water got. When her bones finally shrieked in tired rebellion, she hauled her freezing ass out of the shower and wrapped herself in a fluffy red towel. Wiping the condensation off the trailer’s cracked mirror, she almost didn’t recognize her own reflection.

There were dark rings under her eyes. Her hair was plastered against her skull. Her lips were blue from the cold, and her entire body was shaking. She felt small.

She stepped out of the bathroom, unsure of what to do next.

“Good to see you, finally,” Dorothy said crisply.

Belle blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected company, but she never locked the trailer’s door. Not unless they were traveling.

The older woman was seated at the trailer’s small table. She must have been waiting for a while. She’d made coffee in the old stained percolator and there were two cups waiting at her elbow. The horse mistress looked surprisingly well rested for a woman who’d been through a fire, but she’d always been resilient; a woman who’d raised four kids on the road would have to be.

“I was beginning to worry about you.” Dorothy poured the coffee. “Thought you might have drowned.”

“Not yet.” There wasn’t enough water in the world to quench the memory of fire leaping to the big top’s roof; the screams of her people as they watched their home go up in smoke. She cleared her throat. “I should put on some clothes.”

“Something comfortable,” Dorothy said. “There’s a lot of work to be done today.”

Belle shifted back and forth from foot to foot, suddenly five years old again and listening to one of Dorothy’s lectures. The older woman had been like a second mother over the years, stepping in where Barnaby couldn’t. Dorothy was the one who’d encouraged her to go to Chicago, to build her own life apart from the circus.

Belle turned and walked into her bedroom, closing the door behind her as she hurried to find something to wear.

“I’m going to make some breakfast,” Dorothy called through the shaky partition.

“Help yourself.”

The woman snorted. “I always do.”

Belle scrambled into clean underwear, jeans, and a shirt with the circus’s logo on the front. The shirt was stained, but it smelled clean, like laundry detergent and sweet hay. She stumbled back out into the body of the trailer.

Dorothy was making eggs at the three-burner stove. She was wearing a pink dress with white flowers on it. Her hair was pulled up into a tidy ponytail. She looked good. She was humming to herself quietly while she made breakfast. Happy.

Only that wasn’t possible.

Dorothy’s entire life had been spent in the circus, with her husband and her sons, there was no way she could be happy after the night’s events. It was just a brave front, put on for the benefit of the other performers.

“Sit down,” she ordered. “Drink some coffee. This’ll just be a minute.”

“Right,” Belle slid onto the bench seat and took a quick sip of coffee. Heaven. The percolator was stained by too many years of use and had a threadbare cord, but it made great freaking coffee—hot, black, and sinful—just the way she liked it. “You here to ask me what’s going to happen next?”

“I already know what’s going to happen next.” Dorothy slid the eggs onto waiting plates, next to toast, cheese, and slices of melon that Belle had stuck in the fridge two weeks earlier. It looked damn good, and when the scent hit Belle’s nose her belly began to rumble hungrily.

The horse mistress placed the two plates carefully down on the table along with clean forks and surveyed her work. “Wait a minute.” She opened a cabinet door to retrieve a bottle of hot sauce and put that on the table as well. She sat down and began to dig into her food. “Eat up, before it gets cold.”

Belle did what she was told. The food tasted better than she could have imagined. She ate an egg, a piece of toast, and all of the melon before her brain had time to catch up with her belly. “What’s going to happen?”

“You’re a good girl. You worked hard. Nobody could ask any more from you.” Dorothy dumped some hot sauce on her eggs. “Now, you’re going to do what your daddy was planning to do before he died—what he should have done years ago—you’re going to sell.”

“What?” Belle’s throat went dry. “What are you talking about?”

Barnaby Black would never have sold the circus, not for all the money in the world, not with a gun to his head. Would he?

“Your daddy had debts. I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now. Big debts. I’m surprised you’ve managed to keep us going this long.”

Belle knew all about the debts; food bills for people and animals, lot rents that had gone unpaid for years, and big gambles that had never quite paid off. She’d done her best to pay them off by selling the campground in Florida and her part of the tattoo business. What might her father have done?

“Who was he going to sell it too?” Belle asked. “Frank? Keith?”

“That clown?” Dorothy let out a loud guffaw. “He doesn’t have two fake pennies to rub together.” She shook her head. “There’s a carnival outfit in California, Fun Fair Co. or something fool like that. They’ve got teams traveling all over the place. Not much of a show—the way I hear it—but they make a lot of money on games and rides.”

“Games and rides,” Belle repeated in disbelief.

Her father had always hated the idea of circuses with games and rides. He’d always said they were for suckers and county fairs, people who couldn’t put on a decent performance to save their life. He’d always insisted that his circus was the real circus, the old fashioned circus, the only kind of circus worth having.

“Are you sure that Barnaby was going to sell?”

“He’d filled out the paperwork and everything. Fun Fair Co. is real eager to buy the place. This whole mess—the fire—doesn’t change any of that. They just want the name—Black Shadows has been around for a long while, and it’s got a good reputation—not the equipment.”

They wanted to take her circus and turn it into something else, something loud and crude, something without magic and light and the roar of the crowd…
something without clowns.

Suddenly the eggs tasted dry in her mouth. All the blood was rushing from her head. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe. The entire world felt like it was spinning upside down; first the fire and now this. Her father had been preparing to sell the circus—to sell her home—to a bunch of strangers who didn’t know its people or care about its history.

She swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“I know it’s a lot to take in and you need time to think it through
… I’ve got the paperwork already in my trailer when you’re done. Think about it, you can go back to Chicago—back to your real life—or you could even stay here. Buck Falls isn’t such a bad town. That man you’re stringing along seems like a nice fellow. I certainly wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating popcorn.”

Dorothy stood and dropped her dirty dishes in the little trailer sink. She hustled towards the door. She paused for a moment at the opening. “I’ve always thought of you as the daughter I never had—all those boys—I know you’ll do the right thing.”

The door slammed shut behind her as she left, the noise ringing in the quiet morning air.

What the heck was that supposed to mean?

Belle wasn’t hungry anymore. She didn’t have time to eat, not when the circus was still in disarray. She grabbed a gray sweatshirt from her closet and poured the rest of the coffee into a thermos. A quick chug and she was out the door, looking for something to do.

There wasn’t much. Most of her people had gone back to their trailers for a nap, fighting a fire in the middle of the night could be exhausting. Belle helped Blue fence off the last of the trailers remains and went to visit Tiny.

The elephant had been recaptured and moved back to her temporary corral. Belle didn’t know what a freaked out elephant would look like, but Tiny looked pretty much the same: big and gray, with ears. The animal gave a slight bellow and rumbled over to look for an apple. She was getting spoiled. When she couldn’t find any treats, she went back to searching for nearby trees.

There was still work to do.

Tiny needed fresh hay. Tiny always needed fresh hay. She ate like… well… an elephant.

Frank stopped by while Belle was mucking out the corral, the scent of elephant dung thick in the air. They talked for a while, and when he left, she was more confused than ever. She kept working, liberating apples from the cooking trailer and setting up the buckets to give Tiny a bath.

She was filling the buckets when Graham walked up. The police chief looked like death warmed over in black jeans, a white t-shirt, and a loosely fitting sweatshirt, but she supposed that was only to be expected.

“Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?” She asked.

“I checked myself out.”

“They let you do that?”

“Even gave me some nifty painkillers.” He grinned. “I’m going to be fine.”

That was good to hear. She turned off the hose and began to mix soap in with the water. The elephant rescue in Tennessee might not have had room for a new inmate, but the keeper there had been kind enough to send her a ten-page email on elephant care. Bath time was important. She remembered that much, and the twenty dollar an ounce elephant soap that had arrived in the mail two days ago had helped to ensure she wouldn’t forget it.

“Everything looks good around here,” Graham said.

“Liar.”

“Better than I’d expected.”

“Three families have left in the last hour. They said it was too dangerous.
They couldn’t stay here.” She soaped up a sponge and gave a whistle.

Tiny bounded over enthusiastically. At least someone was happy to see her.

“The Gates family is staying, but I guess they don’t have much of a choice. They’re calling around, trying to find a new trailer for Carter and the kids.”

Graham was nodding slowly. Had he even heard a word she was saying? People were leaving, fleeing her circus like rats fleeing a cotton candy ship. They’d stuck around for the years with her father, all the sweetness, the good times. Now that things were a little hard, they’d taken to the road.