Page 42 of Tightrope

He accelerated smoothly out of a curve, enjoying the purr of the finely tuned engine.

“Even if we don’t get anything from Seymour Webster,” he said, “talking to him could be useful in other ways.”

Amalie turned her head to look at him. “How is that?”

“It’s calledstirring the pot,” he said. “Someone saw something. Someone knows something. Seymour Webster might not have anythinguseful for me, but talking to him at a place like the Carousel will get the word out that I’m willing to pay for information.”

“I guess that makes sense. Bit risky, though, isn’t it?”

“Which is why I tried to talk you out of coming with me.”

“I know. But I can’t just freeze on the platform and wait for someone to shove me over the edge.”

She hadn’t employed some random image, he thought. This was personal.

“Are you talking about Abbotsville?” he asked quietly.

“You know about that? Of course you do. You’re an investigator.”

“I know what was in the papers. I don’t know your version of events.”

She was quiet for so long he wasn’t sure she was going to respond. She did not owe him any answers, he thought. She had a right to her secrets. He was keeping a few of his own—the kind that sent most people, especially potential lovers, running for the exits.

“The police concluded that it was an accident,” she said finally. “A roustabout and a flyer got drunk and decided to play games on the trapeze. Harding used to be a catcher, you see.”

“The trapeze artist who catches the flyers?”

“Right. But I think something happened to him along the way. Maybe he lost his nerve or maybe he made flyers nervous. All I know is that he ended up out west working as a rigger, not a catcher. The Ramsey show hired him about a month before he tried to murder me. His work was good, so good that if he had succeeded in murdering me, everyone would have said my death was an accident or maybe suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“Flying can be... intoxicating,” Amalie said. “Exhilarating. There is nothing quite like it. You feel so free when you are up there, sailing through midair like a bird. They say that the sensation drives some artists to wonder what would happen if they just... let go.”

“What about the net?”

“A lot of artists refuse to use a net during a performance. The audience wants to be thrilled. The acts that sell tickets are those that don’t use a net.”

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Did you ever fly without a net?”

She smiled as if she found the question naïve. “All the time. I was the star attraction of the Ramsey Circus, the last of the Fabulous Flying Vaughns.”

He told himself this was not the right moment for a stern lecture but it was hard to resist the impulse. He longed to pull over to the side of the road and shake her.What the hell do you think you were doing working without a net?

Take it easy, Jones. She doesn’t fly anymore. She’s an innkeeper now.

“You can get killed just as easily by going down in the net, you know,” she said as if she had read his mind. “Land wrong and you’ll break your neck as surely as you will if you hit the floor.”

“You’re scaring the daylights out of me, Amalie. Let’s get back to what happened in Abbotsville.”

“There really isn’t much more to tell. I’m pretty sure Harding drugged me that night at dinner. I woke up to find the point of a knife at my throat. He put a wire necklace strung with glass beads around my throat and forced me to climb the ladder to the platform. He ordered me to grab the bar and fly. I knew he meant for me to die. I goaded him until he lost his temper and stepped out onto the platform. The moment he did that he was in my world. I was in control. I used the trapeze bar as a weapon. He went down. I didn’t.”

There was a sudden silence from the passenger seat.

She was telling the truth, Matthias thought, or, at least, the truth as she remembered it. He downshifted for an upcoming curve and tried to read the scene she had verbally painted.

“There must have been a lot of evidence,” he said. “The knife. The necklace.”

“The crime involved circus people and the circus was due to leave town the following day,” Amalie said. “The cops just wanted us gone. The press turned the whole thing into a lovers’ triangle story. Marcus Harding had been spending a lot of time with Willa Platt, the equestrienne in the show. There was speculation that I was jealous and that I had somehow persuaded Harding to climb the ladder so that I could murder him.”

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