Paris rolled her eyes. "Get on your horse, Trey."
She called to the Guatemalan man in Spanish to bring the gray horse, and the entourage began to move out of the aisle. I turned to follow. Jade was still standing there, still watching me.
"It was nice meeting you, Elle. I hope we see you around-whether V. sells you a horse or not."
"I'm sure you will. I'm intrigued now."
"Like a moth to a flame?" he said.
"Something like that."
He shook my hand, and I felt that current pass through me again.
I watched the pack of them make their way toward the schooling ring. Van Zandt walked alongside the gray, bending Hughes' ear about the jumper in Belgium. Hughes listed to one side on the horse's back. Paris glanced backward, looking for Jade to catch up.
I started the hike back to my car, wishing I had time to go home and take a shower, to wash off the taint. There was a slick oiliness to Jade's crowd that should have had a smell to it, the same way I've always believed snakes should have a smell to them. I didn't want to have anything to do with them, but the wheels were turning now. The old familiar buzz of anxious excitement in my head. Familiar, not altogether welcome.
I'd been on the sidelines a long time. I lived one day to the next, never knowing whether I would decide I'd lived one day too many. I didn't know if I had my head together enough to do this. And if I didn't, Erin Seabright's life could hang in the balance.
If Erin Seabright still had a life.
You got rid of her, Trey Hughes had said. An innocent enough statement on the face of it. A figure of speech. And from a man who didn't even know what day it was. Still, it struck a nerve.
I didn't know if I should trust my instincts, they'd been so long out of use. And look what happened the last time I trusted them, I thought. My instincts, my choice, and the consequences. All bad.
But it wouldn't be my action that did the damage this time. It would be inaction. The inaction of Erin Seabright's mother, of the Sheriff's Office.
Someone had to do something. These people Erin Seabright had known and worked for were far too dismissive when it came to the subject of her, and far too cavalier when it came to the subject of death.
6
The address Molly had given me as Erin's was a three-car garage some entrepreneurial sort had converted into rental property. Geographically, it was only a few miles from the Seabright home in Binks Forest. In every other respect it was in another world.
Rural Loxahatchee, where the side roads are dirt and the ditches never drain; where no one had ever met a building code they wouldn't ignore. A strange mix of run-down places, new middle-class homes, and small horse properties. A place where people nailed signs to tree trunks along the road advertising everything from "Make $$$ in Your Own Home" to "Puppies for Sale" to "Dirt Cheap Stump Grinding."
The property where Erin had lived was overgrown with tall pines and scrubby, stunted palm trees. The main house was a pseudo-Spanish ranch style, circa mid-seventies. The white stucco had gone gray with mildew. The yard consisted of dirty sand fill and anemic, sun-starved grass. An older maroon Honda sat off to one side on the driveway, filthy and dotted with hardened gobs of pine sap. It looked like it hadn't gone anywhere in a long while.
I went to the front door and rang the bell, hoping no one would be at home in the middle of the day. I would have been much happier letting myself into the garage-cum-guest house. I'd had enough human interaction to last me the day. I swatted a mosquito on my forearm and waited, then rang the bell a second time.
A voice like a rusty hinge called out: "I'm around the back!"
Small brown geckos darted out of my path and into the overgrown landscaping as I walked around the side of the garage. Around the back of the house was the obligatory pool. The screened cage that had been erected to keep bugs out of the patio area was shredded in sections as if by a giant paw. The door was flung wide on broken hinges.
The woman who stood in the doorway was long past the age and shape anyone would care to see her in a two-piece swimming suit, but that was what she was wearing. Flab and sagging skin hung on her bent frame like a collection of half-deflated leather balloons.
"What can I do for you, honey?" she asked. A New York transplant in giant Jackie-O sunglasses. She must have been pushing seventy, and appeared to have spent sixty-eight of those years sunbathing. Her skin was as brown and mottled as the skin of the lizards that lived in her yard. She was smoking a cigarette and had two hugely fat ginger cats on leashes. I was momentarily stunned to silence by the sight of her.
"I'm looking for my niece," I said at last. "Erin Seabright. She lives here, right?"
She nodded, dropped her cigarette butt, and ground it out with the toe of her aqua neoprene scuba diver's boot. "Erin. The pretty one. Haven't seen her for a couple of days, darling."
"No? Neither has her family. We're getting kind of worried."
The woman pursed her lips and waved my concern away. "Bah! She's probably off with the boyfriend."
"Boyfriend? We didn't know she had a boyfriend."
"What a surprise," she said sarcastically. "A teenage girl who doesn't tell her family anything. I thought they were on the outs, though. I heard them fighting out in the yard one night."
"When was that?"
"Last week. I don't know. Thursday or Friday maybe." She shrugged. "I'm retired. What do I know from days? One's the same as the next. I know I came out to walk my babies the next morning and someone had run a key down the side of Erin's car and ruined the paint. I have a gate to keep the riffraff out, if my lazy son would come and fix it. He could care if I'm raped and killed. He thinks he inherits."
She chuckled and looked down at the ginger cats, sharing a joke telepathically. One of the cats lay on its back in the dirt with its hind legs stretched out. The other pounced at her foot, ears flat.
"Bah! Cecil! Don't bite Mommy's toe!" she scolded. "I got an infection the last time. I thought I would die of it!"
She swatted at the cat and the cat swatted back, then scuttled to the end of its leash and growled. It had to weigh twenty-five pounds.
"Could I possibly take a look in her apartment?" I asked politely. "Maybe I can get an idea where she's gone. Her mother's worried sick."
She shrugged. "Sure. Why not? You're a relative."
The kind of landlady we all want. Fourth Amendment? What Fourth Amendment?
She tied the cat leashes to the handle of the broken screen door and dug in the fanny pack slung around her waist, coming out with a set of keys, a cigarette, and a hot pink Bic lighter. She fired up as we went around to the front of the garage, where two doors flanked windows that had been set into the plywood wall where the original garage doors had once been.
"When I did the guest house I had them put in two apartments," the woman confided. "One bath. You can get more rent that way. Semiprivate. Seven-fifty a month per."
Seven hundred and fifty dollars a month to live in a garage and share a bathroom with a stranger.
"I'm Eva by the way," she said, sliding her sunglasses on top of her head. "Eva Rosen."
"Ellen Stuart."
"You don't look like family," Eva said, squinting at me as we went into the apartment.
"By marriage."
The apartment was a single room with dingy vinyl flooring and an assortment of hideous thrift store furniture. An efficiency kitchen setup was tucked into one corner: a small sink full of dirty dishes crawling with ants, two burners, a microwave, and a mini-fridge. The bed was at the back, unmade.
There was no other sign anyone lived there. There were no clothes, no shoes, no personal effects of any kind.