He looked away from me, trying to decide how to play this. Respond with the truth, with outrage, stick with denial, stay calm? He had chosen the latter tack to start, but my bluntness was beginning to irritate him.
"I'm not sure who you are, ma'am," he said, still trying to hang on to the false good humor, "but you're crazy."
I found a dry patch along the front fender of the pickup, leaned back against it, and crossed my arms. "Who'd she dump you for, Chad? An older man? Her boss, maybe?"
"I don't know who Erin is seeing," he said curtly. "And I don't care."
He dumped the wash water on the driveway and carried the bucket into the garage. I followed.
"Okay. Maybe I'm way off base. Maybe the fight was about something else altogether," I offered. "If that hangover you had this morning is anything to go by, you're a guy who likes to party. From what I've heard, Erin might like a wild time. And there she is at the equestrian center, a whole new world of drug dealers and users. Maybe that's what you fought about in Eva Rosen's driveway: drugs."
Chad slammed the bucket onto a shelf where car care products were arranged like a display at Pep Boys. "You're way out of line, lady."
"She try to cut you out of a deal, Chad? Is that why you came back later and keyed her car?"
"What's with you?" he demanded. "Why are you here? Do you have a warrant or something?"
I was standing too close to him. He wanted to back away. "I don't need a warrant, Chad," I said quietly, my eyes steady on his. "I'm not that kind of a cop."
He didn't know quite what that meant, but it made him nervous. He put his hands on his hips, shuffled his feet, crossed his arms over his chest, looked out at the street.
"Where's Erin?" I asked.
"I told you, I don't know. I haven't seen her."
"Since when? Since Friday? The night you fought with her? The night you keyed her car?"
"I don't know anything about that. Talk to that fat cow she works with," he said. "Jill Moron. She's nuts. Ask her where Erin is. She probably killed her and ate her."
"How do you know Jill Morone?" I asked. "How would you know anything about the people Erin works with if you haven't been in touch with Erin?"
He went still and looked out the door.
Gotcha. It was nice to know I still had the touch.
"What did you fight about Friday night, Chad?" I asked again, then waited patiently while he struggled to decide on an answer.
"I dumped her," he said, turning toward the shelves again. He selected a white cotton towel from a stack of white cotton towels, all neatly folded. "I don't need the trouble."
"Uh-huh. Bullshit. You don't dump a girl, then come back and key her car. There's no point if you're not the dumpee."
"I didn't key her car!"
"I don't believe you."
"Well, that's your problem, not mine."
"I don't see you dumping her, Chad. Erin might have been off the hook with Krystal and Bruce because she moved out, but you could still pull your old man's chain by staying involved with her."
"You don't know anything about my family."
"Don't I?" I looked around the garage with its place for everything and everything in its place. "Your old man is a tight-ass control freak. His way is the only way. His opinion is the only opinion. Everyone else in the house is there to serve his needs and validate his superiority. How am I doing so far?"
Chad went to his truck in a huff and started trying to towel off the water spots that had already dried on the finish.
"He'll ride you if you don't get those spots out, won't he, Chad?" I said, following him around the truck. "Can't have spots on the cars. What would the neighbors think? And imagine if they found out about you and Erin. What a disgrace, doing it with your stepsister. It's practically incest. You really found Dad's hot button, didn't you?"
"Lady, you're pissing me off."
I didn't tell him that was the idea. I followed him around the hood to the other side of the truck. "Tell me what I want to know and I'll leave."
"There's nothing to tell. I don't know where Erin is, and I don't give a shit."
"I bet you'll give a shit when you've got a cop tailing you. Because maybe there's a drug angle to Erin's disappearance. I can tell you from experience, there are few things a narc likes better than getting his hooks into a kid with money and connections. And how about when your father gets questioned about your involvement? I guess you might enjoy that-"
He turned on me, hands up, as if I was holding him at gunpoint. "All right! All right. Jesus, you're something, lady," he said, shaking his head.
I waited.
"All right," he said again, letting out a sigh. "Erin and I used to be together. I thought it meant something, but it didn't mean anything to her. She dumped me. That's it. That's the whole story. There's nothing to do with drugs or deals or anything else. That's it. She dumped me."
He shrugged and his arms fell back to his sides, limp, the admission taking all the starch out of him. The male ego is a fragile thing at seventeen or seventy.
"Did she give you a reason?" I asked quietly. "I wouldn't ask," I added as his tension level came back up. "But something has happened where Erin was working, and now she's nowhere to be found."
"Is she in trouble?"
"I don't know."
He thought about that for a minute. "She said there was someone else. 'A man,' she said. Like I'm twelve or something." He shook his head in disgust.
"Did she say who?"
"I didn't ask. I mean, why should I care? I know she had a thing for her boss, but he's like fifty or something…"
"Did she tell you she was going anywhere? Did she say anything about changing jobs or moving?"
He shook his head.
"She never said anything about going to Ocala?"
"Ocala? Why would she go there?"
"Her boss says she quit her job and moved to Ocala to take another."
"That's news to me," he said. "No. She wouldn't do that. It doesn't make any sense."
"Thanks for the info." I pulled a card from my pocket, my phone number scribbled on it. "If you hear from her, would you call this number and leave a message?"
Chad took the card and stared at it.
I went back to my car and sat at the end of the Seabright driveway for a moment. I looked around the neighborhood. Quiet, lovely, expensive; golfers lining up a tee shot beyond the backyard. The American dream.
I thought about the Seabrights. Well-off, successful; neurotic, contentious, seething with secret resentments. The American dream in a fun house mirror.
I parked on the street in front of the school, the soccer moms and me. I would have felt less out of place in a chorus line. Kids began to pour out the doors and head for the buses or the car-pool line.
There was no sign of Krystal Seabright, not that I had expected to see her. It seemed quite clear to me that Molly was just a small person who happened to live in the same house as Krystal. Molly had turned out the way she had turned out by luck or self-preservation or watching A amp;E. She had probably watched all the drama and rebellion and parental conflict of Erin's life, and consciously turned in the other direction in order to win approval.
Funny, I thought, Molly Seabright was probably exactly who my little sister would have been, had I had a little sister. My parents had adopted me and called it quits. I was more than enough to handle. Too bad for them. The child learning from my mistakes might have been exactly the daughter they had wanted in the first place.