Dark Horse Read online

  Riding was my refuge as a teenager, when I felt I had little control over any other aspect of my life. It was my stress release when I had a career. It had become my salvation when I had nothing else. On the back of a horse I felt whole, complete, connected to that vital place in the very center of me that had otherwise closed itself off, and the chaos within me found balance.

  D’Artagnon and I moved across the sand arena through the last wisps of the morning ground fog, the horse’s muscles bulging and rolling, his hooves striking the ground in perfect metronome rhythm. I massaged the left rein, sat into his back, tightened my calves around him. The energy moved from his hindquarters, over his back; his neck rounded and his knees came up into the stylized, slow-motion trot called passage. He seemed almost to float beneath me, to bounce like a huge, soft ball. I felt he might take wing if only I knew the one secret word to whisper to him.

  We halted in the center of the ring at the place known as X. In that moment I felt joy and peace.

  I dropped the reins on his neck and patted him. He lowered his head and started to walk forward, then stopped and came to attention.

  A girl sat on the white board fence that ran along the road. She watched me with a sense of expectation about her. Even though I hadn’t noticed her, I could tell she’d been there, waiting. I judged her to be about twelve. Her hair was long and brown, perfectly straight, and neatly held back from her face with a barrette on each side. She wore little round black-rimmed glasses that made her look very serious. I rode toward her with a vague feeling of apprehension that made no sense at the time.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. D’Ar blew through his nostrils at her, ready to bolt and save us from the intruder. I should have let him.

  “I’m here to see Ms. Estes,” she said properly, as if she’d come on business.

  “Elena Estes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are . . . ?”

  “Molly Seabright.”

  “Well, Molly Seabright, Ms. Estes isn’t here at the moment.”

  “You’re Ms. Estes,” she declared. “I recognize your horse. His name is D’Artagnon, like in the Three Musketeers.” She narrowed her eyes. “You cut your hair.” Disapproval.

  “Do I know you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know me?” I asked, the apprehension rising up like bile through my chest to the base of my throat. Maybe she was a relative of Hector Ramirez, come to tell me she hated me. Maybe she’d been sent as a decoy by an older relative who would now pop out of nowhere to shoot me or scream at me or throw acid in my face.

  “From Sidelines,” she said.

  I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play. Molly Seabright took pity on me and carefully climbed down from the fence. She was slightly built and dressed neatly in sensible dark slacks and a little blue T-shirt with a small daisy chain embroidered around the throat. She came up along D’Artagnon’s shoulder and carefully held the magazine out to me, folded open to an interior page.

  The photograph was in color. Me on D’Ar, riding through thin ribbons of early-morning fog. The sunlight made his coat shine as bright as a new penny. My hair was pulled back in a thick ponytail.

  I had no memory of being photographed. I had certainly never been interviewed, though the writer seemed to know things about me I didn’t know myself. The caption read: Private investigator Elena Estes enjoys an early-morning ride on D’Artagnon at Sean Avadon’s Avadonis Farm in Palm Beach Point Estates.

  “I’ve come to hire you,” Molly Seabright said.

  I turned toward the barn and called for Irina, the stunning Russian girl who had beat me out for the groom’s job. She came out, frowning and sulky. I stepped down off D’Artagnon and asked her to please take him back to the barn. She took his reins, and sighed and pouted and slouched away like a sullen runway model.

  I ran a gloved hand back through my hair, startled to come to the end of it so quickly. A fist of tension began to quiver in my stomach.

  “My sister is missing,” Molly Seabright said. “I’ve come to hire you to find her.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not a private investigator. This is some kind of mistake.”

  “Why does the magazine say that you are?” she asked, looking stern and disapproving again. She didn’t trust me. I’d already lied to her once.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have money,” she said defensively. “Just because I’m twelve doesn’t mean I can’t hire you.”

  “You can’t hire me because I’m not a private investigator.”

  “Then what are you?” she demanded.

  A broken-down, busted-out, pathetic ex–sheriff’s detective. I’d thumbed my nose at the life I’d been raised in, been ostracized from the life I’d chosen. What did that make me?

  “Nothing,” I said, handing the magazine back to her. She didn’t take it.

  I walked away to an ornate park bench that sat along the end of the arena and took a long drink from the bottle of water I’d left there.

  “I have a hundred dollars with me,” the girl said. “For a deposit. I expect you have a daily fee and that you probably charge expenses. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  Sean emerged from the end of the stable, squinting into the distance, showing his profile. He stood with one booted leg cocked and pulled a pair of deerskin gloves from the waist of his brown breeches. Handsome and fit. A perfect ad for Ralph Lauren.

  I headed across the arena, anger boiling now in my stomach. Anger, and underlying it a building sense of panic.

  “What the fuck is this?” I shouted, smacking him in the chest with the magazine.

  He took a step back, looking offended. “It might be Sidelines, but I can’t read with my nipples, so I can’t say for certain. Jesus Christ, El. What did you do to your hair?”

  I hit him again, harder, wanting to hurt him. He grabbed the magazine away from me, took another quick step out of range, and turned to the cover. “Betsy Steiner’s stallion, Hilltop Giotto. Have you seen him? He’s to die for.”

  “You told a reporter I’m a private investigator.”

  “They asked me who you were. I had to tell them something.”

  “No, you didn’t have to. You didn’t have to tell them anything.”

  “It’s only Sidelines. For Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s my name in a goddam magazine read by thousands of people. Thousands of people now know where to find me. Why don’t you just paint a big target on my chest?”

  He frowned. “Only dressage people read the dressage section. And then only to see if their own names are in the show results.”

  “Thousands of people now think I’m a private investigator.”

  “What was I supposed to tell them? The truth?” Said as if that were the most distasteful option. Then I realized it probably was.

  “How about ‘no comment’?”

  “That’s not very interesting.”

  I pointed at Molly Seabright. “That little girl has come here to hire me. She thinks I can help her find her sister.”

  “Maybe you can.”

  I refused to state the obvious: that I couldn’t even help myself.

  Sean lifted a shoulder with lazy indifference and handed the magazine back to me. “What else have you got to do with your time?”

  Irina emerged from the barn, leading Oliver—tall, elegant, and beautiful, the equine version of Sean. Sean dismissed me and went to his teak mounting block.

  Molly Seabright was sitting on the park bench with her hands folded in her lap. I turned and walked to the barn, hoping she would just go away. D’Artagnon’s bridle hung from the ceiling on a four-pronged hook near an antique mahogany cabinet full of leather-cleaning supplies. I chose a small damp sponge from the work table, rubbed it over a bar of glycerine soap, and began to clean the bridle, trying to narrow the focus of my mind on the small motor skills involved in the task.

  “You’re very rude.”

  I coul
d see her from the corner of my eye: standing as tall as she could—five-feet-nothing—her mouth a tight little knot.

  “Yes, I am. That’s part of the joy of being me: I don’t care.”

  “You’re not going to help me.”

  “I can’t. I’m not what you need. If your sister is missing, your parents should go to the cops.”

  “I went to the Sheriff’s Office. They wouldn’t help me either.”

  “You went? What about your parents? They don’t care your sister is missing?”

  For the first time Molly Seabright seemed to hesitate. “It’s complicated.”

  “What’s complicated about it? She’s either missing or she’s not.”

  “Erin doesn’t live with us.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen. She doesn’t get along with our parents.”

  “There’s something new.”

  “It’s not like she’s bad or anything,” Molly said defensively. “She doesn’t do drugs or anything like that. It’s just that she has her own opinions, that’s all. And her opinions aren’t Bruce’s opinions . . .”

  “Who’s Bruce?”

  “Our stepfather. Mom always sides with him, no matter how asinine he is. It makes Erin angry, so she moved out.”

  “So Erin is technically an adult, living on her own, free to do whatever she wants,” I said. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  Molly shook her head, but avoided my eyes. She wasn’t so sure of that answer, or she thought a lie might better serve her cause.

  “What makes you think she’s missing?”

  “She was supposed to pick me up Monday morning. That’s her day off. She’s a groom at the show grounds for Don Jade. He trains jumpers. I didn’t have school. We were going to go to the beach, but she never came or called me. I called her and left a message on her cell phone, and she never called me back.”

  “She’s probably busy,” I said, stroking the sponge down a length of rein. “Grooms work hard.”

  Even as I said it I could see Irina sitting on the mounting block, face turned to the sun as she blew a lazy stream of cigarette smoke at the sky. Most grooms.

  “She would have called me,” Molly insisted. “I went to the show grounds myself the next day—yesterday. A man at Don Jade’s barn told me Erin doesn’t work there anymore.”

  Grooms quit. Grooms get fired. Grooms decide one day to become florists and decide the next day they’d rather be brain surgeons. On the flip side, there are trainers with reputations as slave masters, temperamental prima donnas who go through grooms like disposable razors. I’ve known trainers who demanded a groom sleep every night in a stall with a psychotic stallion, valuing the horse far more than the person. I’ve known trainers who fired five grooms in a week.

  Erin Seabright was, by the sound of it, headstrong and argumentative, maybe with an eye for the guys. She was eighteen and tasting independence for the first time. . . . And why I was even thinking this through was beyond me. Habit, maybe. Once a cop . . . But I hadn’t been a cop for two years, and I would never be a cop again.

  “Sounds to me like Erin has a life of her own. Maybe she just doesn’t have time for a kid sister right now.”

  Molly Seabright’s expression darkened. “I told you Erin’s not like that. She wouldn’t just leave.”

  “She left home.”

  “But she didn’t leave me. She wouldn’t.”

  Finally she sounded like a child instead of a forty-nine-year-old CPA. An uncertain, frightened little girl. Looking to me for help.

  “People change. People grow up,” I said bluntly, taking the bridle down from the hook. “Maybe it’s your turn.”

  The words hit their mark like bullets. Tears rose behind the Harry Potter glasses. I didn’t allow myself to feel guilt or pity. I didn’t want a job or a client. I didn’t want people coming into my life with expectations.

  “I thought you would be different,” she said.

  “Why would you think that?”

  She glanced over at the magazine lying on the shelf with the cleaning supplies, D’Artagnon and I floating across the page like something from a dream. But she said nothing. If she had an explanation for her belief, she thought better of sharing it with me.

  “I’m nobody’s hero, Molly. I’m sorry you got that impression. I’m sure if your parents aren’t worried about your sister, and the cops aren’t worried about your sister, then there’s nothing to be worried about. You don’t need me, and believe me, you’d be sorry if you did.”

  She didn’t look at me. She stood there for a moment, composing herself, then pulled a small red wallet from the carrying pouch strapped around her waist. She took out a ten-dollar bill and placed it on the magazine.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said politely, then turned and walked away.

  I didn’t chase after her. I didn’t try to give her her ten dollars back. I watched her walk away and thought she was more of an adult than I was.

  Irina appeared in my peripheral vision, propping herself against the archway as if she hadn’t the strength to stand on her own. “You want I should saddle Feliki?”

  Erin Seabright had probably quit her job. She was probably in the Keys right now enjoying her newfound independence with some cute good-for-nothing. Molly didn’t want to believe that because it would mean a sea change in her relationship with the big sister she idolized. Life is full of disappointments. Molly would learn that the same way as everyone: by being let down by someone she loved and trusted.

  Irina gave a dramatic sigh.

  “Yes,” I said. “Saddle Feliki.”

  She started toward the mare’s stall, then I asked a question for which I would have been far better off not having an answer.

  “Irina, do you know anything about a jumper trainer named Don Jade?”

  “Yes,” she said casually, not even looking back at me. “He is a murderer.”

  Chapter 2

  The horse world is populated by two kinds of people: those who love horses, and those who exploit horses and the people who love them. Yin and yang. For every good thing in the world, there is something bad to counterbalance. Myself, I’ve always felt the bad far outweighs the good, that there is just enough good to buoy us and keep us from drowning in a sea of despair. But that’s just me.

  Some of the finest people I’ve known have been involved in the horse business. Caring people who would sacrifice themselves and their own comfort for the animals who relied on them. People who kept their word. People with integrity. And some of the most loathsome, hateful, twisted individuals I’ve ever known have been involved in the horse business. People who would lie, cheat, steal, and sell their own mother for a nickel if they thought it would get them ahead. People who would smile to your face, pat you on the back with one hand, and stab you in the back with the other.

  From what Irina told me, Don Jade fit into that second category.

  Sunday morning—the day before Erin Seabright didn’t show to pick up her little sister to go to the beach—a jumper in training with Don Jade had been found dead in his stall, the victim of an allegedly accidental electrocution. Only, according to gossip, there was no such thing as an accident where Don Jade was involved.

  I went online and tried to learn what I could about Jade from articles on horsesdaily.com and a couple of other equestrian sites. But I wanted the story in full, uncensored, and I knew exactly who to

  call.

  If Don Jade defined my second category of horse people, Dr. Dean Soren defined the first. I had known Dr. Dean for a lifetime. Nothing went on in the horse world Dean Soren didn’t know about. He had begun his veterinary career in the year aught on the racetrack, eventually moving on to show horses. Everyone in the business knew and respected Dr. Dean.

  He had retired from his veterinary practice several years before, and spent his days holding court in the café that was social central of the large stable he owned off Pierson. The woman who ran the café answered the phone.
I told her who I was and asked for Dr. Dean, then listened as she shouted across the room at him.

  Dr. Dean shouted back: “What the hell does she want?”

  “Tell him I need to ask him a couple of questions.”

  The woman shouted that.

  “Then she can damn well come here and ask me in person,” he shouted back. “Or is she too goddammed important to visit an old man?”