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toward her savior, begging for a scratch under the chin. “Story is he bit through the cord on a box fan hanging in his stall and fried himself.”
    The mare stepped closer and put her head over the fence. I scratched her neck absently, keeping my attention on Dean Soren. “What do you think?”
    He touched the mare’s head with a gnarled old hand, as gentle as if he were touching a child.
    “I think old Stellar had more heart than talent.”
    “Do you think Jade killed him?”
    “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “It only matters what someone can prove.” He looked at me with those eyes that had seen—and could see—so much about me. “What does your friend’s friend have to say about it?”
    “Nothing,” I said, feeling sick in my stomach. “She seems to be missing.”
     
    O n Monday morning Don Jade’s groom, Erin Seabright, was to have picked up her little sister to take her to the beach. She never showed and hadn’t been in contact with her family since.
    I paced the rooms of the guest house and chewed on the ragged stub of a thumbnail. The Sheriff’s Office hadn’t been interested in the concerns of a twelve-year-old girl. It was doubtful they knew anything about or had any interest in Don Jade. Erin Seabright’s parents presumably knew nothing about Jade either, or Molly wouldn’t have been the only Seabright looking for help.
    The ten-dollar bill the girl had given me was on the small writing desk beside my laptop. Inside the folded bill was Molly’s own little homemade calling card: her name, address, and a striped cat on a mailing label; the label adhered to a little rectangle of blue poster board. She had printed her phone number neatly at the bottom of the card.
    Don Jade had been sleeping with one of his hired girls when the horse Titan had died half a decade past. I wondered if that was a habit: fucking grooms. He wouldn’t have been the first trainer with that hobby. I thought about the way Molly had avoided my eyes when she’d told me her sister didn’t have a boyfriend.
    I walked away from the desk feeling anxious and upset. I wished I’d never gone to Dr. Dean. I wished I had never learned what I’d learned about Don Jade. My life was enough of a mess without looking for trouble. My life was enough of a mess without the intrusion of Molly Seabright and her family problems. I was supposed to be sorting out the tangle of my own life, answering inner questions, finding myself—or facing the fact there was nothing worth finding.
    If I couldn’t find myself, how was I supposed to find someone else? I didn’t want to fall down this rabbit hole. My involvement with horses was supposed to be my salvation. I didn’t want it to have anything to do with people like Don Jade, people who would have a horse killed by electrocution, like Stellar, or by shoving Ping-Pong balls up its nostrils, cutting off its air supply, like Warren Calvin’s Titan.
    That was how suffocation was accomplished: Ping-Pong balls in the nostrils. My chest tightened at the dark mental image of the animal panicking, throwing itself into the walls of its stall as it desperately tried to escape its fate. I could see the eyes rolling in terror, hear the grunt as it flung itself backward and hit a wall. I could hear the animal scrambling, the terrible sound of a foreleg snapping. The nightmare seemed so real, the sounds blaring inside my mind. Nausea and weakness washed through me. My throat felt closed. I wanted to choke.
    I went outside onto the little patio, sweating, trembling. I thought I might vomit. I wondered what it said about me that in all the time I’d been a detective, I’d never gotten sick at anything I’d seen one human being do to another, but the idea of cruelty to an animal undid me.
    The evening air was fresh and cool, and slowly cleared the horrible images from my head.
    Sean had company. I could see them in the dining room, talking, laughing. Chandelier light spilled through the