Dark Horse by Tami Hoag Page B

like we should sign a contract,” I said, shaking her hand.
    “Technically, we should. But I trust you.”
    “Why would you trust me?”
    I had the feeling she had an answer, but that she thought it might be too much for me to comprehend and so thought better of sharing it with me. I began to wonder if she was really from this planet.
    “Just because,” she said. A child’s pat answer to people who aren’t really paying attention. I let it go.
    “I’ll need some information from you. A photograph of Erin, her address, make and model of her car, that sort of thing.”
    As I was asking, she bent down, unzipped a compartment of her book bag, and withdrew a manila envelope, which she handed to me. “You’ll find everything in there.”
    “Of course.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. “And when you went to the sheriff’s department, who did you speak with?”
    “Detective Landry. Do you know him?”
    “I know who he is.”
    “He was very rude and condescending.”
    “So was I.”
    “You weren’t condescending.”
    A black Jag backed out of the Seabright garage, a suit at the wheel. Bruce Seabright, I assumed. He turned away from us and drove down the street.
    “Is your mother home?” I asked. “I’ll need to speak with her.”
    The prospect didn’t thrill her. She looked a little nauseated. “She goes to work at nine. She’s a real estate agent.”
    “I’ll have to speak with her, Molly. And with your stepfather, too. I’ll leave you out of it. I’ll tell them I’m an insurance investigator.”
    She nodded, still looking grim.
    “You should leave for school now. I don’t want to be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
    “No,” she said, heading back toward the house, head up, her little book case rattling along on the sidewalk behind her. We should all have so much character.
     
    K rystal Seabright was on a cordless phone when Molly and I walked into the house. She was leaning over a hall table, peering into an ornate rococo mirror, trying to stick down a false eyelash with a long pink fingernail while she chattered to someone about an absolutely fabulous town house in Sag Harbor Court. No one would have picked her out of a lineup as Molly’s mother. Having met Molly first, I might have pictured her mother as a buttoned-up attorney or a doctor or a nuclear physicist. I might have, except that I knew firsthand children and parents didn’t always match.
    Krystal was a bottle blonde who’d used one too many bottles in her thirty-some years. Her hair was nearly white and looked as fragile as cotton candy. She wore just a little too much makeup. Her pink suit was a little too tight and a little too bright, her sandals a little too tall in the spike heel. She glanced at us out of the corner of her eye.
    “. . . I can fax you all the details as soon as I get to my office, Joan. But you really need to see it to appreciate it. Places like this just aren’t available now during the season. You’re so lucky this just came up.”
    She turned away from the mirror and looked at me, then at Molly with a
what now?
expression, but continued her conversation with the invisible Joan, setting up an appointment at eleven, scribbling it into a messy daybook. Finally she set the phone aside.
    “Molly? What’s going on?” she asked, looking at me, not her daughter.
    “This is Ms. Estes,” Molly said. “She’s an investigator.”
    Krystal looked at me like I might have beamed down from Mars. “A what?”
    “She wants to talk to you about Erin.”
    Fury swept up Krystal’s face like a flash fire burning into the roots of her hair. “Oh, for God’s sake, Molly! I can’t believe you did this! What is the matter with you?”
    The hurt in Molly’s eyes was sharp enough that I felt it myself.
    “I told you something bad’s happened,” Molly insisted.
    “I can’t believe you do these things!” Krystal ranted, her frustration with her younger daughter clearly nothing new.