Ashes to Ashes

spending his trust fund on horses and mad flings with pretty young men from Sweden and Germany. We had been friends, Sean always telling me I needed him to be my surrogate sense of humor and fashion.

Our families lived a couple of mansions down from one another on the Lake Worth side of the narrow island, Sean's father a real estate magnate, mine an attorney to the wealthiest crooks in south Florida. The slumlord and the shyster, each of them sire to ungrateful offspring. Sean and I had bonded in parental disdain and our love for horses. Wild child times two.

All that had seemed so long ago as to be a dream I could barely remember. So much had happened since. I had left Palm Beach, left that world. I had metaphorically lived and died in another life. Then I answered that ad: GROOM WANTED.

I didn't get the job. As bad a shape as I was in, even I could see the pity in his eyes when we met for drinks at The Players. I was a dark shadow of the girl Sean had known twenty years past, so pathetic I didn't have the pride to fake mental health. I guess that might have been rock bottom. I might have gone home that night to the apartment I was renting and tried to find that boning knife.

Instead, Sean took me in like a stray cat—a recurring theme in my life. He put me in his guest house and asked that I work a couple of his horses for the winter season. He claimed he needed the help. His ex-trainer/ex- lover had run off to Holland with his groom and left him in the lurch. He made it sound like he was giving me a job. What he was giving me was a stay of execution.

Three months had passed. I was still fantasizing about suicide, and every evening I took a bottle of Vicodin out of my nightstand, emptied out the pills, and looked at them and counted them and thought how one pill would ease the physical pain that had been with me every day since “the incident,” as my attorney called it. (How sterile and neat that sounded. A small segment of unpleasantness that could be snipped from the fabric of life and isolated. How in contrast to my memories.) One pill could ease the pain. Thirty could end it. I had a stockpile of three hundred and sixty pills.

Every evening I looked at those pills, then put them back in the bottle and put the bottle away. I had never taken one. My evening ritual.

My daily ritual for the past three months was the routine of Sean's barn and time spent with his horses. I found both rituals comforting, but for very different reasons. The pills were a connection to death, and every night I didn't take them was a victory. The horses were a connection to life, and every hour spent with them was a reprieve.

Early on in my life I came to the conclusion that my spirituality was something uniquely and privately my own, something I could find only deep within a small quiet space in the very center of my being. Some people find that place through meditation or yoga or prayer. I find that place within me when I am on a horse. My Zen religion: the equestrian art of dressage.

Dressage is a discipline born on the battlefield in ancient times. Warhorses were trained in precision movements to aid their masters in battle, not only to evade enemies, but to attack them. Over the centuries the training went from the battlefield to the showring, and dressage evolved into something like equine ballet.

To the untrained eye it appears graceful and elegant and effortless. A skilled rider seems to be so quiet, so motionless as to virtually blend into the background. In reality, the sport is physically and mentally demanding on both horse and rider. Complex and complicated. The rider must be attuned to the horse's every football, to the balance of every inch of the horse's body. The slightest shift of the rider's weight, the smallest movement of a hand, the lightest tensing of a calf muscle will affect the quality of the performance. Focus must be absolute. Everything else becomes insignificant.

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.”