We kept walking. The heat grew worse, the insects louder. It was true that Frank knew horses, but it had been a while. And he hadn’t known this horse at all. Johnny had handed him the reins anyway. The irony being the ride was almost over, the hard part done. Four kilometers to the stables. Just this gentle slope, barely a slope at all. They remounted . . . Frank struggled with the stallion . . . It wanted to run . . . That’s how it had seemed to Johnny then, watching from behind . . . That’s how he described it . . . Frank taking the horse to a cantor, reining him back just past the bend at the bottom of the hill, holding off the gallop . . . The cluster of oaks looming at the bend . . . a small stone building . . . a line of cypress hedging the dirt road, winding through the yellow fields toward the stables.

We stood under an oak.

“It spooked,” Johnny said. “That’s the way it looked . . . or maybe, I don’t know, the horse wanted water . . .”

There was a trough by the building. Maybe that was it. Or there’d been something unexpected on the path, right here, slithering across the gravel.

The stallion had reared. At the edge of the path stood a live oak, a majestic tree whose branches spread over the trail. One of these branches caught Frank in the back, and Frank side-wheeled over the stallion, head down, his foot caught in the stirrup. The stallion went wild, trying to shake the man loose. He dragged Frank around the corner, kicking and trampling, until finally the body fell free. The horse ran all the way back to the stables.

The Italians watched me as if they expected me to weep, but I was numb. The policeman knelt in the dust. There were hoof marks, footprints, tire tracks. He stared up at the tree, walked to the trough, to the edge of the field. If he had doubts, he didn’t say anything. His department was small, just an outpost. His job was to file an accident report.

There’d been men in the field nearby, two of them, Algerians, and the officer had talked to them the day before.

Migrant workers—illegals.

Who were already gone, no doubt. Who could not afford entanglement with the law. This would cause problems later, when Johnny’s story fell into doubt: suggestions the Algerians had been not field hands but accomplices. That the death had not been accidental but that Frank had been attacked and beaten, trampled after the fact, his corpse dragged through the dirt. Just as there were rumors that Isabella had not died from slipping on the tile but had been knocked about, her head smashed against the sink.