Chapter 8

It took forty minutes, and it happened in the open, in the aisle, with the buyers still there.

Addie didn't clear the barn. That was the part Hollis would never forget. She could have taken it into the office and closed the door and saved the farm the embarrassment. Instead she stood at the folding table and said, loud enough for the rail, "If there's a question about identity on this consignment, it gets answered here, in front of the people buying."

Alma scanned every yearling on the sheet. All of them. One at a time, down the neck, in the stall, with the owner watching and Sonny Delacroix holding the binder open.

Lot 108 matched. Lot 111 matched. Lot 114 - the chestnut filly in Barn C - matched, and she was exactly where the sheet said she was, a small chestnut with a blaze, and the tag that had been in Hollis's pocket belonged on her halter and nowhere else.

Lot 122 matched. Bay colt, out of Sabella's Run, foaled April eleventh, attendant of record: Hollis Renn.

Then Alma turned to the last page and stopped, and Hollis saw her read it twice.

"What," Addie said.

Alma looked up. She looked at Hollis, and then at the buyers, and then she lifted the printout over her head, the way she had that morning, so the whole row could see.

"This is the mare's record," she said. "Sabella's Run. Microchip, breeding dates, foaling date. And on the foaling page, there are two names."

Hollis felt his chest go tight.

"Attendant of record," Alma said. "Hollis Renn. And under that, in the transfer box, dated the same night - a request to update the record. Requested by D. Coyle, three weeks ago. Reason given: correction of attendant."

Nobody moved.

"There's no correction," Alma said. "There was nothing wrong with the record. It was accurate from the night the foal was born. Somebody changed it three weeks ago so the farm's own file would no longer show who was in that stall."

Addie Marchetti turned to Coyle.

"Why would you do that?" she asked.

Coyle had his folder against his chest. He looked at the buyers. He looked at the deputy. He looked at Hollis, and for one second his face did something Hollis had never seen it do - it went young. Scared. The face of a man doing arithmetic he couldn't win.

"Because the colt's a forty-thousand-dollar horse," Coyle said, and his voice cracked on the number. "And the mare's papers are worth four hundred thousand. And I owe a man in Ocala money I can't pay, and I thought -"

He stopped.

"You thought you'd sell the wrong horse under the right papers," Addie said. "And when Hollis walked in on you at the board, you needed him gone."

Coyle didn't answer. That was the answer.

Ellis Boatwright stepped forward and said, "Mr. Coyle, I'd like you to come with me," and Devin Coyle looked at Addie once more, and she looked back at him with no expression at all, and he walked out of the barn between the deputy and the doors, past forty buyers and a rail full of yearlings, and nobody said a word until the gravel stopped crunching under his boots.

Then Addie Marchetti turned around, and she looked at Hollis Renn, and her eyes were wet.