Chapter 13: The Note She Hid

I left Declan with Ronan and walked down to the shop with the tin box under my arm, and I saw Padraig before he saw me. He was standing outside O'Rourke's with his back to the wall and a bottle of water in his hand and his coat collar up, and he had the look of a man who had driven through the night and had not yet decided whether he was awake.

"Niamh," he said, when he saw me. Then he looked at me properly and his face did the thing a good detective's face does when it is quietly taking in the evidence. "You have not slept. You have lost weight. And there is something different about you that I cannot put my finger on."

"There is a great deal different about me." I took his arm and turned him up the road. "Not here. Not on the street. Come up to the cottage."

We walked up the shore road and Padraig looked at everything, the boats and the pier and the co-op hall and the burned shell of the boathouse, and he did not ask a single question until we were inside with the door shut and the kettle on.

"Right," he said, sitting down at the table. "I have been driving since four. I got a call from a sergeant in Galway on Tuesday night who told me my former partner had been asking questions about a drowning in a village on the coast, and that she had been asking them in a way that made people nervous. And I said to him, that does not sound like a woman who has been sitting at home drinking tea, that sounds like Niamh on a case. And he said, she is not on a case, she is a bereaved sister, and I said, you do not know her. So I took two days' leave and I drove down."

"You should not have come."

"You are welcome." He looked at the tin box on the table. "What is that?"

I told him. I told him all of it, the weight and the note and the wolf on the headland and the line across the ledgers and the burned boathouse and the woman with the grey plait and the ring under the peat. I told him about the shift, and about Declan, and about the bond, and I watched his face while I said it and his face did not change at all, which is how I knew he was taking it seriously.

When I had finished he sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling for a while.

"All right," he said. "Let us say for the sake of argument that I believe all of it. Werewolves. The pack. The Alpha who can hear what the village is thinking. Let us say I believe it. What is the case?"

"The case is that Mairéad stole the Alpha's seat from my grandmother's line in 1961, killed my grandmother in a fire to do it, and killed my sister a month ago when my sister tried to take it back."

"Then the case is thirty six years old and the only two witnesses to the fire are an eighty year old healer who helped cover it up and a woman who is dead." Padraig rubbed his jaw. "What else have you got?"

"The ring. The old charter. The list of shifts my sister was keeping and sending to Galway."

"Where is the ring?"

"I do not know. My sister hid it. Bridget found it in the cache and put it in the locker and the locker was emptied and then burned."

"Then the ring is gone."

"The ring is not gone." I got up and went to the dresser and took out the chart I had found in the airing cupboard, the one with the Mary Rose's berth circled and the note that said, ask D about the second key. "My sister wrote this. She wrote ask D about the second key, and Declan says the second key opens the locker, and the locker was emptied. But my sister was not a fool. She had been keeping records and sending copies to Galway for fifteen years and she had a woman from Dublin in her spare room in March and she knew the Alpha was coming for her. She would not have put the only thing that could end Mairéad's rule in a locker in a boathouse that anyone could open with a key."

Padraig looked at the chart. "Then where would she put it?"

"Somewhere no one would look. Somewhere in this cottage that a person could search and still not find." I stood in the middle of the kitchen and turned around slowly. "I have been through every drawer and every cupboard and the linen chest and the wardrobe. I have been through the shed and the airing cupboard and under the bed. But I have not been through the one place in this cottage that a sister would hide something from a sister."

"Which is?"

"The place where she kept the things she did not want anyone to see." I went to the fireplace. There was a picture over the mantel, a print of a fishing boat in a frame, and I took it down and looked at the back of it and there was nothing there but brown paper. I put it back. I went to the dresser and took out every plate and every cup and looked at the shelf beneath. I went to the clock on the wall and opened the little door at the front and looked inside, and there was nothing but the pendulum and a spider.

Then I stood in front of the fireplace and looked at the hearth.

There was a loose flagstone in front of the fire, the one my sister had always put the coal scuttle on. I had noticed it on the first night and had not thought about it, because a loose flagstone in a cottage is not a thing you notice. I knelt down and lifted the coal scuttle off it and put my fingers in the crack and lifted the stone.

There was a hollow underneath. It was about the size of a shoebox and it was lined with a piece of old oilcloth, and in it there was a small bundle wrapped in a tea towel.

Padraig was on his feet. I unwrapped the bundle on the table.

There was a ring. It was silver and heavy and old and the band was wide, and on the face of it there was a crescent moon worn nearly smooth, and inside the band there were letters and a date. M. 1921. There was a folded page from a notebook, torn along one edge, and there was a small brass key with a paper tag on it that said in my sister's handwriting, "The hall, the frame, the back of the charter."

And there was a letter, four pages, in my sister's hand.

I read it standing up, and Padraig read it over my shoulder, and neither of us said a word until I came to the end.

"N," it began, "if you are reading this then I am dead and you have found the ring and the key and the page, and you are the only person in this village who can finish what I started. I am going to write down everything I know, and I am going to write it in the order it happened, and I am going to ask you to read it twice before you do anything at all.

"Maeve was our grandmother. She was Alpha from 1921 to 1961 and she was murdered in the fire in the old charter house. Our mother was in the house that night and she was sixteen and she saw who set the fire. It was not Mairéad. Mairéad was nineteen that year and she was not yet a wolf and she was in Galway at a teacher's college. The woman who set the fire was Mairéad's mother, whose name was Eileen, and who was Beta in those days. She set the fire because Maeve had found out that Eileen had been selling pack territory to a man from the mainland, and Maeve was going to bring it to the Council of Alphas. Eileen took the seat the same night and ruled for nine years until she died, and then her daughter Mairéad took the seat, and Mairéad has been doing the same thing her mother did for twenty seven years.

"I found this out two years ago. I have been collecting proof ever since. The proof is the old charter, which is in the cache on the high ground, and the ring, which is in the hearth, and a ledger that Mairéad keeps in the safe in the hall, which I have not been able to open. If you have the key with the tag on it, the key opens the frame in the hall and the back of the frame opens and the ledger is behind the charter in the frame. Do not go into the hall in daylight. Go at night and go alone and do not tell Declan.

"Do not tell Declan because Declan cannot lie to her. I have watched him try. She calls the pack to listen and she hears him and his face goes grey and he tells her everything, and he does not mean to and he cannot help it. I am sorry, N. He is a good man and he is the best of them, but he is the Beta and his wolf is loyal to the seat before it is loyal to anything else, and I have seen him hand her a thing he swore to me he would keep. If you tell him where the ring is she will know within the hour.

"Do not trust the Beta's son. I know what I have written above and I know it sounds hard, but Cormac is the only thing in this village that Declan has never been able to lie about, and she knows it, and she has been using the boy since he was fourteen. He does not know he is being used. He thinks he is helping. If she has sent him to you, do not let him in and do not let him see the ring.

"There is one more thing and this is the thing I am most afraid of. The Council of Alphas has a man in this region, an enforcer, and his name is Korkut. He has been to this village twice that I know of and both times he went away satisfied. I do not know what Mairéad gives him. I think it is money from the territory sales and I think it is more than money. If you make a challenge and the enforcer comes, you must not let him sit in judgment. He is not a judge. He is a partner.

"I am going to try to take the seat at the spring meeting. If I fail, you will find this. If I fail, do not do what I did. Do not stand up in front of the whole co-op and say what you are. Find the proof first and put it in front of the Council with the enforcer's name in it and let the Council do what the Council is for. And if the Council will not do it, then do what you have to do and I am sorry I will not be there to help you.

"I love you. I have always loved you, even when I was bad at saying it. S."

I put the letter down on the table. My hands were steady, which surprised me. Padraig let out a long breath and sat down slowly in the chair.

"You have your case," he said. "Now tell me what you are going to do."

I picked up the ring and turned it over. The silver was cold and heavy in my palm and the crescent moon caught the light from the window, and I thought about my sister standing in this kitchen with a letter in her hand and a ring in a hole under a flagstone and a whole village to be kept safe from a woman with a silver voice.

"First," I said, "I am going to find out whether Declan is what my sister thought he was. And I am going to do it tonight, because he is coming up here at eight to take me to the harbor office, and by then I will have decided whether to tell him the truth or to lie to him."

"And how will you decide?"

"I will ask him a question and watch his face." I put the ring back in the hollow and put the flagstone down. "My sister says he cannot lie to her. She does not say he cannot lie to me. And if he can lie to me, then I want to know what he chooses to lie about."

Padraig looked at me across the table. "And if he cannot lie to either of you?"

"Then we have a problem," I said. "Because the Alpha is taking the Mary Rose out on Saturday night and she will call the pack to listen, and Declan will be standing beside me, and there is not a thing in the world I can do to stop his wolf from telling her where we are."