Chapter 12: Dale's Smile

Silas was waiting at the end of the pack house road with his car parked under the cottonwoods and the engine off.

“Get in,” he said.

I got in. The car smelled of leather and paper and something clean and sharp, and there were file boxes on the back seat stacked three high and strapped down with a belt.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Nowhere. I want to talk to you in a place where no one from this pack can walk up behind me.” He turned in his seat and looked at me. “You told them about the stone.”

“I did.”

“You told them about a curse.”

“I did.”

“You did not tell them about the man.” Silas put his elbow on the steering wheel. “You stood in front of forty wolves and told them a story about a stone and the founders and the harvest, and you did not tell them there is a man in the mill who turns into a wolf on the wrong moon and is bound to you by a mate bond that half the pack could smell on you if they stood close enough.” He let that sit. “Why?”

I looked out the window at the dark road.

“Because if I had told them that, they would have gone to the mill tonight with silver wire and a rifle, and there is a wolf in that mill who cannot defend himself in a fair fight, and I am not going to be the woman who handed him over.”

“You are protecting him.”

“I am protecting the only witness to my brother’s death.”

Silas was quiet for a moment. Then he opened his folder and took out a sheet of paper and held it up.

“I have been in this county for nine days,” he said. “In those nine days I have read the pack records from 1891 to 1974, the county land deeds from 1885, the survey maps, and the coroner’s report on your brother.” He tapped the paper. “The coroner’s report is interesting. It says the cause of death was a wild animal. It says the wounds were consistent with a large canid. It does not say what kind of canid, and it does not say how many wounds there were, and the coroner was a man named Haskins who retired in March and now lives in Spokane.” He looked at me. “Do you know what is not in the coroner’s report? The word blade. The word knife. The word cut. And the sheriff’s report on the same death says the body was found at six in the morning by a farmhand, and the farmhand’s statement says the body was on its back with its coat open, and the coat was not torn.”

I sat very still.

“A wild animal does not open a coat,” Silas said. “It tears through it. And a man who has been killed by a wolf does not have his coat opened and his shirt undisturbed and a wound in his chest that the coroner calls a canid wound without a single tear in the fabric above it.”

“Where did you get the coroner’s report?”

“I asked for it. That is what I do. I ask for things and people send them to me because they are afraid I will ask again.” He put the paper back in the folder. “I am not telling you this because I am on your side. I am telling you because I do not like being lied to, and someone in this territory has been lying to the Council for a very long time, and the lies go back further than your brother.” He closed the folder. “The 1891 map is a forgery. I have known that since Tuesday. The ink is wrong and the paper is wrong and the surveyor’s signature is a copy of a signature on a different document from 1889. Someone forged the boundary map and filed it with the Council, and the Council has been using that map for eighty-five years, and nobody has ever questioned it.”

“Dale could not have forged a map in 1891,” I said.

“No. But whoever forged it is the reason Dale is doing what he is doing now, and Dale knows what that reason is.” Silas turned the key. The engine came up quiet. “Go home. Get some sleep. In the morning we are going to the east field with a surveyor’s chain and a shovel, and we are going to find the stone, and then we are going to see what a certain Beta does when his story stops working.”

He drove me to the end of my road and I got out and he drove off without another word.

The house was dark. June had left the porch light on and a note on the kitchen table that said she had gone to bed and that I should eat something. I did not eat. I sat at the kitchen table with the lamp on and thought about a coat that had not been torn.

I had seen Owen in the coffin. No, that was not right. I had seen the coffin, closed, in the church, with the flowers on top and the lid down and the priest saying the words. I had not seen my brother. I had not seen the wound. I had not seen the coat. Nobody in my family had seen the coat. Harlan had said the injuries were too much for an open coffin and we had believed him because there was no reason not to.

I got up and got my jacket and went out.

The pack house at midnight is quiet, and I knew the way to the barn without a light. The barn is where the pack keeps the trucks and the tools and the tack, and there is a tack room at the back with a saddle rack and a bench and a shelf of old ledgers that nobody has looked at in years, and I had seen Dale go in and out of that tack room a hundred times.

The barn door was shut but not locked. I opened it a foot and slipped through and stood in the dark and listened. There was a horse moving in the far stall and the smell of hay and oil. No voices. No light.

I went along the wall to the tack room and opened the door and shut it behind me and turned on my flashlight, keeping it down against my leg.

The tack room was the same as it had always been. The saddle rack. The bench. The shelf of ledgers. The pegboard with the bridles. I stood in the middle of it and turned slowly around and did not know what I was looking for.

Then I saw the shelf of ledgers and the way the dust on it had been disturbed.

I took the ledgers down one at a time. They were old co-op books from the twenties and thirties and they had nothing in them but grain weights and names. But behind them, at the back of the shelf, there was a gap in the wood where a board had been fitted badly, and I put my fingers in the gap and pulled and the board came out.

Behind it was a metal box the size of a shoebox, and inside the box was a coat.

It was a dark wool coat with the collar turned up, and it had been folded carefully, and there was a green scarf folded on top of it. There was a tear in the coat at the chest, a long clean tear, and the edges of the tear were stiff and dark.

I stood in the tack room with the flashlight in my hand and the coat in front of me and my heart going so hard that I could hear it in my ears.

Then the barn door opened.

I turned off the flashlight and put the coat back in the box and the box back behind the board and the board back in the shelf, and I got to the tack room door and put my ear against it. There were boots on the barn floor, two sets, and a voice.

“I am telling you it is handled,” Dale said. “The Alpha is going to look at that field tomorrow and find nothing, because there is nothing there but stones, and then Wren is finished.”

“The Council does not like surprises,” a second voice said. It was Silas.

“The Council has been getting surprises from this pack for eighty-five years,” Dale said, “and the Council has been paid for its trouble. There is a cheque in the usual place. It is bigger than last year’s, on account of the extra work.”

The tack room door was thin and I could hear everything.

“The Council does not want a cheque,” Silas said. “The Council wants the boundary stone, and the Council wants it before the Council of Alphas meets in October, and the Council does not care about your border-warden or your dead brother or your coat in the tack room. Have I made myself clear?”

There was a long silence in the barn.

“How long have you known about the coat?” Dale said.

“Since the second night I was here,” Silas said. “You are not the first Beta to hide a coat. You are the first one who folded it.”