Chapter 14: The New Moon Countdown

I woke up on the floor of the co-op back room with my neck stiff and the sun coming through the broken window latch in a stripe across my face.

The cot was empty. The blanket was folded at the foot of it, and the scarf was folded on top of the blanket, and Owen’s coat was hanging on the hook by the door. There was a note on the shelf, written in pencil on the back of a grain ticket.

Gone to the trees before the co-op opens. I will not go near the mill. E.

I read it twice and then I folded it small and put it in my pocket with the stone. The stone was still warm.

June came in at seven and found me in the office with the ledger open and the coffee on.

“You look like you slept on a floor,” she said.

“I slept on a floor.”

She put her lunch pail down and looked at the back room door, which was closed.

“Is he in there?”

“He is in the trees. He does not like to be inside when the sun comes up. He says it feels wrong.”

June nodded slowly. “Well. I brought two sandwiches anyway. You can give him one.”

The morning went by in a slow way. The co-op opened and Harold came in with his hat on the back of his head and a list of wagon weights, and I wrote tickets and weighed grain and answered the telephone, and every time the door opened I looked up. At eleven o’clock the east field party went out.

I watched it from the co-op loading dock. Harlan drove the pack truck with Dale in the passenger seat, and behind them came a flatbed with the survey stakes and the shovel and Mr. Hask and Mrs. Bell, and behind that was Silas in his car with his folder on the seat beside him. Four vehicles and eight wolves, and they went up the mill road and turned into the east field and disappeared behind the stone wall.

They were out there for six hours.

At five in the afternoon the pack truck came back down the road and went past the co-op and up to the pack house, and I could not see who was in it. At half past five the flatbed came back with the survey stakes still on it and the shovel still on it and nobody in the cab but Mr. Hask.

At six, Silas came to the co-op.

He came in through the front door and took his hat off and stood in the office with the light on his pale face and did not smile.

“The stone is not there,” he said.

I put down the pencil.

“What do you mean it is not there?”

“I mean we dug along the whole wall from the trees to the north corner, and we surveyed it, and there is no flat stone with a mark on it anywhere in that field. There is the wall, and there is the old orchard, and there is the place where the wall is broken down, and there is nothing under it but dirt.” He sat down in Harold’s chair. “Someone took it. Between last night and this morning. The ground was turned over and the dirt was fresh and the hole was filled in and smoothed, and if I had not been standing over it with a shovel I would not have seen it.”

I sat down on the desk.

“Dale,” I said.

“Dale was with us the whole time. So was Harlan. So were the hunters.” Silas rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Dale did not take it, and Dale knew it was gone before we got there. He walked straight to the broken wall and he looked at the ground and he turned around and he said, in front of everyone, that there was nothing there and that the Alpha had seen it for himself and that the warden’s story was finished.” He looked up at me. “He was not surprised. He was relieved.”

“Then someone else took it.”

“Someone who knew where it was and had all night to dig.” Silas was quiet for a moment. “Who else knew where the stone was buried?”

I thought about it.

“Elias knew,” I said. “He found it in July. I knew, because I was there when he found it. You knew, because you were standing next to me.” I looked at him. “And Dale knew, because it was in a note in his desk drawer that said the boundary stone is in the east field by the stone wall.”

Silas’s eyes came up.

“In his desk drawer,” he said.

“In Harlan’s desk drawer. In a folder with the cull list. It was in a hand I did not know, and it said the mill is the priority and the stone is in the east field and the Council wants it located before the cull is completed.” I stood up. “I read it eight days ago and I put it back.”

Silas stood up too and began to walk around the office with his hands behind his back.

“So there is a third person,” he said. “Someone who writes to Dale, and who knew where the stone was, and who has been watching that field, and who got there before we did.” He stopped at the window. “The Council did not send anyone else. I would know. I have read every piece of paper that has come out of Boise in the last month and there is no second investigator.” He turned around. “Which means the person who took the stone is not Council. Which means the person who took the stone is working for something else.”

“Or working for himself,” I said.

Silas looked at me for a long time.

“The man in the mill,” he said. “Where is he?”

“He is not here.”

“Warden.”

“He is not here,” I said again. “And before you ask me, he did not take it. He was in this room all night with me, and I locked the door, and the window latch is broken but it makes a noise that Harold could hear from his house.” I met his eyes. “He did not take the stone.”

Silas put his hat on.

“I am going to the pack house,” he said. “I am going to tell Harlan that the stone is gone and that someone dug it up in the night, and I am going to watch Dale’s face while I say it. And then I am going to come back here tomorrow morning and I am going to ask you, one last time, where the man in the mill is sleeping, because there is a thing happening in this territory that is bigger than a Beta with a coat in his barn, and I am running out of time to be polite about it.”

He went out. I heard his car start and go up the road.

I went out to the loading dock and sat on the edge of it with my boots hanging down and put my head in my hands.

“You look like a woman who has lost something,” Maeve said.

She was standing at the bottom of the ramp with her shawl around her shoulders and a basket on her arm.

“The stone is gone,” I said. “Someone dug it up last night.”

Maeve came up the ramp. Her dark eyes were steady and her mouth was set.

“Then we have eleven days,” she said.

“Eleven days until what?”

She put the basket down and sat on the loading dock next to me and took a piece of paper out of her apron pocket. It was a calendar page, torn from a feed store almanac, with the days marked off in pencil.

“The new moon is on the twenty-eighth,” she said. “That is eleven days. I have been keeping the count since July and it has not moved, and it will not move, because the moon does not care what any of us want.” She tapped the paper. “On the twenty-eighth he will change, and if the stone is gone, the curse has nothing to hold it here. It will go where the stone goes, and he will go with it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that on the twenty-eighth, the wolf will not run for the trees.” Maeve folded the paper and put it back in her apron. “It will run for the stone. Wherever it is. And if the stone is in the hands of someone who knows what it can do, then the man who is chained to it will be in those hands too, and there will be nothing you or I or Harlan or the whole Council of Alphas can do about it.” She looked at me. “Eleven days, Wren. You have eleven days to find a stone that has been buried for eighty-five years and to break a curse that has never been broken, and you have a Beta who wants you gone and a Councilman who wants you useful and a mate bond that half the pack can smell on you if they stand close enough.” She picked up her basket. “I am going home to make a pie. When you have finished sitting there, come up the hill and we will start.”

I watched her walk down the ramp.

“Maeve,” I called. “How do you know where the stone is?”

She stopped at the bottom of the ramp and turned around.

“I do not know where the stone is,” she said. “But I know where the box is. And after eighty-five years of hiding, I am going to open it.”