Chapter 18: The Council Letter

June stood at the edge of the co-op yard with her lunch pail in her hand and her mouth open, and for a moment none of us moved.

“June,” I said. “Come inside.”

“That is him.” She did not move. “That is the man from the mill.”

“June.”

“I have been bringing him sandwiches for a week and I did not know what he looked like. I thought he was old. I thought he was a hundred years old and covered in dirt and could not speak English.” She looked at Elias. “You are not old.”

Elias, to his credit, did not smile. He put his hands in his pockets and said, “I am thirty-nine.”

“You look younger.”

“June,” I said again. “Inside. Now.”

The three of us went into the office and I shut the door and pulled the shade down and June put her lunch pail on the desk and folded her arms.

“You are going to tell me everything,” she said. “From the beginning. And do not tell me it is none of my business, because I have been lying to Harold for a week about why the back room is locked and I have been lying to Maeve and I have been lying to Mrs. Pike at the co-op, and I am done lying for a sister who will not tell me the truth.”

So I told her. I told her about the field and the stone and the curse and the coat in the tack room and the barn and Silas and the letter from Boise and the claim that Dale had filed. It took a long time. She did not interrupt. When I was finished she sat down in Harold’s chair and looked at the two of us for a while.

“He filed for you,” she said. “Dale filed for you.”

“Yes.”

“That is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life,” June said, and her voice was very quiet, and she looked at Elias. “And you. You have been in the trees for four months. Why did you not go to the Council? Why did you not go to the sheriff?”

“The Council is the one who signs the cull orders,” Elias said. “The sheriff would have looked at me and seen a man with no clothes and no identification and a story about a wolf and a curse. I have been on the wrong side of the law for a long time, June. I know what happens to men like me when they walk into a sheriff’s office and tell the truth.”

June looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at me.

“What do we do?” she said.

“We go to Maeve’s,” I said. “She has letters from the Council archive and she thinks there is a name in them. If we can find the person who took the stone, we can stop the claim before the full moon. And there is a thing we have to do before the new moon, which is in eleven days, and it is not going to be easy.”

June stood up.

“I am coming with you,” she said. “And do not tell me I cannot, because I am the one who found the grain ticket and I am the one who hid the ledger and I am the only person in this family who has not been lying to everybody for a week.”

I looked at her. She was nineteen and she had her chin out and her arms folded and she looked exactly like our mother.

“All right,” I said. “But you do what I say and you do not go anywhere alone.”

“Fine,” June said.

“And June.”

“What?”

“Do not say a word to anyone about Elias. Not to Maeve, not to Harold, not to anyone. If this gets out before the new moon, he is dead and I am Dale’s wife and the east field belongs to the Council. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you,” June said. “I have understood you since I was six years old.” She picked up her lunch pail. “I will go and open the co-op. Harold will be here in ten minutes and he will want his coffee and he will want to know why there is a strange man’s coat on the loading dock.”

She went out and shut the door.

Elias let out a breath.

“She is going to be a problem,” he said.

“She is going to be the best thing we have,” I said.

We went up the hill to Maeve’s at nine o’clock. June had opened the co-op and promised to meet us at noon, and I walked the fence line with Elias in the trees at my side, and by the time we came up the ridge road the sun was high and the cottage chimney was smoking.

Maeve opened the door before I knocked and looked at Elias for a long moment.

“So,” she said. “You are the man my mother’s curse has been dragging around the county.”

“I am,” Elias said.

“You are taller than I expected.”

“People say that.”

Maeve stepped back and held the door open, and we went in.

The tin box was on the table and the letters were spread out across it with the string beside them, and there was a pot of tea and three cups and a plate of bread and cheese.

“Sit down,” Maeve said. “The letters are dull reading but I have been through them twice since last night and there is a name in them.” She sat down and put her finger on one of the letters. “This one was written in 1902 by a Council clerk in Boise to a man named Everett in this territory. Everett was the pack’s record-keeper and he wrote to the Council about the boundary, and the clerk wrote back to say that the boundary had been settled and that the Council did not want to hear about it again.” She looked up. “The clerk’s name is at the bottom. His name is Arthur Renn.”

Elias sat forward. “Renn.”

“You know the name,” I said.

“There is a Renn in Boise,” Elias said. “There has been a Renn in Boise for a hundred years. The Council’s archivist is a Renn. The Council’s land clerk is a Renn. When I was young and I was on the wrong side of the Council, the man who signed my papers was a Renn.”

“And the note in the mill was signed with a mark,” I said. “The circle with the line through it. That is the old mark of the boundary. Someone who signs with that mark is telling the Alphas that the boundary has moved.” I looked at Maeve. “Who in this territory would know that mark?”

Maeve was quiet for a moment.

“My mother knew it,” she said. “She copied it out of the founders’ record. She had it on a card in her Bible for forty years.” She looked at me. “And the miller’s daughter knew it. Mary. The girl who brought the Luna water.”

“Mary is dead,” I said.

“Mary is dead,” Maeve agreed. “But Mary had a daughter, and her daughter went to live in Walla Walla when she married, and the last I heard of her she was an old woman with a house full of papers and no children and a name that was not Renn.” She sat back. “I have not thought about her in thirty years. She was a strange girl. She used to sit in the churchyard and talk to her mother’s stone.”

“What was her name?” I said.

Maeve looked at me.

“Her name was Clara,” she said. “Clara Renn. She married a man from Walla Walla and she came back here in 1968 when he died, and she bought the old miller’s house at the end of the mill road, and she has been living there ever since.”

I stood up so fast the chair went over.

“The end of the mill road,” I said. “That is a quarter mile from the east field.”

“It is,” Maeve said. “And it is the only house in this territory that looks out over the whole of the east field, and it has a cellar, and the cellar has a door that locks.” She picked up her teacup. “I think you should go and see Clara Renn, Wren. I think you should go today.”

“And say what?”

“Say that you are the Gamma of the Palouse Ridge pack and you have come to ask about the boundary stone,” Maeve said. “And then listen to what she says. She has been waiting for someone to ask for a very long time.”

We were on the ridge road walking down toward the mill when the truck came up behind us and slowed.

It was Dale’s truck. He pulled up alongside and leaned across the seat and rolled down the window, and his sandy hair was combed back and he was smiling.

“Wren,” he said. “I have been looking for you.”

“I have been walking the line.”

“You have been walking the ridge road with a man in a coat.” He looked past me at Elias, and his smile did not change. “You must be the fellow from the mill.”

Elias did not say anything.

Dale reached over and picked up a letter from the seat beside him and held it up so I could see it. It was on Council letterhead and it had a seal on it.

“This came this morning,” he said. “The Council is sending an investigator. He arrives on Friday and he is going to review the rogue situation and the trial claim and the boundary question, and he is going to report directly to Boise.” He smiled wider. “And I have been asked to make him welcome. So on Friday night there is going to be a dinner at the pack house, and I am going to need you there, Wren, because the investigator is going to want to meet the Gamma who has been finding all the bodies.”

I looked at the letter in his hand. My chest was cold.

“What is his name?” I said.

Dale looked at the letter.

“Silas,” he said. “Just Silas.”