Chapter 20: Dinner at the Pack House

Clara Renn put the lid on the box and the box in the cupboard and shut the cupboard door, and then she went to the front of the house and opened the door.

“Mr. Silas,” she said. “You are the Council man who has been staying in the trailer.”

“I am,” Silas said. “May I come in?”

“You may not. I have company and I do not like strangers in my house.” She stood in the doorway with her arms folded. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about the boundary stone.”

“There is no boundary stone. It was taken out of the east field and nobody knows where it went.”

“I know it was taken,” Silas said. “I know it was taken by someone who knew where it was, and I know that person has been watching the field for a very long time, and I know that person left a note in the mill for the Council of Alphas.” He paused. “The note was signed with a mark. A circle with a line through it and another line crossing it. I have been through every record in the Council archive in the last eleven days, and that mark is not in any of them. The only place I have seen it is on a flat stone under a wall in the east field. So I am asking you, Mrs. Renn, as one person to another. Did you take the stone?”

There was a long silence on the porch.

“I did,” Clara Renn said. “And I would do it again.”

“Thank you,” Silas said. “That is the first honest answer I have had in this territory.”

“Do not thank me yet.” Clara Renn opened the door wider. “Come in. There are people here you should meet.”

Silas came into the front room and stopped when he saw me and Elias.

“Warden,” he said.

“Silas.”

“I see you found her first.”

“I did.”

Silas looked at Elias. Elias looked at Silas. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“You are the man from the mill,” Silas said.

“I am.”

“I have been looking for you for eleven days.”

“I know.”

“You hit me over the head on Tuesday night.”

“I did not.”

Silas touched his jaw. “Someone did.”

“It was not me,” Elias said. “I was on a loading dock with the warden all night and I did not leave it.”

Silas looked at me. I looked back at him and did not say anything, and something in his face changed, and he turned away.

“Mrs. Renn,” he said. “The Council of Alphas meets in Boise on the tenth of October. The stone has to be in that room, in front of the Alphas, with a witness who can swear to where it came from and what it is. If you have the stone, I can take it to Boise myself and testify. But I need to know what I am carrying and I need to know it before Friday night, because on Friday night the Beta of this pack is giving a dinner in my honor and I would like to know what I am walking into.”

Clara Renn sat down in her chair.

“Sit down, Mr. Silas,” she said. “I am going to tell you a story about a Luna who did not drown.”

We were at the house until four in the afternoon. Clara Renn told the story again, slower this time, and Silas wrote it all down in his notebook with his fountain pen, and when she was finished he sat back and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

“If the Luna lived,” he said, “then the founders’ claim to this territory was built on a lie. The Council ruled in 1891 that the old pack had no Luna and no heir and no claim. If there was an heir, the ruling is void.”

“There was an heir,” Clara Renn said. “There is an heir. My mother looked for her all her life and she never found her, but she left me the mark and the stones and she told me to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For the wolf of her blood to come back,” Clara Renn said. “And she did.”

She looked at me.

Silas looked at me too. Then at Elias. Then back at me.

“Warden,” he said. “How old is your mother’s family in this territory?”

“My mother was born here,” I said. “Her mother was born here. Her grandmother was born here.”

“And do you know who her grandmother was?”

The room was very quiet.

“Maeve’s mother,” I said. “Her name was Ruth. She worked at the Council archive in Boise for two years and then she came home and she married a farmer and she never talked about Boise again.”

Silas closed his notebook.

“I have been in this territory for eleven days,” he said. “And I have been looking for a stone. I think I have been looking for the wrong thing.”

The dinner at the pack house was on Friday at seven.

I wore the good dress, the blue one with the buttons, and I put my hair up and I put the bag of stones in my pocket, and June came with me because she had been invited and because I was not going to leave her alone at the house with Dale in town.

The pack house was lit up. There were lamps on the porch and the long table in the dining room had a cloth on it and Mrs. Pike had made three pies and the Corrigan boys had brought a keg of cider. Silas was there in his gray suit with his hair combed and his manners on, and he shook hands with Harlan and with Mrs. Pike and with the Corrigan boys, and he complimented the pie and asked after the harvest and charmed the whole room in ten minutes.

Dale stood at the head of the table with a glass in his hand and a smile on his face, and he watched Silas work the room, and I watched Dale watch him, and neither of them gave anything away.

I sat down next to June halfway down the table. Silas came and sat across from me.

“Warden,” he said. “You look well.”

“Thank you.”

“I have been wanting to ask you something since I arrived and I have not had the chance.” He cut into his pie. “Your brother. Owen. I have read the coroner’s report and the sheriff’s report and the church record, and there is a thing in the coroner’s report that I cannot make fit.”

“What thing?”

“The coroner wrote that the body was found in the field behind the mill road at six in the morning,” Silas said. “But the sheriff’s report says the body was found by a farmhand on his way to the co-op, and the farmhand’s statement says he found the body at six, and the co-op opens at seven.” He put a piece of pie in his mouth and chewed and swallowed. “So the farmhand was on his way to the co-op an hour before it opened. That is not unusual. But the coroner also wrote that the body had been moved.”

I set my fork down.

“Moved,” I said.

“Moved. The blood had settled in the body in a way that did not match the position it was found in. The coroner noted it and then he noted that the field had been trampled by the search party and that he could not be certain, and then he signed the report and retired in March.” Silas cut another piece of pie. “I have been thinking about it all week. A body that has been moved is a body that was killed somewhere else. And the only thing between the mill road and the east field is the old mill.”

“And the miller’s house,” I said.

Silas looked at me. His pale eyes were steady.

“Yes,” he said. “The miller’s house. Where an old woman has been living alone for eleven years with a cellar that locks.” He put his fork down. “I am not saying she killed your brother, warden. I am saying that your brother was in that field for a reason, and the reason was the stone, and someone in this territory knew he was there.”

I sat very still. Across the table, June had gone quiet. Down the table, Dale was laughing at something Mrs. Pike had said, and his laugh carried over the room, and it was the same laugh he had used at my brother’s funeral.

“Silas,” I said. “Why are you telling me this at dinner?”

“Because I am going to ask a question in front of the whole pack in a minute,” Silas said, “and I want you to be ready for it.”

He stood up and tapped his glass with his fork, and the table went quiet.

“Thank you all for this welcome,” he said. “The Council has sent me to review the rogue situation and the boundary question, and I have spent the last eleven days reading records and walking the line. I have one question for this pack, and I would like an honest answer.” He looked around the table. “On the night Owen Halloran died, who was the last person to see him alive?”

The room was silent. Nobody spoke.

And then Dale put down his glass and said, “I was.”

I turned my head.

“I saw him at the co-op at six o’clock,” Dale said. “He was closing up and I was on my way home. We talked about the harvest and I told him to go home and get some sleep, and he said he would, and then I left.” He looked at Silas. “I told the sheriff the same thing that week. It is in the report.”

Silas nodded slowly.

“Thank you, Beta,” he said. “That is very helpful.”

He sat down and picked up his fork, and Dale smiled at the table and everyone went back to their pie.

I did not eat another bite.

Because Owen had not been at the co-op at six o’clock on the night he died. I had been at the co-op at six o’clock. I had locked the doors myself at six and I had walked home, and Owen had been at the house with June and our mother, and he had eaten supper with us and he had gone out at seven to see to the north fence.

Dale had not seen him at the co-op. Dale had not seen him at six o’clock.

Dale had just told the whole pack a lie about the last night of my brother’s life, and Silas had let him do it, and now Silas was eating his pie and watching me over the top of his fork.