Chapter 42: The Hunter's Truck

We never got to the trailer.

I was coming down the pack house steps with Elias behind me and the two letters in my jacket when a truck came down the co-op road from the north and stopped at the bottom of the yard, and it was not Dale's truck and it was not the pack truck.

It was a hunter's truck. Gray, with a rack over the bed and a rifle box bolted to the side and a winch on the front bumper, and it had come from the direction of the ridge and it was going toward town.

Mrs. Bell was driving. Mr. Hask was in the passenger seat.

I stood on the steps and watched them go past, and Mrs. Bell turned her head and looked at me through the window, and she did not slow down and she did not wave.

"They are leaving," Elias said.

"They are leaving." I put my hand on the rail. "The clerk arrives in the morning and by tonight the hunters are on the road. That is not a coincidence."

We went to the co-op. The yard was empty and the elevator was quiet and Harold had gone home at four because there was no wagon and no grain coming in and no reason to keep the loading door open. I had a key on a bootlace and I unlocked the side door and went in.

The office was the way I had left it. The ledger was in the drawer and the tickets were in the box and the coffee pot was cold on the burner. I stood in the middle of the floor and did not know what I was looking for.

Then I saw the yard through the window.

There was something in the snow by the loading dock. It was small and it was bright and it had not been there at four o'clock because I had walked across that yard at four o'clock and I would have seen it.

I went out and crouched down and picked it up.

It was a brass casing, short and wide, the kind a rifle leaves behind. It was warm in my hand from the snow and there was a faint smell on it that I knew.

Silver.

"Elias," I said.

He came out of the office and crouched down beside me and took the casing and held it up.

"Silver bullet," he said. "Somebody has been firing silver in this yard."

"Whoever it was did it in the last two hours." I turned the casing over in my hand. "There is a footprint by the dock. And another one by the elevator. And there is a mark in the snow where somebody knelt down."

I stood up and followed the marks. They came in from the road and went along the loading dock and stopped at the window of the office, and there was a place where a man had stood for a while and the snow had melted under his boots. The marks went out again toward the road and then they were lost in the ruts of the truck.

"He was watching the co-op," Elias said. "He came in and he stood at the window and he looked inside and then he fired a shot into the ground and left."

"He fired a shot into the ground and left the casing," I said. "That is not a hunter. A hunter picks up his brass." I looked at the casing in my hand. "That is a man who wanted us to know he was here."

We went back inside and put the casing on the desk and I went through the office drawer by drawer. Nothing had been taken. The ledger was there and the tickets were there and the money box was there with the day's take in it. The only thing that was different was the window.

Somebody had scratched a mark in the glass.

It was small and it was in the lower corner where the frame meets the sill, and it was fresh, the glass still sharp at the edges of the cut.

A circle with a line through it.

"The founders' mark," I said.

"The founders' mark," Elias said. "Or the Council seal. Or the Luna's mark. From here they are all the same."

I stood at the window and looked out at the yard and the road and the dark coming down over the wheat.

"The clerk is at the trailer," I said. "The hunters are on the road. And there is a man in this county with a rifle and a silver bullet and a mark on his truck and a reason to want us looking over our shoulders." I turned around. "We are not going to the trailer tonight. If the clerk has a man watching the co-op, he has a man watching the trailer too, and we would walk straight into him."

"Then what do we do?"

"We go to Maeve's," I said. "We put the archivist and the record and the stones in the truck and we go to Boise tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight. Before the clerk writes his report and before the hunters get to Boise and before whoever is watching this yard comes back with more than one bullet."

Elias looked at the window.

"There is a thing I have not told you," he said. "About the new moon. About the night your brother died."

I put the casing down.

"Tell me now," I said.

He came and sat on the corner of the desk.

"I told you I was in the field that night," he said. "I told you I heard a wolf fight and I heard your brother and I heard him say a name. I told you I tried to hold the wound shut and I told you the scars came in the morning." He looked at me. "What I did not tell you is that I was not the only wolf in that field. There was a second wolf. I heard it in the trees behind the wall, and it was not a pack wolf and it was not a rogue and it was not hunting. It was watching. It stood in the trees and it watched the whole thing and it did not move and it did not come out."

I sat down in Harold's chair.

"You told me the second wolf was the one that killed Owen," I said. "You told me the night of the new moon, when you remembered, that the second wolf was Dale."

"No," Elias said. "I told you the second wolf was the one that killed Owen because I could smell Dale on the body and I did not know what else to think. But I remembered the rest of it this morning. I remembered the trees behind the wall and the smell that was not Dale's smell and the sound of a man breathing slow and steady in the dark." He looked at me. "There were two men in that field, Wren. Dale was the one with the knife. And there was a second man in the trees with a lantern, and he watched Dale do it, and he did not stop him and he did not come forward and he did not report it. He just watched."

I sat in the chair and looked at the window and the scratch on the glass.

"A man who watches a murder and does not report it," I said, "is a man who has a reason to keep the murderer quiet. And the only man in this county with a reason to keep Dale quiet is the man who has been paying Dale from a Council payroll since 1954." I stood up. "We are going to the trailer tonight. Not to find the clerk. To find the man who watches."

The wind came up outside and rattled the loading door and a truck went past on the road, and the headlights swept across the window and lit up the mark on the glass.