Chapter 44: The Night Owen Died

The light was in the room under the loft.

We stood in the mill road with the snow coming down and looked up at it. It was a small yellow light, the kind a candle makes, and it moved a little the way a flame moves when somebody is breathing near it.

"Somebody is up there," June said.

"Somebody has been up there before," I said. "There are ninety-four tally marks on the wall and the last one is fresh."

We went in through the broken door and stood on the mill floor. The gap behind the grain chute was open, and the ladder was there, and the light from above came down through the gap in a thin gold line.

"Stay behind me," I said.

I went up first. The ladder held and the gap was cold and narrow and I came up through the hatch into the room under the roof with my knife in my hand.

There was nobody there.

The candle was on the table and it was burning and there was a chair pulled out and a blanket on the floor by the bed, and the box under the bed was open, and the papers were spread out on the table where somebody had been reading them.

I put my knife away and stood in the middle of the room and turned around.

The wall behind the bed had writing on it.

It was in pencil and it was small and close and it ran along the boards about a foot above the straw tick. I took the candle off the table and held it up and read it.

It was Owen's hand. I knew it the way I know my own. He made his letters with a hard downstroke and he never closed the loop on an a or an o, and he wrote his dates with the month first and the day second and a slash between them.

It said: 22/6. E. R. 1954. 11. 4. 7.

And under that, in the same hard downstroke, it said: Tell Wren the field is not empty.

June came up through the hatch and stood beside me and read it and put her hand on my arm.

"What does it mean?" she said.

"I do not know yet." I put the candle down on the floor and knelt on the straw tick and read it again. "E. R. 1954. That is a name and a year. The year is the year the record was sealed and the year Ruth came home and the year the Council started paying a man who does not exist."

"Erik," June said. "Erik R."

I sat back on my heels.

"The farmhand," I said. "The man who found the body. The man whose statement is not in the sheriff's report. His name was Erik and the Council has been paying him since 1954 and my brother wrote his initials on a wall in a room under a mill roof on the night he died."

Elias came up through the hatch last. He stood in the doorway of the room and looked at the wall and his face did not change.

"Read it to me," he said.

I read it to him.

He was quiet for a moment.

"E. R.," he said. "Erik Renn."

The candle guttered.

"What?" I said.

"Erik Renn," Elias said. "I know the name. I have heard the name. It was in the founders' record, in the list of the eleven wolves who came with the founders in 1891. Erik Renn was one of them. He was the one who held the Luna in this room while the others went to the Council." He looked at me. "And he did not die. He was made the Council's maintenance man and he has been on the payroll ever since."

"That is not possible," I said. "That would make him a hundred and ten years old."

"Werewolves live a long time," Elias said. "The founders' line lives longer than most. Maeve is sixty-one and she looks forty. Your mother died at forty-eight and she looked thirty. A wolf of the founders' line can live a hundred and twenty years if nothing kills him."

June sat down on the edge of the bed.

"So there is a man in this county who came here with the founders in 1891," she said. "And he has been alive the whole time. And he has been on the Council payroll for twenty-five years. And Owen wrote his initials on a wall."

"And Owen said the field is not empty," I said. "Which means there is something in the field we have not found." I stood up. "But that is not what I came up here for. Elias. You said you could not say the name. You said the curse took it out of your mouth. Try again."

Elias stood in the middle of the room and looked at the wall.

"I have tried a hundred times," he said.

"Try a hundred and one."

He closed his eyes. He stood there in the candlelight with the snow coming down outside the boarded window and his hands at his sides, and his jaw worked.

"Owen said a name," he said. His voice was low and it was not steady. "He said it twice. And then he said my sister and then he said the field." He opened his eyes. "It was not a name I knew. It was a short name and it had a hard sound in the middle of it." He looked at me. "And it was not Dale's name."

The room was very quiet.

"Then whose?" I said.

"I do not know whose. I know it was not Dale's." He turned to the wall and put his hand flat on the boards. "I have been carrying this for four months and I have been telling you it was Dale because I could smell Dale on the body and because Dale had a knife and because Dale ran. And every time I said it, something in me pulled back. I thought it was the curse. I thought the curse would not let me speak the truth." He looked at me. "It was not the curse. It was me. I did not want to say it because if I said it out loud then I would have to admit that I let him die."

"Elias," I said.

"No." He came and stood in front of me. "Listen to me. There were two men in that field. Dale was the one with the knife. But Dale did not kill your brother."

I stared at him.

"You told me Dale killed him," I said. "You told me on the night of the new moon that the second wolf was Dale."

"The second wolf was Dale. The man with the knife was Dale. But the knife did not kill him." Elias put his hand on my shoulder. "When Dale put the knife in his chest, your brother was still alive. I told you that. I told you the wound was small and clean and it was bleeding slow and a healer could have saved him. Dale left and your brother was still alive. I went to him and I put my hands on the wound and the bleeding stopped and he opened his eyes." His hand tightened. "And then the second man came out of the trees."

The candle flickered.

"What second man?" I said.

"The man with the lantern who put it out when Dale called out. The man who was in the trees on the north side of the road. He came out of the trees after Dale was gone and he stood at the wall and he looked at me. He was wearing a coat with the collar up and he had a scarf over his face and he smelled of dust and old paper." Elias' voice had gone flat. "And he said, get away from him, and I did not move, and he came across the field and he pushed me off your brother and he knelt down and he did something with his hands."

"What did he do?"

"I could not see. I was on the ground and my head was ringing and I was trying to get up. And then he stood up and he walked back to the trees and he did not run. He walked." Elias looked at me. "And when I got back to your brother the wound in his chest was open again and he was not breathing."

Nobody said anything.

"He killed him," I said. "The second man killed him."

"The second man finished what Dale started," Elias said. "Dale put the knife in him and left him alive. The second man came out of the trees and made sure he did not live." He took his hand off my shoulder. "And I have known that for four months, and I did not tell you, because I could not prove it and because I could not say his name and because every time I tried to remember what he did with his hands I could not see it. But I remember the smell of him now. Dust and old paper and a little of the lamp oil the Council uses in its offices. And under all of it there was a scent I have smelled since, in this territory, in a place I did not expect."

"Where?"

"On the payroll sheet," Elias said. "On the letter from the clerk. On the folder that man Kessler carries in his car." He looked at me. "The second man was not Dale. The second man was the Council."

I stood in the room under the roof with the writing on the wall and the candle and the snow coming down outside, and I thought about the thing my brother had written with his own hand a few hours before he died.

Tell Wren the field is not empty.

"The field is not empty," I said. "He was trying to tell me there was a man in it."

"There was a man in it," Elias said. "And he is still in this county, and he has been here since 1891, and he is on the payroll, and his name is Erik Renn."

June was crying. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and the tears running down her face and she was not making a sound.

I put my hand on her head.

"We are going to find him," I said. "We are going to find him and we are going to put him in front of the Alphas and we are going to tell them what he did in that field."

"How?" June said. "We have no proof. We have a wall with initials on it and a cursed wolf who cannot say a name and a payroll sheet with a man who does not exist."

"We have the record," I said. "And we have the stones. And we have the archivist and the investigator and the Alpha and the Beta of this pack." I looked at Elias. "And we have the second man's scent. You said he smelled of dust and old paper and lamp oil. Where in this territory would a man who smells of old paper and lamp oil go?"

Elias looked at me.

"The trailer," he said. "The Council trailer on the north road."

I picked up the candle and went down the ladder.

We came out of the mill into the snow and the dark, and there was a truck in the road with its lights off and a man standing beside it.

It was the clerk. Kessler. He had a lantern in his hand and his folder under his arm and his face was the color of the snow.

"Miss Halloran," he said. "I have been looking for you. There is a thing I have to tell you and I am going to tell you now before I lose my nerve." He held up the folder. "This is my report. I have been writing it since Tuesday and I have not sent it. It says the Beta of this pack killed a wolf and the Council covered it up and the man who covered it up is my own father." He put the folder down on the hood of the truck. "And it says there is a man on the Council payroll whose name is not a name. It is an initial and a year. E. R. 1954." He looked at me. "I do not know who he is. But I know where he lives."