Chapter 55: What the Sheriff Saw

I put the coat in the back of the truck and got back in and drove.

Nobody said anything for a while. June sat with her hands in her lap and her arm in the scarf and her face turned to the window, and Arthur Renn looked at the record on his knees and did not turn a page, and Hannah in the back was so quiet I might have forgotten she was there except that I could smell her worry through the glass.

We came to a wide place on the river road where a farmer had cut a turnoff for wagons, and I pulled in and stopped the truck.

“Arthur,” I said. “The file. The one your grandfather kept. You said it is in the truck.”

“It is in the box behind the seat.”

“Get it out.”

He got it out. It was a cardboard file box with a string around it and the string had been tied and untied so many times that it had gone soft. He opened it on the seat between us and there were papers in it, dozens of them, some typed and some handwritten, and the paper had gone yellow at the edges.

“What am I looking for?” I said.

“Anything with the sheriff’s name on it,” Arthur Renn said. “The sheriff in this county in 1975 was a man named Walter. He retired in 1977 and he died in 1978 and he never gave an interview to anybody as far as I know. But he filed reports and the reports went to the county and the county sent copies to the Council and the copies went into my grandfather’s file.”

I went through the box. Most of it was nothing. Land deeds and tax notices and a letter about a road that was never built. And then near the bottom there was a folder tied with a red string and the folder had a date on it in pencil, and the date was June 1975.

I opened it.

There were four papers in it. One was the coroner’s report, the one Silas had already read. One was a witness statement with a name at the top that was not Erik, and the statement was signed and dated and it said the witness had found the body at six in the morning and had gone straight to the co-op to telephone the sheriff.

The third paper was a letter from Walter the sheriff to the Council, dated the twenty-fifth of June, and it said that the investigation into the death of Owen Halloran had been closed and the cause of death had been determined to be a wild animal attack and no further action would be taken.

The fourth paper was the one I had not expected.

It was a copy of a Council order. It was typed on Council paper and it had a register number and a seal and it was dated the twelfth of June, 1975, and it said that the Council had authorized the Beta of the Palouse Ridge pack to conduct a cull of a rogue wolf on the north line of the territory, and that the cull was to be carried out before the end of the month.

The twelfth of June.

Owen died on the twenty-second.

I sat in the truck on the river road with the paper in my hands and the sky going pink over the river and I read it four times.

“Arthur,” I said. “This order is dated the twelfth of June.”

“I know.”

“That is ten days before my brother died.”

“I know.”

“The cull order was written before any calf was killed.” I looked at him. “The first calf died on the fourteenth. I have the co-op ticket in my head. The Hendersons lost a calf on the fourteenth and Dale came to the pack meeting on the fifteenth and told us the rogue had been on the north line for a week.”

Arthur Renn took off his spectacles.

“The cull order was not written because a calf died,” he said. “It was written because your brother wrote to the Council and asked who Erik Renn was. The Council wrote the cull order ten days before the first calf died and sent it to Dale, and Dale did not carry it out because your brother came to him first and he thought he could handle it himself.” He looked at me. “And then your brother died in the field and Dale put the cull order in a drawer and told the pack it was a rogue attack, and the Council countersigned the report and sealed it, and the whole thing was covered up before the first calf was even dead.”

I put the paper down on the seat.

“So there was never a rogue,” I said. “There was never a wolf on the north line. The calves died because Dale wanted them to die or because the Council wanted the pack to be afraid, and the cull order was written before any of it happened.”

“That is what the paper says,” Arthur Renn said.

I looked at June.

“You found the grain ticket,” I said. “You said the east field was cut on the fourth of July and the weight was a third of what it should be.”

“I did.”

“And you said there was a note in Dale’s hand on the co-op board in July that said the east field goes first.”

“I did.”

“So Dale was already cutting the field before the hearing and before the claim and before any of it.” I sat back in the seat. “The whole thing was planned. The calves and the cull and the rogue and the field. It was all planned before my brother ever went to that tack room.”

Hannah leaned over the back of the seat.

“Wren,” she said. “There is a truck behind us.”

I looked in the mirror.

It was coming up the river road from the north, and it was moving fast, and it had its headlights on even though the sky was up and the snow was bright. It was a gray truck with a rack over the bed and a winch on the front bumper.

It was Mrs. Bell’s truck.

“That is the hunter,” I said. “That is Mrs. Bell.”

“Is she alone?” Hannah said.

I watched the truck come. There was one shape in the cab. It was small and it had a braid and it was driving too fast for the road.

“She is alone,” I said. “But she is coming fast and she is going to catch us before the county line.”

“Then drive,” June said.

“I cannot drive. If I put this truck into the snow at this speed I will put it in the river.” I looked at the mirror again. “She is not shooting. If she wanted to shoot she would have shot by now.”

The gray truck came up behind us and slowed and pulled alongside, and Mrs. Bell rolled down her window and shouted across the snow and the wind.

“Pull over,” she shouted. “Pull over. I am not here to shoot anybody. I have a thing you need to see.”

I pulled over.

Mrs. Bell got out of her truck with a rifle over her shoulder and a piece of paper in her hand and her face red from the cold. She came up to the window and held out the paper.

“I found this in Rourke’s coat,” she said. “When they took him to the tack room I went through his coat because I have been a hunter for eleven years and a hunter always goes through the coat. And there was this.” She put it in my hand. “It is the real cull order. Not the one from September. The one from June.”

I looked at it.

It was the same order Arthur Renn had in his file. The twelfth of June. The register number. The seal. And at the bottom, under the signature of the chief clerk, there was a second signature in a hand I knew.

E. R.