Chapter 62: The Ledger

The barn door came down and Rourke came in.

He was in his shirt with his coat off and his face was red and there was a cut on his cheek and he had a rifle in his hands. Behind him there were two men with rifles and a third man on the ground in the yard with his hands over his head.

“Warden,” Rourke said. “Put the key down.”

Elias was between us. He had his shoulder into the bar and the bar had come down with the door and he was standing in the gap with his hands up and his teeth showing and the smell of him was the smell of a wolf who was about to change.

“Rourke,” I said. “There are thirty-one wolves in your front yard and they have rifles and they are not going to stop.”

“I have twelve men and four of them are on the roof.”

“You had twelve men,” I said. “I have been listening. You have nine.”

Rourke looked at the yard behind him. There were men on the ground and men running and the shouting from the front of the pack house had not stopped. The Corrigan boys had got into the barn lot and there were wolves on the roof of the barn and the hunters' truck was on its side in the gate with its wheels in the air.

“The key,” Rourke said.

I held it up.

“You want the vault,” I said. “That is why you are here. Not the wolf and not the cull and not the Council. The vault. You want the paper in the vault and you want it burned before the Alphas see it.” I closed my hand around the key. “What is in the vault, Rourke? What is in it that is worth a burned co-op and a dead wolf and eighty-five years of forgeries?”

Rourke did not answer.

“The Lunas,” Silas said.

He was standing in the barn door behind Rourke with his hands still tied and his face bloody and June beside him with the pistol in her hand.

“The Lunas,” Silas said again. “Fourteen of them. The vault has the trial claims and the deeds and the registers and it also has the Luna records. Every Luna the Council has ever claimed under the trial provision for eighty-five years. Every one of them is in that vault in a file with her name and the name of the pack she was taken from and the amount the Council sold her land for.” He came into the barn. “And there is a column in that file for the ones who died.”

Rourke turned and looked at him.

“You have been in the vault,” he said.

“I have been in the vault,” Silas said. “I have been in it three times. I have been in it as the Council’s investigator with the Council’s key and I have never once written down what I saw.” He looked at me. “Fourteen Lunas. Four of them are dead. One of them died in a cell in Boise in 1932 and one of them died in a fire in a pack house in Montana in 1954 and one of them was a girl of twenty-two who was found in a river in Idaho in 1968.” He looked at Rourke. “And the last one was Wren’s mother.”

The barn was quiet.

“What?” I said.

“Your mother was claimed in 1954,” Silas said. “Under the trial provision. By a wolf named Erik Renn.”

I stood in the tack room door with the key in my hand.

“Erik Renn,” I said.

“Erik Renn. He filed a claim on your mother in the same month the Council sealed the record and put him on the payroll. The claim was registered and your mother was never told and the land came to the Council under the claim.” Silas looked at the floor. “And then she wrote to the Council in 1968 and asked for a hearing. She did not know about the claim. She was writing about the curse. And the Council wrote back and told her the claim had been considered and denied and that if she pursued it she would be driven out.” He looked up. “They denied a claim she had never made. They used her own letter to close the file on her. And the land she was standing on when she wrote that letter was already the Council’s.”

I sat down on the bench in the tack room.

“My mother’s land,” I said.

“Your mother’s land,” Silas said. “The house and the fields and the co-op share. It has been the Council’s since 1954 and she lived on it for twenty-five years and paid the taxes and never knew.”

June came into the tack room and sat down beside me on the bench and put the ledger on the table.

“The ledger,” she said. “I have been going through it. I did it last night while the co-op was burning and I did not tell you because I did not want to say it in front of the pack.” She opened it. “There is a page at the back. It is not in Dale’s hand and it is not in Harold’s hand. It is in a hand I do not know and it is older than the rest of the book.” She turned the book around. “It is a list of payments. Not from the Council. To the Council. Every year from 1954 to 1968 there is a payment of two hundred dollars from the co-op account to a box number in Boise. And in 1968 the payments stop.”

I looked at the page. The hand was small and neat and it was the same hand that had written the letter to the Council in 1968. It was my mother’s hand.

“She was paying them,” I said.

“She was paying them,” June said. “Two hundred dollars a year for fourteen years. It is not a bribe. It is not enough to be a bribe. It is the rent.” She put her finger on the page. “She was paying the Council rent on land she thought was hers.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

Rourke had not moved.

“It does not matter,” he said. “The ledger is wet and the co-op is ash and the paper in the vault is going to burn. The Alphas are not coming. The petition was a lie and the hearing is a lie and the Council of Alphas does not leave Boise for a wheat pack in the Palouse.” He lifted the rifle. “Give me the key.”

Elias changed.

It was fast and it was loud and it was not the slow painful change of the new moon. He went from a man to a wolf in the space of three breaths and the barn filled with the sound of it and Rourke's rifle came up and Elias was already across the floor.

The rifle went off and the bullet went into the roof and the two of them went down in the hay.

June pulled me back into the tack room and shut the door.

“The key,” she said. “Do you have it?”

I opened my hand. The iron key was there.

“Then go,” she said. “Down the tunnel. Now.”

“Elias.”

“I will get Elias. I will get all of them. You go down that tunnel and you open that vault and you put the paper in front of the Alphas.” She put her hand on my face. “Wren. Go.”

I went out the back of the tack room and through the gap in the barn wall and across the yard to the kitchen door. There were wolves in the yard and rifles going off and a man on the ground and I did not stop to look at any of it. I got to the kitchen and down the trapdoor and into the tunnel with the key in my hand and the ledger under my arm.

The tunnel was dark and cold and I ran it with the lantern swinging and my breath going hard.

I came up in the mill cellar and out through the mill and across the field to the east wall and over the wall and into the trees.

The circle was quiet. The standing stone was there and the stones were in their ring around it and Arthur Renn was sitting on a root with the record on his knees and Hannah was beside him with the box of stones in her lap.

I put the ledger down on the moss.

“Wren,” Arthur Renn said. “What happened?”

“The pack house is ours,” I said. “Or it will be. And I have the key.”

And then I heard it. It came from the north, from the river road, from the trees. It was a sound I had not heard in this county in my whole life.

It was a horn. Three long notes, low and deep, the way a horn sounds when it is calling a hunt.

Hannah stood up.

“The Alphas,” she said. “That is the Alphas’ horn. It is the call for a hearing.”

The horn came again, three long notes and then silence, and then the trees on the north line moved.