Chapter 94: A Name in the Ledger

The district officer was tall and young and he had a paper in his hand and two men in the street behind him, and he did not look like a man who had done this before.

“Beta,” he said. “I am going to ask you to come with me quietly.”

“Read me the warrant,” I said.

He read it. It was short and it was in the chief clerk’s hand and it said the Council of Alphas had ruled that the Beta of the Palouse Ridge pack was a rogue wolf and was to be taken to Boise and held until the full Council met.

“The Council of Alphas has not ruled anything,” I said. “The Alphas who sat on the tribunal are in this territory and they have not ruled. The warrant is signed by the chief clerk and the chief clerk has been arrested.”

The young man looked at the paper.

“It has the seal on it,” he said.

“The seal is a stolen mark,” I said. “It is the founders’ mark with a line through it. The Alphas have the register and the crates and the whole of it and they are in this territory and they will tell you what the seal is worth.”

The young man did not move.

And then Ruth stood up.

“Officer,” she said. “I am eighty-six years old and I have lived in this town my whole life and I have never once been in trouble with the Council. And I am going to tell you a thing that you can write down in your report.” She put her hand on the table. “The woman standing in front of you is the Luna of the Palouse territory and the land she is standing on is the Luna’s line and the warrant in your hand is a forgery. If you take her to Boise you will be the officer who arrested the Luna on a forged warrant and there will be forty Alphas in that room in three days who will want to know why.”

The young man looked at her.

“I have a warrant,” he said.

“You have a paper,” Ruth said. “Papers can be forged. I have a box on that table that has a ring in it and a photograph and a piece of a stone and a letter from the founder’s wife, and I have had it since 1954 and I have never shown it to anyone because I was afraid of the Council.” She picked up the letter. “I am not afraid anymore. So I am going to ask you to put that warrant in your pocket and go back to your car and write to Boise and tell them that the officer they sent to Walla Walla has found the Luna’s line and it is not a rogue.”

The young man stood in the kitchen with the warrant in his hand and did not say anything.

Then he folded it and put it in his coat.

“I am going to write to Boise,” he said. “And I am going to tell them what I found. And if the Council writes back and tells me the warrant stands, I am going to come back here and I am going to have to take you.” He looked at me. “I am sorry. I have been a district officer for two years and I have never had a warrant like this one.”

He went out and the car in the street started up and went away.

Ruth sat down.

“Well,” she said. “That is the first time in eighty-six years that I have said a thing out loud in front of a Council officer and I find that I am shaking.”

I sat down beside her.

“You did not shake,” I said.

“I am shaking now.” She put her hands in her lap. “And there is a thing I have not shown you. It is in the box and I did not want to take it out in front of the officer.” She reached into the box and took out a folded paper and put it on the table. “It is a page from my mother’s ledger. My mother kept the farm accounts and she kept them in a book and there is a page at the back that she wrote in 1954 and it is a list of names.”

I unfolded the paper.

It was a list of names in a small neat hand and the names were the Luna’s line. There were four columns. The first column was the Boise line and the second was the Kessler line and the third was the Walla Walla line and the fourth was the Palouse line.

The Palouse column had three names in it.

Ruth Halloran, born 1930.

Mary Halloran, born 1952.

Wren Halloran, born 1953.

I looked at the second name.

“Mary,” I said. “My mother’s name was Mary.”

“Your mother’s name was Mary,” Ruth said. “And she was born in 1952 and she was the Luna’s line and she was the founders’ line and she was the third Ruth’s daughter.” She put her finger on the paper. “But that is not the name she used. Look at the fourth column. There is a note at the bottom.”

I looked at the bottom of the page.

There was a note in the same small hand.

Mary changed her name in 1970 when she wrote to the Council. She took her grandmother’s maiden name so the Council would not find her in the register. She called herself Mary Hale.

I sat in the chair.

“Mary Hale,” I said. “My mother’s name was Mary Hale.”

“Your mother’s name was Mary Hale,” Ruth said. “And she is in the Council’s register under that name. And the register in the vault has a claim on a Luna named Mary Hale and the claim is dated 1954 and the claimant is Erik Renn and the parcel is the mill land.”

I stood up.

“The claim on my mother is in the vault under a different name,” I said. “And the Council has been looking for Mary Hale for twenty-five years and she was living in this territory the whole time and she was paying rent on land she already owned.”

Ruth put her hand on the table.

“There is a thing you can do with this,” she said.

“What thing?”

“The Council’s register has a claim on a Luna named Mary Hale. Your mother. And the claim is a forgery and the claimant is a man who has confessed to eighty-five years of fraud.” She looked at me. “If you take that page and the claim and the register to the full Council of Alphas, you do not have to prove that the Council took the land from the Luna’s line in 1891. You only have to prove that the Council took the land from your mother in 1954. And there is a page in her own hand and a letter in her own hand and a box of papers in her own house that prove it.”

I sat down.

“Then we do not need the full moon,” I said. “We do not need the circle. We only need a court.”

“You need a court,” Ruth said. “And the full Council of Alphas is a court. It meets in three days. And if you put this page in front of it, the Council will have to rule on the claim of Mary Hale before it can rule on anything else.” She put her hand on mine. “And a claim of blood on a living Luna is a different thing from a claim on a woman who died in 1891. It is a thing the Alphas cannot ignore. It is a thing that has a name and a date and a page in a ledger.”

I looked at the paper.

“Mary Hale,” I said again.

And then Elias said, from the window, “Wren. There is a car coming down the street and it is not the district officer.”

I went to the window.

It was a black car and it was long and it had a Council mark on the door and there were four men in it and the man in the front seat had white hair and a scar through his eyebrow.

It was Halloran.

“He is out,” I said.

“He is out,” Elias said.

The car stopped in front of the house and Halloran got out.

He was in a gray coat and he had his hands in his pockets and he walked up the path and stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the door.

“Beta,” he called. “I have come to make a deal.”