All Chapters of The New Moon Mate: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

I went down to the yard and stood in front of the clerk with the wind coming across the snow and my hands in my pockets.“Mr. Kessler,” I said. “I have a question about the payroll.”He looked at me and did not blink.“The payroll is a Council matter,” he said. “It is not a matter for a Gamma of a pack in the middle of a rogue investigation.”“It is a matter for a Gamma when a Council employee has been paid every month since 1954 and nobody in this territory has ever seen him.” I watched his face. “The name is Erik. There is no surname on the record. There is no address and no county roll and no pack roll, and the payments have been signed by the same clerk every year for twenty-five years.”The clerk closed his folder.“I do not know what you are talking about,” he said.“You signed the payments,” I said. “Your name is at the bottom of every one of them.”He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was a small thin thing that did not go anywhere near his eyes.“Miss Hal

We did not go to the trailer that night. We went up the ridge to Maeve's with the casing in my pocket and the letters in my jacket and the snow coming down again, and by the time we got to the cottage the road behind us was white and there was no sign that anyone had walked it.Maeve had the stove going and the kettle on. Arthur Renn was asleep in the chair by the fire with the record on his knees and his spectacles still on his face. Silas was at the table with a candle and a page of notes and his arm out of the sling because the sling had begun to smell.Dale was sitting in the corner with a blanket around his shoulders and his hands in his lap.I had forgotten he was there. I stood in the doorway with the snow on my boots and looked at him and he looked at me.“I have been thinking,” he said. “About the field. About the night it happened.”“Not tonight,” I said.“Yes, tonight.” He sat forward. “I have been sitting in this corner for six hours with nothing to do but think, and there

Kessler did not know where the man lived. He knew where the man had a mailbox.“It is on the north road, past the ridge turn,” he said. “It is a box on a post with no name on it and no house behind it. I have driven past it forty times since I came to this territory and I have never seen a house. But the payroll checks go there and the mail comes back signed, and the signature is always the same. E. R.”“And you never asked who he was?”“I am a clerk,” Kessler said. “The Council sends me a list of names and a list of amounts and I write the checks. I do not ask who the names belong to.” He looked at his folder on the hood of the truck. “I am asking now.”We did not go to the north road that night. The snow was too deep and the truck would have been stuck in the ditch before we got to the ridge turn, and there was a thing I wanted to do first that I had been putting off.Dale’s shed.It was at the back of his house, and his house was at the end of the co-op road, and the co-op road was

The pack square is not a square. It is the space between the pack house and the barn where the ground has been worn down to bare dirt by eighty years of boots and meetings, and there is a post with an iron ring in it at the north end and a bench at the south end where the old wolves sit.By seven o'clock it was full.The snow had stopped and the sky had cleared and the cold had come down hard, and the pack stood in their coats and their hats and their scarves and their breath came out white. There were more wolves there than I had ever seen at a meeting. The Corrigan boys and their mother. Mrs. Pike with her hands folded. The young border-wardens in a clump. Old Mr. Carter who had not come to a meeting in five years. The co-op men. The farmers from the west line. Harold with his hat in his hands. And at the back, near the fence, three wolves I did not know, in dark coats, with the snow on their shoulders, who had come in from the north road on foot and were not saying anything to anyo

Harlan read the telegram twice. Then he read it a third time and handed it to Silas.Silas read it with his pencil in his hand and did not write anything down.“When was this sent?” he said.“Yesterday afternoon,” Kessler said. “It came into the depot at Walla Walla and the depot called the co-op and Harold took the message and brought it up.” He looked at his folder. “There is a second telegram. It came in the same batch and it is addressed to me and it says the Council has appointed a culling officer for this territory and the officer is on his way.”“Who is the officer?” Harlan said.Kessler looked at the telegram in his hand and did not say anything for a moment.“It says the officer is a man named Silas,” he said. “It says the Council has appointed the investigator as the culling officer because he is already in the territory and knows the ground.”Everybody turned and looked at Silas.Silas put the telegram down on the step.“I did not ask for this,” he said. “I did not know abo