Forever

chapter THIRTY-NINE

• SAM •

This time, Koenig gestured for me to ride in the front seat of the police car. The car had gotten hot under the unmitigated attention of the sun, and Koenig combated the heat by cranking the air-conditioning on full blast. It was so cold that little drops of moisture kept hitting my face. The wolf that must still be inside me didn’t stir. Everything smelled like pine cleaner.

Koenig turned off the radio. It was playing ’70s rock.

I was thinking about Culpeper shooting my family from a helicopter.

The only sound in the car was the occasional crackle of the radio clipped on Koenig’s shoulder. My stomach growled, audibly, and Koenig leaned across me to let the glove box fall open into my knees. There was a package of crackers in there, and two candy bars.

I took the crackers.

“Thanks,” I said. They hadn’t been offered in such a way that gratitude felt uncomfortable.

Koenig didn’t look at me. “I know that Heifort was wrong,” he said. “I know what the common factor is, and it’s not you.”

I realized that he had not turned toward the bookstore. We were headed away from Mercy Falls, not toward it.

“Then what is it?” I asked. There was something like anticipation hanging in the air. He could have said Beck or Boundary Wood or anything, really. But I didn’t think he was going to.

“The wolves,” Koenig said.

I held my breath. The dispatcher’s voice, fuzzy, crackled over the radio. “Unit Seventeen?”

Koenig pressed a button on the radio and leaned his head toward his shoulder. “I’m en route with a passenger. Will call when I’m clear.”

“Ten-four,” she replied.

He waited a moment, and then he said, still not looking at me, “Now tell me the truth, Sam, because there is no more time for dancing around it. Tell me now, the truth, not what you told Heifort. Where is Geoffrey Beck?”

The tires were loud on the road. We were nowhere near Mercy Falls. Trees flew by us, and I remembered the day I drove to get Grace from the tackle shop. It seemed like a million years ago.

There was no way I could trust him. There was no way that he was prepared for the truth, and even if he was, this was our number one rule: We didn’t tell anyone about ourselves. Especially not an officer of the law who had just been standing in the room while I was accused of kidnapping and murder.

“I don’t know,” I muttered. Barely audible over the road noise.

Koenig set his mouth and shook his head. “I was there at the first wolf hunt, Sam. It wasn’t legal, and I regret it. The whole town was choking on Jack Culpeper’s death. I was there when they drove them through the woods to get them up against the lake. I saw a wolf that night and I have never, ever forgotten it. They are going to drive those wolves from the woods and shoot every single one of them from the air, Sam, and I saw the paperwork to prove it. Now I am going to ask you again, and you are going to tell me the truth because you and the wolves are out of options except for me. Tell me straight, Sam. Where is Geoffrey Beck?”

I closed my eyes.

Behind my eyelids, I saw Olivia’s dead body. And I saw Tom Culpeper’s face.

“He’s in Boundary Wood.”

Koenig let out a long, long hiss of breath between his teeth.

“Grace Brisbane, too,” he said. “Right?”

I didn’t open my eyes.

“And you,” Koenig said. “You were there. Tell me that I am crazy. Tell me I am wrong. Tell me that when I saw a wolf that night with Geoffrey Beck’s eyes, I was wrong.”

Now I opened my eyes. I had to see what his face looked like when he said this. He was staring straight through the windshield, eyebrows drawn together. The uncertainty made him younger; made the uniform less daunting.

“You’re not wrong,” I said.

“There is no cancer.”

I shook my head. Koenig didn’t turn his head, but he nodded a tiny nod, as if to himself.

“There are no leads on Grace Brisbane not because she disappeared, but because she is —” Koenig stopped himself. He couldn’t say it.

I realized that I was letting a lot ride on this moment. On whether or not he finished this sentence. Whether he grabbed the truth like Isabel had, or whether he pushed it away or warped it to fit some religion or changed it to match a less strange worldview, like my parents had.

I kept looking at him.

“A wolf.” Koenig kept his eyes on the road, but his hands twisted around the steering wheel. “We cannot find her or Beck because they’re wolves.”

“Yes.”

Koenig shook his head. “My father used to tell me wolf stories. He told me he had a friend in college who was a werewolf, and we used to laugh at him. We could never tell if he was telling a story or telling the truth.”

“It’s true.” My heart was thudding with our secret hanging out there between us. Suddenly, in light of his suspicions, I was replaying every conversation I’d had with Koenig. I was trying to see if it changed how I saw him, and it didn’t.

“Then why — I cannot believe I am asking this, but why are they staying wolves if the pack is about to be eliminated?”

“It’s involuntary. Temperature based. Wolf in winter, human in summer. Less time every year, and eventually we stay a wolf forever. We don’t keep our human thoughts when we shift.” I frowned. This explanation was getting less true every day that we spent with Cole. It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you’d relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays. “That’s grossly oversimplified. But it’s the basic rules of it.” I felt weird saying grossly oversimplified, too; a phrase like that was only because Koenig spoke so formally.

“So Grace —”

“Is missing because she’s still unstable in this weather. What is she supposed to tell her parents?”

Koenig considered. “Are you born a werewolf?”

“No, good old horror movie technique. Biting.”

“And Olivia?”

“Bitten last year.”

Koenig snorted softly. “Just incredible. I knew it. I kept finding things that led me back to that, and I could not believe it. And when Grace Brisbane disappeared out of the hospital and left just that bloody hospital gown behind … they said she was dying, that there was no way that she could have left under her own power.”

“She needed to shift,” I said softly.

“Everyone in the department blamed you. They have been looking for a way to crucify you. Tom Culpeper more than anyone. He has Heifort and everyone else lapping out of a bowl.” Now he sounded a little bitter, and it made me look at him in an entirely different way. I could see him out of uniform, at home, getting a beer out of the fridge, petting his dog, watching TV. A real person, something separate from the uniformed identity I’d assigned him. “They would very much like to hang you with this.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Because all I can do is tell them I didn’t do anything. Until Grace gets stable enough to reappear. And Olivia …”

Koenig paused. “Why did they kill her?”

My head was full of Shelby, her eyes on me through the kitchen window, the desperation and anger I thought I’d seen there. “I don’t think there was a ‘they.’ There’s one wolf that has been behind all of the problems. She attacked Grace before. She attacked Jack Culpeper, too. The others wouldn’t kill a girl. Not near summer. There are other ways to get food.” I had to try, very deliberately, to push away the memory of Olivia’s destroyed body.

We rode in silence for a minute or two.

“So, this is the situation,” Koenig said, and I was kind of charmed, now, to see that he sounded like a cop no matter what he said. “They have clearance to eliminate the pack. Fourteen days is not very long. You are telling me that some of them probably will be unable to shift before then, and some of them cannot shift at all. So we’re talking mass murder.”

Finally. It was relieving and terrifying to hear Culpeper’s plan defined as such.

“And there are not many options here. You could reveal the wolves for what they are, but —”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said hurriedly.

“—I was going to say that I do not think that is feasible. Telling Mercy Falls that they have a pack of wolves carrying an incurable infectious disease right after we discover that they have killed a girl …”

“Won’t end well,” I finished.

“And the other option is to try to motivate more animal rights groups to save the pack as wolves. It didn’t work in Idaho, and I think the time frame will be impossible, but …”

I said, “We thought of moving them.”

Koenig stilled. “Go on.”

I stumbled over the words. Koenig was so precise and logical that I felt, again, as if I needed to match it. “Someplace farther away from people. But then … it could just put us in a worse situation, unless we know what the people are like. And I don’t know what the pack will be like in a new place, without boundaries. I don’t know if I should try to sell Beck’s house to buy land, or what. There’s not enough money to buy a complete territory. Wolves range hugely, over miles and miles. So there’s always a chance of trouble.”

Koenig drummed his fingers on the wheel, eyes narrowed. A long moment of silence went by. I was glad of it. I needed it. The ramifications of my confession to Koenig felt unpredictable.

“I am just talking as I’m thinking,” Koenig said finally, “but I have property, a few hours farther up in the Boundary Waters. It was my father’s, but I just inherited it.”

I started, “I … don’t …”

“It’s a peninsula,” Koenig interrupted me. “Pretty big one. Used to be an old resort, but that’s all shut down because of old family politics. The end of it is fenced off. Not the best of fence, just box wire between trees in some places, but it could be reinforced.”

He glanced over at me at the same time that I looked at him, and I knew we were both thinking: This might be it.

“I don’t think a peninsula, even a big one, would be big enough to support the pack. We’d have to feed them,” I said.

“So you feed them,” Koenig said.

“And are there campers?” I asked.

“It faces mining land,” Koenig replied. “Mining company hasn’t been active since sixty-seven, but they hold on to the land. There’s a reason why the resort didn’t make it.”

I chewed my lip. It was hard to believe in hope. “We’d still have to get them there, somehow.”

“Quietly,” Koenig advised. “Tom Culpeper won’t consider relocation an alternative to their deaths.”

“And quickly,” I said. I was thinking about how long Cole had been unsuccessfully trying to trap wolves, however, and how long it would take to catch twenty-odd wolves and how we would transport them hours north.

Koenig was silent. Finally, he said, “Maybe it’s not a good idea. But you can consider it an option.”

An option. Option meant a plausible course of action, and I wasn’t sure it was even that. But what else did we have?