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?
CHAPTER FORTY
• GRACE •
The interminable day finally ended when Sam came home with a pizza and an uncertain smile. Over the pizza, Sam told me everything that Koenig had said. We sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, his desk lamp and Christmas lights turned on, the pizza box between us. The desk lamp was next to the one sloping wall by the roof, and the way the wall diverted the light made the room seem warm and cavelike. The CD player by Sam’s bed was turned on, low, some smoky voice singing to a piano.
Sam described everything that had happened, making a little sweeping motion with his fingers across the floor with each one, as if unconsciously moving the last thing out of the way before he told me the next. Everything was a sort of a wreck, and I felt completely adrift, but I couldn’t help but think how much I liked to look at him in this low yellow light. He was not as soft as when I’d first met him, not as young, but the angles of his face, his quick gestures, the way he sucked in his lower lip to think before going on — I was in love with all of it.
Sam asked me what I thought.
“Of?”
“All of it. What do we do?”
He was stunningly trusting of my ability to logic it all through. It was such a lot to take in — Koenig guessing the secret of the wolves, the idea of moving being plausible, the thought of trusting all our fates to someone we barely knew. How did we know that he would keep our secret?
“I need another piece of pizza to answer that,” I said. “Didn’t Cole want any?”
Sam said, “He told me he was fasting. I don’t think I want to know why. He didn’t seem unhappy.”
I pulled the crust off a piece of pizza; Sam took what was left. I sighed. The idea of leaving Boundary Wood was a disheartening one. “I’m thinking it wouldn’t have to be permanent. The wolves being on the peninsula, I mean. We could come up with a better idea later, after the hunt business had all died down.”
“We have to get them out of the woods first.” He closed the pizza box and traced the logo with a finger.
“Did Koenig say he’d help you get out of trouble? I mean, about me being missing? Obviously he knows you didn’t kidnap and kill me,” I said. “Does he have some way to get them off your back?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything.”
I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice; I wasn’t really frustrated with him. “Don’t you think that’s