I sat at the small desk in my motel room with the laptop open and the single lamp throwing a yellow circle of light across the wood. The obituary stared back at me from the screen.
Leonard J. Harlan was a legal advisor to various regional land-holding entities, and he died in 1989. The deed to my mother's property had been filed two years after that, still carrying his name and stamp. I cross-checked it against Graymoor's public territorial registry and found the same name attached to a property dispute forty years ago. Other party: Graymoor Pack. Representative: Alpha C. Gray.
I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes. Someone had used a dead man's name to file paperwork. Someone who knew how county records worked and how the pack handled legal matters. The pieces lined up too neatly to be coincidence, but they still didn't add up to anything.
