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He looked at her. She was wearing jeans and a navy blue Turtleneck sweater with her boots. He wondered where she got the sweater. They needed to go clothes shopping.
Adding it to the list, he mocked himself.
“Duncan had some clothes here from when his grandchildren were living with him,” she murmured, answering his thoughts out loud. Or maybe she had just guessed. “It’s a help, because the women have nothing. And really jeans and sweaters don’t exactly go out of style.”
He nodded. “Who is staying with the women?” Damn it, he should have thought of that earlier.
“Titus and Miles,” Jessie answered. “And Duncan says he’s got some men for us to meet tomorrow, because we need guards. Titus said he’d send for some of the Okanogan pack if you thought that would be a help.”
Ryder grimaced. “Probably not,” he admitted. “We’re going to have Hat Island pack here tomorrow. But adding Okanogan into the mix is asking for trouble. It would be best if we can solve our problems ourselves — with Penticton pack.”
Duncan turned around at that comment and nodded his approval. “Your personal men don’t raise eyebrows,” he said. “And we can justify the Hat Island men because of the medic. But you’re right. Penticton needs to take care of Penticton business.”
“That would be a first,” Benny muttered. He stretched as if his back was hurting him. Well he’d been riding a bike for the first time in years — that alone would stretch some muscles. But Ryder thought it was something else. Benny looked tired.
“I’m driving,” Dennis said. “And we should leave now. We can talk in the car.” He led the way out of the house through a two-car garage to the dark green Expedition parked outside. He guessed Dennis had just confiscated it. He wondered where Dennis’s own car was parked. Today had been a wild day.
And it wasn’t over yet.
Once they were on the road and headed north, Ryder sighed. He was seated in the middle back seat with his arm around Jessie. Benny was in the far back, and Duncan was in the front passenger seat.
“All right,” Ryder said. “What do I need to know?”
There was a silence as if people were hoping someone else would start. Were things that bad?
“I’ve been doing some thinking, and I have questions,” Jessie said hesitantly. He smiled and nodded his encouragement. He’d picked up enough from Benny and his father over the years to know that good questions were worth their weight in gold. “I’ve been thinking about what must have happened after what people here call the retribution,” Jessie continued. “There must have been a lot of widows and orphans. So did they inherit businesses and property? What happened to it? What happened to them?”
There was silence. “Gentlemen?” Ryder prompted gently, because that was a good question. Not where he would have started, but maybe he should have.
“Let us back up a bit from that,” Duncan said. “I’ll get to it, I promise. There are six main families in the pack. So think of the pack as six interconnected families, of which the McKenzies are one family. Large families, obviously. I have great-great-grandchildren here; so does John. And we have always had a lot of additional single men. Most packs do, right? But John recruited them deliberately. First for logging, and then for the mill. This was a rough town in the early days. And then the gold rush, and we got men then too. Shifters are always on the move. We’re a restless species, and a lot of shifters coming from the Old World came through here, and many stayed. Married into the pack, some of them.”
“The Vancouver pack looks to Asia,” Jessie said thoughtfully. “A lot of our families came in on the ships to the harbor.”
Duncan nodded. “Whenever you have men on the move you can almost always guarantee there’s also a pack mixed in too. So then John got sucked up into that plot to overthrow Tanaka. He wasn’t the brains of the operation, you already know that. What he had was an isolated location, and lots of men who would do whatever he ordered.”
“Even torture a woman,” Benny said flatly, before adding reluctantly, “Although some of the torturers were men that Anton Vuk supplied. Vuk knew what he was doing. He knew how you made a berserker wolf, and he was applying those techniques to Haru Ito. Although why he thought he could control that man as a berserker is beyond me. But I would agree. Penticton pack was the grunt labor.”
Duncan nodded again. “And they died,” he said. “And quite frankly, they deserved to die. I just wish Tanaka and Garrison had finished the job and killed John too. But that’s water under the bridge — he’s dead now. But Jessie’s right. That left a lot of families without a man to provide for them. I took in all of mine who needed a place to go, and most families did the same. A rumor was put out about an ugly flu epidemic to cover the missing men. We have fixers in the pack, we have to, right? And 15 years ago was a good time to have a lot of names enlist in the military and never return. So to answer your question, the women and children were cared for. The advantage of a family pack.”
Jessie frowned. “But that’s not quite my question,” she said slowly. “Those women and children? They owned a house right? They had a car. Assets. Why did they need to come to you at all?”
Oh, oh, Ryder thought, but he waited, curious to see what Duncan said.
“The assets, as you call them, weren’t in the women’s names,” Duncan said finally. “We’re old-fashioned, even now. The house and such would have been in their husbands’ names.”
“And they didn’t inherit?” Jessie pursued the question. “Surely the wife would inherit the property — or even the business — right?”
More silence. “No, the pack inherited the businesses, if there were any, and there were,” Duncan said as if he’d not ever thought of this before. “And same with the houses. Or well, the bank owned them. But we have a pack bank.... The women and children were provided for, Jessie. The pack provided. The family provided. No one went hungry.”
“The pack provided,” Jessie said woodenly. “Took their homes and businesses and then doled out charity? Isn’t that what you mean?”
Ryder squeezed her hand, and then said, “I think I’d like to see the records from that time, gentlemen,” he said. “Because what I’m hearing is that John McKenzie confiscated the property and assets of the men who died rather than deeding them over to the women and children who survived them. So he got rich off it, didn’t he? And the women were left to take charity from relatives?”
“I’ll call Peter Dawson,” Benny said in the silence. “He can send up one of his accountants. They can do an audit of the books and see who might need asset restoration.”
“I never thought of it,” Duncan said blankly. “Family takes care of family. That’s how I was raised.”
“In the 1950s, maybe,” Jessie said. “But in the 21st century, women can hold their own property and run their own businesses.”
