Jason did reply, but not to any of what she had written, other than to say that he had liked kissing Ruth Harper fine too and hoped they might do so again before he left.
On the final points of her letter he was more specific:
You are welcome for saving your life, although I should thank you for loading the gun or else I would be dead. I am sorry you lost your Colt.
I do not want to go to the quarantine again without a gun at least. But I will meet you at the place you wrote in your letter this night and we can talk about it.
And then he set the pencil down and thought for a moment and wrote:
I am terrified of this too but you were terrified of kissing so I will be brave like you.
He thought about changing that sentence—it was not at all as pretty as the sentences that Ruth had set down in her long letter, and it was not made any prettier by his awful handwriting. And there was that other question—one that he should have an answer to by now. So he wrote his name at the bottom, folded up the note paper, slipped it into the envelope, and settled down to wait for the servant’s return.
Jason kept Ruth’s letter and read it over a couple of times more. His eye kept moving to that single question—the one that he could not figure.
She wrote: I cannot yet fathom why you asked him that question: “Who sent you to murder Dr. Waggoner?” I have been beside myself with wondering—how you would have thought this fellow had gone to murder Dr. Waggoner? Will you not tell me, Jason my darling? Is there another piece to this mystery you have kept from me?
And what of his answer, Jason? What of that? What is this “old man” of whom he speaks? Is it Dr. Bergstrom? That creature you described in the quarantine? Some other man? Do you know? Pray write me & say!
Jason read the letter over and over, until the hour struck three, and it was time. He folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and with a shaking breath, slipped out through the door and padded down the corridor.
How in tarnation was he supposed to know who the old man was anyhow? All he knew was what Nowak had said, lying in his own quickening blood and spitting through the pain:
“The Oracle is on the march. She deliver God.
“She deliver God.”
21 - The “Germe de grotte”
“You are ever punctual, Mr. Thistledown,” Ruth said.
Jason didn’t see her, but he felt a warm hand on his arm as soon as he stepped through the doorway of the cider house. She drew him further along, and the door swung shut. In the dark now, Jason leaned over to where he thought the voice came from with another kiss in mind.
Fortunately, Ruth Harper was deft enough to move aside, so when Louise Butler struck a match and held it to a candle, they stood blinking in the flickering light a respectable distance from one another. Louise granted Jason a bare smile and set the candle on a wooden shelf behind her, and gave Ruth a look of ambiguous meaning. Jason nodded a how-do-you-do and Ruth let go of his arm.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Ruth’s voice was taut as a banjo string. “Louise has elected to join us.”
“Pleased to see you again,” said Jason. Then to Ruth: “You sure you want to go to this place?”
“Soon enough,” she said. “But not right away.”
Jason’s eyes narrowed. “We have only a little while to sunrise. You want to figure out a mystery, we best be on our way.”
“On your way where?” said Louise. “I thought—”
“Yes,” said Ruth quickly. “There’s work to be done here first. Jason, why don’t you sit down a moment.”
Jason looked around. They were alongside the curve of a huge wooden barrel that he guessed was for pressing apples. There was a bench along the wall underneath where the candle was. As he looked around, he saw a dark shape on the plank floor. He squinted and stepped closer.
“That’s my aunt’s bag,” he said, bending down to touch the handle.
“Indeed it is,” said Ruth.
“Ruth stole it,” added Louise.
Ruth scoffed: “Oh, hardly.”
“She ordered the help to bring it to her,” said Louise. “They wouldn’t bring the guns though.”
Jason looked at Ruth. She wore a pair of dark trousers and high laced boots, her blouse concealed underneath a small woollen jacket, and in the light, Jason might almost have thought he was kneeling beside a fellow.
“We will give it back,” said Ruth. “After we’ve given it a proper search. I trust that won’t present a problem?”
“I—I looked through it at Cracked Wheel,” said Jason. “She was pretty upset when she caught me.”
“Yes. Well, Mr. Thistledown, why would she be upset if she had nothing to hide? I have been considering the tale you told me about your sad adventures at Cracked Wheel—and the more I considered it, the less sense I could make of it. Consider the fabulous coincidence: a terrible sickness strikes your community, and in its aftermath—this long-lost relation arrives to spirit you off to… here! Where she consorts with that awful Dr. Bergstrom, who subjects you…”
“Subjects him to what?” said Louise.
“Well my point,” said Ruth hastily, “is that your Aunt Germaine, if that is who she is, seems a most sinister presence.”
“All right, Miss Harper, Miss Butler,” he said. “Let’s have a good look inside and see what we can see.”
Jason had hauled that bag across hundreds of miles it seemed, since the winter’s end. As they pried open the clasp and began their inventory, he was amazed with himself that he had found so little when he looked inside it the first time—and that he had failed to take a second look during the rest of the journey. Was he that afraid of inciting his Aunt Germaine’s displeasure?
Ruth felt no such compunction. She wasted no time in pulling out Germaine’s box of eugenical index cards, removing one after another and reading the contents out loud in an unflattering impersonation of Aunt Germaine’s overly precise east coast diction. Louise looked at some cards too, but more quietly—her brow creased as she tried to decipher the numeric code.
Jason helped her: “Epilepsy,” he said. “That’s the fainting sickness. Congenital criminal. That’s—that’s folks born bad.”
Ruth gave him a light slap on the thigh at that. “You’ve already explored these then,” she said, and dug further. After pulling out some garments and a small ivory box that contained small amounts of cosmetics, she reached to the bottom, and looked at her hand in the bag and then at the floor.
“There is,” she said, “another compartment in this bag. Between the bottom and the floor, there is a good four or five inches.”
“Let me see,” said Jason. Ruth leaned away from the bag and Jason took her place. He felt the bottom of the bag. He tapped at it.
“Sounds hollow,” he said, and ran his finger around the edge as Ruth smirked and Louise, in spite of herself, moved in closer.
“A secret compartment,” Louise whispered.
“Not much of a secret,” said Jason as his finger stopped at what felt like another clasp. He twisted it, then when the bottom wouldn’t budge moved to the other side of the bag and found another. He pulled the bottom out, and set it on the floorboard. Ruth stood and brought the candle down from its shelf.
Jason peered into the compartment. There were two things there: a sheaf of paper bound in string, and a small wooden rack, perhaps ten inches long and five wide. It had two circular holes cut in it. One was empty. The other held a small, earthenware jug fired with a reddish glaze. Its top was sealed with deep red wax that drooled down its edges. As Jason lifted it carefully from the bag, he could see no writing or seal on it to say what might be inside. Whatever was inside shifted when he turned the jug upside down to look on its bottom.