Ruth stopped short beside him, huffing and clutching her lantern. “Oh my,” she said. “That is queer.”
They had a good view of the main streets of the town, and those streets were easy to tell, because they were lit up with lamps, bright like star-points, swinging and twinkling up and down the avenues. More light came from windows, shining squares of light that flickered with flame and intersecting shadows. That was strange—all those lights and activity past three in the morning—but that wasn’t what made him worry so.
It was the whistling.
The whistling was everywhere—and it was the same kind of sound as he had heard that first night, that filled the whole of the quarantine and got into the back of his head. The same as came up at the picnic, when Bergstrom made such a scene.
As he listened now, Jason wondered if maybe he’d been hearing it all through the night, since he snuck out from the house and made his way down here—got to wondering if maybe it had granted Louise the fascination with the love letters from Africa and Ruth her sense that fate decided everything. It was the sound, after all, that had nearly robbed him of his will, when he saw the thing—the Juke, whatever it was—in the quarantine.
And then, as fast as it had come, the whistling faded. And there were just the lights. Hundreds of lights.
Another light appeared beside him, as Ruth struck a match and held it to the wick of the lantern she carried. “I don’t know what they’re doing. But we won’t be able to sneak past them. We may as well hide in plain sight.”
Jason sighed. He slid the hatchet into his belt, and lifted his shirt so it covered the blade. He wished that fate, if it were watching over them, would have at least seen fit to provide him with a decent gun.
The street was empty, but it was lit by the flickering lamps in the windows and on the porches of the worker houses. Jason started, as he saw one of those lights blacked out for a moment—blacked out by something that was moving in the dark outside. Ruth didn’t notice that; she was too busy trying to hide in plain sight, as she’d said. She held the lantern in front of her like a banner in some parade.
“Jason,” she said, as they approached St. Cyprian’s, “I should thank you for your kind reply to my letter.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“And you answered many of my questions. But not everything.”
She stopped at the path to the church. “I can remember very specifically in fact, a particular question I put to you that you did not answer.”
“That so?”
“That’s so, yes. I asked you: why did you think that this fellow was sent to murder Dr. Waggoner? And you wrote me back a fine letter about many things besides that.” She lifted the lantern to shine it on Jason’s face, and peered into his eyes seriously. “Don’t think you can avoid all my questions, Mr. Thistledown, now that we have become intimates.”
Jason looked back at her. He was on the edge of telling her the whole thing: how Sam Green had warned him of the attempt on Waggoner’s life, and how Dr. Nils Bergstrom was tied up in it, and everything else. It would be easier to betray Sam Green to Garrison Harper’s daughter, he thought, than it would have to tell Aunt Germaine the truth about what had happened in the quarantine. Jason wondered about that: this was a betrayal, pure and simple—not just keeping a secret from someone he’d stopped trusting anyhow.
But it was betrayal to Ruth Harper, who was, as she’d put it, an intimate.
“Well, Jason?”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry but I can’t.”
She narrowed her eyes and looked at him more closely. Jason was sure then that she would become angry and stalk off, leaving him alone in the road. But she surprised him.
“I see that’s so,” she said. “I’ll not press the point. You can tell me about that when you tell me more about your papa.”
“All right,” said Jason.
“All right,” she said, and pulled the lantern away.
The whistling started up again as they passed the sawmill. Jason by this time had one hand clutched around the handle of the hatchet, his grip all the tighter for the fact that he knew it would be of scant help, if all those folks turned their attention away from the mill and its maze of lumber. He leaned to Ruth and said that he thought it was time to snuff the light and she agreed.
The crowd around the mill was prodigious; there were easily as many people there as had attended the picnic that afternoon. Their attention on the mill was absolute; they stood facing the walls and between the stacks of lumber, as though waiting for someone to emerge from it.
“Why are they whistling?” whispered Ruth.
“I don’t think they are whistling at all,” said Jason, and then looked to his feet when a woman dressed scandalously in a long nightgown, turned to him and made a shushing noise. Ruth shuddered, and hurried toward the hospital.
It wasn’t far—indeed, they came upon it sooner than they might have thought, because unlike most of the other buildings in Eliada, the hospital was dark. Jason pulled the hatchet from his belt.
Perhaps they both could feel it: the darkness was only an indication of what was truly going on there. They hunkered low as their eyes adjusted to the lower light.
There was movement around the hospital’s perimeter. Maybe more of Sam Green’s men, perhaps guarding Nowak. But they moved different. There was a flutter, like a skirt.
Jason touched Ruth’s shoulder and pointed. She whispered: “I see.”
Jason leaned to her ear, so near her hair tickled his cheek. In a few short breaths, he relayed a plan that he thought might work. When he was done, she nodded, brushed his jaw with her fingertips, and got to her feet.
Absent sheets and masks, Jason gave up the notion of hiding in plain sight. Better to creep up on the quarantine through the woods surrounding it, emerge from the farthest point from the hospital, and wait until the guards had moved ’round the corner to make the final rush.
Thinking about it made it seem easy. Doing it was something else.
The underbrush was thick with high, curling ferns that came past Ruth’s waist and that combined with the darkness made it difficult to move quickly; nearly impossible to move quietly. So to avoid getting spotted, they decided to go back farther into the woods.
This turned out better or at least easier: under the canopy of the trees, the underbrush thinned, and they were soon walking between pine and fir trees on a floor of needles. Jason’s eyes were well-enough fixed to the dark that he could navigate, stepping around a deadfall here and spotting a little spring-bed there—and still keep an eye on the clearing where the quarantine sat.
Finally, he judged them far enough around to make the plunge back. They stood on a small rise of rock and moss, in a spot near a clear sky that made a lonely patch of ferns behind them.
“All right,” he whispered. “You ready, Ruth?”
There was no answer.
“Ruth?” he said again, and turned.
Ruth stood with her back to him. He thought she was saying something, but it was hard to telclass="underline" her head shook and bent side to side, but the words weren’t clear. Jason stepped beside her, and as he did so she bent to her knees, peering down from the rocks. Something was moving down there, in a nest made of crushed ferns. He couldn’t tell what it was. He knelt down too, and put his hand on Ruth’s shoulder. Her back was twitching, like she was sobbing. He looked at her, but she shook her head, and pointed down. Jason looked.