Germaine smiled wanly in the thin light and nodded. But she did not let go of the firearm.
“Did he hurt you, Nephew?”
“No, but he was fixing to. These cuts—” he motioned to his leg “—I got them outside.”
“Did you?” said Germaine. She was wearing her travelling skirts—long, deep blue swaths of wool that held stains of grass and muck gathered from countless miles of Montana track and they had a smell to them, of must and mildew that would not launder free. Unpacking here, she’d vowed to burn them, but had obviously not gotten ’round to it. With her empty hand she picked at them now, as though pulling off invisible burrs. She seemed to catch herself, smoothed the cloth and looked up at Jason.
“Who was that?”
Germaine shook her head. “A common thug,” she said.
“In a Klansman’s sheet,” said Jason. “And you knew his name. He work for the Eugenics Records Office too?”
Her eyeglasses caught a flash of sky-slate in reflection and lost it again as she tilted her head.
“What do you take me for?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were outside with the Harper girl,” she said. “In spite of everything that transpired at that picnic—in spite of all the things that Mr. Harper said—you were outside. Skulking about in the night. Weren’t you now? And you met with some things. Didn’t you, now?”
Germaine was waving the revolver around as she spoke, so strenuously Jason was sure it would go off sooner or later. His expression must have communicated that, because she stopped, looked at the gun in her hand as though she had only just realized it was there, nodded to herself and set it on the windowsill.
Then she turned back to Jason.
“Do you take me for a fool, Jason Thistledown?”
Jason stared at his Aunt Germaine Frost. He thought about the way her chin twisted as her thin and pale lips pursed, and he thought about his mama. He thought about how Aunt Germaine knew to call that fellow Mr. Bury—and how she worked so close with Nils Bergstrom. He thought about some of the very smart points that Ruth and Louise had raised, after listening respectfully to his tale of the tragedy and woe in Cracked Wheel.
And then, because he didn’t want to be a fool himself he thought some more before he decided what to say.
“No more a fool,” he said, “than Mama did, when your pa shot his own foot outside Boston back when she was a girl and I guess you were too.” And then he made himself smile a little.
She softened at that—smiled back, like she was remembering how it’d been, Jason’s grandpa cleaning his shotgun on the road outside Boston, only it’d gone off, and filled his boot full of shot that penetrated through some leather and gave him a funny limp until he was older.
“You remember that?” he asked. Aunt Germaine nodded and came over and sat down on the bed beside him. She squeezed his knee and Jason let her.
“Oh, Nephew, I am sorry for that. I know that you’re not being disrespect-ful.”
“I’m not,” he said. He stood up and walked over to the windowsill. “Just like Mama was nothing but respectful when Grandpa hurt himself like that.”
“I remember it well,” said Aunt Germaine.
He lifted the gun, turned to Aunt Germaine, and as surprise widened her eyes, he said: “No, you don’t.”
“What—?” she began, but Jason could see by her expression that she understood.
“Far as I know, my ma’s pa never shot himself in the foot. You were really her sister, I think you’d know that.”
Germaine Frost was without words. Her mouth worked in little oh’s, like a river trout on the rocks.
“You lied to me,” said Jason. “From our house to Cracked Wheel to here. You ain’t my aunt, but you went to a lot of trouble to make me think it were so.”
“Jason,” she finally managed, in a high, frightened voice, “I only wished to help you.”
Jason held the gun steady. A moment ago, he’d been ready to shoot her—put a bullet in this woman, who he ought to have figured sooner for an imposter. Hell, she didn’t look like his Mama or him or anybody in his family. She’d shown up in the middle of the winter just right after a terrible plague—like some sneaky old vulture, a hawk, swooping in and carrying him off to this place. And there was the thing she’d let Dr. Bergstrom do… And then there were those letters they’d left with Louise… .
“The Cave Germ,” he said.
And with those words, all the fear melted from Aunt Germaine—Mrs. Frost. In its place rose an expression that Jason could only describe as glee.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “It is up, isn’t it? You’ve divined my purpose, my hero.”
If Germaine Frost were afraid of getting shot this morning, she showed no sign of it.
“Stop calling me your hero,” said Jason.
“All right,” said Germaine. “Though it’s true.”
“Truer than me being your nephew maybe.” Jason braced his arm against the weight of the gun. “Why don’t you tell me how you came to tell me you were my aunt. How you know my mama to pretend at bein’ her sister.”
“Oh, from the Cracked Wheel Town Hall,” said Germaine. “I knew her, and your father, and many others.”
“What you mean by that?”
She leaned forward. “Records, Jason. I had ample time to peruse them all—in the long days that the Cave Germ took to finish its work.”
She smiled at that—or maybe at Jason trying to work it out. Whichever it was, Jason didn’t care for it, having this lying old woman, who’d abducted him (that was the only word for it) smirking at his ignorance.
“The Cave Germ from the Belgian part of Africa. That Mr… . Dew Lake sent you all those letters about?”
“Dulac,” corrected Germaine. “From the Belgian Congo. You’re a clever boy, Jason. But you are not quite clever enough to translate my private letters—not unaided, hmm? Why don’t you give me that gun. You’re shaking, Nephew—”
“Don’t call me that!” The gun had been lowering, and Jason held it up and drew the hammer back. That got Germaine’s attention. She held up her hands in clear surrender.
“All right.” Her voice had a bit of a shake to it. “May I call you Jason?”
“You may,” said Jason. “You can tell me about those letters now. That Dulac fellow—you fixin’ to marry him?”
Germaine’s hands lowered slightly. “Marry?” In spite of her predicament, she chortled. “Oh, no. Maurice is not the marrying sort. No, Neph—Jason, my correspondence with M’sieur Dulac is strictly professional. He is an operative at a plantation in Africa—not too far up the Congo River. We have never met face to face.”
“How do you know him then?”
“Correspondence,” said Germaine. She shrugged. “We had, I suppose, become intimate sufficient to trick the eye of one with schoolgirl French. But we are professional colleagues, Jason.”
“You mentioned that.”
“I prefer to make myself clear,” said Germaine. “M’sieur Dulac would not relish any confusion on the matter either. He has already risked so much, so much… .”
“How’d he do that?” Jason had spent long enough with Germaine to know that she told her stories in her own time—and he could tell by the way she perched, her thick shoulders arched like a child’s by fireside, that she was building towards an important one now—but he was getting impatient.
“M’sieur Dulac had been working on this sugar plantation for some time. He was on the one hand managing the vast crew of jungle niggers that his company employed—but he also made a study of them. For these were not like the niggers you find in America—weak and foolish and prone to crime—but proud savages. Still you could not trust them, for crime and deceit is congenital to that race. But Dulac conspired—conferred with the physician there to make good records of their health. And as he told me, there was one nigger—particularly tall, with teeth strong and thick and endowment prodigious even for his species—he who walked alone. No wife, nor mother, nor sibling, did he have—and he rarely spoke to others. This nigger came from a village some miles back in the jungle—a village that, the stories told, had been ravaged by a fever that came from the earth—” she chuckled “—from a dank cave inhabited by Devils! Only this nigger—only he—had walked away from it. The superstitious darkies—they all thought it was Devils at work, but Dulac—he, like myself, was a man of science. Devils do not bring up sores, or stop hearts with congestion or drive fevers high. No. It was a germ at work.”