four of them reflexively pulled their caps from their heads and stood there holding their headgear against their chests, for all the world like schoolboys in the presence of the headmaster. Three of the four stared at the fourth one, as if they expected him to do all the talking. After a moment, he did.
“Don’t mean to disturb you, Frau Wildern, but we’ve come to ask if you’ve seen a stranger about in your forest,” the young man said, his cheeks reddening with the effort of speaking to the formidable old woman. “He’d be a hunter, with a rifle.”
“There are many hunters with rifles in my woods, and some of them are strangers—but not this season,” she said, one eyebrow raised. “This is not the season for hunting. Nor have I heard any shots fired since last winter. Why do you ask?”
“There was a fellow calling himself Gunther von Weber who won the Maifest shooting contest. The Hauptmann didn’t like the look of him, so he looked the fellow up in the conscription rolls, and he wasn’t there. So he decided to conscript him on the spot.” The young man twisted his hat in his hands as Tante Gretchen gave him a hard look.
“Is that legal?” she demanded, as Giselle sat silently, watching and listening. “He could have been an only son. He could have had a club foot. He might have been foreign-born—there are many reasons why he wouldn’t be on the rolls!” She began tapping her foot impatiently, and the young man flushed.
“I’m sorry, ma’am but—” he made a little, helpless gesture with one hand. “—but it was the Hauptmann, you know? It didn’t matter if it was legal or not, if the Hauptmann wanted something done.”
There was a long silence, made deeper by the fact that the air was still and not even leaves were rustling. Tante Gretchen stood there, hands on her hips, giving all four of the soldiers the sort of look that would make any young man squirm as if he had been found stealing a pie. Finally the silence was interrupted by a rook calling in the distance and two of Tante Gretchen’s hens who came clucking around the corner of the cottage.
Tante Gretchen snorted. “So, go on. Did the fellow desert?”
“In a manner of speaking. The Hauptmann took him into the office and locked the door.” Now the soldier paled a little. “We all knew what that meant, and we all knew what would happen to us if we interrupted, so we just . . . went about our business. In the morning, the orderly found the door still locked, and nobody answered at his knock, so he brought men to break the door down. The hunter was gone, and the Hauptmann was dead without a mark on him.”
Tante Gretchen rolled her eyes. “Now boy, don’t you dare tell me you all think it was witchcraft and you want me to hunt out the man-witch for you! You know I don’t hold with such superstitious nonsense! I am a good woman! I go to Mass whenever I can! I have a shrine to the Virgin right here in my front garden! And just because I’m an old woman that lives in a cottage in the woods by herself, that doesn’t mean I’m possessed of magic powers and riding a broom to the Horned Mountain on Walpurgisnacht!”
Giselle had to hide her face by concentrating very hard on her peas. It was clear that her role in this was to observe. She might have observed that all four of the young men were rather good looking—but that encounter with “Johann” when she was fourteen had put her off good-looking young men, and after her sorties into Maifests, strangers were no novelty to her.
“No, no!” The scolding made the poor boy grow paler. “No, but the chief of police said we at least needed to find this von Weber fellow and bring him in for questioning, because he was the last man to see the Hauptmann alive! So we’ve all gone out as far as we think he might have gotten, and your woods would be a good place for a hunter to hide!”
“Did he have a horse?” the old woman asked shrewdly. “Because if he didn’t, I doubt very much he got this far.”
Now the four soldiers exchanged baffled looks, and one shrugged.
“We don’t know, I guess,” Hans admitted.
“Giselle, you went mushroom hunting yesterday,” Tante Gretchen said, turning to Giselle. “Did you see a