“Behave, woman.”
With an evil chuckle, she tugged him toward the house, then carefully avoided the broken board on the stairs. Damn. She was getting sassy for a girl who’d initially been shy.
Inside, dusty shelves and showcases lined the front room, hosting an array of extraterrestrial-looking odds and ends—green alien pencil toppers, UFO snow globes, and rings set with what were purported to be pieces of meteorite. Each had a small boutique tag saying how much Georg was asking for the item. Most of the tags looked blank, but upon closer observation Luke could see the marker had only faded in the sun shining in from bare windows.
In the next room, there were exhibits under glass.
“This is a piece of the meteorite that flattened out this part of the mountain,” he said. Without any encouragement, he launched into a rehearsed speech about the history of the area and the numerous alien abductions documented nearby over the past hundred years.
“It’s why I moved here, you see. When I was a boy, in Austria, all I ever wanted was to meet the gray people, but where I lived? Nothing. This mountain, though, is special. When I bought it, people said I was crazy, but what do I care about that?”
Passion shone in Georg’s eyes, and Luke nodded. “Did you buy the museum from Mitchell?” he asked, not willing to let that go. Ophelia’s eyes gleamed as she browsed through the exhibits. Did she believe Georg’s stories or was she just enjoying the whole hokey place? It had almost as much dust as it had character, but there was something about the old man that made you want to visit him regularly, just to give him someone to talk to.
“Here, look at this one.” Georg jabbed a finger at a showcase that had a small pillow in the middle of it. On the pillow was a tiny computer chip, visible only because of the magnifying glass positioned over it. “Every time they come, I find one of these buried in the skin behind my knee, like the microchips veterinarians put into dogs. I dig them out with a penknife, because the hospital doesn’t believe anything is there. Our inferior medical technology won’t show us the small devices aliens implant under our skin.”
He sidled over to Luke and whispered, “You should really check the back of your wife’s knees. She looks like the type of woman they’d want for their breeding program.”
Ophelia glanced over at them, and Georg smile pleasantly, as though he hadn’t just been talking about her. When she looked away again, Georg continued.
“If you want to make sure they don’t track her down again, you need to look for a reddish patch behind the knee that never seems to go away. If you find that, dig just under the skin with something sharp. If you’re squeamish, though, just cover the area with Vaseline before she goes out and it should block the signals they read off the chip.”
Luke managed to keep his expression neutral, and whispered, “If you like going with them so much, why would you assume she wouldn’t? Maybe she won’t want me to interfere.”
Georg shook his head sharply. “Not the same. The women . . . Let’s just say the gray men can have peculiar appetites compared to a human male’s. No decent woman like your wife should be exposed to that sort of depravity.”
These gray men sounded like Luke’s kind of people.
Slowly, and with great showmanship, Georg led them through displays of the gray men’s culture and eating habits, culminating in a small room in which he’d recreated one of their research labs, complete with an exam table and reconstructed alien medical implements.
When a phone rang and Georg stepped out of the room for a moment, Ophelia leaned in. “I heard his warning.”
“I wonder which of these things is the probe he thinks you’re too ladylike for?” He pinched her ass and she smothered a laugh.
“Maybe he thinks the bed restraints will freak me out.”
“Won’t they?”
She lifted her chin and looked him bravely in the eye. “After last night?” Her shrug seemed like a dare. “Do you really think bed restraints will intimidate me?”
“We could try tonight, but there’s only one alien probe I’m interested in using on you.”
“Dirty.”
“I blame you.”
“Oh, you were like this when I found you . . . or I suppose I should say when you borrowed me without permission.”
Behind them, Georg cleared his throat. “If you’d care to join me, I’ll bring you out to the barn. I’ve constructed a quarter-s
ized model of the gray men’s most commonly used ship. No one else has seen it yet!”
They followed him out, ready to be suitably impressed.
Later, before they got in the SUV for the long trek back down the mountain, Georg insisted Luke buy his beautiful wife a necklace, from which dangled a tiny vial of alien DNA.
For the rest of the drive to Glacier, they speculated about what superpowers she might develop if the vial leaked.
Chapter 9