The Rampant Reaper

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Like Myrtle.” Charlie stood at a front window. She could see where Del had plowed a lane on Main Street.

  “Most of them did go off to live with faraway relatives, have the baby, and some family would adopt it and the girl would be sent out to work until she could find a husband or earn her living. But I always wondered if some of ’em didn’t end up getting whupped to death in the barn one night by a angry daddy and get buried on the farm. Nobody but the family would know any different—they’d just disappear. It was a terrible sin to get with child without a husband, brought down such shame on a family, and shotgun weddings weren’t so common as some would have you believe. Things was different then.”

  “But some would go to Marlys’ house and she’d take care of them and adopt the babies out? Why did she do that?” Even through wind-swirled snow, Charlie could see the trench line in the vacant lot across the street where the cave-in had all but filled. Looked like it was heading for the pool hall.

  “That was true everywhere, not just in Myrtle or Floyd County or Iowa, Charlie.” Mr. Rochester moved back away from the stove, fed and finally warmed. But he accepted another cup of coffee with a soothing dollop of brandy.

  “Girls in my school days were still disappearing,” Edwina said. “Guess I never thought much about it. But the whispers were if she moved and her family stayed, she was going to have a baby. She was soon forgotten. Once ruined, forever ruined then. How old is Marlys Dittberner, Harvey? You must have records on her at Gentle Oaks.”

  “Actually, damn few for someone who lived here all her life. And those records don’t tie down how long that life was. She’s outlived all her children and I’ve never talked to anyone with a mind left who knew her as a child. She was always a grown woman to all of them I questioned, and birth records were mostly stored in family Bibles then because no doctor attended and people pretended the messy birthing process was a joyous, antiseptic surprise from God. I can tell you though, having been given entrance to one of her dead children’s records and memorabilia, that she was not originally a Dittberner but married an Auchmoody before that. So she married at least twice. What’s that sound? Either it’s Charlie’s confounded cellular phone or our barkeep has taken in a feline.”

  Charlie was momentarily so soothed and warm and sheltered from this hostile environment that she didn’t know where to look for her purse. No problem. Old cool Kenny handed her cell to her. He was getting as irritating as her mother but had the good sense not to touch her hand with his when the phone was exchanged.

  It was a desperate Larry Mann. Her secretary and good friend and favorite date. First problem—the weather blonde on CNN had assured the nation that all residents of Minnesota and Northern Iowa were buried under tons of snow with power and communications out, and there must be hundreds if not thousands dead or in dire danger of being so because even National Guard helicopters could not get to them. “Charlie, I can’t believe I’m talking to you. You’re right in the middle of it. Are you freezing and hungry and thermally perishing? We’re frantic here.”

  “Jesus, what’s happened there? Is Libby in danger of—”

  “No, we’re frantic about you. It’s mildly balmy here. Hilsten is threatening to parachute from a chopper or something to save you. Except no one’s sure where you are. You went to Minneapolis and then to a Mason City? Where did you fly from there? Tell me quick before we lose contact again. Hurry.”

  “Settle down. I’m fed, warm, and sheltered as is the rest of Myrtle, Iowa, and even its one homeless person. We drove here from the Mason City airport. And please tell Mitch to stay in L.A.. He’s one problem I don’t need now.” Charlie had inadvertently saved the superstar’s life twice and he was heaven-bent on returning the favor. “Edwina and I are safe and sound, and I’ll get home as soon as the weather and roads clear. Larry, give me a quick rundown on the state of the office while we’ve got contact.”

  “Shirley Birkett is freaking in Tampa. Said she’d quit and wanted to change her mind. Quit what? The agency?”

  “No. She’s got some screwy notion that writing novels is a job and not just work she’s lucky to get. Let her stew till I get back.”

  “The Duesenburg contracts arrived this morning.”

  “How do they look?”

  “They look like you’re going to cross out three pages and consult the lawyers before the author signs. Oh, and Monroe’s interview on Celebrities Tonight airs tonight. Have they ever done a writer before?”

  “Norman Mailer I think I remember was on in the early days. Tape it for me, will you? Talked to Libby?”

  “She’s cool and made it to school today. Maggie and Mrs. Beesom had her for dinner last night and she’s dining at the Esterhazies’ tonight, so rest easy for a while on that one. She doesn’t watch the news so she’s not as worried about you as the rest of us. I’ll leave a message on Ed Esterhazie’s voice mail that you’re okay and not to stir her up. Take care, boss.”

  “Who is this wonderful Larry person? You’re positively misty-eyed,” Harvey Rochester said just as Charlie decided to check her voice mail. “My jealousy consumeth all.”

  “One of my best friends.”

  “Her secretary,” Edwina said. “He’s drop-dead gorgeous.”

  “You have a secretary?” Ben the homeless person squinted in disbelief. He had long lashes and almost no eyebrows. He never took off his knitted cap, so you didn’t know if he had hair.

  “You got a man for a secretary?” Uncle Elmo raised his eyebrows. They were about an inch thick and stuck out in all directions.

  There were three frantic messages from Mitch Hilsten that Charlie ignored. How do you tell a superstar to get a life?

  “Your secretary is drop-dead gorgeous and he’s just a friend?” Kenny didn’t sound convinced.

  “He’s gay,” Edwina explained. “That’s what she loves about him.”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars! Congratulations, Charlie Greene, this is John Stone of United Pacific Bank and Trust of Southern California and you have been approved for a line of credit twice that amount! UPB and T of SC looks forward to doing business with you. Your personalized checks will be mailed to you immediately. You have twenty-four hours to call me at—”

  “Jesus, now I’m getting telemarketers on my cellular.”

  “Never say that word around Elsina,” Rochester intoned.

  “Telemarketer?”

  “Jesus.”

  “You love your secretary because he’s gay?”

  “Makes him safe,” Edwina told Kenny.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Charlie told Kenny.

  “What makes you think I’m not gay?” Kenny asked Charlie.

  “Somehow, I just know. Positively.”

  “Positively?”

  “Is it getting too hot in here, or is it just me?” Ben unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Now stop that,” said Edwina Greene, who’d had to give up hormone replacement therapy because of breast cancer.

  “I think you need to quit feeding that stove,” Uncle Elmo advised. “You mean gay as in joyful or gay as in—”

  “Charlie Greene, I have a buyer for your condominium. Offer’s the greatest. List with me soonest and discover the deal of a lifetime!”

  “Charlie Greene, are you interested in exotic places, scenes, sex? Young, innocent prepubescent children innocently await your desire and tutoring. Nice, obedient—”

  “Jesus.”

  “Don’t say that word around—”

  “I know.” What I don’t know is how these horrible people could get my cell number. I’m going to have to filter everything here, too. “Is there no place safe from telemarketing?”

  “Gentle Oaks,” Harvey answered. “We don’t let them have phones at all. Insurance companies are always trying to sell them policies that will pay if they fall down. At horrific fees. They are feeble people who fall down all the time. Even those in wheelchairs decide to stand for no reason—they’ve forgotten they can’t, you see
. But they’re in a twenty-four-hour nursing environment. What more could a policy do but send them to a nursing home where the government pays for it anyway? After all their money is used up, of course. And once it is, what reason do their bereft heirs have to pay for anything? We live in a strange world. I hate to be too insistent, but you don’t suppose we could use your wonderful cellular device to converse with the coroner of Floyd County, do you? I’m at your mercy, lady, and in deep dung up at Gentle Oaks, upon which an entire town and a good portion of Floyd County depend for a meager living.”

  “You need a new scriptwriter, Harvey.”

  But “twas not erelong” in Harvey language before Charlie was torn from the warm, erotic world of Viagra’s to the hellhole of Gentle Oaks in Marshal Delwood’s humvee of a snowplow.

  CHAPTER 21

  “MARLYS IS AN unusual name,” Charlie told Harvey Rochester as they fought the weather up the few steps from the drive to the porch of Gentle Oaks. “Seems like she wouldn’t be that hard to trace in this small place—her past, I mean. I’ve only seen that name once before. There’s a mystery writer—”

  “Marlys is not that uncommon a name in Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota. I know of two in Floyd alone, several in Nora Springs.” Harvey brushed snow from his face and eyebrows and it blew right back in again, even under the porch overhang. You couldn’t see any oaks at all, but you could sense them hovering over the building. Well, okay, Charlie could. “But Marlys Dittberner is a true enigma because she was married to an Auchmoody first.”

  “She was born a Staudt, then married twice. What’s so enigma about that?”

  “Kenneth showed you the album. There is some question about the veracity of that book, Charlie. Like our history, it has been fiddled with by those who wish to make it as they wish so strongly that they truly believe the changes they’ve fiddled.” He pulled and pushed at the door to the lobby and Charlie lent what muscle she had. “Must be frozen shut. There’s a buzzer here somewhere.”

  “Maybe it’s locked from the inside.”

  “We do not lock people out of Gentle Oaks, child.”

  Charlie didn’t see how the coroner could get here today if he couldn’t yesterday. The blowing, drifting snow alternately hiding and exposing the ice underneath and causing whiteout conditions was worse than the blizzard that came before it. They were pounding on the doors, he cursing, she yelling, and taking turns punching the buzzer. This was serious here. The marshal and his humvee dump-truck plow had dropped them off and disappeared into the whiteout to destroy monster drifts so people could get places that wouldn’t be open anyway. Charlie had been in some really strange places, but … . People from Southern California are not prepared for either Mother or people Nature in Iowa.

  They were about pounded out and shouted hoarse and not bothering to hide their panic when two abominable snowmen snuck up behind them. The snow was so blowy and sticky and they were all dressed in so much padding, Charlie realized she too must look abominable. But Buz and Helen Bartusek got right in her face and wanted to know what was going on and Harvey explained their angst at not being permitted entrance to this “abode for the decrepit, weak, weary, and senile.”

  “They’re not senile. They’re confused,” Helen shouted over the howling wind.

  “Can you say Alzheimer’s, Nurse Helen?” Mr. Rochester shouted back.

  All four were in the process of rushing the door when Mary Lou Hogoboom opened it and they tumbled in nearly on top of her.

  The Bartuseks had come by snowmobile. How else, stupid? The generator at the Oaks had pooped out according to Nurse Hogoboom, and they’d locked the doors to keep Marlys in and the cold out even though it was against the fire codes. Breakfast had arrived—cold cereal, frozen milk, and ice-sludged juice. No hot coffee, tea, or cocoa. Only remnants of the morning shift had arrived. The mood was not pleasant here. Mary Lou Hogoboom was about an inch from hysterics. “Pipes freeze and we can’t flush the toilets—think about trying to breathe in this place.”

  Nurse Helen, daughter of the latest corpse, was well past hysterics. “You buried my mother out in the hazardous-waste area?”

  “Just till the coroner gets here.” Charlie put Kenny’s knee-length jacket back on after littering the lobby with its snow coat. “She’ll keep better that way.”

  Buz and Harvey tromped off to work on the generator. Helen turned on Charlie. “She’ll keep? My mother will keep? She was murdered.”

  “Was she a vegetable, Helen? Were all the recently deceased vegetables?”

  “Doesn’t mean they weren’t murdered. So what did you find out about the murderer?”

  “My first guess is that their time had come and nature took its course. My second guess is that someone from the town or on the staff decided to put them out of their misery. My third is that one of the inmates is a little more clever than we think. Or it could be a combination of natural and assisted death. So now there have been six, right? And they’ve all been pretty well gone mentally. What else do they have in common?”

  “They were all women. Hey, you’re better at this than I thought.” Helen took off her thick glasses to rid them of steam by rubbing them on her sweater. “And they were all born Staudts.”

  “Are there any more ‘born Staudts’ here?”

  Cousin Helen blew her nose so hard into three consecutive tissues that her glasses steamed up again and she still had to breathe through her mouth. When she unsteamed her eyewear on her sweater again, her unprotected eyes walled like one of Edwina’s used to. “My God, there’s at least two I can think of.”

  “Now don’t panic. It could easily be coincidence.” One more dead “born Staudt” and I’m gonna forget the nature thing myself. “But there does appear to be a possible pattern here.”

  “I told Buz you’d been detecting a lot and would be better than old Delwood.”

  Actually, cuz, I get most of this from reading endless film scripts, manuscripts, teleplays, proposals, and treatments. Damn near every story has a murder in it these days. My deductions are totally unscientific and unreliable—but if it makes Cousin Helen feel better until the coroner arrives, what the hell?

  Darla Lempke was there, but the administrator’s office was dark. Elsina must still be converting the Mexicans. Darla had lost her bubbles. Sherman and Flo sat together at a table carefully cutting up construction-paper figures that Darla had made to show them as examples.

  “You let these people have scissors?” Charlie couldn’t believe it.

  The activities director slumped in a chair. “I’ve worked two straight shifts without sleep and little food. I’m a social worker, not an aide. The residents run around half the night. I’m not supposed to work nights and weekends. I’m cold.”

  “Ciga-riga-rooo?” Flo tried to cut the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  Sherman squinted at the social worker. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Darla. You know who I am.”

  “I don’t know who I am. You smoke?”

  Dolores the tom sat high atop a cabinet along the wall behind Sherman and Flo, alternately hissing and washing behind his ears. Even the cat had lost it in this place. Snow began to blow on the big TV screen next to him like it was blowing past outside the windows.

  “Where are the aides?” Darla screeched at Mary Lou Hogoboom, who was rushing through the cafeteria to someplace else. “This place can’t operate without the aides.”

  “You’re always complaining that they’re lazy and hiding somewhere when you have something for them to do.” Harvey walked in still looking wet. “At least notice that the lights are on, dear child, and the heating system is gargling. It’ll take a while to heat up the place, but the pipes haven’t frozen yet.”

  “You fixed the generator.” Charlie was hoping to hurry out like Mary Lou, not wanting to be drafted into service by Darla Lempke, no longer a cheerleader for the positive.

  “No, it’s deader than Ida Mae. Apparently the power lines are repaired for the O
aks at least. Health-care facilities are given first priority in emergencies. Hope it lasts. I sent poor Buz out into the storm to gather the snowmobile cowboys to round up the aides and the Mexicans, many of whom are one and the same, to relieve the situation here. Where’s Nurse Helen?”

  They had moved out of the cafeteria by now, leaving Darla with the problem of no cigarettes for Sherman and Flo, who both smelled strongly in the need of a change. Which reminded Charlie of her own impending problem. She wondered if, with all the female employees, there might be a stash of female sanitary products here. Plugs and pads, as Libby termed them.

  “She rushed off to check out women who had been born Staudts, I think.”

  “Charlie, as soon as this storm is over and the roads are clear, I am going to Mason City and buy a grand piano—the grandest piano I can find.” Mr. Rochester’s eyebrows, thick but not hoary like Uncle Elmo’s, were highly expressive in some way Charlie didn’t want to deal with. Her feet were so cold she probably wouldn’t even get a period this month.

  “Do you play the piano?”

  “No.” The eyebrows rose and arched, and fortunately somebody screamed. He backed off when Helen came running down the hall. “Charlie, it’s Doris Wyborny. You were right. Oh, dear Jesus. Oh, God.”

  Helen sort of collapsed toward them still on the run and Harvey caught the brunt of her. Charlie was beginning to feel edgy. She was either on the edge of a migraine, a panic attack, or the damn curse or, worse, all three at once.

  Doris Wyborny lay on her back in her bed as had Ida Mae Staudt Truex. Her roommate lay in the next bed relentlessly pleading for help, relentlessly ignored because there wasn’t any.

  “Was Doris born a Staudt?”

  Helen and Harvey looked at each other and shrugged.

  “She was something like a hundred and four. I’m not sure what she was before she was married.” Helen reached to pull the sheet up over Doris’s face and Harvey grabbed her.