The Rampant Reaper

by Marlys Millhiser

  The answer is in the way the bedclothes were messed up on Wilma Overgaard, the latest victim, or maybe the latest winner.

  Oh, shut up. You know less about puzzles, crime scenes, and mysteries than I do. Which is saying a lot.

  Charlie still lay there, still groggy, when footsteps sounded on the outside stairs.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs—Jesus, it’s good you’re an agent and not an author.

  “Oh, bugger off.”

  Up at the Oaks early this morning, the doofus who got Gladys going with his reference to excrement was so startled when Gladys smiled without her dentures and wheeled up to invite him to be her boyfriend that he followed it with “Jesus,” which of course set off Administrator Elsina on getting born again. Charlie wondered what became of him after she, Mary Lou Hogoboom, and Gladys fled the scene.

  “Whadya mean, ‘bugger off’? I live ’ere, Sheila.” Kenny’s head and part of his torso appeared over a bookcase. He pulled off a sweatshirt and used it to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

  “Don’t turn around. Wait.” Charlie covered her head with the pillow. “Now turn around.” She kept covered until she heard the shower running. She had to get out of this town.

  When Charlie had taken her turn in the shower, coffee fragrance saturated the air of the place. “So where’s Edwina? Did you ever find Marlys?”

  “You realize you’re hyperventilating?”

  “Like you did after following me up the drive to the Oaks the second time I saw you? I hate romances. Besides, I’m inhaling coffee air.”

  “This has nothing to do with romance.”

  “I know.” Her neck hurt just looking up at him.

  “Drink your coffee and we’ll walk to the Schoolhouse Café for breakfast. Where we’ll be safer.”

  They stood out on his rickety back porch overlooking his snowmobile and the Sinclair. The air was cool, not cold. Fresh, not rush hour. They drank strong coffee and breathed deeply, didn’t talk and didn’t touch. Sufficiently caffeinated, they strolled around puddles, patches of ice, frozen mud, gooey mud, up to the Schoolhouse Café and ordered wicked omelets and orange juice. They got toast and potatoes, too. If Charlie had felt stared at the last time she was here, she felt scrutinized this time. At least the trees and sky looked friendlier now.

  “I don’t know where your mother is, but the Lumina was gone when I got back from my run, so she feels good enough to drive anyway. I hope she’s out seeing to old Elmo. He got a little strange on us yesterday. Far as I know, Marlys has not turned up.”

  “I hope she doesn’t. I hope she’s out of her misery. Oh, God, there goes the sun again. I’d hang myself from a clothes hook in a closet if I lived in this climate.”

  “Actually, it’s great for moody writing.”

  “You write moody nonfiction?”

  “When it suits.”

  “Hey, Kenny? You seen Ben?” the wait person asked. The entire staff consisted of one waitress and one cook. “Didn’t show up for breakfast this morning.”

  “No, but he was looking for Marlys last night with the rest of us. You checked the Sinclair?”

  “Mayor says his bed wasn’t slept in.”

  “Maybe Ben and Marlys ran off to get married.” That brought laughter from everyone in the room.

  The omelets were the special—eggs, ham, onions, green pepper, and cheddar cheese, for godsake. “I’m going to have to start lifting your weights.”

  “So what’s this about my not turning around?” Kenny lowered his voice.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Can Mitch Hilsten turn around without getting in trouble?”

  “So what’s with Ben? He lived here a long time or just wandered in one day?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. You got a problem with buns?”

  “Okay, backs. Satisfied? Now, about Ben—”

  “What, like shoulder muscles? Sculpture?”

  “No, from the waist up. And, yes, Mitch has a great back.” But not as great as yours.

  “Would you believe that’s one I’ve never heard of? Okay, okay—” he put his palms up against the tough Hollywood-agent squint “—let’s do Ben.” But he grinned and chuckled over her preposterous weakness. At intervals, anyway.

  It seems that Ben, the town watchman, was the illegitimate son of one of the dark-eyed girls who got pregnant, and an adoptive home was never found for him. He was sort of passed around among families. “Didn’t have the mentality for school, so he dropped out early, but he was a good worker and earned his keep at various farms around, and then at the grain elevator for years. One day he got under a chute that dumped a load of oats on him. Buried for long enough that he wasn’t good for much anymore. So he started wandering the town, reporting what he saw to anyone who would listen.”

  “Hence the town watchman.”

  “Right. Never got violent or nasty. Just watched things. And the Sinclair was the only place around with a lot of cash on hand at all times, so the mayor, who runs it with her husband, gave him a bed there, put in a shower. That was before Viagra’s and The Station became viable businesses.”

  “So who was his birth mother? Was she a Staudt?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. Marlys always kept the identities of the girls as secret as she could in a small town. Are you anxious to find out who your birth mother is?”

  “You know, I don’t think I am now. My life is so full, I just don’t want to deal with it. What if she wants to extort money or horn in on my life with Libby or, God forbid, wants me to sell her screenplay?”

  As they walked back to Main Street by another route so Charlie could see what little of the town she hadn’t already, Kenny asked, “What have you got against romances? Women are supposed to love them.”

  “Yeah, we’re supposed to love football, too, if you listen to the right promoter.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “They make women out as needy people who have to have a man to survive.”

  “I understand that—I don’t read them—but I understand that they outsell anything else and those days they portray gutsy women who demand a lot.”

  “But who will never be whole without Mr. Right. Hey, I work in Hollywood, I know the female dependency myth. That’s what plays there. That’s all that plays there. How about you, big guy? Need Cinderella to make your life complete, do you?”

  “No, but then I like football.”

  “You’ll be ready for Cinderella when you’re a geezer and can find a blithe and dewy one.”

  “Is that why Mitch Hilsten became engaged to Deena Gotmor? And are you why they split up?”

  “Actually, Mitch and Deena were starring together in Paranoia Will Destroy Ya and somebody’s press agent decided it would make great press when the film opened if an engagement were announced. She was already humping Godfrey Arthur of the Gluecks anyway.”

  “That’s why you’re so cynical. A woman working Hollywood, and of course a teen pregnancy before that.”

  “That just now occurred to you? Hello? And let us add my welcome to Myrtle, Iowa.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THEY PASSED THE Catholic Church, so small and so sad. Holes in the roof, boarded windows instead of stained glass. Crows peering down from exposed rafters like pigeons from the ruin of a barn that had shattered suddenly at the home place.

  “You’re using me for your book, aren’t you?” Charlie said to the poor church, but really to the man beside her.

  “How’d you know?” he asked the crows on top of the building or the sky or God or the universe, but really Charlie Greene.

  “I know writers, God help me. They’re driven. They never stop working and they feel free to use whatever and whoever comes across their vision.”

  The Solemn Lutheran Church wasn’t far from the Catholic Church and was in similar condition except that its windows weren’t covered at all. “Solemn? This is a joke, right?” Charlie asked.

  “Lutherans tend
to be Scandinavian and are given to somber moods.”

  “Looks like the Methodists won.”

  “They had the backing of old Abigail and her money.”

  “If she’s got that kind of money, why can’t she hire some Mexicans to take care of her like Harvey does? Until she’s ready for the Oaks.”

  “Not a chance Edwina’s going to move back home, is there?”

  “She has a home and a career, friends, books to write, lectures to give. Would you give that up for the family witch? This isn’t home to her. She’s lived in Boulder almost three times as long as she ever lived here. She isn’t planning on retiring soon and when she does, she’s considering Prescott.”

  “But this is where she was born, her parents are buried, where you were born—”

  “And thank God, she’s not sentimental. I don’t know why she came back this time, really. These people are all remote history to her.”

  “There is a plot for her next to her parents out at the cemetery. But I suppose she’ll be buried next to her husband.”

  “My dad’s buried in Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder, but Edwina has asked to have her ashes scattered over a special place in the Canyonlands of Utah, where her favorite rats and bats rule the night.”

  “At least she’s sentimental over rats and bats.”

  “Make no mistake, Kenny Cowper, Edwina Greene will move back here only over my dead body.”

  They blinked at each other. She laughed, he chuckled.

  “Man, is that an opener or what?”

  “Yeah, had I but known, I’d sure as hell never said that.”

  “Don’t forget, Marlys Dittberner predicted you would be next.” His eyebrows raised to perfect arches.

  “Maybe Edwina drove to the Mason City airport instead of the home place. Roads will be plowed, planes flying. Maybe we’ve already got tickets.”

  They stopped in front of the gray Victorian. The sun came out, briefly lighting it and the snow around it, but couldn’t cheer it up much. “God, Psycho meets Fargo.”

  “Right. There’s more wonderful material here than a writer could use in a lifetime. This place is a gold mine. And I’m the only writer in town.”

  “So what did you do before you became a famous writer?”

  “I was a reporter for the Miami Herald for a few years. Writers were seeping out of the cracks in the sidewalks. Myrtle’s all mine.”

  “You either made good in a law suit, a divorce settlement, an inheritance, won the jackpot—if you’d made that good with your writing, even I would have heard of you.”

  “Your mother has read a couple of my books.”

  “Living and business expenses may be low here, but the remodel on that apartment of yours cost bucks. Wait, I know—you’ve got a Sugar Mommy.”

  “God, you Hollywood career types are vindictive. Okay, my sister and I share an inheritance from my mother’s parents, left in trusts from the sale of farms, all set up before they committed suicide.”

  “Rather than end up vegetables in Gentle Oaks.”

  “Who knows? The trustees put the money in the stock market when we were small. While we grew, it grew.”

  “It didn’t go to your mother first?”

  “It was split three ways between us. My grandparents did not like my father, figured he’d blow her fortune trying to keep the pool hall alive in a dying town. And he would have. But by the time she could have collected her share, he’d managed to get in the way of a combine.”

  “And you want to return to your roots? Forget Fargo. More like Psycho meets The Addams Family.”

  “I know you think you’re just talking Hollywood, Charlie, but you are really saying what I’ve already said. Listen to yourself. Read my lips. There is material here.”

  “But that’s all reruns, or in syndication or cable stuff now.”

  “Remember, I’m doing fact, not fiction. How many baby boomers are dreading futures in nursing homes for themselves because they’re dealing with parents already incarcerated? They can’t deny the reality of aging, much as they want to. There’s a certain sick fascination in the inevitable. You want to read about it to find evidence it won’t happen to you. You’ll just go to sleep one night in your own bed in your own home and not wake up. Do you have any idea of the growth industry in Iowa and much of the Midwest? It’s medicine, hospitals, nursing homes, especially those run by tax-exempt churches. They and drug companies are cleaning up, along with lawyers who know how to work the system. Forget Family Farms and crop subsidies, corn and soybeans. Iowa’s getting fat on Medicare and Medicaid.”

  “And Myrtle, Iowa, is an example so extreme, it’s news.” The last thing Charlie wanted was more ties to this place, but this hunk could pitch. She fished in her purse for a business card and handed it to him. “I know old Jethro Larue can pull wedgies in New York that I can’t from Beverly Hills, but should he ever let you down, I wouldn’t refuse to look at a proposal on this one.”

  This is really scary, Greene. We’re almost doing business in the backwater of a backwater.

  “That’s the problem. Old Jethro is old enough to find the topic fearsome, loathsome, and nonmarketable.”

  “But you said baby boomers would get into this.”

  “He’s way past baby boomer, Charlie. He’s too close to the age of incarceration. This is not the topic for most people over seventy-five.”

  “Jeth Larue’s over seventy-five?”

  “Pretty damn close. And remember, a lot of older women who read, who are also most of the people who read, are going to be living at home independently longer than guys, who die earlier and watch more football than read anyway. And these women are still responsible for grandmoms and greatgrandmoms in nursing homes. Charlie, we’re talking demographics here. Larue’s mother is still alive.”

  “You aren’t making sense. He must have to visit her in a nursing home.”

  “He’s got three sisters still living, so he doesn’t have to confront that reality.”

  “I don’t want to confront it either. Do you?”

  “Only while I’m writing this book about it. And, Charlie Greene, my personal financial stability should have nothing to do with New York publishers not thinking I’m starving.”

  Too bad Shirley Birkett, the next Danielle Steel, was married and pregnant. Charlie could have fixed her up with Kenneth Cooper. They could have shared suspicions.

  “Know what else? Harvey told me very few doctors will even visit a nursing home. They can’t handle it.”

  “They have to, nursing homes are full of sick people. You’re making this up.”

  “Law says family doctors have to visit four times a year. Harvey says they whirl through like dust devils, prescribe medications over the phone with the nurses the rest of the time. Things get serious, they send out a helicopter from Mason City, take them into the hospital where specialists, who don’t visit nursing homes at all, fix them up and send them back to vegetate longer in awful ways the specialists never have to witness.”

  “Medicaid’s not going to pay for a helicopter.”

  “Somebody’s paying for it. Harvey’s making out like a pig at a trough.”

  Abigail Staudt stepped out on her porch. “Just what is it you two want, standing there like that for so long?”

  “Admiring your house, Aunt Abigail.”

  “Don’t you call me aunt, hussy. Just get out of this town and take that good-for-nothing mother with you.”

  “She’s been watching us a long time from a corner of her front window,” Kenny said as they walked off.

  There were no sidewalks, so they sloshed through the slush of the streets. Charlie’s poor fashionable boots started leaking. “Do you want Edwina living back here?”

  “I guess not, now that I’ve gotten to know her a little. She just seemed like the perfect answer to an imperfect problem there for a while.”

  “Like Myrtle seemed to her family.”

  “Everybody around here remembered your mother a
s the ugly duckling. Ugly ducklings are not supposed to have lives. She’s actually aged pretty well. So has my mom. But she’s had some work done.”

  I’m not touching that sucker, Charlie thought, but said, “Is this stuff adobe or stucco or what?”

  They stood in front of the ruin of a two-story house with that same brown coating that she’d seen often here and which coated the store buildings her mother’s family had lived in on Main Street.

  “I think it’s some kind of colored cement. Lots of buildings were built with it or coated over, probably in the twenties or thirties. It was touted to never rot or need painting and originally a light tan in color, but it got dirty with the decades, which hadn’t been predicted.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  “I have an interest beyond my book. I have roots here. As do you.”

  “Nobody feels rooted to a place they’ve never seen or hardly even heard of. So, you are using me as a possible outlet if your agent won’t accept the Myrtle book because the reality and immediacy of nursing homes would upset him at his age, because you are delving into the intricacies of loyalty, family secrets and genes, and the lingering power of female guilt in a once agrarian society.”

  And because we both apparently belong to a horny strain of the same ancestry. Time for a reality check, big guy.

  “Do you happen to know if the mayor carries tampons or whatever at the Sinclair?”

  CHAPTER 30

  WHEN CHARLIE MADE her purchase, the mayor and her dog were extra somber. Ben had not shown up, nor Marlys either. Even Orlyn Sievertsen’s Lab and Saint Bernard hadn’t seen her. “So how’s old Elmo?”

  “Something happened to Uncle Elmo?”

  “You haven’t heard? Marshal Delwood’s been looking all over for you two. Elmo tried to kill himself out at the Staudt place—botched it. From what I hear, it’s the Oaks for the poor guy.”

  On their way to Kenny’s car, Charlie said, “Did you hear the dread in the mayor’s voice when she said poor Uncle Elmo was headed for the Oaks? What I don’t understand is why anyone stays in this town once they notice the first gray hair, eye bag, or wrinkle.”