The Rampant Reaper

by Marlys Millhiser

  “‘Del and I’—now we volunteer to help the only law for miles to do a duty he could do alone? Why is that, Cowper?”

  “I don’t trust her alone with you, Brunsvold. Or alone with me either.”

  The marshal sighed long and heartfelt. “Sure is different than in old Elmo’s day, huh?”

  “Looks like a pretty nice house for a truck driver and a nurse with four children.”

  “It was Ida Mae and Arly’s house. They sort of inherited it because Helen was the only one who stuck it out here. She had two brothers who took off after graduating from college. One’s retired in Oregon now and the other in Connecticut. They never come back.”

  “What happened to Arly?”

  “He was real deaf,” Delwood said. “Walked in front of a freight one night at the crossing by The Station, actually died from a blow on the head from the crossing-signal arm, got run over anyway. Yeah, story goes ol’ Arly greased the tracks for half a mile.”

  “He was on his way to the pool hall, according to legend. Maybe that’s why Helen hates the place so.” Kenny slid in beside the marshal and they drove off to look for Marlys. And Ben, too.

  The Bartuseks’ house was two-story wood in a pale yellow with white trim, glassed-in front porches on both stories, cleaned-out flower beds rimming house and front walk. A birdbath with a heater in it, ornate concrete urns awaiting next spring’s blossoms. Tidy, cared for, no chipped paint or drooping eves here. Piles of raked leaves showing through melting snow. The air was chilly but not cold, full of moisture for the dry linings of throat and nose, and it smelled so fresh—not empty, but filled with soaked earth and tree bark and leaves. No exhaust fumes or sea salt. The sun came out filtered by moisture haze but dispelled the gray gloom, and so did two cats from a clever cat door in the porch’s siding instead of in the storm-screen people door. They both resembled Dolores the tom but had shorter fur, thinner bodies, and the markings of a tiger cat mixed with the Siamese. They came down the walk to greet Charlie as if she’d never been between the sheets with Mitch Hilsten or drank beer at the pool hall. They purred, rubbed against her legs, butted her ankles with their heads. Why didn’t Libby’s damn cat at home ever treat her like this?

  Buz opened the porch door before she and the welcoming cats reached it. His big smile sort of lit up her day, his big stomach showing his fondness for Jack’s fried chicken. The cats accompanied her in and sent a tiny dachshund off the porch and into the house by simply blinking at it. The porch also had screens and wicker furniture and carpeting and many of the plants they would transport back outside in summer. And inside, more yellow carried out the theme, bringing a hint of sun into the house.

  It was the sort of a place, if you could bear the thought of being old enough to retire, you’d consider soft and snug, soothing for tired bones and aching head, sore joints, and a craving for tranquility. Comfortable furniture, abundant reading lamps, bright, light, secure, soft, mellow, roomy—yet cozy, perfect for commercials for retirement-oriented products like medications, diet energy drinks, herbal longevity scams, long-term-care insurance—safe shelter for your parents or investments. Most of Charlie’s writers made their living off a significant other and some managed on ad writing. It took only a few hot talents to make her career.

  If you could get a decent production staff and film crew to come to Myrtle, Iowa, this would be nirvana for all those set to reap the market in the baby-boomer geriatric boom on the horizon.

  Charlie, here you are, with your money, in a tiny town in which a helpless bunch of your blood relatives have been murdered—and you are looking at the marketing aspects of this house? “You are sick.”

  Edwina, in the process of mincing across yellow-gold carpet without her crutches, stopped short and grabbed the flowery yellow couch.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Mom. I meant me. Talking to myself again.”

  “So, what was it you were sick about, girl?” Buz flopped down in the ubiquitous Lazy Boy. There were two, both in a pale sage-green that set off all the yellow. The accents in the room were creamy white—lampshades, throw pillows, knitted afghans, figurines—along with two forest-green table lamps.

  “I was just thinking what a great place this would be for a commercial shoot as a reason to save money for a retirement paradise. The colors are perfect, butter melting to cream melting to lemon—the gold and the green accents. The whole place screams comfort and tranquility.”

  Cousin Helen blinked at Charlie and melted, too. She toured the room turning on all the lamps and light switches. “I did my own decorating. Buz kept saying all this yellow would make us go blind—but he likes it now I’ve got it all together. It’s like the sun’s out even when it’s not.”

  “Problem is, nobody wants sun to watch David Letter-man.” The dachshund on Buz’s lap growled warning to the unimpressed cats circling the sage-green Lazy Boy.

  “Oh, you can’t stay up that late anyway.” Helen threw a pillow at him and insisted on showing her guest the rest of the first floor. But not the second, Charlie figured, because it was all bedrooms she and her mother had not been invited to sleep in. Back in the living room, where she was still practicing putting weight on her injured ankle, Edwina told Charlie she’d been asked here because “I wanted to talk you out of leaving tomorrow. There’s going to be a memorial service Saturday and Helen and Buz have offered us a room and it would mean so much to me, Charlie. We’d have our own bathroom. There’d be a shower.”

  “For all those who’ve died recently at Gentle Oaks,” Helen added. “Murdered and not.”

  “And there’s ribs and kraut at The Station tonight,” Buz said as if that should be a surprise.

  “Hey, no problem. You can keep the Lumina even. Kenny and Del have offered to take me to the Comfort Inn tonight. I’ll get a cab to the airport. I have to get back to work, if you don’t.”

  “Charlie, tomorrow is Friday. It’ll take you all day to get back and then it’s the weekend. What difference will a day or two make?”

  “One, do you have a clue to how much we’ve blown on canceling our flights already? Two, a weekend is a good time to be home when you have a teenage daughter, and anyone remotely connected to this little village who couldn’t pick up on that fact is ready for Gentle Oaks. Three, due to modern technology, I can catch up on a lot of office work with e-mail, fax, and phone from my home so that four, I land at the office on Monday running. Five, I don’t get outta here, I’m Loony Tunes.”

  Charlie’s mother, the Bartuseks, the dachshund, and two cats squinted at her for seconds, everybody but the cats pausing to blink. Then Buz said, “They got taxicabs in Mason City?”

  Charlie was mentally squinting at Cousin Helen and thinking, boy, I’d kill off a whole bunch of Staudt relatives, too, if my only future meant losing the chance to enjoy a comfortable retirement, hold onto what life I could salvage to enjoy home and Buz and gardening, to visit children and grandchildren, have a few winter months in Arizona. After working in the hellish environment of Gentle Oaks … .

  Buz checked his watch. “Harvey will be looking for us. Cocktails, don’t ya know?”

  “It’s only four o’clock.”

  “Yeah, well, folks don’t stay out late in Myrtle and everybody’s going to The Station for kraut and ribs, and Harvey, he has some things at his house he thought you might like to see.”

  Did Helen drink cocktails? Did these sudden invitations to homes where Charlie had not been invited before mean some kind of trap? She’d go along with the Rochester manse for the sake of Jane Erye. But she was outta here tonight.

  CHAPTER 34

  HARVEY ROCHESTER LOOKED and sounded more like Richard Burton the more he drank. What he drank were martinis with a lemon slice rather than a twist—pre-chilled Tanqueray and frosted glasses. They were really good, and Edwina and Charlie signaled caution to each other by an expression Charlie remembered but couldn’t say how. Everyone but Cousin Helen had one and she actually accepted a beer. Maybe she was slummin
g. Then again, this wasn’t a pool hall. Sniff, sniff.

  There were tiny, fried-crisp veggie wraps with salsa, corn chips with a bean dip to die for. Again that warning look between the Greenes, sort of a family thing, a wide eye and then a hard blink. Funny that Charlie should remember it, wondered when it started. Probably in her childhood. Did she and Libby do that?

  After a short tour, they were entertained in the living room, what Harvey called “the parlor.” The rooms were spacious and separated with pocket doors that could be opened to nearly make the whole first floor one room with a hall and staircase in the center. Parlor, formal dining room, kitchen, and office/study took up the first floor, with what had been a pantry donated for a bathroom, with all the museum-piece facilities still there or recreated—like the toilet tank hung high on the wall with long chains dangling below. Upstairs there were two modern bathrooms, several bedrooms, and a sleeping porch.

  Other than a game room, the finished basement belonged to the Lopezes.

  In the parlor, Charlie munched a crunchy veggie wrap and looked out the curved bay window, noting with relief that there was no grand piano. In a place of honor and lighted with a picture lamp hung a painting of the Myrtle Staudt of legend, or so her host claimed. This Myrtle was not ugly like the one at Great-aunt Abigail’s.

  “So who’s version is the real Myrtle?” Charlie asked her host, but both were watching Cousin Helen try to drink a Corona through the lime wedge stuck in the bottle’s mouth.

  “This one, of course. It’s a family treasure and heirloom. And I’m going to put the grand piano over in that corner.” He pointed to exactly the spot it had been in Charlie’s dream, in relation to the bowed window. A love seat and chair sat there now.

  “I still can’t believe that horrible family would have bothered to have her portrait painted—and she’s not even ugly in this one. And she has blue eyes. The legend-of-Myrtle story isn’t working for me.”

  “Abigail Staudt, my lovely Charlie, is our Parson Weems, who, you may recall, made up morality tales to teach future generations the right path according to his particular take on it—using totally fictional material about real historical figures—myths, if you will, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abe Lincoln and a railroad tie or something. Victorian ladies, which Abigail and her formidable sisters were even when the rest of the world was modernizing—and this is not unusual in parts of the Midwest, where change is generally suspect—were particularly adept at using this method to right the wrongs of the forefathers … and I forgot where I was going with this. Here, give me that.” Mr. Rochester grabbed the bottle from Helen’s hand, squeezed the lime into the neck, and handed it back to her.

  “I don’t have a clue where you were going either. Your Myrtle is not gorgeous by today’s standards, but she’s not bad. Abigail’s Myrtle is plug ugly. Myrtle’s sisters must have been knockouts if she was the sacrifice.”

  “Myrtle had no sisters. She was the only sacrifice available. She and five brothers lived to adulthood.”

  “Still doesn’t answer why you and I and Kenny and Marlys and my daughter have black eyes, does it?”

  But they were watching Cousin Helen peer into her empty Corona bottle. Harvey motioned Miguel with a lift of his impressive Broadway brows and another bottle appeared in Helen’s hand just before their host removed the lime wedge altogether and after Miguel had lifted the empty from her grasp.

  “The Auchmoodys?” Charlie looked back at the portrait and finished her drink. Damn, that gin was good. She even accepted a small plate of corn chips and bean dip from Teresa, setting her glass on the table under the good-looking Myrtle.

  Mr. Rochester smiled, dramatically of course, and held out his glass to Miguel. But it was Helen Bartusek who answered. “The damn Cowpers. Can’t you see anything?”

  Unlike Cousin Helen’s house, this one was dark due to the beautiful wood of the paneled walls and pocket doors and floors. An enormous Persian-like carpet graced the center of this room, but even the floor-to-ceiling windows of the porches and the curved bay couldn’t brighten it.

  “So who do you suspect now of killing all those folks up at the Oaks? And I don’t want to hear any more about the Grim Reaper. You must have discovered something or suspected someone,” Helen said.

  “Actually, I’ve suspected everyone. At first, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to pick on such helpless people. And the longer I’m here, I’m not sure why everyone wouldn’t. They live forever at the Oaks. There goes any inheritance for their families. Harvey here sees a need for assisted and independent living to meet the modern needs of those who can’t live alone but don’t want to mingle with the vegetables. And the women in the town—and county, for all I know—are trading in their jobs to care for the elderly at home day and night or in nursing homes, where they at least have shifts off and it isn’t necessarily their relatives. You, Helen, in a fictional mystery, would be a prime suspect because you’ve got a lot to lose.”

  “Fiction, Nurse Helen, is a made-up story,” Harvey condescended without being asked. “As opposed to nonfiction, which is made-up news—fact, if you will. Both attempting to convince you of a reality for a price, neither without the addition of a great deal of imagination.”

  Buz and Charlie’s mother sat on a couch and appeared to be cracking up over the cocktail conversation under the portrait.

  “I don’t understand what you mean by Harvey’s motive here.” Helen finished off her second beer.

  “Well, he wants to upgrade half a nursing home full of vegetables to assisted living—and it’s the vegetables who are dying, which should certainly make his job easier. Except for Darla, who could be a shill to throw us off, or who could have discovered who the murderer was and had to be eliminated. You, Helen, are under a heavy burden of eldercare at a time in life when there should be an opportunity for you to enjoy your home and husband and travel before you are both too old. And your grandfathers are wacky enough to do anything. And strong enough, too. And Kenny Cowper might feel really bad for these lingering folks and sneak up after the pool hall closes, quietly suffocate the veggies. But Darla doesn’t fit that theory either, unless Marlys and Gladys and the Fatties have secretly witnessed the murders and decided to take care of her for the fun of it or because they find her ‘activities’ aggravating and silly. There’s little enough dignity left in their lives.”

  “You realize how ridiculous all this sounds?” Mr. Rochester looked impressed again. Or was it guilt?

  “Murder so often does.” The young Myrtle with the blue eyes gazed down on them with a faint curiosity. “She looks uncomfortably human for someone dead for so many generations.” Charlie took a sip of her drink and contemplated the girl with Libby Greene’s platinum-blond hair. Myrtle’s was coiled on top of her head. “Why would you pay to have a portrait painted of a daughter doomed to servitude, and why aren’t her eyes black?”

  “Legend has it that her paramour commissioned the painting in defiance of her family. The painting has hung in this house since before my mother was born.”

  “Is your mother up at the Oaks?”

  “My mother ran off to France with a distant cousin and enjoyed the blessed vagaries of Paris for years before succumbing to a stroke and dying in her sleep. I was able to visit her and Cousin Arnold many times as a young adult.”

  “If she’d had her stroke here, would she have suffered for decades at Gentle Oaks?”

  “We make great use of antidepressants and anxiety medications at the Gentle Oaks Health Care Center. Our residents do not suffer.”

  “Do the Fatties get any of that medication? They don’t ever seem calm.”

  “As much as we can get a doctor to prescribe. Think for a moment of what they’d be like without it.”

  “So the black eyes are Cowper, the platinum-blond Staudt. How about my hair?”

  “Auchmoody,” everyone in the room but the Lopezes and Charlie said at once, as if they thought she’d never ask.
/>   “So my birth parents were probably local.”

  Myrtle was not as drop-dead gorgeous as Libby, but there was a certain resemblance. Charlie felt weary, and a quick memory picture of the room at the Comfort Inn beckoned. It was no five-star hotel but it was hers for the night, and she’d be on the plane bright and early.

  Buz and Edwina chatted quietly now. Helen stood next to Charlie, tears on her cheeks. “I can’t take any more. I want to go to Tucson for six months and come back here for the rest.”

  “I appreciate your problem, Helen. Can’t you just quit going to the Oaks, now that Uncle Elmo and your mother are gone? Quit your job and stay away from the place.”

  “Everybody’d talk about me.”

  “Was Uncle Elmo really my grandfather and Marlys my great-grandmother?”

  “No, but I know who your grandmother was. And I don’t know who got her in trouble. Could have been somebody from out of town. And I know who your great-grandmother was. You don’t want to know. You won’t like it.”

  Charlie didn’t care. She would have lunch at the Minneapolis airport—there was a long layover. She wanted to try a Lefsatilla. She’d clear up a lot of business by cell phone during the layover. She’d be home for dinner, sleep in her own bed, have a wonderful, normal weekend in the real world. She better call Libby and tell her.

  “I just can’t take any more,” Helen repeated and had to set her bottle of beer on the table to fish a tissue from the wrist band of her sweater and blow her nose. Her bottle was full again. That’s when Charlie realized so was her glass. She’d meant to have one martini but could remember already emptying one. How many had she had? She’d been warned to take it easy on alcohol until her headaches and blackouts and the return of her accident were completely gone. And her blood-sugar thing. She did feel awful good. Which could be awful bad.

  CHAPTER 35