The Rampant Reaper

by Marlys Millhiser

  CHARLIE WENT ALONG to The Station for kraut and ribs for three reasons. One, she was tipsy. Two, she needed food. And three, Kenny and Del would take her to the Comfort Inn in Mason City. But she’d have to find them first and not until she got her chemicals straightened out with food.

  There was a table reserved for The Station’s owner and his guests in the nice if smoky section. Edwina felt so good after the martinis that she left her crutches in the car. The place smelled so bad it turned Charlie’s stomach, which was turning on its own and needed no help. And she was so buzzy Harvey offered to fill a plate for her.

  “Just half full, please.” Least he could do after getting her drunk in her condition.

  “Anything from the bar?” the hostess of the whiskey voice asked.

  “Just coffee, please.” Her cell went off and she stepped outside to answer it, weaving hardly at all. “Shirley Birkett is more than just the next Danielle Steel. She’s far more quirky,” she said in response to a plea from Larry, who’d been contacted in her absence to fill in some West Coast press on Shirley’s first book.

  “Charlie, are you looped? ‘Quirky’ is pretty lame these days.”

  “Just for lady mystery writers. If you can think of anything better, be my guest.” Damn, gorgeous kid. She returned to the table to find Cousin Helen with another beer.

  “I tell you, Buz, I’m not taking any more.”

  “Sounds reasonable.” He set a plate of food in front of her and another in front of Edwina and went off, chuckling, to fill one for himself.

  Charlie’s plate came with a side dish of scarlet Jell-O with incarcerated banana slices. The green beans, cooked to mushy, floated in a sea of juice, as did the mashed potatoes and this pile of stuff on top—some of which was meat falling off bones, and the rest, she assumed, the foul-smelling sauerkraut of legend. This did not resemble the sauerkraut she’d seen on bratwursts. How anything could taste so good and smell so bad, Charlie wouldn’t be able to explain if she lived as long as Marlys Dittberner. But she cleaned her plate, even spooning up the juices. Weird times call for weird behavior patterns. She’d be okay when she flew out of Iowa tomorrow. Salty, meaty, satisfying, rich—and the potatoes served as a sort of ballast. The Jell-O she skipped.

  “What do you think I should do, Buz?”

  “Whatever you decide, I’m behind it a hundred percent.”

  “I think I should quit my job, and right after the memorial service, we should load the dog and the cats in the motor home and head for Tucson before another storm comes in. Stay until spring.”

  “Sounds good. Maybe stop in Omaha and see the kids on the way.”

  “You travel with two cats and a dog?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, yeah. They’re family,” Helen said, as if that should be sending a message to Charlie.

  “We got Lazy Boys in the motor home, too. Can’t go anywhere without them neither. Sweet deal.”

  “Isn’t that awfully expensive?” Charlie parroted the birdlike maiden aunts who’d come to her first dinner at the home place in the huge Buick a week ago tomorrow night. Especially for a nurse and retired truck driver.

  “Buz and Helen were fortunate enough to have been gifted great amounts of money from Ida Mae and the Staudt sisters before the new rules about spending down one’s assets before going on Medicaid went into force,” Harvey said ruefully.

  “All that cash and the house Gentle Oaks didn’t get before having to hook up to the public tit. Lots of us were lucky that way, Charlie. Not so for our kids, but there are ways to see they get something after all this keeping people alive long after they want it. Helen, here, appears to finally have gotten the message how the rest of us feel about the Oaks,” Buz said. “But it’s hard for a nurse to see through the god-doctor business and thinking how she’s told to think. I’m proud she’s finally seen the light.”

  “You have any people up at the Oaks, Buz?” Charlie asked, thinking, oh, swell, another suspect. Good thing I’m outta here.

  “Oh, yeah. Too depressing to go see ‘em. None of ’em know me by now, anyway.”

  About that time, Charlie noticed that the two empty chairs across from her were filled with the studs from Myrtle. And they’d been there long enough to have filled their plates and half-emptied them. “Did you find Marlys?”

  “Nope,” one of them said.

  “Charlie? You looped?” the other asked and leaned across the table.

  Dolores reached over to refill Charlie’s coffee cup, rubbing between Marshal Sweetie and the barkeeper’s biceps in the process.

  “Remember, you promised to take me to Mason City tonight. You coming or not, Mom?”

  “I’m staying, Charlie. I think you should, too.”

  “There’s a long layover in Minneapolis,” Harvey said.

  “I checked at the airport. Fewer planes fly on Saturday and Sunday and they’re booked. We’d be stuck for the weekend. Can we leave right after you’re finished?” she asked the studs.

  “There goes my pie again,” the marshal said. “That’s one mean woman.”

  “Don’t forget your announcement.” Kenny smiled fondly at Charlie for no reason. If he was seen around Gentle Oaks, no one would question that he wasn’t visiting his “Grammy.” He could smother an inmate or two and be gone before anyone found them. Maybe Darla discovered this and that’s why she had to go.

  “Oh, yeah.” Del stood and beat on his water glass with his fork. “Hey, listen up, everybody. Got me a question.” The glass was plastic and got him nowhere, so he tried one of the Bartuseks’ empty beer bottles and that didn’t get him anywhere, so Kenny made a heart-startling whistle and the place quieted, all eyes turned on their table. “I just want you to know we’re missing Marlys of course, and this time Ben, the town watchman, too. Anybody seen either one today, or last night even?”

  There was some mumbling and head shaking, lots of shoulder shrugging, before people turned back to their food and conversation. The hostess stepped over from the cash register, still blowing smoke. “Can’t promise, but I thought I saw Ben skulking around old Abigail’s this morning. Hadn’t had my coffee yet, so I can’t be sure, but I didn’t think anything about it. He’s always fetching and carrying for her, so it’s not like he shouldn’t have been there or anything.”

  Edwina turned to Helen. “Thought you and Buz got her groceries and stuff in Mason City.”

  “We do, but Ben takes them over to her. She drives me nuts. Can’t please her. She doesn’t even say thank you. And you get to go off to Colorado and have a life. Well, we’re going off to Arizona and have a winter, anyway.”

  “You can’t leave now, Helen.” Harvey looked to be hanging a few sheets in the wind himself. “RNs don’t grow on trees and I have to replace Mary Lou already. Besides, there will be a murder investigation and you will be one of the suspects and so will I, according to our detective here.”

  “Well, I can leave town.” His detective managed to get out of her chair without stumbling. “You ready, guys?”

  But the guys and the red Cherokee didn’t head for the stone bridge and out of town. Del overruled her protests. “Just got to stop at old Abigail’s first. See if she’s seen Ben or Marlys.”

  Kenny went to the door with him and they stayed inside so long, Charlie grew impatient. If they were hatching a ruse to keep her from that plane in the morning, they were in for a surprise and a half. She was still feeling her gin when she walked up the sidewalk to that front door. That evil front door. And she thought that was just the gin talking.

  “You, too?” Great-aunt Abigail opened it before Charlie could knock and led her into the parlor. “Might just as well join us.”

  Said the spider to the fly.

  “Oh, shut up.” Charlie didn’t even bother to apologize for talking aloud to herself.

  Marlys Dittberner stood under the portrait of the ugly Myrtle. Long, streaming hair, grinning old face. She was missing at least her top dentures and wearing a period dress from some
movie like Titanic.

  “I warned you,” Marlys said. “And you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Her kind never do,” Great-aunt Abigail said behind Charlie. “You know what to do, Ben.”

  Charlie looked around for the town watchman but caught only the closing of the pocket door on someone. “Where’re Kenny and Del?”

  “They’re gone.” Marlys did a little hopping dance.

  “I knew the moment I laid eyes on you that you would ruin everything.” Abigail Staudt wore her snowy collar again. “And now you must pay the price.”

  “The marshal’s Jeep is sitting right out there at the curb. You’re a totally crazy old—” But then, through the bay window, Charlie saw the red Cherokee drive off down the street. Had the Myrtle studs betrayed her? Nah, they were just teasing. They were really into teasing, those two.

  We don’t feel very good. Have you noticed?

  “I noticed.” There’s something about the inevitable dashing of all your hopes and dreams that can make you sick. “I am going to leave here, catch that plane, see my kid, have my life back.”

  “You won’t be catching your plane, Charlemagne Catherine Greene,” Abigail said with bitter satisfaction. Her little half-glasses hung on a cord around her neck and she put them up on her nose only to stare at Charlie over them. “Ever. The curse will end with you. This was all your fault from the beginning.”

  “That’s what Cousin Helen implied. I barely even heard of Myrtle. Never been here, except I guess at birth. I won’t carry on the guilt. It’s so totally out of the frame.” In real life, Judy Garland would have poured a pail of water on Great-aunt Witch and melted her.

  The ugly Myrtle smiled above Marlys Dittberner. She didn’t have her teeth in either. There was a muffled pounding going on inside Charlie’s head, and one going on outside it, too. The pounding outside her head had far-off shouting in it. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re off to see the wizard,” Marlys sang off-key. The furniture was sort of dancing.

  “Out the back door,” the wicked witch answered. “Ben, you there?” It was almost dark outside. And getting cold.

  “The wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

  “Why? I feel sorta sick.”

  “Because, because, because, because, because … of all the wonderful things he does.”

  “Did you know Edwina married a Jew?” the wicked witch asked.

  “Did you know Charlie is Isobel’s granddaughter?” Marlys Dittberner laughed like it was already the full of the moon again. “A direct descendant of Myrtle herself. Like you.”

  “That is as insane as you are, you nasty old bat.”

  “I should know. I birthed all three of ’em. Because, because, because—”

  Charlie lost her sauerkraut and ribs on the yellow brick road.

  CHAPTER 36

  CHARLIE WAS DRENCHED in cold sweat when the semi jumped the median barrier and came toward the Toyota and Darla waved at her from the Oliver with lugs and she skidded the Lumina into the ditch on the ice. Charlie’s guts ached. The air smelled wet and chilled, of trees and dead leaves instead of exhaust, smelled like Iowa, not California. Which made sense because it was Ben the watchman pulling her from the red Jeep, the antique Marlys dancing ahead in her silly antique dress, Abigail Staudt already on the porch of Gentle Oaks.

  “I have a plane to catch,” Charlie told Elsina Miller, who slipped out the door and held it closed. “I’m off to see the wizard.”

  “What are you doing here?” Great-aunt Abigail asked the administrator. “It’s after five.”

  “They wouldn’t let me go to my car. Help me. Is the marshal here? The founder, Herman Rochester, has been murdered.”

  “Because, because, because, because,” Marlys Dittberner sang, then curtsied and shoved Elsina away from the door. “Because of the wonderful things he does.”

  Elsina bolted as residents began to push their way out, but they stopped and jammed the entrance when they saw Abigail.

  “Ben, stop her,” the wicked witch ordered and Ben let go of Charlie, who grabbed for a white pillar and missed. She went down watching a flurry of flowered skirt and knee-highs and Elsina ripping off the watchman’s knitted cap.

  Charlie started woozing out again but not before she noticed the lumps on Ben’s bald scalp and heard Abigail bark orders to the crowd clogging the doorway. Someone could apparently focus the inmates, for a while at least.

  When Charlie focused herself next, it was to blackness and the sound of moaning she thought at first to be her own and then, “My Lord Jesus, being buried alive is the most horrible fate I could ever imagine … and with this wretched creature. What have I done to deserve such a fate as this?”

  “Buried alive? Hello?” The wretched creature fought her foggy brain to remember how they’d come from the porch at Gentle Oaks to the darkness, fought her eyelids open to meet only more darkness. Buried alive was getting serious here. “Elsina? Did you say Herman Rochester’s been murdered?”

  Elsina wept and sniffed and bawled, the sound like her voice oddly muffled.

  The total dark did smell a lot like dirt. Moldy dirt. But there wasn’t any weight of it on Charlie’s face or chest. Her back rested on something bumpy and hard. She didn’t hear any shoveling. There seemed to be enough air but the blackness was heavy. “Sweetie, stop that. What exactly is happening here?”

  “I hate it when women call me ‘Sweetie.’”

  “You know, I do too. But I don’t feel dirt on my face. Are we in a coffin?”

  “I am smothering from something on my face. I can’t see—”

  “I can’t either.” Charlie vaguely remembered losing her dinner, but the martinis seemed to have been absorbed. She was on the downside of tiddly. She sat up and reached above her head. No grave ceiling. “But I can sit up. I can breathe. And we both can talk and hear. Are we in a crypt or a cave?”

  Elsina was on her left. Charlie groped to find a textured cloth, a blanket maybe, with a moving form beneath. She pulled it away and her elbow hit no earthen wall. “Can you breathe better now?”

  This moldy dark was so dark it seemed lighter when she closed her eyes. Claustrophobia suggested she would soon have difficulty breathing. Cool air brushing past her face told Charlie this was not so. That air felt and smelled damp but not wet. Water dripped into a puddle not far off she thought. But total darkness made distance even of sound hard to judge for some reason. “I thought Jesus wanted you to be good to the wretched.”

  “Of course He does. He’s just trying me. What do you know about Jesus?”

  “Not much. Maybe we are already dead and this is a holding cell between heaven and hell.”

  “That’s Catholic nonsense.”

  “If you found yourself in purgatory, you’d just deny it?”

  “I wouldn’t find myself there because there is no such thing.”

  “Wow, faith is a powerful thing.”

  “That’s the first intelligent statement I’ve heard you say, Charlie Greene.”

  A stealthy rustling sounded farther off than the drip and made Charlie’s skin prickle in odd places, her breathing go shallow. Rats? Bats? Snakes? Spiders? Demons? “Maybe we’re in hell. It’s not as cold as I thought it would be under ground.”

  “That’s it. We’re underground.”

  “Underground where? Frankly, I don’t like you either. But it’s wonderful to have somebody to talk to right now. I had a dream not long ago that I was underground in Myrtle’s fruit-cellar grave. So what happened? I was sort of out of it.”

  “You were drunken.”

  “That, too. This is a lot like being blind, I bet.”

  Elsina decided she’d been blind to come to Iowa and took off on a tale of woe not particularly germane to the situation. Charlie was just glad for another’s voice. The administrator had fallen in love with Floyd County and especially Myrtle, after living in sinful Minneapolis, because of its simple lifestyle, so Christian and caring as to have a facility like Gentle O
aks that tended to its elderly with such compassion they lived happily way beyond expectation. Charlie, having left Boulder for D.C., Manhattan, and L.A., tried hard to imagine that.

  “When the sun shines, I could see Jesus in the sky, arms outstretched over this rich and fertile place. Now I’m buried and can’t see Him.”

  “Why don’t we see if we can move toward where that draft is coming from?” Charlie sensed one of them wasn’t exactly tracking. “Maybe we can see Jesus from there. Bring the blanket.”

  “Why should I follow you? You curse and fornicate, drink alcohol.”

  “Okay, I’ll follow you.” Charlie tried standing up. She’d feel better moving away from the rustlings but now that they’d stopped she wasn’t sure too sure which direction that would be.

  “And Mr. Rochester, with all his flaws, showed such promise.”

  “You ever read Jane Eyre?”

  “Is it a spiritual work?”

  “By today’s standards, it could almost be. I know—we’re both dead. Just dreaming this whole conversation.”

  “If we were dead, our conversation would be with Jesus. He will guide us.”

  But Charlie found herself in the lead. You can’t stand up and walk around in a grave. “Harvey Rochester drinks quite a bit. And utters profanities. He does not come across as religious.”

  “Once he gives himself to Jesus he will be a new man in body, mind, and spirit.” The more times Elsina said, “Jesus,” the stronger she became.

  “Myrtle is not a particularly godly place. It has a horrific history of unwed teens and the jerks who left them with child and settled down to inherit the farm. Marlys practically made a business of taking them in and adopting out the babies born in sin.”

  Charlie was beginning to see strange things in the darkness, like a huge red spider frantically jiggling and writhing, dangling just ahead. One good blink and it was gone. Titanium plate or no, the wobblies and nausea of an impending migraine began to manifest. She’d been warned against stress until she had fully recovered from her accident. Why did doctors assume patients could avoid stress at will? There were pills for this in her purse. Where was her purse? Good old Marlys probably had the answer to that.