The Rampant Reaper

by Marlys Millhiser

  Her supposed great-grandmother (Charlie didn’t trust marshals or anyone named Delwood, no matter how cute) watched her careful approach without pulling a disappearing act, pulling out a long knife, or an ax even.

  At close range, Marlys’s eyes were rheumy and full of veins. Charlie wondered how much they could see without eyeglasses. Charlie wore contact lenses to see the ancient woman at all. And she had the odd feeling that she could be more vulnerable than this creature somewhere from her past who knew the secret innuendos, hints, and rumors of generations of people who didn’t discuss that which was too important to trust. She studied Charlie from head to toe and before turning away, declared, “Top dollar, just like I foretold. Too bad.”

  “Does that mean I’m related to you? Have some value?”

  “Course not. But we’re both related to Gertie here.” They stood side by side at Great-aunt Gertie’s grave—Gertrude Staudt—where the rich, hungry dirt was so newly turned it trembled. With insects? Worms? Charlie’s overactive imagination? She’d had vision aberrations since the accident, which often meant the onset of a migraine, but few since the titanium plate had been implanted in her neck. “God, I want to go home.”

  “Be careful what you ask for.” The shaky finger of the creature beside Charlie pointed at the fresh dirt at their toes. “Gertie said the same thing, over and over and over. And got her wish.” There was a live brain behind that statement, and that was possibly scarier than the vomit comet taking two passes to land at the Mason City airport because of wind turbulence on the runway. “You wear your pants that tight, honey, you’ll cut off your female rhythms. Skirts are better.” She raised hers, dropped her soiled diapers, stepped out of them, and squatted on Gertie to pee forever and sighed. “So good to be out of that place. You won’t try to take me back, will you? Why would you have that right?”

  “But you’d be warm and fed—”

  “And dead at the Oaks. I don’t mind being dead out here.” Several oak leaves had caught in her flowing hair like dried flowers. She was stick-thin, her dress hung on her, reached to mid-calf. She wore a pink sweater to match her scalp, and tennies with anklets, one white and one green. Now that the diaper was gone, Charlie was sure that was all she wore.

  “Tell me about Gertie.”

  “There was four sisters, Gertrude, Abigail, and Annabel. Augusta died of scarlet fever as a wee child.”

  “Annabel was Annie.” Charlie shivered.

  Marlys nodded. She didn’t appear chilly at all. She just trembled from age. “Now, there’s one.”

  “Abigail.”

  “They was beautiful and proud and pure. Never married. Just broke hearts right and left. Couldn’t find nobody pure enough for ’em. Become quite a burden on nieces and nephews’ wives. Course, pure is how you look at it. What you know.” She cackled. Her lower bridge was gone, but she spoke clearly without it.

  “Big family.”

  “Oh, yeah. Staudts tried to populate the whole town. Except for the sisters, they bred like mice. The sisters all become schoolmarms and all taught at the school. Ruled the place. Almost ruled the town. Railed against bootlegging and fornication.” Marlys raised her arms toward the sky, hidden behind the towering trees and their dead and dying leaves. “They was so righteous everybody waited for a rumor, maybe even a truth, they could find disgusting. Mind, nobody came out and said that.”

  This old woman was breaking the unspoken law in Myrtle, Iowa, about keeping the unspeakable unspoken. She was leading her quarry away from Gertie’s grave and the soiled diaper. They moved from shade to shadow to deeper shadow. Charlie seriously wouldn’t want to be caught here at night without a flashlight. The gravestones from all different time periods and of all different shapes and sizes were a dark gray except for that odd encroaching moss and the white lambs of the children’s graves where, strangely, no moss grew.

  “Marlys, you and I have very similar eyes. Why is that? Am I descended from a Dittberner?”

  “That’s my married name.” The old black eyes turned knowing and amused. “We all bred like mice, truth be known. Three, four families in this whole town made it what it is. Most was Germans, Norwegians, and the Cowpers. Too much inbreeding makes for strange history.”

  “What about Harvey Rochester?”

  “His mother was a Cowper. His father was a Rochester.”

  “Who was Myrtle?”

  “You’re standing on her. See for yourself.”

  CHAPTER 8

  MYRTLE WAS ALL the name on the stone. It was the bent-over, tall, oblong slab rounded at the top that Charlie had ducked behind, embarrassed when her cellular had gone off. “She died before the Civil War.”

  “Old town. Old graveyard. Old people. So sue us.”

  “Was she kind of like a founding mother?”

  “You could say that. If you couldn’t think of a better reason.”

  “She was only eighteen when she died.” Libby’s age, gulp.

  “People didn’t use to live to retire and beyond and beyond some more in them days.”

  “Marlys, do you think there’s a murderer up at Gentle Oaks killing the helpless?” Charlie had jumped off the grave when the old woman told her she was standing on Myrtle, actually jumped up off the grave because it was quite an indentation. Not surprising when you thought of how long ago it was filled with Myrtle and then with sucking dirt. The reason the stone was bent over could possibly be the bare tree root crossing just in front of it—probably right over Myrtle’s head.

  Charlie decided to think of other things, until the ancient Marlys Dittberner said, “Whole place is a contract with the devil. Most folks won’t even come up and visit you there because they know their time’s coming next. It’s our curse, the devil’s dram. It’s spreading, I hear—but it’s always been this way in Myrtle. You look at the dates on these stones, girl. People live long here. Myrtle, she left a curse on this town— been dying since she was murdered, but can’t die. You ought to take your mother and get out of here while you can. Them that stay are doomed.”

  “But how do you explain Del Brunsvold coming back to his roots here? And Kenny Cowper?”

  Marlys Dittberner kicked daintily at the bare oak root above Myrtle’s head and looked directly at Charlie. “Dumb explains most folks if you think on it too long.”

  Charlie was about to ask how Myrtle was murdered when the mewling in her purse distracted her just long enough to lose Marlys again. To regular people who were not tone deaf, it might have sounded like music, but to Charlie it sounded like a sick cat, extreme sick. It was Mitch Hilsten, big-deal superstar.

  “My God, Charlie, I’ve been trying to get you for two days. What are you doing?”

  “Looking for Marlys. If I were a writer, I’d have a ball with this place.”

  “What place?”

  “Myrtle, Iowa. Edwina and I are looking into the welfare of seriously ancient relatives.”

  “Charlie, tell me no one’s been murdered in Myrtle.”

  “Myrtle for one.”

  Charlie roamed among tombstones and indentations that had been people checking out the dates on the stones and looking for Marlys while Mitch Hilsten explained why he’d hardly be out of town for his new project because most of it was interiors and much of the exteriors could be shot on the lot or in redwood forests in California.

  “Tell me you didn’t take on Bambo, please? That’s so corny.” Why didn’t he get engaged to some vacuous starlet again and leave Charlie alone?

  “Hey, deer are popular and they are everywhere. What’s the matter with Bambo?”

  “Mitch, you know deer aren’t aggressive unless they’re in rut. You’re a conservationist.” He wasn’t dangerous in rut even. But he was good.

  “Birds weren’t either until Hitchcock got ahold of them.”

  “Talk to you later. Busy now. Bye.”

  “Charlie? Be careful. It’s not only the full moon, but your vulnerable time of the month.”

  “Pervert.” She hun
g up and looked for Marlys, who was plenty strange herself. The sucking dirt was after Charlie’s boots again.

  Bartusek, Sievertsen, Wyborny, Auchmoody, Hogoboom, Fellwoek, Longbotham, Enabnit, Nimglet, Talgoth, Bublitz, Streblow, Stubbe, Overgaard, Truex. All kinds of people here who weren’t Cowpers or Staudts or Norwegian, either. Lots more than three or four families for sure represented here. Marlys was nuts. Charlie went back to the Staudts’ section—it was pronounced “stout”—and the dirty diaper which supported the idea that Marlys lacked screws, and then started looking for Edwina’s parents. But she couldn’t remember their first names. Edwina had mentioned them by name surely in Charlie’s youth, or was it just Mom and Dad?

  So she started looking for Marlys again without much hope, wandering among the dead in the dark under the trees until she got so depressed she gave up and headed back to town and Gentle Oaks. She saw a couple, whose butts would never fit on an airplane in the coach class, raking leaves in their front yard. They nodded as she passed. Many, if not most, of the people she saw at the cemetery and church yesterday were not obese, many quite slim. It was just that those who were heavy were so unbelievably enormous—they were the unforgettable ones, and you went away remembering only them.

  The sun was warm enough away from the Myrtle Cemetery that Charlie hooked her leather jacket over her shoulder by a thumb and enjoyed the colors and lack of people and traffic. There’s a lot to be said for a small town. Was it only the job opportunities that drove the young to the cities? Or the guilt thing as well?

  Because of her teen pregnancy and her father’s heart attack and death before Libby’s birth, Charlie had lived a life drowned with guilt. But she was beginning to get an inkling here in Myrtle, Iowa, as to how heavy a guilt load could really get—especially for previous generations caught up in old ways. The shunning could come about simply because you got above yourself, dared to step out of the prescribed pecking order. Edwina—a strong, competent, often grating woman—could be reduced to childhood helplessness by a look back here at the place of her roots. Even after years of ignoring those roots and Myrtle, even after having formed her own life, family, career.

  Myrtle was beautiful today, despite sizable shoddy patches of neglect, and had been yesterday, too. Edwina had rarely spoken of Iowa that Charlie could remember, but when she did, it had been with a shudder and often about relentless, bug-ridden, smothering humidity and heat in summer and bone-chilling cold in winter. Charlie’s mom had three fingers on one hand that would turn white on the ends when they got cold just putting away frozen groceries. She never tired of telling Charlie it was caused by frostbite from walking to school in an Iowa winter wearing heavy mittens, while Charlie ran off to school bareheaded without gloves or boots because fashionable kids didn’t wear jerky stuff. Charlie lived only a block and a half from her grade school, for godsake.

  She passed a derelict Solemn Lutheran Church that looked rather cheerful with the sun shining through all the holes and the bright colors of the maples around it.

  She could hear footsteps behind her on the white rock drive to Gentle Oaks, but didn’t turn and look. With any luck, poor, demented Marlys Dittberner had been curious enough to follow her.

  But when she reached the white columns holding up the porch roof, it was the deep and unmistakable voice of Kenny Cowper behind her that said, “I’ll say one thing for you Auchmoodys—you sure know how to move right in a pair of jeans.”

  Charlie’s gut knew a dangerous man when her eyes saw one, ears heard one. An if-it-looks-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is kind of thing. Her inner voice reminded her of what Mitch Hilsten had said a short time ago—she was particularly vulnerable right now and it had little to do with the full moon, but a lot to do with her female rhythms, as Marlys put it. There were certain times of certain months when Charlie didn’t go out at night. And it wasn’t only to protect herself.

  He held the outer door for her and she stepped in, but he didn’t follow. She turned to see him facing the drive with hands on hips. He appeared to be breathing deeply. It wasn’t until she’d crossed the lobby that she realized he too had Charlie’s, Libby’s, and Marlys’s almost black eyes. Was one of Charlie’s progenitors a Cowper? But his hair was so dark—brown, not black, but dark—and he had a pronounced widow’s peak. Inbreeding? Different traits appear? Could inbreeding explain the unreasonably long-lived people here even when they’re at death’s door?

  Charlie carefully opened the inner door this time, nobody flew out and no alarm startled the quiet of the place. Now the odor was of cooked food rather than what it would become later. She’d turned toward a nurses’ station when a clanking sounded behind her and a raspy voice said, “Got a match?”

  Something hard poked the middle of her back. “No.”

  “Got a cigarette?”

  “No.” Nobody would have a gun in a nursing home, would they? Sure what it felt like.

  “You smoke?”

  “No.” Charlie whirled to find a small man pointing a cane at her.

  “Can I borrow a cigarette?”

  “I don’t have any. I don’t smoke. Now leave me alone.”

  He wore overalls way too short for him and a shapeless pinstripe suit jacket that looked like gangster-era Chicago. So did his hat. And shapeless slippers with white socks. His ankles were enormous.

  “Well, you don’t have to get nasty about it.” The clanking started up again the minute he did. “Tart.”

  “Sherman, you get back here with that silverware.” An RN, by her badge, came around the curve in the hallway and passed Charlie to grab his arm. “Hi. You must be the girl from L.A. Come on in the dining room. Got to unload his socks.”

  “The silverware?”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t mind so much but he steals the dirty stuff off the trays before we can get to it. Before I went into nursing, I used to work in a preschool and believe me, it was easier than this.”

  “Is he an Auchmoody or a Dittberner or—”

  “Sherman’s a Rochester—and a disgusting one. This is awful, old man. Look at your socks. Ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Ciga-riga-roo?” A florid lady howled from across the room—the only person left except for the busboy who came to put Sherman’s stolen goods in a pan with water.

  “Harvey’s father?”

  “Grandfather. His father blew his own head off with a hunting rifle out in a field. Very moody, the Rochesters. Isn’t that right, Sherman?”

  “Head was all over the place,” Sherman said gleefully. His ankles had shrunk to sticks.

  “Like in Jane Eyre?”

  “Never heard of it. That in Iowa?” Her badge identified her as Mary Lou Hogoboom. Her butt wouldn’t fit in coach either.

  “Ciga-riga-roooo?”

  “Off to see the wizaaard.” A large-screen TV hung from the ceiling in one corner. Only the busboy paid attention to Judy Garland skipping down the yellow brick road with men dressed like animal, tin, and straw.

  “I was looking for my mother—Edwina.”

  “I know. She and Helen are around here somewhere. All the aides are busy getting the residents off their potty chairs and down for naps right now. I have to smoke Flo and Sherman and me. Come with us and I’ll show you where they might be. Or we’ll come across somebody who knows.”

  The smoker was a glassed-in porch at the back of the building, heated in winter, with screens all around to air it out. There were several windows along the hall here looking down on loading docks and employee parking. There must be a walkout basement below at least this section of the building. Edwina, Cousin Helen, Marshal Del, and Kenny Cowper stood watching a gurney with a covered figure on it get its legs folded so it could slide into a Floyd County Sheriff’s Department van. Great-aunt Annabel, no doubt.

  CHAPTER 9

  COUSIN HELEN, CHARLIE, and Edwina stood in the hall gazing into the smoker, mostly at Kenny Cowper, who squatted next to a woman in a wheelchair. She puffed on a cigarette in one hand and pat
ted him on the head with the other. Even squatting, he was taller than she was in her wheelchair and she had to reach up to pat him.

  “That his mother?” Charlie asked.

  “Grandmother,” Helen said with a sniff. “Mother remarried when his dad got run over by a combine. She moved off to Florida. Can you imagine?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Charlie’s mom answered. “Definitely absolutely.”

  The residents may have been shuffled off of potty chairs to their beds for naps, but it seemed that televisions were tuned to blasting in every room up and down the hall. Helen explained that it helped the inmates feel less alone. “They don’t really hear it, and it helps the staff with a pretty dreary job, too.”

  Something tugged at Charlie’s jacket sleeve and she looked down to see Gladys and her extended leg and wheelchair. “He’s one of my five boyfriends.” She pointed to Kenny, who turned to look at them all standing there admiring him. He winked at Gladys and turned back to his grandmother. “See? Told you, didn’t I? We talk dirty together. How many boyfriends do you have?”

  “Not a one, Gladys. I stand in awe of you.”

  “Least you can stand.”

  “Edwina, I keep telling you, Iowa’s not so bad—just your memory of it. Our memories do not improve with age, you know. And you look wonderful, but we both know you aren’t getting any younger.”

  “If Iowa is so wonderful, why do you and Buz go to Tucson for three months during the winter?”

  “Because I have to get away from this and you-know-who or go nuts. It’s not Iowa. And we’ve raised four children. It’s time for us now.”

  There was a growling behind them and everybody but Gladys turned when a pretty young aide in tears shouted, “Fatty Staudt and Fatty Truex are at it again. I quit.”