The Rampant Reaper (12 page)

Authors: Marlys Millhiser

BOOK: The Rampant Reaper

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“
M
ARLYS 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 placeâher past, I mean. I've only seen that name once before. There's a mystery writerâ”

“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 â¦ . 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 arrivedâcold 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 toiletsâthink 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 âborn 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 unreliableâbut 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 Oaks 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 pianoâthe 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.

“Do not touch a thing. The coroner is on his way.”

“Don't close her eyes or mouth, fold her handsâanything,” Charlie agreed. “Did it get cold enough while the power was off to cause this death naturally, do you think? It's possible at this age, it was just her time, you know.”

“I doubt it got that cold,” Harvey said, then added ruefully, “She's been at the Oaks for twenty-two years. Something of an institution. Outlived her whole family, including the two kids.”

“Twenty-two, how awful. Was she a vegetable?”

“Only the last five or six years.”

“Help me, please help me. Somebody,” Doris's roommate wailed.

Charlie had half an urge to grab a pillow and help the woman.

CHAPTER
22

“
A
S TO OUR enigma, you should know that on record since Marlys entered Gentle Oaks eight years ago, she has been found trying to, nearly succeeding in, or threatening to bury herself alive on or in the grave of the town's namesake a number of times.”

Harvey and Charlie sat in Elsina Miller's office still waiting for the coroner of Floyd County, who lived and had his business in Charles City because the railroad changed its mind and course after the county had been named.

Charlie had taken off her boots and wrapped Kenny Cowper's warm coat around cold feet. She'd also managed to swipe a handful of plugs from a lower drawer in the nurses' station and felt back from the edge a bitâas long as that door to the nut hatch stayed closed.

Harvey leafed through assorted papers in Doris Wyborny's file. Doris had been born a Streblow.

“Marlys is amazingly quick. She could sneak into a room and smother some half-conscious person pretty easily. She has the run of the place.” Charlie had a gut feeling that the ancient and mobile Marlys Dittberner was the key to something. Charlie's gut, however, was more often wrong than not.

“Rose is very mobile, but if she set out to do something, she'd have forgotten what it was by the time she'd entered the room. Flo and my grandfather are slow, but they do wander in their quest for something to smoke.”

“Helen may have secretly wished to put her own mother out of her misery, and her great-aunts, too. But what about
the others? We need to make up a list of the dead and look for comparisons. Kenny could come up and do it while visiting his grandma. So could the marshal, for that matter. Ben seems to have access everywhere. As you said, you don't lock people out of Gentle Oaks. Up until Doris, women totally out of it who were born Staudts have been the pattern.”

“Don't look at me. Every time one dies, I lose the money coming from the government.”

“But there is a waiting list, right? Those beds aren't empty long.”

Mr. Rochester glowered and took another file out of the cabinet, tapped her on the head with it, and dropped it in her lap. “You are good at this, you know it?”

Charlie found him suspicious because, like Helen, he pretended Charlie knew what she was doing. And they were both desperate for her to investigate because they knew she had no professional training. Who better than an amateur if you're the perp? But Harvey didn't have Helen's motive. Didn't mean he didn't have one at all.

It was Marlys's file, and mostly emptyâtwo sheets of paper filled out by a neighbor who had brought her here when the community could no longer put up with her antics.

“But she must have had some insurance papers and a Social Security numberâI mean, if she ran a store, owned a house.”

“There was a fire in the courthouse, back in the nineteen forties. A lot of the records are gone. People her age, you can't be sure records even existed. She never drove a car. She kept setting fire to her own houseâone of the reasons the neighbors wanted her up here. To get her Medicaid payments started through the bureaucratic mill was somewhat of a hassle, but so was Doris Wyborny's and others'. Women didn't own property as a rule, or work for wages, when Marlys was young. If Marlys was young. They were just Mrs. Somebody.”

“But she inherited from her husbands, surely. She ran the grocery store. She would one day be eligible for benefits.”

“As the widow of Lester Dittberner. No wills or deeds or anything survived.”

“Wouldn't she have had to have a Social Security number to pay her taxes on the store?”

“You know, you are good. Wonder what happened to it. Unless her son owned the store. He died here years before she came.”

“How old is the Oaks?”

“About fifty years now. I inherited it from my great-uncle from Swaledale. It's been added on to and modernized a good bit. Uncle Herman had plans to build a series of long-term health-care centers in small towns around because expenses are low out in the tullies. But he found that so many of the children were leaving the Midwest, and their parents followed them when they began worrying about aging. But in Myrtle, the elderly seemed to have too many living parents to go off and leave. Some siblings might migrate, but not all could.”

“So there are locals with relatives incarcerated here who are in and out all the time?”

“Actually, few visit after the first year or two. And their loved ones are residents, not prisoners. And this has turned out to be a long, long-term care facility.”

“So it was Herman and Sherman Rochester?”

“There was a third brotherâ”

“I don't want to know. What happened to Herman?”

“He's in Room Forty-three.”

The coroner arrived with a sheriff's deputy and the press. Myrtle was suddenly on the map. The situation could not have been worse if a slew of presidential candidates had invaded.

Neither Mr. Rochester nor Charlemagne Catherine realized that the wind had dropped and the air cleared of whiteout until helicopters sounded overhead. Which caused another whiteout as the blades stirred up the snow on the ground. Two copters had the good sense to land on the drive
in front of the building, and one tried to land on the lawn ornaments in the center circle and thought better of it to set down back out on the road. But the cadre of approaching snowmobile heroes couldn't be blocked and began downloading Mexicans as fast as they could.

“In California, we call them Hispanics or Latinos,” Charlie muttered, determined to commit some murder of her own if Mitch Hilsten, superstar, dared step down from one of those choppers.

“In Myrtle, they're Mexicans, and the only ones who live here are my housekeeper and groundsman, a married couple. Their relatives travel from Mason City each day to do the real dirty work on farms and here at the Oaks.”

Buz brought Elsina Miller the administrator up to the doors with a big wink for Harvey. “Thank God that creature is out of my house, else I would never return to it. Remember, do not say the word âJesus' in her presence. She will go on for hours, days, and weeks. She is the bane of my existence.”

“Why do you keep her on?”

“She's a wonderful missionary for Baptist donations for the needy elderly.”

“'Nuff said.” Charlie backed away from all the commotion coming at them, but not before the missionary administrator noticed her standing beside Harvey Rochester through the glass doors leading from the porch.

Charlie grabbed her boots from the office and ran for the ladies' room in the hall inside the really smelly part of the institution. She just wasn't up to a photo op. Neither was Gentle Oaks.

Marlys Dittberner ran naked down the hall, mouth wide open in a screamâno teeth. This time, she lifted Charlie's whole purse by its shoulder strap on her way by, almost taking Charlie's shoulder with it. This time, Charlie had no mother to fly into the arms of and cry. There went all the plugs and this was not a good time for that. To hell with MarlysâCharlie raced to the nurses' station and stole another, then ran
back to the ladies' room, and of course it was not empty.

“Out of my way, Sherman.” She shoved the poor old guy into a stall and locked herself in another. She had brought only two pairs of pants and one was still out at the home place.

With at least some protection in place and in bad need of Tylenol, she stepped out of the stall to find Sherman Rochester leaning on his cane looking around, probably for something to stuff in his socks. So she led him to the door to the hall, hoping he would distract whatever attention was festering out there, and gave him a shove before going back to wash her hands and plan how to find Marlys and her purse and her sanity.

When she was composed enough to peer out again, it was to see a cast of strangers, a hookup, makeup, and script under discussion with a talking head, and handheld cams. The wheelchair folks caught up on the cables began to form a traffic jam between her and the naked Marlys. This was not all out of a Mason City newsroom.

Charlie dearly wanted to lock herself back in a stall and have a good cry. But she stepped out into the fray just as Rose began to read from a flyer. She read without intonation, pronounced the words clearly and slowly but as if she didn't understand their meaning. She did pause at periods and commas, and sometimes for no reason.

“Jesus loves everyone and all who come to Him are saved. Are you saved. He will help you. Jesus is the son of God, creator of the earth and the heavens and the universe. Jesus can forgive you your sins. Are you forgiven.”

“Ciga-riga-rooo?”

“Excuse me, sir. You're running over the cables here. Could you back your chair off them?”

“Who the hell you think you are, you son of a bitch? Get outta my way.”

“Jesus, what's that smell in here?”

“Smells like shit.”

“We got plenty of that.”

“Got a cigarette?”

“Jesus loves everyone and all who come to Him are saved. Are you saved.”

“Help me. He-ll-lp me. Somebody, please â¦ .”