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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

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“
C
HARLEMAGNE CATHERINE, GET in here,” Mr. Rochester roared.”Miss Miller, be still now. And where the hell is that damn deputy?” They stood in front of the door to a room Charlie had never seen inside.
It was lit by a bright light from above that reflected off-white, ceramic-tiled walls and floor. The only color in the room was the royal-blue waterproof cushion, seat and back on a shower chair, and Darla Lempke. The chair frame, formed of white poles, sat on casters over a drain in the floor between two waist-high walls, also covered in white tile, that jutted out into the middle of the room. A cabinet stood on one side of the low walls, a high-wheeled stool on the other, with Darla Lempke sort of wrapped around the wheels, her thick black hair splayed up against the white wall.
A shower curtain, pulled open now, divided this portion of the room from a sink and hair dryer and shelf with hair spray and shower caps, plus a commode stool into which the sheriff's deputy was busy upchucking whatever he'd managed to find to eat today. And in the interim, between the poor wretch's retching and Mr. Rochester's enraged intakes of breath, came Rose's starkly flat and unemotional eulogy, “Darla Lempke. Activities Director.”
Harvey managed to disengage himself from his now merely whimpering administrator—rather reluctantly, Charlie thought. She, Kenny, and Del exchanged raised eyebrows at that but chose to ignore the implication. Now was not the time.
“Well, this sure blows my theory,” Charlie said instead.
“Mine, too,” said the marshal.
“And mine,” echoed Kenny Cowper. “Guess it just goes to show, real life's not a murder mystery, huh?”
Charlie could not have agreed more, but she wasn't about to tell the hunk of Myrtle that. Like police and mystery readers and editors, she preferred patterns when dead bodies multiplied, especially in a short time in the same place. This would have been a perfect locked-place murder scene if anybody'd locked people out—so Duane from PORK was right. It had to be somebody from within, at least during the snowstorm.
Darla Lempke had a clear plastic hose with a shower nozzle on the end of it wrapped around her neck. The other end attached to the spigot on the wall where the water came out. This allowed somebody to sit on the stool on the other side of the tiled wall and keep reasonably dry while showering someone in the bath chair. Bathing helpless, way elderly, full-grown babies—Charlie hadn't even thought about how that was done. She'd hung up on the bowel movements instantly and not moved on very far.
Stupid Hollywood silliness, which Charlie was ever making fun of even while working it, seemed suddenly dear when confronted by a reality so awful and unalterable it didn't have to face edit. She could better understand why people looked for a reward in death for suffering in life, why the Hemlock Society and Dr. Kervorkian made good sense to others.
Unfortunately, that was all too early and too late for Darla the activities director at Gentle Oaks.
“Get on your cell phone,” Kenny told Del. “Looks like the deputy's busy at the moment.” He knelt down to get a better look at Darla in one easy movement. Nothing even cracked in his knees. “What do you think, Charlie?”
“Except for the hose around her neck, she doesn't look strangled somehow. But if she was suffocated like Del and I think the others were, would it look like strangulation? And she wasn't a vegetable and she wasn't a born Staudt. We can't
move the hose to see if there are marks on her neck. And if you say I'm good at this, I'll—”
Kenny Cowper looked up at her very directly, matter-of-factly, “You'll what?”
“Tell my mother, Squirt,” Charlie said, breaking that odd tension breeding when he was around. She really had to get out of here, real soon.
“I am aghast, unbelieving, tormented, shocked beyond credulity. Here lies a murdered innocent young woman and you can—what is going on with you two?”
Same thing brooding in your eyes, Harvey old boy. But Elsina? The three of them eyed each other with the dark Myrtle eyes.
Delwood broke the tension this time. “Charlie, coroner wants to talk to you.”
“You were supposed to call the sheriff, you idiot,” Mr. Rochester said.
“I did. They're together.”
“Miss Charlie, describe for me what you see quickly. I'm already on my way. There's no doubt that she's dead?”
Charlie saw a crumpled form, eyes vacant and wide open, mouth partially open, tongue visible, but she couldn't tell if it was swollen or rolled up. There was no breath, no movement. There was no life in Darla Lempke.
“Good. Now, my dear, I want you to cover your hand with something clean and clothlike and very carefully move the shower hose away from the girl's throat. Try not to rub any clues off it. Feel for a pulse in her neck without the cloth on your hand.”
“If you're on your way, can't you do it? I don't want to disturb the crime scene.”
“You've been wonderfully patient so far,” said the mortician. Charlie couldn't remember anyone ever saying that to her before. “Do as I ask and I'll explain later.
Charlie grabbed a clean white washcloth from a pile on a nearby shelf and did as he asked. “There's not even a red
mark, let alone a bruise. It's not wrapped around that tight really. She doesn't look strangled, but I don't know what strangled looks like except in movies. There is no pulse in her neck.”
“Excellent.” Leland the jolly ghoul laughed. “Now, do you smell anything unusual in that room, or around the body?”
“Not really. This place is pretty much nothing but smells. The most pronounced one at the moment is vomit.”
“The victim vomited? You didn't mention that.”
“Not the victim, the deputy sheriff. In the stool.”
Leland Mosher, mortician and coroner, giggled. “Miss Charlie, I want you to get him and the town marshal and our delightful Harvey out of there—is there anyone else nearby?”
“Kenny Cowper, the bartender. And all the resident lunatics in the halls.”
“Are the lights on?”
“Yes.”
“I want everyone out of the room, the hose as you left it, the light left on, and you to use your cloth-coated hand to lock the door behind you and them, and you to watch that they touch nothing upon leaving. Door moldings, nothing. You may flush the stool, however.”
Leaving the marshal and the sheriff's deputy to guard the locked door of the shower room without touching the door moldings, Charlie and Kenny looked for her purse. They stayed together because this had become a right dangerous place. In the dim nightlights, they saw people without teeth and their mouths open who looked dead but, unlike Darla, were breathing. Without machines.
People sat up in bed listening and looking—but they didn't hear or see Kenny or Charlie because their hearing aids and glasses were on the bed table or because they were past finding any artificial device useful. But though they were very aware of danger, they'd forgotten how to use the buzzers next
to their beds that would bring staff to their bedsides or forgotten that the buzzers had ever existed or how to mechanically manipulate them. But they hadn't forgotten how to fear.
One man was so afraid he forgot his legs didn't work and he got out of bed as they walked in. Kenny lifted him off the floor and gently placed him back in bed, pulled up the covers and raised the side bar so he couldn't get up again. Must be awful to not be able to do anything for yourself, have lost any way to convey that awfulness, and perhaps, unlike a real infant, have shadowy memories or learned instincts telling you that you did know all this once.
“One of your people?” Charlie asked. She just hated big strong men who could be so gentle and kind. Guys didn't have to—that was women's work.
“No. Herman Rochester, the creator of Gentle Oaks.”
“I have a hunch the key is to find Marlys and Gladys. They're kind of the brains of this outfit,” Charlie said as they tiptoed out of Herman's room. Poor guy was whimpering. “And Sherman—he's pretty bright.”
“Compared to whom?”
“Compared to florid Flo, his smoking buddy.”
“Kenny, is that your voice?” a woman said from the next room. “Please come here.”
“What's wrong, Grandma?” He went to her and Charlie followed.
Even in the dim light, she could tell Kenny's grandmother didn't have the Myrtle eyes. Hers were a faded blue. “I'm so afraid. Please take me home, Kenny.”
“I can't, Grandma, you know that. You need nursing care, around the clock.”
“Kenneth Cowper, I've never been sick a day in my life and you know it. Why do you hate me so to leave me in this awful place? I can take care of myself just like I always did. Help me sit up. I'm very thirsty. They don't even let me have water here.”
“There's a full pitcher right here on your bedside table.
There's ice in it, and a straw to drink out of. Every time I come, it's here. You just forget. If you'd ring the buzzer, an aide would come and help you drink it.”
“I don't need help drinking. What buzzer?”
He held the straw to her lips, showed her the buzzer hooked to her sheets.
“Where's your father? He'll help me.”
“He's dead, Grandma. Been dead for twenty years.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I tell you every time I come here. You just forget.”
“I never forget. You never come here. I need a cigarette.”
“Tomorrow. Now, what were you afraid of?”
“I'm never afraid.”
He kissed her cheek, covered her, and pulled her railing up, too. “Night, Grammy.”
“Don't you wish you'd never come back to Myrtle? That was horrible,” Charlie said when they were out in the hall again.
“It's life, Charlie. Don't take it personally.”
“You sound like the ultimate businessman. And it's death, stupid.”
“That's what I said.”
This place was really larger than it looked from outside. Probably because the trees above it and the fields around it were so huge. There were in fact two nurses' stations, each unattended at the moment, and a scratching sound from behind the one on this wing.
“Could it be rats?” Kenny asked.
“Or another dying person suffocating alone.”
The nurses' station was a long counter desk with chairs behind it and a glass shield in front of it from desktop to head-high if you were standing. Dolores, the portly Siamese tomcat with long hair, clawed the wall where Charlie at first assumed there was a scratching post, but it was his wrestling with something that made the faint rustling sound, something loose in the wall. He butted it with his head, then pulled at
it with his teeth. Kenny reached down to yank a sweatshirt out of the hole that became a rubber cat door without it. Dolores looked up at Kenny and hissed before he plunged through it.
The gorgeous barkeep took the shirt to a light above the nurse's station just as a zombie in a hospital gown lurched past—so slowly Dolores could have taken a dump, gone to a movie, and come back in to have dinner by the time he finally rounded the curve to disappear, his bare, sagging ass flopping with every slow-motion step through the gap in his gown. This place reminded Charlie of an animated museum where the mummies walked with their wrappings coming loose.
Kenny Cowper nudged Charlie with the sweatshirt to show her the thick black lettering on the inside of the back of its neck;
Marlys D
.
They both turned to look at the cat door.
“She couldn't have,” Charlie said. “Could she?”
“Maybe if she left her shirt behind.”
They raced to an outside window that looked onto another raised loading dock and saw Mr. Dolores squatting there with tail raised high, in blissful contemplation of the heavens bright with moonlight. Moonlight that delineated small, human footprints in the snow next to him.
“She's headed for the graveyard again,” Kenny said, pointing out the path of the footsteps leading off from the base of the loading dock.
“But that's not how you get there from here.”
“It is as the crow flies. And Marlys, too.”
“She flies? You mean like a witch?” The moon above seemed suddenly to double in size.
“
W
E'LL BE BACK in minutes, soon, really fast, but there's an escapee who got out the cat door and left her shirt behind and could perish in the cold,” Charlie told the deputy as Kenny held his fireplug coat for her to scramble into. “We have to take the marshal and his Jeep. If the coroner comes before we get back, tell him what happened.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the lawman. “First, you're going to go off and leave me alone here with these creepy-crawlers.”
“You're the law. You'll be all right. And Harvey Rochester's here somewhere.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes me feel real better.” His irises looked suspiciously large, like Mr. Dolores's did when trying to get to the outhouse potty. “And second, you want me to tell the sheriff of Floyd County that one of these human critters escaped through a cat door?”
“That doesn't sound likely,” Marshal Del agreed.
“And third, why would you keep anybody able to escape this place from doing it if they could? Even if she perished, it couldn't be worse than this. Not like she's safe in here. Why not let the poor thing die?”
“Because it's against the law,” Charlie told the law with authority.
“I can't believe this is the same woman who questioned saving Marlys in her derelict grocery store the other night,” Kenny
said as they raced to Del Brunsvold's Cherokee but paused to sniff the warm wind, listen to the icicles and trees dripping, before climbing in.
Yeah, Greene. Marlys Dittberner wants to escape the misery of derangement while she still knows what it is, and you would deny her that right.
I just don't want her doing it on my shift. When I'm back home, she can do whatever she wants. I don't want to take the responsibility.
In the Myrtle Cemetery, Kenny said, “You were thinking about your dealing with your mom someday when you watched me dealing with my grandmother back there, weren't you?”
“You're so good with those people. I just want to get out of there and pretend places like that don't exist.”
“And you're in a rush to send poor old Marlys Dittberner back.” Marshal Del turned on a heavy-duty flashlight that looked like it should come equipped with a snarling police dog. “I have to, I'm the law.”
It was still cold to Charlie's “hot-water blood,” but the humidity had to be two hundred. The wind blew snow off oak limbs in plops, icicles snapped and stabbed to the ground. In places, the earth lay bare of snow but filled with wet, or frozen dead leaves. In others, the drifts were taller than Charlie. It was an entirely different landscape than it had been on her first day here to bury Great-aunt Gertie. What, four days ago? Felt more like a couple weeks.
“The secret me hopes we never find her. But the other me worries for her out here without even her shirt.” She probably saved my life by taking care of my birth mother so Edwina and Howard could adopt me. I can't let her die. Yet I can't let her suffer anymore. I can't go on like this.
The marshal's flashlight was more a distraction than a help. Moonlight on snow, without the heavy leaf cover, made for shadow limbs across drifts and gravestones but not dark moon shade. Branches with bare twigs looked more like claws,
where once the leaves had made fingers before they fell to clutch at clothes and hair.
“Somebody go look at Myrtle's grave,” Charlie said. While I deal with my issues.
Del and his maximum flashlight wandered off. Kenny asked softly, “What if we find her, Charlie?”
“Hope she's dead already? And if not, take her back alive?” Why should I make the decision, big guy? “I mean, you know her.” And I've got some extreme cramps here. She'd swiped a couple more plugs at the nurses' station but this could get serious. “Kenny, do you know who my birth mother is?”
“Your mother and Elmo and I discovered something about your family this afternoon with the book from the museum. I think Edwina should tell you about it.”
“Is that why she ordered a Scotch after dinner?”
“Hey, you guys, come here,” Del Brunsvold's voice came across the snow and graves without even an echo of the boyish grin.
“Is she dead?” Charlie asked hopefully.
“She's gone. But she was here. I think we've found our murderer.”
Myrtle's stone rose out of a drift, but still tipped forward to shadow the writing in the snow. Marlys had been trying to dig her way in again but there was far too much of that snow. It looked as if she'd dug with her hands like a dog might with his front paws. She'd tried several places. So old, she must have been so cold and so tired. But finally she'd picked up a stick and made letters in the snow. Scraggly letters, overlarge and incomplete because of snowmelt.
“Charl
—
g
—
home or die
—
You
—
next”
was readable only because of the size of the letters and Del's powerful flashlight.
“If Marlys could think, remember, plan, and write this clearly, she's probably the only resident at Gentle Oaks who could be the murderer,” Charlie told the men. “And it really looks like an inside job. I don't want to think this, guys.
Which still doesn't mean she wasn't trying to help people out of their misery.”
“She comes and she goes.” The marshal switched the light to the small footsteps leading off down the wind-cleared parts of the road into the cemetery. She'd left before they arrived. They followed the prints far enough to see that she was headed for town. At least she was wearing shoes.
The haunting sound of a dog howling at the moon, which seemed to get bigger as the night wore on, made them run for the red Jeep Cherokee. The marshal gunned it toward Main Street and Orlyn Sievertsen's doghouse, all the while watching for Marlys, fallen from exhaustion and cold at the side of the road.
“I don't see Marlys Dittberner killing anybody,” Kenny Cowper said. “I don't really know her that well, but she's one disturbed puppy. She has so many problems and fears—why would she focus on anybody long enough to kill them? And particularly Charlie, who just got here? And why warn somebody if you're going to kill them?”
“Ken, I spent more time looking for Marlys since I became Marshal, I can believe anything. She takes up damn near half my time and the taxpayers' money.”
“I may have just got here, but I was apparently born here. She's crazy,” Charlie offered. “Crazy people can be very clever people.” I don't want it to be her, either.
Viagra's seemed to be doing more business. Charlie noticed a CNN news van parked at the curb in front of it and two pickups. “If I was born in the Dittberner house, which was the old Staudt house, where was Edwina born, do you think?”
“I figure, like most of us, you were both born in the hospital in Charles City,” Del said.
“Where did Edwina grow up, live with her parents? What house?”
Del backed the Cherokee to the town's main intersection where Main Street crossed the street that crossed the bridge,
passed the Sinclair and the Dittberner house, before heading for the railroad track. At the intersection, the ruin of the Dittberner grocery store stared across at the ruin of another building. This one was made of that odd brown stucco you saw a lot of around Myrtle. In fact, there were twin buildings, both in the same shape. They, like Marlys's grocery, reminded Charlie of ghost towns in the West, sagging window sashes like bags under sad eyes, crumbling thresholds like trembling lower lips.
You read too much fiction, Greene.
I know, but dead buildings are so heartbreaking. “At least we bury dead people.”
She was in the backseat, the guys up front since this was a serious mission here, and the Jeep stayed parked in the middle of the street in front of the twin buildings. The guys turned to peer at her, Del around the headrest and Kenny over his.
“Okay, I talk to myself. Don't ask. My mom grew up in one of these?”
“These were stores in the business district with nice apartments above, both owned by Edwina's grandparents on her mother's side. Edwina and her parents lived in the apartment above this second building, the in-laws above the first,” Del said. There had been a series of thriving businesses then and those shops were rented as barbershops, meat markets, electrical stores. A whole series of businesses came and went over the years before the commercial centers moved to strip malls along major highways out of other towns, national chains in or near larger population centers.
“Bargain stores.”
“Nobody loves bargains more than your German, Scandinavian, European peasant breeds,” Kenny said. “Could be my next project after the Myrtle book.”
“What did you do, win a lottery? Jethro Larue and the industry aren't going a to let you diversify that much, even in nonfiction. Secret to success in publishing is to write the same
thing over and over. I'm here to tell you it works.”
“Yeah, this was swank living, those apartments. They had stairs going up the outside of the buildings with railings and covered lattices and arched grape arbors at the top. Screened back porches so you could sit out and see over to the river, get the morning sun. And your mom's grandparents were always cooking cabbage stew with potatoes and onions and ham and carrots in it, and apple cinnamon strudel. The smell would waft all over town because they were cooking up so high. There're stories about these old buildings that go on forever.”
“You're not that much older than I am, Brunsvold. I don't remember any of that and I used to live on Main Street.”
“I just remember hearing about it, Ken, the stories, you know. And another story is that the first real donuts in town were made by Edwina's grandmother. Bet they really smelled good. Now we're down to those powdered plastic things at the Sinclair, Wonder bread or whatever. Imagine all those wonderful aromas wafting from those vacant, roofless buildings once, over a town half again this size.”
“There's somebody in one of those buildings right now.” Kenny said and opened the door on his side. “Do you suppose it's Myrtle?”
Charlie and Del tumbled out the other side and stopped to look at each other.
“He must have meant Marlys, not Myrtle,” Del reassured Charlie and drew his mega flashlight.
“Just don't call her ‘honey', okay?” Charlie could swear she smelled the donuts and the onions and carrots and ham. Why would anybody cook cabbage? There were still vine tendrils attached to the side of the second buildings. “Well, what family were these maternal grandparents of my mom's?”
“They were Auchmoodys.”
“And Marlys married an Auchmoody. And Kenny told me once that we Auchmoodys knew how to wear a pair of jeans. Because of the color of my eyes?”
“Myrtle's mother was an Auchmoody. So was Kenny's grandfather.”
“And so was Edwina's mother. But I'm adopted. Yet I came from this area. What am I missing?”
“Damned if I know. Those Myrtle eyes have spread everywhere by now, definitely all over the county, probably the country. I heard there were Auchmoodys in Texas during the Civil War. You know, these buildings still smell like sauerkraut? One night a week at The Station, they serve spareribs and sauerkraut. A real big draw. Serve it over mashed potatoes and swimming in juice. Oh, my.”
Charlie and the marshal stood between the two buildings, where the wind had cleared out the snow but for one humongous drift. Charlie wondered if the marshal too was in no hurry to rescue Marlys, who took up half his time and the taxpayers' money. Not like she could be tried and jailed if she were the murderer. You just had to respect her determination to die and escape the Oaks.
The top of that one drift was as high as the second-floor landing on the inner building, and Kenny stepped out of the hole that once had been its door, carrying a bodylike load. “Del, I need help.”
It wasn't Marlys this time.

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