The Rampant Reaper (16 page)

Authors: Marlys Millhiser

BOOK: The Rampant Reaper

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T
HEY PASSED THE Catholic Church, so small and so sad. Holes in the roof, boarded windows instead of stained glass. Crows peering down from exposed rafters like pigeons from the ruin of a barn that had shattered suddenly at the home place.

“You're using me for your book, aren't you?” Charlie said to the poor church, but really to the man beside her.

“How'd you know?” he asked the crows on top of the building or the sky or God or the universe, but really Charlie Greene.

“I know writers, God help me. They're driven. They never stop working and they feel free to use whatever and whoever comes across their vision.”

The Solemn Lutheran Church wasn't far from the Catholic Church and was in similar condition except that its windows weren't covered at all. “Solemn? This is a joke, right?” Charlie asked.

“Lutherans tend to be Scandinavian and are given to somber moods.”

“Looks like the Methodists won.”

“They had the backing of old Abigail and her money.”

“If she's got that kind of money, why can't she hire some Mexicans to take care of her like Harvey does? Until she's ready for the Oaks.”

“Not a chance Edwina's going to move back home, is there?”

“She has a home and a career, friends, books to write,
lectures to give. Would you give that up for the family witch? This isn't home to her. She's lived in Boulder almost three times as long as she ever lived here. She isn't planning on retiring soon and when she does, she's considering Prescott.”

“But this is where she was born, her parents are buried, where you were bornâ”

“And thank God, she's not sentimental. I don't know why she came back this time, really. These people are all remote history to her.”

“There is a plot for her next to her parents out at the cemetery. But I suppose she'll be buried next to her husband.”

“My dad's buried in Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder, but Edwina has asked to have her ashes scattered over a special place in the Canyonlands of Utah, where her favorite rats and bats rule the night.”

“At least she's sentimental over rats and bats.”

“Make no mistake, Kenny Cowper, Edwina Greene will move back here only over my dead body.”

They blinked at each other. She laughed, he chuckled.

“Man, is that an opener or what?”

“Yeah, had I but known, I'd sure as hell never said that.”

“Don't forget, Marlys Dittberner predicted you would be next.” His eyebrows raised to perfect arches.

“Maybe Edwina drove to the Mason City airport instead of the home place. Roads will be plowed, planes flying. Maybe we've already got tickets.”

They stopped in front of the gray Victorian. The sun came out, briefly lighting it and the snow around it, but couldn't cheer it up much. “God,
Psycho
meets
Fargo.
”

“Right. There's more wonderful material here than a writer could use in a lifetime. This place is a gold mine. And I'm the only writer in town.”

“So what did you do before you became a famous writer?”

“I was a reporter for the
Miami Herald
for a few years.
Writers were seeping out of the cracks in the sidewalks. Myrtle's all mine.”

“You either made good in a law suit, a divorce settlement, an inheritance, won the jackpotâif you'd made that good with your writing, even I would have heard of you.”

“Your mother has read a couple of my books.”

“Living and business expenses may be low here, but the remodel on that apartment of yours cost bucks. Wait, I knowâyou've got a Sugar Mommy.”

“God, you Hollywood career types are vindictive. Okay, my sister and I share an inheritance from my mother's parents, left in trusts from the sale of farms, all set up before they committed suicide.”

“Rather than end up vegetables in Gentle Oaks.”

“Who knows? The trustees put the money in the stock market when we were small. While we grew, it grew.”

“It didn't go to your mother first?”

“It was split three ways between us. My grandparents did not like my father, figured he'd blow her fortune trying to keep the pool hall alive in a dying town. And he would have. But by the time she could have collected her share, he'd managed to get in the way of a combine.”

“And you want to return to your roots? Forget
Fargo.
More like
Psycho
meets
The Addams Family
.”

“I know you think you're just talking Hollywood, Charlie, but you are really saying what I've already said. Listen to yourself. Read my lips. There is material here.”

“But that's all reruns, or in syndication or cable stuff now.”

“Remember, I'm doing fact, not fiction. How many baby boomers are dreading futures in nursing homes for themselves because they're dealing with parents already incarcerated? They can't deny the reality of aging, much as they want to. There's a certain sick fascination in the inevitable. You want to read about it to find evidence it won't happen to you. You'll just go to sleep one night in your own bed in your own home and not wake up. Do you have any idea of the growth
industry in Iowa and much of the Midwest? It's medicine, hospitals, nursing homes, especially those run by tax-exempt churches. They and drug companies are cleaning up, along with lawyers who know how to work the system. Forget Family Farms and crop subsidies, corn and soybeans. Iowa's getting fat on Medicare and Medicaid.”

“And Myrtle, Iowa, is an example so extreme, it's news.” The last thing Charlie wanted was more ties to this place, but this hunk could pitch. She fished in her purse for a business card and handed it to him. “I know old Jethro Larue can pull wedgies in New York that I can't from Beverly Hills, but should he ever let you down, I wouldn't refuse to look at a proposal on this one.”

This is really scary, Greene. We're almost doing business in the backwater of a backwater.

“That's the problem. Old Jethro is old enough to find the topic fearsome, loathsome, and nonmarketable.”

“But you said baby boomers would get into this.”

“He's way past baby boomer, Charlie. He's too close to the age of incarceration. This is not the topic for most people over seventy-five.”

“Jeth Larue's over seventy-five?”

“Pretty damn close. And remember, a lot of older women who read, who are also most of the people who read, are going to be living at home independently longer than guys, who die earlier and watch more football than read anyway. And these women are still responsible for grandmoms and greatgrandmoms in nursing homes. Charlie, we're talking demographics here. Larue's mother is still alive.”

“You aren't making sense. He must have to visit her in a nursing home.”

“He's got three sisters still living, so he doesn't have to confront that reality.”

“I don't want to confront it either. Do you?”

“Only while I'm writing this book about it. And, Charlie Greene, my personal financial stability should have nothing to
do with New York publishers not thinking I'm starving.”

Too bad Shirley Birkett, the next Danielle Steel, was married and pregnant. Charlie could have fixed her up with Kenneth Cooper. They could have shared suspicions.

“Know what else? Harvey told me very few doctors will even visit a nursing home. They can't handle it.”

“They have to, nursing homes are full of sick people. You're making this up.”

“Law says family doctors have to visit four times a year. Harvey says they whirl through like dust devils, prescribe medications over the phone with the nurses the rest of the time. Things get serious, they send out a helicopter from Mason City, take them into the hospital where specialists, who don't visit nursing homes at all, fix them up and send them back to vegetate longer in awful ways the specialists never have to witness.”

“Medicaid's not going to pay for a helicopter.”

“Somebody's paying for it. Harvey's making out like a pig at a trough.”

Abigail Staudt stepped out on her porch. “Just what is it you two want, standing there like that for so long?”

“Admiring your house, Aunt Abigail.”

“Don't you call me aunt, hussy. Just get out of this town and take that good-for-nothing mother with you.”

“She's been watching us a long time from a corner of her front window,” Kenny said as they walked off.

There were no sidewalks, so they sloshed through the slush of the streets. Charlie's poor fashionable boots started leaking. “Do you want Edwina living back here?”

“I guess not, now that I've gotten to know her a little. She just seemed like the perfect answer to an imperfect problem there for a while.”

“Like Myrtle seemed to her family.”

“Everybody around here remembered your mother as the ugly duckling. Ugly ducklings are not supposed to have lives.
She's actually aged pretty well. So has my mom. But she's had some work done.”

I'm not touching that sucker, Charlie thought, but said, “Is this stuff adobe or stucco or what?”

They stood in front of the ruin of a two-story house with that same brown coating that she'd seen often here and which coated the store buildings her mother's family had lived in on Main Street.

“I think it's some kind of colored cement. Lots of buildings were built with it or coated over, probably in the twenties or thirties. It was touted to never rot or need painting and originally a light tan in color, but it got dirty with the decades, which hadn't been predicted.”

“You've been doing your homework.”

“I have an interest beyond my book. I have roots here. As do you.”

“Nobody feels rooted to a place they've never seen or hardly even heard of. So, you are using me as a possible outlet if your agent won't accept the Myrtle book because the reality and immediacy of nursing homes would upset him at his age, because you are delving into the intricacies of loyalty, family secrets and genes, and the lingering power of female guilt in a once agrarian society.”

And because we both apparently belong to a horny strain of the same ancestry. Time for a reality check, big guy.

“Do you happen to know if the mayor carries tampons or whatever at the Sinclair?”

CHAPTER
30

W
HEN CHARLIE MADE her purchase, the mayor and her dog were extra somber. Ben had not shown up, nor Marlys either. Even Orlyn Sievertsen's Lab and Saint Bernard hadn't seen her. “So how's old Elmo?”

“Something happened to Uncle Elmo?”

“You haven't heard? Marshal Delwood's been looking all over for you two. Elmo tried to kill himself out at the Staudt placeâbotched it. From what I hear, it's the Oaks for the poor guy.”

On their way to Kenny's car, Charlie said, “Did you hear the dread in the mayor's voice when she said poor Uncle Elmo was headed for the Oaks? What I don't understand is why anyone stays in this town once they notice the first gray hair, eye bag, or wrinkle.”

“Being dead might not be so great either, you know. And not everybody's a deserter in this army, Charlie. Some people feel sympathy, responsibility, for the suffering, aging members of the community.”

“I hate that word.”

“Aging?”

“Community. One more reason to steal my time and energy. Always something.”

He drove her out to the Staudt farm in his Range Rover, forced to rough it by the warming weather and the county snowplows, slightly pissed that he couldn't have ferried her into the rural wild on his brand-new snowmobile. He kept the Rover in an off-ally garage behind the beauty/barber shop
that was a converted house at the other end of Main Street. The shop was open two and a half days a week, which took care of the local population, so renting out the garage helped a lot. “Looks like you won't be flying out today.”

When they reached the home place, the helicopter was just taking off for Mason City. And Edwina was destroyed.

“They'll resuscitate him to be a vegetable for twenty years, and he smoked and drank and ate so hard. It's not fair,” Charlie said. She, Kenny, Edwina, and Cousin Helen watched Elmo disappear into the forever-frigging clouds of this place. “At least you must not get skin cancer around here.”

“Oh, yeah, you gotta slather yourself with sunscreen, wear long pants, sleeves, slacks, and floppy broad-brimmed hats. Best thing is to stay inside. But that doesn't weed your garden. Plant your crops.”

“Do you do all that slathering?”

“Why bother? We live forever around here, the way it is.”

“I don't suppose you had time to buy plane tickets.” Charlie leaned over to look in Edwina's face. Her mom sat on the bottom step of the back porch. The home place seemed desolate without the barn, the glint of sun on ice.

“We can't leave now, Charlie.” Edwina looked like a battered wife, with blotches for bruises.

“I can.”

“I need you. I think I'm responsible for what my uncle just did.”

“Mom, he's been trying to kill himself for years and it had nothing to do with you.” Charlie took another look at her mother and got a cramp that took her breath away. “I hate family.”

“Me, too.” Edwina tried a wobbly smile, acknowledging Charlie's capitulation.

“God, so do I.” Helen Bartusek pulled a tissue from the cuff of her sweatshirt to wipe her ever-dripping nose.

“I don't,” Kenny Cowper said.

The women looked at him as one. Nobody felt up to saying the equivalent of “well, duh.”

Elmo Staudt had returned to the home place on the county snowplow, crawled into the cab of his half-buried truck with a cigar and two bottles of whiskey, and when sufficiently plowed, he took out a brand-new razor and got one wrist cut some but scraped good before he had a stroke.

Kenny was staring at the open door of the truck. Even from the porch, you could see the flashy red of blood on what lingered of the snow where the county plow driver had pulled him out. “It should have worked. He had all night to bleed to death. There should have been time. Must have clotted on him while he was unconscious.”

The county plow person had been uneasy about something Elmo Staudt had said. Like “Thanks for the ride and good-bye forever,” or similar wordsâand had stopped by this morning to check on him. He'd used Elmo's phone to call for help and, having been trained as a paramedic, did the wrong things to allow Uncle Elmo to make his own ultimate decision. In all fairness, the suicidal man had done much to undo himself. His blood ran thick and slow. Wouldn't you know? All the rich desserts and eggs and cheese and sausage had done their thing, but without clogging his heart. Clogged his brain instead.

Charlie went upstairs to finally change clothes and pack for herself and her mother and to weep for Elmo Staudt in private. It was a great relief to change into cotton socks and athletic shoes and fresh everything else.

When she came out onto the porch with the bags, Cousin Helen said, “You can't leave. Someone has to look after the house. I told you there's no place to stay around here anyway, and your mother and I have to go to Mason City and Elmo.”

“Well, I'm staying at a hotel in Mason City or at your place tonight, cousin dear. Next time you call in evil relatives, consider accommodations and ramifications.”

“Well, you can stay with Kenny while Edwina and Iâ”

Both Kenny and Charlie were shaking their heads at her.

“She just doesn't get it,” Kenny said.

“I'd rather stay with Buz.”

“I could stay home until my shift, and you and Edwina could go to Elmo.”

“No, sweetie, manipulation isn't like that. Like poor Elmo's going to know who's out in the waiting room or not.”

“What if he dies in the night?”

“We celebrate,” Charlie answered. “At Viagra's.”

Charlie and Edwina Greene ended up spending the night at the Comfort Inn in Mason City. They visited Mercy Hospital to check on Elmo Staudt. Mason City wasn't a city, it wasn't even a big town, but the hospital complex was enormous. Elmo Staudt was not expected to recover, so he'd been sent to a nursing home.

“I'm sorry, there was nothing we could do for him here,” said a female at the front desk who knew all this by typing his name into a computer database. “He'll have excellent care there and should any sign of his coming out of the coma occur, the staff at Gentle Oaks in Myrtle will contact us immediately. We can have him back in no time.”

Next, they drove out to the airport and purchased tickets for the day after tomorrow. On the way back, they stopped at an Appleby's for huge chicken Caesar salads, garlic bread, and Chianti.

“I'm not kidding about day after tomorrow being it, Mom,” Charlie said over coffee. It wasn't as good as Viagra's but it was rich and strong. “I've had it with Iowa.”

“Is it Iowa or Kenny Cowper?”

“That, too. And don't forget I have a daughter with the Myrtle eyes all alone back home.”

“Great-aunt Abigail has blue eyes, Charlie.”

“What's that got to do with the price of asparagus in China?” as her boss, Richard Morse, would have said, or something similarly out of frame.

“Let's not talk about it now, okay? It's so nice to be away from there. Let's enjoy tonight.”

They showered and fell asleep trying to watch the news and read about it in the paper at the same time. In the morning, the TV and lights were still on. Charlie woke to grain futures and the price of gasoline and the governor's office calling for a full investigation of the nine suspicious deaths in the nursing home in tiny Myrtle, Iowa. The person behind the computer behind the front desk at the hospital here hadn't mentioned that little fact yesterday.

She didn't realize her mother's bed was empty until Edwina shouldered in with a tray of complimentary bagels, coffee, and juice. Charlie announced that she had no intention of spending another night in Myrtle ever again and would keep her room to ensure she caught the plane to Minneapolis tomorrow. “But I will go there with you today after I've made a few million phone calls.”

“Charlie, be reasonable.”

“I have been. Now it's time to get back to the real world.” To forestall any pleas for pity, she muted the TV and called Libby, woke her up forgetting there was a two-hour difference in the time zones. While her daughter explained just how much she appreciated this fact, a color-enhanced commercial showed a machine on TV spraying some chemical mixture on rows of plants. Charlie had the feeling it wasn't Miracle Grow. Libby was not a morning person.

While Charlie ignored her mother's smirk and dialed the office to leave a message on Ruby Dillan's voice mail that she would absolutely positively be flying back to blessed California tomorrow, a strange assortment of letters and numbers zipped along the bottom of the screen. Ruby Dillan was the office manager at the agency, and the zipping letters and numbers attempted to inform Charlie of such things as the price of corn, wheat, soybeans, soybean oil, and soybean mealâof feeder cattle, hogs lean, and pork bellies. It was like a stock-exchange
ticker tape, but it was out of Chicago. Iowa was a foreign country.

To further drive home her point, Charlie left a similar message on Larry's machine, her stomach starting to eat itself again at the thought of another trip to Myrtle. Just before she awoke this morning, she'd dreamed that she and Marlys Dittberner held a pillow over Uncle Elmo Staudt's face until he stopped breathing.

They were met with a new sound at Gentle Oaksâ
La Traviata
or something operatic, sung at full volume from a deep voice that couldn't hold the pitch and ended each measure or whatever with a squeak or a rasp. More than one of the empty beds had been filled. The mind behind the voice was as garbled as the tune and the lyrics. Charlie's tone deafness made most music painful, but this was excruciating.

“God, I hate it when we get singers,” Cousin Helen said.

His name was Eugene and he was a devil on wheels in a wheelchair, pulling himself along on the walk bars in the hallway at terrifying speed, driven by a music only he appreciated.

“Yeah,” Mary Lou Hogoboom agreed. “He can't coma-out soon enough for me.” She grabbed poor Rose and her walker with the green tennis balls out of the way of the musical maniac just in time.

Eugene had once been a professor of music at the University of Iowa.

Charlie didn't want to be there when he met up with the scrawny Fatties. Retired farmers she could see, but a “professor?”

“The best brains go down the hardest,” Helen reassured them.

“Ahhaa eeeiahhhh,” Eugene sang/squeaked. Fat Dolores tore off in the other direction. The family of this songster had to hate his music a lot to allow him to be sent to a nursing home that had just suffered nine suspicious deaths.

“It's sooo hard to be alive nowww.”

“Everybody keep me away from all pillows,” Charlie said.

Uncle Elmo Staudt had settled in fastâmouth open, teeth out.

Charlie turned on her heel, “I'm outta here.”

“Wait.” Edwina pulled her back around by one elbow. “At least touch him, say good-byeâsomething.”

“Mom, why are you putting me through all this? I've had enough. If you want to rot in this funky family stuff, be my guest, butâ”

“Charlie, baby, he's your grandfather.”