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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

BOOK: The Rampant Reaper
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T
HE SUN WAS so hot on her bare skin Charlie had trouble breathing. It beat through the rounded corner window of Harvey Rochester's living room. She and Kenny Cowper rolled on Harvey's lush carpet next to a black grand piano. It was probably the most painfully erotic moment in her life, but she wasn't exactly fighting him off. Leaf shadows played on the window and across the carpet and on Kenny Cowper.
“Told you it was her,” Great-aunt Abigail hissed above them, and the piano bench was full of Harvey Rochester, pounding out something broody and moody and violent. There were two women with Abigail, all three in period dress—like the Civil War era or something. All three pointed down at her, and Kenny disappeared and Charlie was suddenly cold. By this time, she'd figured out it was a dream but damn near came anyway. Can women do that?
“Can women do what?” Her mother stood over her. She'd pulled the covers off Charlie and had a towel wrapped around her head. “You were having a bad dream. Hurry up, I've got a tub running for you.”
“What'd I say, did I say anything?” Oh, jeesh.
“You were just moaning and groaning and wondering if women could do something. Now get down there before the tub runs over—real hot water, Charlie. You can wash your hair in the tub. There's a saucepan you can dip it up with, pour it over to rinse. Hurry.”
“Wash my hair in the bathwater? Gross.”
But after Charlie's “nightmare,” she really needed a bath and her head was a total itch, so she did as she was told. The water was hot and the deep tub spilled over a little when she displaced some of that water. She got shampoo in her eyes from rinsing with a saucepan and the towels were thin to nothing and the room a refrigerator once she was out of the water, but she did feel much refreshed.
Edwina had a little travel hairdryer. Charlie didn't carry one anymore because she always stayed in upscale hotels where they were attached to the bathroom wall.
Uncle Elmo had decided to take them out to breakfast at the Schoolhouse Café in town. He found an ankle-length coat that made Edwina look like a fireplug, and escorted them out onto the back stoop.
“I think I better drive, Uncle Elmo,” Charlie said, blinked, and looked again, squinting in the sunlight glinting off ice. Everything was as before but coated with shiny ice. Every dead blade of grass or weed or fence post or wire shimmered with beauty. And the skeleton barn most of all because of its mass and incompleteness, strange and saggy shadow angles and holes. This was not thin ice either. Weed blades and harvest stubble were three times their size and clacking against each other in the wind. Fence wires drooped with the weight, and a wire to the house from a pole along the driveway was barely a foot off the ground.
“Where's the car?” Charlie stepped off the stoop and landed on her ass in seconds.
“Put it in the barn—” Uncle Elmo helped her up “—because of the storm. It's still some shelter if not a lot. Your mother and I'll meet you at the gate. Careful how you step now.”
Charlie pretended she was ice-skating, which she was, but on boot bottoms. Her hair hadn't quite dried at the roots and she imagined it was freezing upon her scalp, sending icy tendrils down to her nerve endings.
Jesus, Greene, will you pay attention? This is not your average slippery.
Where have you been? Charlie asked her inner voice. Is that what's been missing here?
Not as fascinated with the marshal and the barkeep as you, babe. Besides, Myrtle, Iowa, has been dominating the guilt scene. Not much I could add.
The rest of the world spoke in zillions of tiny cracking and clacking sounds. Was this what it sounded like inside a deep freeze or an ice-cube tray? She fell only twice more before reaching the barn, hoping all the way that the Lumina would start. She'd never driven a Chevy before. It was parked next to an ancient pickup of indeterminate color, and started after a couple of turnovers.
Charlie would forever be grateful for whatever instinct or fantasy or hovering protective angel told her to back the black rental out of the barn right away instead of sitting there a while to let it warm up. Because she'd no sooner cleared the barn door than the barn collapsed in shivering stages of shimmering ice-coated pieces of wood, finally too old to hold up under the weight. Charlie sat there staring at the dazzling explosion—many of the ice shards striking the windshield, some painting rainbow hues in the sunlight—thinking of Marlys Dittberner.
When the crystal dust settled, the tailgate of Uncle Elmo's pickup was all of it that showed through the humps of rubble. Edwina walked like an old-lady-on-ice on the ice and on the arm of her surefooted uncle—maybe it was the cane. Elmo had to be seventy-five at least, and if the great-aunts were his aunts, he was right—whole generations of the elderly
were
stacking up in Myrtle. And Edwina, who was herself a grandmother, had a grandfather still living. Again, thinking of Marlys with a hunch that she already had the key to something here, Charlie got out to help inspect the Lumina. When they wiped away the ice and wood dust, a few scratches showed on its hood and roof, no major dents.
“Not too bad. Better than you being under it when the roof came down, little Charlie.” Elmo Staudt stood looking at the barn that wasn't. “Always figured it'd be the wind that took it. Or some kids'd set fire to it some night. But we don't hardly have any of them anymore. Now it's just me and the house that stands between the home place and the Family Farms.”
Edwina and Charlie instinctively put an arm around him. “Oh, don't fuss, it don't matter. Old pile of junk.” But there was a catch in his voice and he didn't move away from them. “Used to sit on the back stoop and listen to the wind whistle through the rafters and old boards creak like they was all playing a tune together. Sometimes I'd think I could still hear the bellow of cows wanting milking, and the hogs grunting and snorting.”
“Don't forget the geese.” Edwina had a catch in her voice, too.
“Oh, yeah. You always was scared of them geese.” But his chuckle was hollow. “Well, let's get some breakfast. They have real good coffee at the Schoolhouse Café. I could sure use some.”
Charlie only slid the Chevy Lumina off the drive once, managed to get it back on without anybody having to get out and push, but with a lot of advice from her elders. She hadn't driven on ice in years. And never had she seen such an expanse of it as when she turned onto the road to Myrtle. It was one solid, smooth, shiny sheet of ice, and the little snow that had accompanied it had blown off to shallow riffs in deep ditches. The sun's glare, so pretty on the exploding barn, was blinding here, even with Southern California-strength sunglasses.
“Now take it real slow, Charlie,” Uncle Elmo said calmly, “and don't spook, but there's a mighty big tractor coming up behind us. Let him pass. He's got traction on that old Oliver, Lyle does. He just don't have rubber tires. People always tease
him about that museum piece but he can chop up this ice a little for us and you can follow in his tracks.”
Charlie hadn't even thought to look in the rearview mirror—once out at the home place, you felt all alone in the world. But the earth seemed to rumble now. “I thought you couldn't see.”
“I can see out of the sides of my eyes, just the middle that's dark.” Cold swept into the car as he lowered his window and yelled, “Morning, Darla. Fine day, ain't it? Old Lyle's taking his granddaughter to work.”
This huge iron wheel jounced past Charlie's window and the rumble became a vibration that tickled her ears. When it pulled back in front of them, this fireplug resembling Edwina waved back at them. It was a padded person standing on a tractor, holding onto the seated driver. Charlie had never seen anything like this, not even in the movies. The closest she could tag it was like
Fargo
meets
Grapes of Wrath
.
The museum piece had great iron ridges that broke the ice into chunks that spewed out from all around the wheels. The machine was mostly wheels, and Elmo called the metal ridges “lugs.”
“Does Darla work at the City Hall?”
“Oh, no. She's been to college. She's the social director at the Oaks. Social workers make good money.”
“They do?” Charlie and her mother said, barely out of sync.
“Oh, yeah. Lot better than schoolteachers, from what I hear.”
“Mom is a university professor and research scientist,” Charlie insisted. “Not a schoolteacher.”
The Oliver, Darla, and her dad were ka-chunking way out ahead of them and Charlie was glad for their damage to the ice in her path, when one of the loose chunks threw the rental sideways enough to veer her across the road and into the opposing ditch in less than a breath, facing back toward the home place.
When she saw the semi ka-chunk over the meridian, going the other way between north and south on the 405 and heading straight for the Toyota after taking out a few SUVs in front of her, it was too late to change lanes. Or was it?
She heard herself screaming and cursing as she wormed the little crushable Toyota over between two other SUVs. The one in front of her climbed the semi's hood. She managed another worm into the next lane over, where traffic was really slowing down, and then to the next. There Charlie and her beloved Toyota joined—she couldn't tell how many—cars and trucks and everything in between in a crunch that shoved it all into what looked like a grassy ditch, where the dependable old gray Toyota bent its rib cage in the middle, and Charlie, too.
Darla was one of those bouncy, cheerful people it was impossible to appreciate before morning coffee. She stood next to Charlie and Edwina as Lyle Lempky pulled the Lumina out of the ditch with his ice-crunching Oliver, and Uncle Elmo behind the wheel. Charlie was just coming out of a nightmare daze. Her mom explained her recent accident to an effervescent Darla, who counseled Edwina to find some good counseling for her daughter. And the sun went behind a cloud bank big enough to swallow the earth.
Darla didn't even blink. The glittery ice world had become
Dr. Zhivago
meets
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, and this bubbly person didn't register it. And she had to go to work at Gentle Oaks, for godsake.
Uncle Elmo drove them into Myrtle and breakfast. Neither Charlie nor her mom objected when he explained, “I don't have a license and I can't see, but I can drive on ice, you better believe.”
At the Schoolhouse Café, located in a three-story brick building that had once been Myrtle's school, the center of the community that was now the Community Center, the menu
was written on the blackboard and everyone nodded at Elmo and stared at the Greenes.
On the way in, Edwina had pointed out classrooms where she had attended school. One had a preschool sign on the door. Uncle Elmo said it had closed for lack of young. Ballet and piano studios had closed for lack of grade-schoolers.
“Garden club still does good in summer, senior citizens' activity center thrives. Exercise for active elders closed, but day care for senile elders goes great guns when they can get somebody young enough to staff it,” Elmo told them and ordered a double order of eggs, scrambled with melted cheese on top, biscuits and sausage gravy, and bacon. If they'd left him flabbergasted last night, he'd just returned the favor this morning and he knew it. He gave a mighty, satisfied grin and announced, “Doing everything I know how to kill myself before I end up at the Oaks.”
C
HARLIE SUCKED THANKFULLY at the coffee, while Uncle Elmo complained that eating eggs by the ton didn't seem to make his cholesterol go up. “Used to like oatmeal a lot but won't eat it now. Might save my life. Smoke all the cigars I can stand, enjoy all the beer I can hold. What more can I do? I'm not churchy but I'm religious enough to feel bad about shooting myself. Upbringing and all. It's the curse of Myrtle. Your folks did right in leaving young, Edwina.”
There were booths along the inside wall and tables of various sizes in the center of the room. The tall windows on the outside wall showed a gray sky where the clouds had coalesced into one big downer.
“How'd they die?” Charlie could hear the listlessness in her voice. She hadn't relived her accident for three months, thought that part of the nightmare over, gone off the antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs because they leveled her out too much, took the terror out of life but the joy and excitement, too.
“Ol' Eddie dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-five,” Elmo said wistfully. “What a way to go. Prime of life. Wasn't even sick more 'en a few minutes. And Elsie? How'd she go?”
“Breast cancer at fifty. Not such a good way to go.” Edwina sat back as a huge bowl of oatmeal was set before her. “Do you remember when you were very young, visiting them in Albuquerque, Charlie?”
“Were they the ones with the cool tile floors and cute birds
with antennalike things running around their backyard?”
“Gambel's quail, yeah. You must have been about four. My mother was already dying but didn't show it much. None of us knew, actually.”
“She had you at eighteen?” Charlie asked after some quick figuring. “I thought that was the generation that married late because of the Depression.”
“Both families had money,” Elmo said.
“And my mother was pregnant with me,” Edwina said.
Charlie said, “I ordered
an
egg. I got two. And toast. I got potatoes, too.”
“Eggs come in the plural here and with potatoes now. Don't sweat it.” Edwina was still staring at all that oatmeal. “You may need some extra calories before we're through this.”
They compromised by ordering an extra plate and bowl and sharing each other's breakfasts. Hey, oatmeal wasn't so bad. With all that brown sugar and cream, sawdust would have been good. The orange juice tasted like Tang, the toast was Wonder bread, but the coffee, though not Starbucks, had a kick. They all mellowed some. And Charlie decided to ignore the stares from the booths across the room and the depressing cold sky outside the tall windows and ask some hard questions. She figured she'd better before she sank back into the sea of morass ignited by Myrtle and issues on aging she had no desire to look into and the icy, damp cold out there. She'd have given anything for the marshal's grin that promised nothing but made you feel good.
“So how is it everyone in Myrtle knows I was in an auto accident last spring when I barely heard of Myrtle until a few days ago? And I want a straight answer—clear, direct, and to the point.”
“Well, Lester Wyborny's son David lives out in Los Angeles, and he works in the movies, cameraman, you probably met him, and he always sends his mother newspaper clippings whenever your name shows up in one—or that
Hollywood
Reporter
. And she always sends him clippings on how bad a place California is and how dangerous it is to live there. Vivian's determined he'll perish by earthquake, tidal wave, stray bullets, or wildfire any day. Anyway, she hands his clippings about you around at church. From there, the news is spread by mouth. You do tend to get yourself reported up in the paper a lot. Straight enough answer?”
“Yes, thank you, Uncle Elmo. Now, next question—”
“And of course when that Mitch Hilsten fella got himself engaged to someone else, everybody in town either felt bad for you or thought you had it coming. They was about evenly divided on that one, seems to me.”
Charlie spilled some coffee in her oatmeal. “You know about Mitch?”
“Everybody knows about him. He's a famous movie star. I liked him best in
Bloody Promises
and
After Hours
. He's real popular around here, you know. The Sinclair can't keep his videos in. Oh, and
Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel.
All that mountain railroad stuff. Didn't know the Colorado mountains was that beautiful.”
“Actually, it was filmed in Canada. But—is that why everybody looks at me so funny and doesn't say anything?”
“You got to understand, this isn't Los Angeles. We never expected to actually see somebody who'd been between the sheets with Mitch Hilsten.”
Well, if Charlie hadn't felt like she had three noses before,
that
sure as hell did it.
“In Myrtle, that makes him a he-man and you a whore,” Charlie's mother said bitterly.
“So what's your next question?”
Charlie was still trying to get her breath and couldn't remember the next one, not that there weren't a bunch. “Well, Marlys Dittberner told me that there were three groups of families in Myrtle—Germans, Norwegians, and Cowpers—and that the Myrtle for whom the town is named was murdered.
And she left a curse on the town, and you said the same thing just now.”
“Charlie, Marlys Dittberner's more than a few pies short of a load of manure. Crazy folks are often the most clever, don't forget. But yes, Myrtle was killed.”
“Who killed her?”
“Her family, the town, the times. We been paying for it ever since. Women aren't greatly valued by men in this town, or most towns, I'd bet, until the men get too old to take care of themselves and then they begrudge their helplessness and them that care for them.”
“That's not a straight answer.”
“In Myrtle's time, little Charlie, women weren't thought to earn their keep, so they came out owing. That's how you explained their duty to see to others first. Edwina, you explain this one—I'm paying for breakfast. But I will say Helen Bartusek drives me loony because I have to be nice to her because she cares for me.”
“Cousin Helen? I thought she was a Staudt.”
“Bartusek is her married name,” Edwina answered. “Buz is a Bartusek. Her maiden name was—”
“What's all this ‘maiden' stuff anyway?”
Charlie's mom put her hands over her face and Uncle Elmo called for the check. Charlie stared out the window at the gray sky and the black, leafless tree whose branches looked like threatening fingers. Charlie wanted to go home real bad.
Great-aunt Abigail's house was right out of Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
. Dreary, weary, spooky. A large Victorian painted gray like the day. Edwina slid the rental to a stop out front. Charlie didn't want to drive on ice again yet. They'd dropped Uncle Elmo at the Sinclair, where the old men who weren't in the cemetery or the Oaks met to gab before the pool hall opened at noon.
“So, what are you going to do, offer to move her to Boulder?”
“Uncle Elmo's right, it'd probably kill her. She lives to control and judge others.”
“If it killed her, she wouldn't have to go to the Oaks, right? She wouldn't have much control there either. I can't figure out how all these people are related.”
“Uncle Elmo is the youngest child of Fatty Staudt or Grandpa Staudt or Edward Senior, who had three sisters that lived—Abigail, Gertrude, and Annabel. He had one daughter, Ida Mae, who is Helen's mom. She's at the Oaks. Then Edward the Second—my father—then Elmo. Ida Mae Staudt married a Truex, so Helen Bartusek, Cousin Helen, was a Truex before she married.”
“So Fatty Staudt is the grandfather who carved your watermelon for family reunions out at the home place?” It didn't seem like Edwina had taken any notice of him.
“No, Fatty Staudt has become something totally unrelated to the grandfather I remember.”
“Both Fatty Staudt and Fatty Truex are Helen's grandfathers? And her mother Ida Mae's there, too, and until recently, two great-aunts—Gertrude and Annabel, whose deaths are suspicious and under a coroner's investigation? I know where I'd look for the murderer—can't figure why Cousin Helen hasn't gone screaming into the cornfields before now, can you?”
“With the debt ratio, there is little money here for most. Family Farms does not pay as much as you might think. Many families in and around Myrtle had great wealth in farmland once. But one cannot spend dirt, and profit evaporates swiftly when the debt builds. The idea was that if one owned a piece of land, it would be valuable because God would not be making any more land: That it was the one thing one could never replace, and if one had a piece of it and built on it, that land
would support one and one's children and their children.”
Great-aunt Abigail obviously lived in two rooms of this house, the “parlor” and the kitchen. The entryway had been cold, but when they entered the parlor and the pocket doors closed behind them, it was stuffy hot. A neatly made twin bed sat off in one corner, dressers and two wardrobes alongside it, and the door to the kitchen stood open. Abigail had put on the teakettle. It whistled now, and she interrupted her lecture to go make tea. A gas-log fireplace had been installed in a real fireplace—not terribly convincingly—and Charlie, who'd thought she'd never be warm again, began to wonder if she'd ever cool down again. On an ornate side table, knitting needles stuck out of what looked to be an all-but-finished cap with what would be a rolled rim all around.
Above the fireplace was a bad painting of an incredibly ugly girl with Charlie's eyes and Libby's and Kenny Cowper's and Marlys Dittberner's and Mr. Rochester's.
Abigail came back with a silver tea service so huge she rolled it on a little table with wheels. It sat on a shiny silver tray Charlie would bet had to be polished like in the old days when women didn't have enough to do already, or had servants to polish for them. Hot tea in one gleaming pot, sugar cubes and lemon slices—except for the absence of milk, it was just like London. There were delicate cookies, cups and saucers, small plates. When you've already got three noses, you notice things.
Charlie was cheered only by the fact that the tea tasted like Lipton's, the cookies were obviously Pepperidge Farm, and there was an eye-popping-sized television in perfect alignment with the ancient woman's Lazy Boy, which of course she wasn't using now. The Towers in Boulder would have a difficult time replacing this little nest.
The lecture continued. Farmers could create their own workforce from their own loins and it would be economical because that workforce would be working for its own future families. Then the world went berserk, became unmanageable.
“Irreligious and immoral men of science invented methods of growing crops on less land. Women decided they didn't wish to wash their own dishes by hand. Farming machines became so large one went into debt so deeply that even the devil couldn't bail one out, and then computers came along to steal away one's children and their children. They could now make money without land, and purchase their food. You be careful, you women of the world. That which you bank on now could be worthless as our dirt in a few years.”
In Hollywood, Charlie thought, in a few days.
“And that stock market you godless count on is merely smoke—as was the certain value and future wealth of land of which God would never make more. Those poor demented souls up at Gentle Oaks are all there on Medicaid.”
Charlie'd thought listening to the evening news was depressing.
“I notice, Charlemagne Catherine Greene, your intense interest in that portrait above the mantel. I think we both know who that is, don't we, my dear? And recognize her likeness to you?”
“Myrtle?”
“Yes, our founding mother and our curse, and ultimately yours, too. She died, harlot, because she betrayed her family as you betrayed yours and as Edwina plans to betray hers.”

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