The Rampant Reaper (23 page)

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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

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H
ER FIRST FULL day at home, Charlie snuggled in a corner of her kitchen breakfast nook and savored a communal dinner. Mrs. Beesom's tuna noodle casserole ripe with canned peas and potato chips. A tall glass of milk. Jacob Forney's fresh-baked yeast rolls with butter. Maggie Stutzman's salad greens tossed with raspberry vinaigrette and sprinkled with raspberries. Charlie, as usual, provided the table and the entertainment.
“There's no place like home, Toto.” She raised a fork of canned tuna and chips to Tuxedo, the black cat with the white chest and feet giving her a jaundiced eye from atop the refrigerator.
“My secret,” Mrs. Beesom, sitting across from Charlie, confided, “is the cream-of-celery soup, Campbell's.”
Luscious Libby, with the Myrtle eyes, sat beside Charlie. “Mom, you're not too old to get pregnant, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“I'm joining the Hemlock Society, first thing Monday morning.” Maggie Stutzman had raspberry seeds between her front teeth. She was a lawyer and next to the birth-control pill, Charlie's best friend. Her eyes looked strangely dilated, reminding Charlie of the Floyd County deputy sheriff after he got in the med cart. “No ancient aging for me.”
“I mean, not some gross guy thing like Mitch Hilsten, but you go to one of those donor clinics and buy sperm? Have it injected or whatever?”
“Why would I want another baby?”
“Well, I'll be leaving home soon. And you could use the company. And I could use a sacrificial sister to dump you on when you get to be a FROW. Works out for both of us. Right?”
“Well, I'm going to live in my house until I die in my sleep,” the eighty-three-year-old Mrs. Beesom said, and Charlie and Maggie exchanged that helpless look becoming more frequent by the month. Betty Beesom had not one relative to her name—sacrificial or no.
“FROW?” Charlie asked her daughter.
“Fucking really old woman. Be glad you're not a guy or you'd be a FROG.”
If it was possible to choke on mushy tuna noodle casserole, Jacob was doing so. The newest neighbor in their little condo complex of houses, attached by a high stucco wall with heavy gates to street in front and alley in back, he, along with Tuxedo on the fridge, was the only guy living here. His eyes were watering but he cleared his throat and said, “I think it a great honor to live long and prosper.”
“Me, too,” Libby said. “Until you get sick and your muscle and flesh and brains turn to mush.”
“So the Mexicans just hid wherever and not down in the cellar and tunnels?” Maggie changed the subject with a warning look at the diplomatic Libby.
“There were only three of them the night of the fire, and few anytime. They just had such a gigantic job—you thought there were more.” The two in the laundry room survived only because of the sprinkler system. “The whole situation is so overwhelming. Think of a daycare center where most of the babies and children are well over a hundred pounds, in diapers, and tormented by images and phantom memories of a life they no longer understand, their minds and bodies can no longer tolerate.”
“That's why I never go near them places, even to visit,” Mrs. Beesom agreed—with what, Charlie couldn't imagine.
“If these were such helpless people, how could they take
out the deputy sheriff?” Jacob Forney wanted to know.
“He'd apparently helped loot the med carts. Blood tests from the autopsy hadn't come back yet when I left, but he had a few open bottles of really fun painkillers in his pockets. The ancient smokers ignored them and went after his cigarettes.”
“Hard to believe tough old Charlie Greene was born in nice old Iowa,” Maggie said. “You and Edwina never looked into who your birth mom was?”
“Yeah. I might have two grandmas.” Libby rearranged her Staudt hair with long fingers. Everybody watched it fall back to perfectly cup her face.
“She'd be the daughter of Isobel and Uncle Elmo?” Jacob was an accountant and, unlike his neighbors, given to detail. They had chosen him carefully.
“Problem is, Isobel was the illegitimate daughter of Abigail Staudt.” Charlie vowed Libby would never go to Myrtle.
“Not that scion of propriety, too?” Maggie glanced hard at Libby Abigail Greene. “Wow, that's some curse.”
“I thought the curse meant you weren't pregnant.” Libby stared back.
“Which makes Great-aunt Abigail my great-great-grandmother. And Uncle Elmo, my grandfather, is also Abigail's nephew. Somehow, Edwina and I didn't want to explore this.”
“Oh-oh, problems with the gene pool there.” Nobody had told Jacob Forney yet that the last guy who'd lived in the compound had been murdered or that he had the same initials. “That could be serious.”
“I always knew there was something wrong with you, Greene,” Maggie teased, but oddly without the usual grin.
“So, do you think the curse is over?” Jacob was probably in his early forties, but he looked older. Because he was so serious.
“Which one? Gobs of fatherless babies and ruined teenage moms? Or living past the outer reaches of senility? I don't
know. That many people over a hundred is sure no blessing.”
“Marlys was certainly an entrepreneur. Chubby little white babies for sale, from healthy, wholesome corn-fed parents. I wonder if she advertised,” Maggie said.
“She was cursed more than most. She kept trying to dig herself into Myrtle's grave to go home—Myrtle wasn't even there. And she had no luck killing herself running around naked in a very harsh climate. I think she mixed herself up with Myrtle in her dementia. And I think my great-great-grandmother witch helped that fantasy along.”
Marlys Dittberner was out of luck again. She'd survived the fire unharmed but had been doused by the sprinklers and left in the cold so long, she'd contracted pneumonia. But, since she'd been given the flu and pneumonia shots three weeks before, she was recovering nicely. She would live on as a vegetable, but she would live on. Maybe into
The Guiness Book of World Records
, if anyone managed to document her date of birth. Life's not fair.
“Was there really a curse, or was one invented to explain the unexplainably long-lived elders of Myrtle?” Careful Jacob kept probing, doubting. “Or had Abigail Staudt used this lie to get Marlys to do her bidding? Marlys remembered enough to believe herself culpable and was that why she was always trying to dig her way into Myrtle's grave?” Jacob had bookshelves full of mysteries. Someday they'd have to tell him about the mystery of the man who'd preceded him in the compound.
Charlie was absolutely euphoric, even giddy, her first day back in her Beverly Hills office at Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc., on Wilshire. When her gorgeous assistant called into her lavish office from his tiny cubicle that protected her privacy from the hall—“The next Danielle Steel, line one”—she left her shoes under the desk and put her feet up on its top, leaned back in her leather chair and sighed.
“That's a call back, Larry.”
“You are a hard-hearted woman. Okay, Paul Lazzart, Constellation Productions.”
“Call back.”
“Charlie, you coming to work today or what?”
“Anything else, smart-ass?”
“Yeah, some jerk from Iowa—Kenneth Cooper?”
“Oh, Kenny Cowper. I'll take it.”
“Charlie, get a grip—”
“Hey, barkeep, how's it going?”
“Hi, Charlie. Just had an interesting tidbit thought I'd share with you.”
“Like your book proposal.”
“No. Like Delwood and I been digging because life's so boring here when you're not around. And he doesn't have enough snow to plow. We found Myrtle.”
“What, you're writing fiction now? What ever happened to Dolores the tomcat?”
“Charlie, the cat's fine, not even singed. But we found Myrtle and the remnants of her baby—well, they were both remnants but in a casket together. It's her, because her bible was buried with her.”
“You're kidding—in the cemetery?”
“At the bottom of the stairs in the cellar under Gentle Oaks. Going to have to revise my proposal, but you'll be the first to see it. Charlie, you still there? Charlie?”
FEATURING CHARLIE GREENE
Killer Commute
Nobody Dies in a Casino
It's Murder Going Home
Murder in a Hot Flash
Death of the Office Witch
Murder at Moot Point
OTHER NOVELS
Michael's Wife
Nella Waits
Willing Hostage
The Mirror
Nightmare County
The Threshold
THE RAMPANT REAPER. Copyright © 2002 by Marlys Millhiser. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
eISBN 9781429978033
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Millhiser, Marlys.
The rampant reaper : a Charlie Greene mystery / Marlys Millhiser.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-29096-9
1. Greene, Charlie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Nursing home patients—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Women detectives Iowa—Fiction. 4. Literary agents—Fiction. 5. Iowa—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.I4225 R36 2002
813'.54—dc21
2001058854
First Edition: July 2002

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