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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

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“
W
HY'D YOU NEED the siren? There wasn't a car or pedestrian in sight.”
“To impress a pretty woman? See if it still works? Uh-uh, none of that. Not that smile again. More lethal than a tanked-up pheasant hunter.”
They were walking toward “the house,” Charlie having ignored orders to stay in the Jeep. “Was I really born here?”
“That's not for me to say.”
“Maybe I should ask Marlys.”
“Oh, jeez, I'm not touching that sucker. Now you stay out here. Floors are rotted.”
Following close on his heels, Charlie asked, “If I wouldn't stay in the car, why would I stay out of the house? Was this a whorehouse?”
“Woman ought to have more respect for the law,” he muttered, turning to face her. “Can you really imagine a whorehouse in the middle of Myrtle, Iowa?”
Over his shoulder, she looked into the eyes of an ancient hag with long, snow-white hair and a bright pink scalp. Charlie was looking into Libby Abigail Greene's eyes and her own, too.
“She's in there, I can tell by how you just lost your tan. Don't make a move.”
“She has my eyes.”
“No, you have her eyes.”
“Is she my birth mother? My daughter has those eyes, too.” Charlie suddenly had to pee.
“She's well over a hundred years old. You figure out the math on that one. Now stay quiet. I'm going to turn around very slowly so as not to scare her. Marlys, I've come to take you home, honey.” He turned very slowly, which gave Marlys the chance to vanish.
“Nobody well over a hundred years old can move that fast.” Charlie picked her way across a ruined floor in a ruined house. She felt sweaty all over. Blood sugar? That had been a problem since the accident. She'd had to learn how to snack. The fat cells on her thighs just loved it.
Charlie commuted from home in Long Beach to the agency in Beverly Hills, and one day last spring, a semi had jumped the median on the 405. Twelve people and Charlie's Toyota died. Charlie didn't.
“I don't know how she does it.” Myrtle's marshal put his hands on his hips and turned a full circle, eyes searching floor, what ceiling there was, and out the extreme-open windows. “Marlys? Honey?”
“Maybe when you're well over a hundred, you don't want to be called honey.”
“Yeah, too much sweet stuff, huh? Hey, you old bat. Bitty, bitty, bitty. Get your diapered ass over here this minute.”
Charlie started laughing and then thought better of it.
“That didn't work either. I—hey, you okay?”
“I need food and a powder room fast. But not in that order.”
Charlie was back in the Cherokee and headed toward the railroad tracks in seconds. Good thing Marlys didn't decide to cross the road.
Next to the grain elevator and mountains of shelled corn sitting all around it was The Station. An old brick railroad station right out of Norman Rockwell that had been turned into a restaurant. Charlie left the ladies' room feeling in control of her world again and had to walk through the bar to get back to Marshal Delwood, waiting at the cash register. A boy-man with a toddler on his lap, two men at the bar, and
the bartender watched a sport thing on the huge TV. Everybody but the toddler and the bartender sucked on a beer.
Back at the cash register, this tall, thin woman in leisure-fit jeans and low-necked blouse laid her cigarette down in the ashtray, picked up two menus, and rasped, “Smoking or non?”
“Non,” Charlie answered automatically.
“You'll be sorry.” Delwood Brunsvold chuckled low and dirty.
“Do you smoke? I didn't even think.”
The hostess lady led them past tables with padded captains' chairs and checkered tablecloths, stained-glass windows and outdoor carpet, past buffet steam tables to a cold, dark, windowless area way at the back, crowded with cheap metal tables, folding card-table chairs, and highchairs. Kids ran between tables on a chipped tile floor with what appeared to be mashed potatoes on their hands and chocolate pudding around their mouths and in their hair. And the smell of dirty diapers.
“I'm not hungry.” Charlie backed away from a grinning brat and into the marshal of Myrtle.
“Yes you are. We'll take a table up front in the sun of a window, and the buffet, please.”
“Right you are, Del. Coffee?”
“Do you have lattés?”
“Nope. But you can pour cream in it and hiss a lot if it'll make you feel better. Is this—?”
“Just pour coffee and orange juice fast and stop being a smartass, okay?”
“Whatever you say, Officer Sweetle.”
“Officer Sweetle?” The orange juice was half sugar additive and certainly not fresh-squeezed, but Charlie felt better in minutes. They sat at a table for two in the light of a stained-glass window. “What's that noise?”
“Church bells. We got here just in time before the church crowd. Sunday brunch, Charlie Greene. You can have lunch
or breakfast or both.” He leaned closer and frowned, sat back and considered. “Those teeth can't be real. I heard about your accident. Are those caps or dentures? Don't worry—whatever they are, they light up the room.”
“Edwina was into orthodontists when I grew up. Hated it then, love it now. You do know how to make a woman feel good, don't you?”
“Let's get some food in you before you turn my head, okay?”
“What about Marlys and the pheasant hunters?”
“She'll keep for a while longer. I'm the law and I say we move.”
“How did you know about my accident? There're people living on my street in Long Beach who don't know who I am.” But even Charlie forgot her question when faced with the salad bars and steam tables at The Station.
You could get cabbage or macaroni or potatoes in your mayonnaise at the salad bar. The rest was Jell-O with fruit, canned fruit cocktail, or cold peas and cheese cubes with mayonnaise. Or you could top off a wilted piece of iceberg lettuce with chicken salad, ham salad, or egg salad in mayonnaise.
For breakfast, there were scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes, waffles, pancakes, and cinnamon rolls. For lunch, creamed soup, bean soup, scalloped potatoes, mashed potatoes, fried chicken, fried fish, barbequed ribs, dinner rolls, overcooked mixed vegetables floating in butter sauce, and at the very end—well-done roast beef au jus and ham and a guy to slice them as you wanted.
Charlie went through the line with an empty plate and went back to start over. She selected small amounts of egg salad, hashbrowns, a dinner roll and a slice of ham. The dessert table across the room on the way back offered apple pie, pecan pie, and carrot cake—she didn't count the kinds. Del was already seated before a heaped plate and scrutinized her choices. She ordered a glass of milk to go with the coffee.
“I get it. You're diabetic.”
“No, just not used to all the mayo and fried stuff. You should have seen the dinner last night at the home place. And I was on a lot of drugs after the accident. It's taking my system a while to get over them.
And
fat's about as popular as gray hair in Hollywood.” She'd forgotten how good mayonnaise tasted. “So where are the ex and the kids?”
“Des Moines.”
“Ah, you did leave home and go to the big city.”
“Oh, yeah. Iowa State, Des Moines, family—and then everything went bust and I came home. I love it here. I get to play Marshal, look for Marlys, talk to dead folks out at the cemetery, got two snowmobiles, hunt pheasants, look for Marlys, play with my snowplow—it's just a dump truck with a blade on the front but it's really big, makes lots of noise.”
“And be Officer Sweetle, too. What more could a man want?”
They were trying to ignore a woman at the next table who couldn't extricate herself from the captain's chair. Finally, Delwood went over to hold the chair down. “Now you push with your arms, Mrs. Lansky. They just don't make these things big enough.”
“Guess I'll have to go on a diet,” she said ruefully.
Mr. Lansky, skinny of course, stared at the ceiling. The girl with them sat on a folding chair from the nonsmoking pit. More of her hung over each side than rested on the seat.
“Do you eat here often?” Charlie asked Del when he sat down again.
The hostess had the captain's chair moved against the wall and a folding chair replacing it before Mrs. Lansky returned with her second helping.
“Well, Station's only open evenings and for brunch on Sunday. There's a little café in the schoolhouse for breakfast and lunch every day but Sunday. I eat with my folks now and then. And Viagra's is open for lunch and dinner every day.” He glanced over at the double backsides at the Lansky table. “Maybe I won't have that piece of pecan pie after all.”
“How can such a small town support all these eateries?”
“The Station draws from the towns around and the farms—what's left of them. So does Viagra's, and the population's aging fast here. Women get to be a certain age and have some money, they don't want to cook anymore. And there's no McDonald's this side of Mason City.”
“Are any of your people at Gentle Oaks?” Charlie asked as they stepped outside.
“Two grandparents and a great-aunt.”
“That why you were up there this morning?”
“No, as a matter of fact.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Better see if the coroner's shown yet. Had another death last night.”
Charlie took the opportunity to check her own voice mail. A call from Larry, her assistant at the office. One from Mitch Hilsten, superstar. And one from Libby Abigail Greene, who never would have had that middle name if Charlie had met its origin.
Libby's was a simple, “Hi, Mom, everything's fine here. Just wondering how you and Grandma are doing in Iowa. And
what
you and Grandma are doing in Iowa. Have fun, love ya.”
That kid had been nothing but trouble since her conception—and yet that voice alone could bring a constriction to the back of Charlie's throat that took her breath away. That kid was a senior in high school and would soon fly the nest. Charlie so wanted to be there, not here.
Charlie's hair was sort of a light bronze and uncontrollably curly. Libby's was platinum-blonde and straight, but both drew looks of surprise when they took off their sunglasses around strangers—their eyes were dark, almost black. Like Marlys Dittberner's.
“
D
O YOU ALWAYS call the coroner when someone dies at Gentle Oaks?” Charlie asked the marshal. They were driving around looking for Marlys again. “I mean, isn't a nursing home where people go to die?”
“First time since I been marshal, I've called the coroner for anything. But you have to understand that the Oaks is not your regular nursing home. And it's the only place in town that's got more business than it can handle. They've had to send people to Mason City because there just weren't any more beds.”
“Frankly, with the diet and exercise regime around here, I'm surprised anyone lives long enough to get to Gentle Oaks.”
“It's a mystery, for sure. People go in there at death's door but don't die. For years and years, they don't die. Lose a lot of weight. Had the water tested. Didn't show anything.”
“Do they get better?”
“No, they just stay at death's door.”
“For years and years. Doesn't make sense. People like Mrs. Lansky and her daughter can't—”
“They're from Floyd.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, at the Oaks, we got more people over a hundred than anyone wants to admit. Bad for business, you know. And thirty or so of them—we got at least one of their children there, too. People just don't die there—until lately. Abigail Staudt isn't the only one wondering what's going on. We've
gone eight years without a death up there, and in the last month there's been five, counting old Annie last night.”
“Any similarity in the infirmities of those who died?” Charlie couldn't quite believe his story, but was worried enough about her own aging and dreading her mother's to not want to contemplate later generations.
“Oh, yeah. Vegetables, every one. Course we got a lot of those at the Oaks.”
“My mother's Uncle Elmo says he doesn't doubt there's murder happening up there.”
“Eight years without a death in a nursing home is unheard of, impossible. But follow that with five in a month is suspicious. According to insurance companies wanting to sell people like my folks long-term health-care policies, two years in a nursing home is usually it. Tell that to somebody in Myrtle. You have to understand, Charlie, most people in this town are in their mid-sixties to late seventies and most of them have folks at the Oaks, some more than one generation. Touchy subject here.”
“How are they dying?”
“Suffocation, or what looks like it—which can be of natural causes or not. And yes, we've called for an investigation into every member of the staff. Not unknown for someone dealing with that situation every day to feel sorry for those who suffer.”
“The pillow-over-the-face technique. My writers have worked that old saw to death. So, how about your folks?”
“They both look like Mrs. Lansky and her daughter. Live from one meal to the next and butter better be butter and milk better be cream. My brother and his wife are the same way. Drove my wife nuts, but I don't worry about it. When they go to the Oaks, they'll slim down a lot and they'll never die.”
“Unless Marshal Brunsvold fails to solve the sudden primordial death-syndrome caper. Wow, who lives there?”
“Harvey Rochester himself. Quite a man, our Harvey. Except
he talks funny. And right next door is where I live. Not as fancy, but a lot less maintenance.”
Both houses sat on lots like you'd put apartment buildings on in Long Beach. Del's house was small, square, one-story smack in the center of the lot, plus flagpole with flag waving, some trees, and a few sheds at the back. Two snowmobiles sat up toward the street like lawn ornaments with mowed weeds for a lawn. It was the last house before the cornfields began.
Harvey's house stood in the front of the lot, with a screened porch on each side and curved windows at each corner upstairs and down, and an open formal porch between them. Two stories, with high ceilings and an attic by the looks of it, and probably a basement, the house extended back quite a way. There was a lot of room, but it was the curved corner windows that caught the eye. The house and the outbuildings were of that white-painted wood with the gray beginning to weather through in spots.
“Your accident didn't leave any dents or permanent injuries at all? You don't even have a limp.”
“Didn't I tell you? I'm the bionic woman now. So why is it I and my daughter have Marlys Dittberner's eyes?”
“Charlie, you've got to understand, people here don't talk about things like that.” He turned the Cherokee around and started back down the street. There were lots of houses on big lots with snowmobiles for lawn ornaments, she noticed now.
“Then how come everybody knows these things? Everybody but me.”
“You kind of find out things that nobody talks about by rumor, hints, innuendos, and such—piece them together over the years and end up knowing what everybody else knows by living here. But direct questions will just get you put off. People aren't direct about some kinds of things in small towns—important things, scary ones, embarrassing things, intensely personal things, family things. Or stuff that could cause unknown
results. People are cautious. This is Myrtle, not Minneapolis.”
“I don't live here. I don't have years to find out anything.”
“What's this bionic woman business? You have mechanical parts—powerful ones?”
“That is a very direct, personal, important, and potentially scary question. How can you ask it?”
“Because you don't live here. You're not one of us.”
“Then why do I have Marlys' eyes?”
“Because she's your great—” Marshal Delwood was saved by his cellular. Marlys had been sighted on the road to the cemetery. He switched on the siren and floored the pedal.
“Don't you think that might scare her? The siren? Or at least alert her?”
He turned it off and slowed down. “I get carried away. It's so much fun being marshal.”
“I'd hate to be out when you're plowing the streets.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Great what?”
“Great-grandmother. And you did not hear that from me.”
“I heard a rumor on the wind, or was it an innuendo?”
Nothing in Myrtle is far from anything else, which still did not explain how Marlys could move so fast, but they were already at the gates of the dark little graveyard with the sucking soil.
“Wouldn't it be better if we parked here and walked in? Less threatening for her?”
He stopped the red Jeep under the entrance arch that announced they were entering the MYRTLE CEMETERY. “Okay, bionic Charlie, you call the shots. Your way isn't as much fun as mine, you know.”
The marshal grabbed his cellular, Charlie her purse, and they slid to the ground without slamming the car doors. They walked to the sides of the white-rock-graveled one-lane drive into the shade and still-gliding dead leaves. Maple leaves, because of those finger jags, catch on your clothes and hair. They
also make it impossible to sneak because once fallen, they crunch right along with the oak leaves.
“There she is,” Charlie whispered and pointed to the lone standing figure ahead whose hair blew in the wind. The rest were tombstones. “Don't call her honey, okay?”
This guy was no rocket scientist but he was endearing and fun—he grimaced, wrinkled his nose at her, and gave her the bird.
And then his cellular went off and he was just another guy. “Got to go, coroner's at the Oaks,” he whispered, Charlie thought, with somewhat unnecessary jubilance. “You're running this show. You keep track of her till I get back. Don't let your great-grandmother out of your sight. Meanwhile, I'll check on your mother for you.” The dork stuck out his tongue but backed the Cherokee away with proper decorum.
Her supposed great-grandmother (Charlie didn't trust marshals or anyone named Delwood, no matter how cute) watched her careful approach without pulling a disappearing act, pulling out a long knife, or an ax even.
At close range, Marlys's eyes were rheumy and full of veins. Charlie wondered how much they could see without eyeglasses. Charlie wore contact lenses to see the ancient woman at all. And she had the odd feeling that she could be more vulnerable than this creature somewhere from her past who knew the secret innuendos, hints, and rumors of generations of people who didn't discuss that which was too important to trust. She studied Charlie from head to toe and before turning away, declared, “Top dollar, just like I foretold. Too bad.”
“Does that mean I'm related to you? Have some value?”
“Course not. But we're both related to Gertie here.” They stood side by side at Great-aunt Gertie's grave—Gertrude Staudt—where the rich, hungry dirt was so newly turned it trembled. With insects? Worms? Charlie's overactive imagination? She'd had vision aberrations since the accident, which often meant the onset of a migraine, but few since the titanium
plate had been implanted in her neck. “God, I want to go home.”
“Be careful what you ask for.” The shaky finger of the creature beside Charlie pointed at the fresh dirt at their toes. “Gertie said the same thing, over and over and over. And got her wish.” There was a live brain behind that statement, and that was possibly scarier than the vomit comet taking two passes to land at the Mason City airport because of wind turbulence on the runway. “You wear your pants that tight, honey, you'll cut off your female rhythms. Skirts are better.” She raised hers, dropped her soiled diapers, stepped out of them, and squatted on Gertie to pee forever and sighed. “So good to be out of that place. You won't try to take me back, will you? Why would you have that right?”
“But you'd be warm and fed—”
“And dead at the Oaks. I don't mind being dead out here.” Several oak leaves had caught in her flowing hair like dried flowers. She was stick-thin, her dress hung on her, reached to mid-calf. She wore a pink sweater to match her scalp, and tennies with anklets, one white and one green. Now that the diaper was gone, Charlie was sure that was all she wore.
“Tell me about Gertie.”
“There was four sisters, Gertrude, Abigail, and Annabel. Augusta died of scarlet fever as a wee child.”
“Annabel was Annie.” Charlie shivered.
Marlys nodded. She didn't appear chilly at all. She just trembled from age. “Now, there's one.”
“Abigail.”
“They was beautiful and proud and pure. Never married. Just broke hearts right and left. Couldn't find nobody pure enough for 'em. Become quite a burden on nieces and nephews' wives. Course, pure is how you look at it. What you know.” She cackled. Her lower bridge was gone, but she spoke clearly without it.
“Big family.”
“Oh, yeah. Staudts tried to populate the whole town. Except for the sisters, they bred like mice. The sisters all become schoolmarms and all taught at the school. Ruled the place. Almost ruled the town. Railed against bootlegging and fornication.” Marlys raised her arms toward the sky, hidden behind the towering trees and their dead and dying leaves. “They was so righteous everybody waited for a rumor, maybe even a truth, they could find disgusting. Mind, nobody came out and said that.”
This old woman was breaking the unspoken law in Myrtle, Iowa, about keeping the unspeakable unspoken. She was leading her quarry away from Gertie's grave and the soiled diaper. They moved from shade to shadow to deeper shadow. Charlie seriously wouldn't want to be caught here at night without a flashlight. The gravestones from all different time periods and of all different shapes and sizes were a dark gray except for that odd encroaching moss and the white lambs of the children's graves where, strangely, no moss grew.
“Marlys, you and I have very similar eyes. Why is that? Am I descended from a Dittberner?”
“That's my married name.” The old black eyes turned knowing and amused. “We all bred like mice, truth be known. Three, four families in this whole town made it what it is. Most was Germans, Norwegians, and the Cowpers. Too much inbreeding makes for strange history.”
“What about Harvey Rochester?”
“His mother was a Cowper. His father was a Rochester.”
“Who was Myrtle?”
“You're standing on her. See for yourself.”

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