The Rampant Reaper

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  ALSO BY MARLYS MILLHISER

  Copyright Page

  For aging children of the elderly everywhere

  CHAPTER 1

  MONSTER TREES STRETCHED a shroud across the sunlight and Charlie Greene in the sad little graveyard. Spores of dying leaves and turned earth moved thick on the air. The earth was so black she imagined it seethed with impatience to decay or to grow anything that came near. A hungry, spongy earth that sucked at her boot heels.

  In clear sunlight on the other side of a wire fence, giant harvesting machines and grain trucks longer than railroad cars rumbled and exhaled gassy breath to provide sustenance for the living. Charlemagne Catherine Greene stood at her mother’s side to provide solace for the dead? Why was she here?

  Still dressed in their airplane clothes, they looked as out of place as belly dancers at a church supper.

  Moss in burnt-orange splotches, like a creeping rust, nearly covered the bases of gray gravestones. No little flat-to-the-ground bronze identifiers here that you could run a riding mower over, nor much grass to mow, what with all the shade.

  There were obelisks tall and short, pointed stretched-out pagodalike things, slabs rounded at the top, large and small. And the small white lambs, heartbreaking in number, denoting the young and the very young and the stillborn. This might be a small cemetery, but it was a crowded one.

  Charlie, in tight black jeans, short black-leather jacket over a silk cranberry blouse, and black boots with high, square heels, figured she looked, here, like the type to jump on the back of some ancient, bald, bearded hippy’s motorcycle. Funny, in L.A. she’d felt fairly fashionable in this outfit, more like the type to drive off in a Porsche with a young hunk.

  Edwina Greene’s tailored black suit screamed expensive. The whole effect spoiled by sensible shoes. At least she wasn’t sinking into the soil.

  The gloom was not lightened by the number of mourners in wheelchairs hacking up God-knew-what to drown out the minister bravely trying to minister. Between the hacking oldsters and the graying children behind their wheelchairs, the minister and the marshal were closer to her age than anyone but those innocents long rotted away under the white lambs.

  The oldsters demanded to know when could they take their nap, eat, go to the bathroom, or simply get the hell out of here—who was it being planted anyway? Their children, Charlie figured, counted the days until they could escape to Arizona for the winter.

  She knew who was the marshal because he leaned against a Jeep Cherokee wearing a George W. grin to perfection, and on the side of the blood-red vehicle supporting him and his grin, MYRTLE MARSHALL stood out dramatically in white.

  The minister, obvious because she officiated, wore a long, flowing skirt and a knowing if benign cast as she picked up a handful of that hungry black dirt. She said something Charlie couldn’t hear over the honking, snorting, hacking of the geezers in wheelchairs, the pointed questions of the hearing-impaired of both sexes, and the harvesting machinery roaring on the other side of the fence.

  Dead leaves swooped and swayed in a gentle, gliding fall to touch down and crunch brittle underfoot as the uneasy and demented alike shifted in their discomfort.

  Everything but the leaves seemed to go silent, every eye that could see turned to Charlie Greene, and even the good-natured marshal stopped grinning when a mewling sounded in Charlie’s purse.

  If you want to know what it’s like to feel truly out of place, forget to turn off your cellular at a funeral.

  Charlie’s mother walked stone-cold silent to the rental car parked along the road outside the Myrtle Cemetery. Two handicap vans passed them loaded with the wheelchair folks. Some of their gray-haired children looked over their shoulders at the Greenes. They were about Edwina’s age, the women were dressed in a combination of skirt lengths and sensible shoes, some in dressy pants. Their husbands in white or light shirts, no ties or coats. The day was warm once you left the gravestones.

  Charlie looked back to see the Myrtle marshal filling in Great-aunt Gertie’s grave. Charlie walked in sunlight, he shoveled in deep shade. Stephen King’d have a blast with this.

  “God, I’m sorry about the cell—it just seems like I’ve been rushing around all day and haven’t caught up with my head yet. I didn’t mean to embarrass you, honest.”

  Charlie’s mother turned with tears in her eyes. “Don’t sweat that, Charlie. For once, this isn’t about us.”

  What isn’t about us? I fly from Long Beach to LAX to Minneapolis and take the vomit comet to some place called Mason City and we rent a car for another place called Myrtle where your great-aunt died. I’m adopted. I’m not related to her. Do you have any idea of what I’m missing back home and at work? How important can this be?

  But Charlie couldn’t remember seeing her mother in tears since Charlie’s father, Howard, died, and she was too stunned to voice her angst. And stunned by Myrtle, Iowa, too. The marshal had taken off his lumberjack shirt.

  Charlie worked in Beverly Hills on Wilshire at the firm of Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc., a Hollywood talent agency, as their sole literary agent, and that call had come from a new, exciting, and valued client. It was one of the many reasons she should not be in Myrtle. Charlie had sucked up her heels from the ravenous dirt to crawl off behind a really big flat, bending-over slab tombstone to answer the call. She hadn’t been this humiliated since she realized nobody was going to ask a pregnant teen to the prom. She’d had to make whispered excuses to Shirley Birkett, the latest successor to Danielle Steel, and would have to find time real soon to answer that call more fully.

  Jesus, we’re talking bucks here, careers even.

  But somehow, looking at the people of Myrtle, she didn’t think she’d bring all that up over coffee. And there was coffee, with three different kinds of carrot cake, in the basement at the tiny Methodist Church. Here, people even came up to talk with Edwina, who still looked shockingly exotic. Imagine how her daughter looked.

  “Edwina, what’s happened to you? You were always so lank—I mean … studious. Did you finally find God?”

  “Cancer finally found me,” Charlie’s mother answered politely. She certainly had changed since her mastectomy. Even Charlie couldn’t believe how much. “Aunt Abigail, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Charlemagne Catherine Greene.”

  Aunt Abigail—how many aunts were there around here?—looked Charlie up and down and sideways over half-glasses. She was taller than both Charlie and Edwina, arrow-straight and bone-thin. Her navy-blue dress had a startling-white lace collar. Her cheeks had sags where once had been bags.<
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  “So, it’s you, is it?” Aunt Abigail had to be ancient, but her movements were as swift and sure as her dislike when she turned away and strode to the other side of the room.

  “God, Mom, I didn’t know how to dress—this was all so quick. And all you said was the weather was changeable in Iowa in October.”

  “It’s not you, honey. It’s her. Remember that. Sorry I had to bring you and on such short notice. But there are things you need to know. Now, let’s both stop being sorry. It can get you suffocated here.”

  Charlie’s mom hadn’t called her “honey” since she gave birth at sixteen. Edwina, a professor of biology, lived in Boulder. Charlie lived in Long Beach as the unwed mother of a trying, gorgeous teenage daughter, Libby.

  “Oh, Edwina, I’m sorry about Aunt Abigail. But I guess we both know what we’re facing here.” This was Cousin Helen, who had stood off away from them at the burial of Aunt Gertie but who now hugged Edwina, and Charlie, too. She smelled pleasantly of black soil and garlic. “I know this has got to be culture shock coming in from the real world, but I am so grateful. I haven’t told her anything. I was waiting for you guys to help me out.”

  The basement was chilly. Charlie’s leather jacket didn’t seem enough. She took one bite of carrot cake and put its paper plate with the plastic fork on a table. She hugged a paper cup of hot, watered-down coffee for solace. Others seemed to draw courage from Cousin Helen and approached Charlie’s mom, most remaining distant from but curious about Edwina’s daughter.

  They tended to be short, middle-aged to senior citizen types, their elders deposited someplace by the handicap van. The men had white foreheads where the sun had not reached under baseball caps. The women looked sort of like laid-back soccer grandmoms, if there were such things.

  But before they could really warm up to the exotic Greenes, Great-aunt Abigail announced soundly and surely from across the room, “Gertrude died old and sick and cursed. And we all know why.” The glaring-white collar rose as the old lady’s arm lifted, and, a finger pointing at the guests, she whirled to face the interlopers and glared directly at Charley. “Because of her. It was murder.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CHARLIE STOOD OUTSIDE the church, remote from the small band of people standing around her mother. She knew Edwina was from Iowa, but she’d rarely heard of Myrtle and never of these relatives. Edwina had never brought Charlie back to visit and Charlie’d never wondered why. Well, boy, did she now.

  She was a busy career woman and didn’t have much time to waste wondering. She knew her father had had a previous family, but Howard had never chosen to invite them to the house. Charlie hadn’t wondered about that either.

  You’re thirty-four years old, Charlie Greene—washed-up by Hollywood standards—but still as self-involved as a teenager.

  Two more church spires rose among splendid scarlet, burnished-orange, gold, and russet trees. They were glorious in the sunlight against the depth of sky and scattered puffs of clouds as white as Great-aunt Abigail’s collar. Looked like a painting, a fake Hollywood backdrop.

  Just because you’ve never been to Iowa doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. Little bit out of our element, aren’t we?

  How could a place like this produce a Great-aunt Abigail?

  Your mother needs you now, and she has all the answers, and she was there for you after the accident. Took six weeks off work to nurse you. Even lost her boyfriend because of you. You owe much of your prized independence to her.

  Totally without her permission, Charlie’s conscience was growing stronger as she grew older, thus making her weaker. Didn’t make sense.

  I was there for her after her mastectomy, Charlie fought back, but she was beginning to see the lovely red trees through tears and suddenly realized she wasn’t alone after all.

  “You really hurt for the passing of old Gertie? Well, don’t. She didn’t know who she was or why and didn’t give a damn either. Not for, oh, like—” the Myrtle marshal pursed his lips and squinted at the cloud puffs “—I’d say ten, fifteen years” now.

  “Really?” Charlie wiped a cheek. Hollywood literary agents don’t cry. Well, not in public. She was so self-involved she hadn’t even heard him approach. “That long?”

  “Oh, yeah. Took her a whole Myrtle minute to die, poor thing. But she didn’t mind because she didn’t know. So if you look at it that way, a Myrtle minute’s not that bad. In the long run.” His last sentence cracked him up so hard that even Charlie’s grin found her. He stuck out his hand. “You’re Charlie Greene. Del Brunsvold.”

  “Was Gertie your mom or aunt or somebody? I mean, I noticed you filling in the grave as we were leaving.”

  “This is Myrtle where the marshal is the sexton, and I plow the streets in winter, too. Hey, we all got to make a living. Oh, my. You could wipe out half the town with that smile,” said Del, the marshal of Myrtle who plowed the streets. “I’d have to put you in jail, you know. If I had one.”

  Charlie and the marshal were both laughing when Edwina and Cousin Helen joined them. Cousin Helen looked startled, to put it mildly. There was no end to the social faux pas Charlie could commit in Myrtle, Iowa.

  “Go slow,” Edwina said. “I want to see this.”

  Charlie, driving the rental car, was scared—her mother’s voice had gone hollow like she’d never heard it do before. But she didn’t have to be reminded to go slow—Charlie wanted to see this, too.

  The main street of Myrtle was actually called Main Street. And it was paved, sort of. The asphalt had crumbled away at the edges, leaving pothole parking along the high concrete curb and sidewalk. The sidewalk was wide but only on the side of Main Street that had stores—a few boarded over, others with windows out and sills and sashes loose and crooked like warped, vacant eyes. Crumbling foundations and thresholds presided over cracked, humped sidewalks.

  The other side of Main Street was mostly empty lots, the city garage, and the Town Hall. One of the lots was scored by a long trench that Helen explained was a cave-in that the worthless Delwood better get filled in before someone broke a neck stumbling into it.

  “What caved in?”

  “We all figure it was from mining the white rock around here for buildings and roads in the old days.”

  On the store side of the street, signs read THE MYRTLE HOME AND FARM HISTORY MUSEUM and MYRTLE LIBRARY, and there was a grocery store, too. All were closed, the grocery store had been for years. The Myrtle Post Office—

  “Charlie, stop.”

  Charlie already had.

  “What’s happened to the pool hall?”

  “Not much but the name, I understand,” Cousin Helen answered from the backseat. She was showing them the way out of town to “the farm” so they could unpack. “I’ve never been in it, of course.”

  Charlie was laughing again. This was certainly being a strange day. Crying, laughing, feeling sorely out of place. “Viagra’s Bar and Grill?”

  “Kenny Cowper’s back in town. Marlin’s Kenny. You probably didn’t know him. He took over the place.”

  “I knew Marlin,” Edwina said.

  They turned at another abandoned grocery store, and on the side road out of town stood a Sinclair station. The sign covering most of its window advertised GAS FOOD, AND VIDEOS. A block later, they crossed a beautiful white-stone bridge—made out of the local rock—and were on a road between fields that stretched to the horizon.

  A dusty road of white crushed rock that coated the black Lumina. Charlie pulled out to pass one of those huge shiny-green harvesting machines—burdened with claws and chutes—that invariably seemed to be pulled by old dirty pickups and far too slowly. “Don’t people in Iowa know there aren’t three ‘e’s in deer?”

  “Some of them don’t know there can be three ‘e’s in Greene,” Edwina said dryly.

  There was only silence from the backseat until Cousin Helen relented. “John Deere is a trade name, Charlie. Everybody knows that. And Edwina, a lot of us younger folks feel bad about
how you were treated. It doesn’t look like it, but times have changed in Myrtle. You’ll see. Next turn is ours and to the left. Second farm to the right.”

  Edwina ordered a stop here, too, when Charlie was about to turn into the drive of the second farm to the right. “My God, what’s happened to the trees?”

  “It’s called ‘Family Farms,’” Helen answered with a sigh. “Told you things had changed.”

  “I buy their products all the time at Von’s.” Charlie pointed to a little sign that managed to fit a young, slim family, happy cows, pigs, and chickens all in the same picture with a barn.

  It was a long drive, with a few buildings and a windmill at its end. “Used to be big maples and oaks along the driveway. Buildings were shaded by more, and there was a regular forest behind them.” Edwina had tears in her voice now. “Half the buildings are gone.”

  “Oh, yeah. Like Uncle Elmo says, what the home place needs now is a real good tornado.” Helen’s tone held more than a modicum of stoic sarcasm. “Trees don’t grow profits every growing season, don’t ya know?”

  Great, there’s an uncle, too. How much family did Edwina have here, and how could she have hidden it this long? Charlie, however, was beginning to guess why.

  She was sure that her mother’s parents were dead, and Edwina had always claimed to be an only child.

  The driveway to the home place was two rutted mud tracks through high, dried-up weeds in the middle that scraped and scratched at the underside of the Lumina with bristle sounds to make your teeth grit. In other words, it was not much in use. Why should it be? There was nothing at the end of it but some foundations, a house, a few sheds, a giant barn falling apart, and the windmill unaware of a swift October breeze. The house was wood like the barn, both showing white paint worn through to gray patches. The front porch took up the whole face of the house and sagged at both ends like a frown. Helen had Charlie drive around to the backdoor, where the back stoop sagged, too. “Couldn’t we stay in a motel or bed-and-breakfast?”

  “No such things around close. It’s not as bad as it looks.”