“Do not touch a thing. The coroner is on his way.”
“Don’t close her eyes or mouth, fold her hands—anything,” Charlie agreed. “Did it get cold enough while the power was off to cause this death naturally, do you think? It’s possible at this age, it was just her time, you know.”
“I doubt it got that cold,” Harvey said, then added ruefully, “She’s been at the Oaks for twenty-two years. Something of an institution. Outlived her whole family, including the two kids.”
“Twenty-two, how awful. Was she a vegetable?”
“Only the last five or six years.”
“Help me, please help me. Somebody,” Doris’s roommate wailed.
Charlie had half an urge to grab a pillow and help the woman.
CHAPTER 22
“AS TO OUR enigma, you should know that on record since Marlys entered Gentle Oaks eight years ago, she has been found trying to, nearly succeeding in, or threatening to bury herself alive on or in the grave of the town’s namesake a number of times.”
Harvey and Charlie sat in Elsina Miller’s office still waiting for the coroner of Floyd County, who lived and had his business in Charles City because the railroad changed its mind and course after the county had been named.
Charlie had taken off her boots and wrapped Kenny Cowper’s warm coat around cold feet. She’d also managed to swipe a handful of plugs from a lower drawer in the nurses’ station and felt back from the edge a bit—as long as that door to the nut hatch stayed closed.
Harvey leafed through assorted papers in Doris Wyborny’s file. Doris had been born a Streblow.
“Marlys is amazingly quick. She could sneak into a room and smother some half-conscious person pretty easily. She has the run of the place.” Charlie had a gut feeling that the ancient and mobile Marlys Dittberner was the key to something. Charlie’s gut, however, was more often wrong than not.
“Rose is very mobile, but if she set out to do something, she’d have forgotten what it was by the time she’d entered the room. Flo and my grandfather are slow, but they do wander in their quest for something to smoke.”
“Helen may have secretly wished to put her own mother out of her misery, and her great-aunts, too. But what about the others? We need to make up a list of the dead and look for comparisons. Kenny could come up and do it while visiting his grandma. So could the marshal, for that matter. Ben seems to have access everywhere. As you said, you don’t lock people out of Gentle Oaks. Up until Doris, women totally out of it who were born Staudts have been the pattern.”
“Don’t look at me. Every time one dies, I lose the money coming from the government.”
“But there is a waiting list, right? Those beds aren’t empty long.”
Mr. Rochester glowered and took another file out of the cabinet, tapped her on the head with it, and dropped it in her lap. “You are good at this, you know it?”
Charlie found him suspicious because, like Helen, he pretended Charlie knew what she was doing. And they were both desperate for her to investigate because they knew she had no professional training. Who better than an amateur if you’re the perp? But Harvey didn’t have Helen’s motive. Didn’t mean he didn’t have one at all.
It was Marlys’s file, and mostly empty—two sheets of paper filled out by a neighbor who had brought her here when the community could no longer put up with her antics.
“But she must have had some insurance papers and a Social Security number—I mean, if she ran a store, owned a house.”
“There was a fire in the courthouse, back in the nineteen forties. A lot of the records are gone. People her age, you can’t be sure records even existed. She never drove a car. She kept setting fire to her own house—one of the reasons the neighbors wanted her up here. To get her Medicaid payments started through the bureaucratic mill was somewhat of a hassle, but so was Doris Wyborny’s and others’. Women didn’t own property as a rule, or work for wages, when Marlys was young. If Marlys was young. They were just Mrs. Somebody.”
“But she inherited from her husbands, surely. She ran the grocery store. She would one day be eligible for benefits.”
“As the widow of Lester Dittberner. No wills or deeds or anything survived.”
“Wouldn’t she have had to have a Social Security number to pay her taxes on the store?”
“You know, you are good. Wonder what happened to it. Unless her son owned the store. He died here years before she came.”
“How old is the Oaks?”
“About fifty years now. I inherited it from my great-uncle from Swaledale. It’s been added on to and modernized a good bit. Uncle Herman had plans to build a series of long-term health-care centers in small towns around because expenses are low out in the tullies. But he found that so many of the children were leaving the Midwest, and their parents followed them when they began worrying about aging. But in Myrtle, the elderly seemed to have too many living parents to go off and leave. Some siblings might migrate, but not all could.”
“So there are locals with relatives incarcerated here who are in and out all the time?”
“Actually, few visit after the first year or two. And their loved ones are residents, not prisoners. And this has turned out to be a long, long-term care facility.”
“So it was Herman and Sherman Rochester?”
“There was a third brother—”
“I don’t want to know. What happened to Herman?”
“He’s in Room Forty-three.”
The coroner arrived with a sheriff’s deputy and the press. Myrtle was suddenly on the map. The situation could not have been worse if a slew of presidential candidates had invaded.
Neither Mr. Rochester nor Charlemagne Catherine realized that the wind had dropped and the air cleared of whiteout until helicopters sounded overhead. Which caused another whiteout as the blades stirred up the snow on the ground. Two copters had the good sense to land on the drive in front of the building, and one tried to land on the lawn ornaments in the center circle and thought better of it to set down back out on the road. But the cadre of approaching snowmobile heroes couldn’t be blocked and began downloading Mexicans as fast as they could.
“In California, we call them Hispanics or Latinos,” Charlie muttered, determined to commit some murder of her own if Mitch Hilsten, superstar, dared step down from one of those choppers.
“In Myrtle, they’re Mexicans, and the only ones who live here are my housekeeper and groundsman, a married couple. Their relatives travel from Mason City each day to do the real dirty work on farms and here at the Oaks.”
Buz brought Elsina Miller the administrator up to the doors with a big wink for Harvey. “Thank God that creature is out of my house, else I would never return to it. Remember, do not say the word ‘Jesus’ in her presence. She will go on for hours, days, and weeks. She is the bane of my existence.”
“Why do you keep her on?”
“She’s a wonderful missionary for Baptist donations for the needy elderly.”
“’Nuff said.” Charlie backed away from all the commotion coming at them, but not before the missionary administrator noticed her standing beside Harvey Rochester through the glass doors leading from the porch.
Charlie grabbed her boots from the office and ran for the ladies’ room in the hall inside the really smelly part of the institution. She just wasn’t up to a photo op. Neither was Gentle Oaks.
Marlys Dittberner ran naked down the hall, mouth wide open in a scream—no teeth. This time, she lifted Charlie’s whole purse by its shoulder strap on her way by, almost taking Charlie’s shoulder with it. This time, Charlie had no mother to fly into the arms of and cry. There went all the plugs and this was not a good time for that. To hell with Marlys—Charlie raced to the nurses’ station and stole another, then ran back to the ladies’ room, and of course it was not empty.
“Out of my way, Sherman.” She shoved the poor old guy into a stall and locked herself in another. She had brought only two pairs of pants and one was stil
l out at the home place.
With at least some protection in place and in bad need of Tylenol, she stepped out of the stall to find Sherman Rochester leaning on his cane looking around, probably for something to stuff in his socks. So she led him to the door to the hall, hoping he would distract whatever attention was festering out there, and gave him a shove before going back to wash her hands and plan how to find Marlys and her purse and her sanity.
When she was composed enough to peer out again, it was to see a cast of strangers, a hookup, makeup, and script under discussion with a talking head, and handheld cams. The wheelchair folks caught up on the cables began to form a traffic jam between her and the naked Marlys. This was not all out of a Mason City newsroom.
Charlie dearly wanted to lock herself back in a stall and have a good cry. But she stepped out into the fray just as Rose began to read from a flyer. She read without intonation, pronounced the words clearly and slowly but as if she didn’t understand their meaning. She did pause at periods and commas, and sometimes for no reason.
“Jesus loves everyone and all who come to Him are saved. Are you saved. He will help you. Jesus is the son of God, creator of the earth and the heavens and the universe. Jesus can forgive you your sins. Are you forgiven.”
“Ciga-riga-rooo?”
“Excuse me, sir. You’re running over the cables here. Could you back your chair off them?”
“Who the hell you think you are, you son of a bitch? Get outta my way.”
“Jesus, what’s that smell in here?”
“Smells like shit.”
“We got plenty of that.”
“Got a cigarette?”
“Jesus loves everyone and all who come to Him are saved. Are you saved.”
“Help me. He-ll-lp me. Somebody, please … .”
CHAPTER 23
DOLORES-THE-FAT, ALREADY IN a snit, took an instant dislike to the press and upchucked a hairball on the soon-to-be-talking head’s shoe. “God, what’s that? Its stomach? Get that off me.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, do you work here? We’re having some trouble with the traffic—”
“No.” Charlie shoved Fatty Truex’s wheelchair into Fatty Staudt’s knees to get herself through the pileup in front of the cameras and caused a vituperative altercation in the process.
“Somebody stuff a sock in those geezers’ beaks. We’re about to go live.”
“Please, lady, could you tell our viewers a few facts about the series of murders occurring here?”
“No.”
“Can you send us some of the staff to interview? These people aren’t really suitable.”
“Oh, really.” Charlie escaped behind the jam of wheelchairs and walkers and the nurses’ station and around the curve in the back wall just as the reverse countdown for show-time began. Only to come up against Cousin Helen.
The nurse’s tears dripped onto a thick sweater with subdued colors and rows of angry racoons duking it out like her Fatty grandpas back at the newscast. She stood next to the door to the smoker, looking down into the hazardous-waste storage area enclosed in chain-link fencing and drifted snow. “I don’t see a push broom.”
“It’s under one of the drifts. Helen, where is the staff? National news media with television cameras are blocked just inside the door to the hall here.”
“All hiding. Afraid it’s an INS raid. What if you can’t find my mother?”
“She’s not going anywhere, trust me. Can you go and take care of the television crew? And have you seen Marlys? She stole my purse.”
“Everybody’s looking for Marlys. What about my mother? It’s all her fault anyway. Even you.” She slid the glass door open and walked out into the cold of the smoker to grieve in peace.
Charlie held the door from closing. “What’s whose fault, your mother’s?” Before she could get an answer, three things in close succession distracted her. The tomcat tore up the hall one way, fur all puffed like he had a Doberman on his tail. The naked Marlys tore down it the other way, chased by her own demons, without Charlie’s purse, and headed straight for the photo op of the decade.
And Harvey Rochester with two other men, all bundled up and snow-crusted to the knees, appeared at a slower pace behind her. The helicopter, forced to set down out in the road, had brought the coroner and deputy sheriff. They’d walked around to a back door to avoid the public exposure Marlys Dittberner was about to garner in spades.
The coroner, who was really a mortician, was also something of a surprise, as were nearly all the people Charlie had met since she’d come to Iowa. He was jolly, for one thing—which didn’t seem proper in either a mortician or a coroner. In fact, he was more than jolly. He cracked up at every other thing Charlie said. He’d probably heard she’d been between the sheets with Mitch Hilsten, which would make even more ridiculous her pronouncements on Marlys’ running naked into the limelight and Dolores hacking up a fur ball and the Fatties cursing and coming to blows for the cameras, as well as Rose reading deadpan and toneless immortal prose from one of the evangelical pamphlets from Elsina Miller’s office in front of a national broadcast.
He stood over the expanding body of Doris Streblow Wyborny wiping laugh tears from his cheeks. “I always love to come to Myrtle. Okay, stand back, put up your masks—this is going to get messy.”
He stuck a small knife into a ballooning Doris, and the deputy sheriff took off gagging as Doris deflated in an audible hiss. The coroner’s name was Leland Mosher. He was short and considerably overweight, with great jowls and belly and receding hair, and an expression that made hardened old Charlie even want to cuddle him—kind of like a koala the size of a polar bear. You just knew there was soft fuzz on him somewhere.
“Leland, are you certain that was necessary?” Mr. Rochester asked in his deep Broadway diction. “We have been through a great deal here, you realize.”
“Sorry. I just love working with the deputies. Expected your lovely detective here to be a little squeamish. Life should be more fun. Death sure isn’t. Fun is where you find it. And in my profession—” He wore thick, dark-rimmed glasses, which he peered over now with a sigh that made Charlie laugh, too.
“My detective sees murder all the time,” Harvey proclaimed in a comic, prissy “So there.” “She works in Hollywood.”
“Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? Do you know Dick Van Dyke?”
The comic coroner kept heaving belly laughs—literally, you’d have to see it for yourself—while cutting into a poor dead woman and sniffing stuff everybody in Bulgaria could smell by now. The deputy walked back in only to grab his mouth and run back out, leaving the mortician convulsed. Charlie and Harvey raised eyebrows over their masks and shrugged.
Meanwhile, Marshal Delwood was busy digging through the drifts in the hazardous-waste compound for Ida Mae Staudt Truex, under the watchful if teary eye of her daughter Helen Truex Bartusek, still up in the smoker.
The jolly-ghoul coroner asked Charlie to relate her impressions of what was going on here.
“I’d rather not. I really am not qualified.”
“Would you rather be thrown to the network lions, Miss Greene? I’d like particularly to know if you see any similarities to the previous body you and Harvey here examined and took samples of for me.”
“Well, they both were lying on their backs with a sheet and light blanket pulled up to their chins. Doris’s eyes were wide open. Ida Mae’s had one eye half closed. There was no blood. They both appear to be very heavy for their age, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is bloating. Like I’ve been telling everybody, they could have died because it was time, because someone felt sorry for them, by help from some medicine, or a pillow held over their heads to suffocate them. Both had defecated, which is not unusual in death.” Or anytime in this place. “If it was murder, it could have been done by anybody—the doors aren’t locked.”
“She’s even suggested that I might be knocking off the residents to make more beds available for those on the waiting
list, Leland. Can you believe that? I, Harvey Rochester?”
“Now, let her finish. Time for your theatrics later. Go on, Miss Charlie. Let’s pretend we all know these are premeditated murders. They will be seven, a sizable number for this community.”
“Until Doris here, there was a pattern. The victims were all women who had been born Staudts. What if somebody made a mistake? Thought she was born Staudt? Or what if this is all getting out of hand? I think that the deputy and the marshal should spend the night here.”
Everyone but Doris stared at her. The coroner/mortician had sobered up.
“Now stop that,” Charlie said.
“This has got to be the nuttiest place on the planet,” Charlie complained to Kenny Cowper, cum Kenneth Cooper. “No wonder you’re writing a book about it. It’s too unbelievable for fiction, good thing you’re doing it nonfiction. Everybody bugs me to find out what I think—Harvey, Cousin Helen, even the coroner, and then when I tell them, they make fun of me.”
Marshal Del finally found Ida Mae, and she and Doris Wyborny were air-lifted with Coroner Leland to Charles City and the mortuary/funeral home, leaving a very morose deputy behind to protect the patients. You could hear the marshal’s dump truck roaring around town, clearing the streets with a vengeance. He’d caught hell from Cousin Helen for not being careful enough while digging around for Ida Mae. Not like she felt anything.
“How do they make fun of you?” Kenny set a beer on the bar in front of Charlie.
Her mother sliced a thin slab of smoked cheese, put it on a cracker, and handed it to her. “You’re looking kind of pale. Did you have lunch? You have to be careful now, you know.”
“I haven’t had anything since breakfast, and I still haven’t found my purse. They make fun of me by looking dumbfounded when I answer their questions and say things like ‘Wow, you’re good at this,’ when all I’ve said is the obvious. Know what I think? I think the whole town’s in on this. Look, I’m crying in my beer.”