“Were you conscious when we were put down here? Do you know who did this to us?”
“They have become like children again, God’s children.” Elsina Miller’s voice came froggy out of the dark. “They don’t know what they do. They are innocents being led by the devil.”
“Who?” Charlie felt her balance tilting and reached out to find something solid. Finally. It felt like wood.
“The beloved of God who are sheltered at Gentle Oaks until He is ready for them.”
“The inmates. So who’s the devil?”
“All televisions must be removed from Gentle Oaks. They are committing acts they don’t understand.”
“Like what? Murder?”
“You’re no detective. You’re not even very bright. People listen to you only because of your wicked reputation and your figure.”
“Hey, no argument there. You think the beloved inmates are killing each other because they see violence on TV and are copying it? You know, that makes more sense than any theory I’ve been able to come up with.” Charlie was under the sucking black earth of Iowa and hanging for dear life onto something made of wood that had gradients. Like steps. “Oh, my God, Elsina, we’re in Myrtle’s fruit cellar. Great-Aunt Abigail will throw bloody dead babies on us.”
And sure enough the door in the floor above the stairs opened slowly with a regular Hollywood creaking and the spreading of blinding light. Charlie couldn’t find voice to scream and there was no more sauerkraut left to throw up.
“What the bloody hell? So this is where the Mexicans hide when they think the INS is invading. My uncle never told me about this. It’s not on the building’s plans. How did you find it?” Harvey Rochester stood above them.
The only answer came from behind him, the call of the lonely Ciga-riga-rooo? bird and the low, warning moan of Dolores the tomcat.
“Mr. Rochester, please help me.”
“Miss Miller? What in damnation are you doing down there?”
“Because, because, because—because of all the wonderful things she does.”
Harvey Rochester tumbled down the wooden steps instead of a bloody baby—just before the lights went out in the ceiling of Myrtle’s grave. Now it was even darker, a possibility she would have thought impossible only moments ago.
“Oh, damn. I think I broke my finger. Elsina, where are you, woman? Oh, sorry, did I hurt you, darling? What is all this about?”
Charlie heard the sound of her groaning and him trying to move safely in the invisible pitch. She just felt better for more company, but “darling?”
“It’s about revenge, Mr. Rochester. The devil has taken over our work.”
“Which devil?”
“Hey, Harvey,” Charlie said. “Great to have you aboard. We were beginning to feel picked on down here. Do you happen to know where down here is?”
“Charlemagne Catherine? You, too? Who the devil has done this?”
“I told you about the devil. And this is not the first time,” the administrator said. “I’m sorry about your uncle. The Lord had a reason He has not revealed to us.” Elsina had called Harvey’s house and the Lopezes had called Harvey at The Station.
“I thought you said he was murdered, and if he was a vegetable anyway—” Charlie shrugged a shrug no one could see. It was like living a radio drama, all sound and no pictures. She could visualize the speakers but other than the steps, it was just the three of them in an unfurnished emptiness.
“You know who committed the foul deed, Miss Miller?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, Mr. Rochester. The Lord moves in strange ways.”
“You actually saw it happen? You’re a witness? This isn’t a setup? Thank the Lord for me, too,” Charlie said and took back every unkind thought she might ever have had about Baptists. There was nothing she cherished more than having someone else solve a murder. Even her headache threatened to evaporate.
CHAPTER 37
“IT WAS MY grandfather,” Harvey Rochester said from the bottom of his soles. His sigh came lower still through the dank.
“How did you know?” Elsina moaned again.
“Old Sherman hated Herman.”
“Now stop that.” Charlie struggled to bring sanity to an insane situation. “We are in serious trouble here, you guys.”
“He hated his brother. Old Sherman had lost so much memory I assumed he would not recognize Herman should my grandfather wander into his room in search of a smoke. I should have known better. But in all fairness, Sherman didn’t know Sherman, so how could he know Herman? Still, I can but blame myself, Miss Miller.”
“Nonsense, Mr. Rochester. What more could you have done for either of them?”
“Hey, Harvey and Elsina, could we get back to basics here before—” Jesus, was that the sound of heavy breathing? “Where exactly are we? I mean, how did you get here?” Hell, how did I get here?
After a barely proper pause—who was Charlie to judge proper?—the owner of Gentle Oaks answered, “We appear to be in a cellar under the Oaks. Like a fruit cellar.”
“Like in The Wizard of Oz,” the administrator added.
“Why is that old movie so prevalent around here?”
“It’s the only tape we still own. The mayor charges largesse for the rental of her tapes at the Sinclair. And it is one of the few of which Miss Miller approves. And the residents don’t give a damn what they watch. In fact, they don’t seem to watch at all. More like something to pacify the staff. Background noise for the empty-headed.”
“Marlys must watch it, she’s always singing it.”
“Thank God it’s not written down somewhere for Rose to read.” Harvey had stormed into the Oaks demanding to know who had murdered his uncle and the whereabouts of his administrator. Gladys led him to a storeroom that had once been a kitchen, now used to store extra furniture or items needing repair. Gladys pointed at the rubber matting in the center of the floor and told him Miss Miller was in the cellar where she belonged.
“One never knows with Gladys when whimsy and mischief have degraded to lunacy, but other residents began to gather round and I thought it best to raise the matting and prove to all that the Oaks had no cellar.” Instead, he found a door flat in the floor and a metal ring to pull it up. When he did, someone pushed him from behind. “And here I am. How did you get here?”
“Miss Greene was drunken and has no idea.”
“Thanks to dear Harvey’s martinis and kraut. The acid reflux is awesome, let me tell you. I was at Abigail Staudt’s house and then I was here. And Ben and Marlys were there. And then I was out front at the Oaks, and then I was here.”
Someone had thrown a blanket over Elsina’s head and forcibly led her out of Herman Rochester’s room after she’d witnessed his murder. “And I made my escape only to be confronted by Abigail Staudt and her henchman Ben, who forced me down here to try to communicate with a drunken fornicator.”
“Why were you in Herman’s room?” the fornicator wanted to know.
“Because they wouldn’t let me go home, let me leave. They played with me, led me deeper into Gentle Oaks than I’d ever been. But I would have escaped if you hadn’t been on the porch instead of the marshal. They wouldn’t let me in my office to get my car keys.” She began to cry again.
Mr. Rochester “there, there’d.” Even Charlie felt for her. “Must have been scary.” What were these two doing in the dark that made such suspicious sounds?
“There, there … . Don’t worry, Charlie, I’m still going to buy that grand piano. The best there is.”
“Use the money to rent some new videos from the mayor instead. Elsina, who else was there when Sherman did in his brother?”
“He said, ‘Rose, bring the pillow.’ And then he held it over Herman Rochester’s face until the founder died. The room was full of the beloved children of Jesus, some of them holding the founder down.”
“The residents?”
“Some I didn’t even know could get themselves up and into walkers or wheelchairs. T
here was no staff anywhere.”
The cellar, or whatever it was, stayed very quiet until Charlie and Harvey whispered in unison, “Oh, Jesus.”
“They are innocents, misled by Satan.”
“Why,” Charlie asked no one in particular, “do I have the feeling he had some help and don’t we know who now?”
Charlie had seen two nursing-home scripts that actually made it to TV with the same premise, both atrocious. And there’d been a manuscript in a similar vein, unpublished. And obviously a lot more she’d never encountered. It was not uncommon for writers to be overwhelmed by unforseen life problems at certain stages in their lives and feel compelled to explore them. Which didn’t make the whole mess here at Gentle Oaks Health Care Center less awful to contemplate. Still, something niggled. Besides the sauerkraut-alcohol after-burn.
“So where was the staff all this time? The Mexicans? They don’t seem to be down here with us. I don’t think Rose and Sherman could have pillowed all of them.”
“We’re illegally short-staffed tonight,” Harvey said. “I thought you, Kenneth, and Delwood were on your way to Mason City and the Holiday Inn.”
“They stopped at Abigail’s to check out what had happened to Ben and Marlys. Ben and Marlys were there—but when I walked in, Kenny and Del weren’t.”
“Well, good. Marlys isn’t missing at this moment at least. She’s the bane of my existence, and the marshal’s and Miss Miller’s, I daresay.”
“She’s outlived her usefulness, self-worth, desire to exist,” Charlie said. Hadn’t Miss Miller been the bane of his existence just a few days ago? “Who can blame her behavior? Who would want to be her?”
“That is for Jesus to decide. Thank God, people like you don’t have a say in these things.”
“How could the residents know of this hole and I not know? I own it.”
“Most of the inmates were probably around Myrtle when Gentle Oaks was built.” Charlie felt for the wood of the stairs. In the thick darkness, she had no sense of direction. “Why can’t we just march up those stairs, push the door in the ceiling open and go find a phone? We could do that by feel, couldn’t we?” She had a plane to catch, felt considerably more together now, and had no idea how long that improvement would last. “What was here before Gentle Oaks?”
“Somewhere on the grounds was the original Staudt homestead.”
“Why did I know you were going to say that?” Charlie couldn’t find the stairs.
“It was burned to the ground many years ago and left to plowed fields long before it was Gentle Oaks.”
“So we’re in the cellar where Myrtle was murdered. Where the curse began.”
“That was so long ago no wooden stairs would have survived.”
“Somebody built new stairs since.”
“There’s no such thing as curses. That is superstitious non-sense.”
“I bet Marlys knew of this hole at one time. Elsina, how can the incarcerated above us be children of God unless they’re born-again types? Most of them are or were probably Methodist, Lutheran, or Catholic. If anything.”
“We are all children of God. We just have to find our way back to Him.”
“The lunatics upstairs can’t find the potty. But they can kill each other.”
“Each will be judged by a just God.”
“Well, you have to admit she’s glib,” Harvey said out of the black.
You two are going to get along splendidly, once she remakes you in His image. If we ever get out of here. “So why were Great-aunt Abigail Staudt, Ben the watchman, and Marlys Dittberner at Abigail’s house and not Kenny and the marshal, when the Cherokee we arrived here in was at the curb? And if this is where the Mexicans hide when the law descends and is mistaken for the INS, why aren’t they down here with us?”
“Good question. Questions, actually, as usual. Californians speak in tongues, Miss Miller, I’m sorry to say.”
“Having lived in Minneapolis, nothing surprises me.”
“There seems to be a source of air coming in here. Did fruit cellars have ventilation?”
“Usually little chimney apparatuses, covered to keep out rain—still, definitely ventilation holes. But we are under the Oaks. I can’t imagine from whence the draft is coming either, but I’m grateful for it. What? Listen, voices approach.”
“We have to get up there and save those old people from the other old people,” Charlie said, not real sure why. Or why they all flailed around and didn’t hit any dirt walls or ancient fruit jars—barrels of long-dead apples or potatoes. Dead babies. Whatever. “I don’t hear any voices.” But she heard footsteps. And she walked into someone.
Someone who had been eating sauerkraut, too, who shouted right in her face, “Who goes there?”
“Harvey? Is that you, forsooth? Where are we? Del? Harvey’s here. Del? Damn, that guy could get lost in his own closet.”
The marshal and the barkeep, lured to the coal cellar under Abigail’s gray Victorian in search of Ben and Marlys, found themselves locked in instead. They’d come across a wooden barricade in the dirt wall, forced it open to discover a tunnel, and since they couldn’t force the cellar door into the house, and the old coal chute to the backyard had been boarded over, they hoped to find a way out on the other end of the tunnel. “Problem is, there’s more than one connecting tunnel. Without a flashlight, we just got deeper and deeper in trouble and then I heard voices. Sweetest sound I ever heard. I’ve been bent over practically double for so long my back’s killing me. But this has to be another basement, not more tunnel. I can stand up.”
“We’re under the Oaks, Charlie, Elsina, and I, and now you.”
“A real underground railway, do you think?” Charlie asked.
“I’d bet something more recent than that, but something the old-timers up above us would have known about.”
“A fruit cellar for burying unwed moms?” Charlie tried again and this time walked into the stairs instead of Harvey Rochester.
“Bootleggers?” Harvey said.
“I can remember playing with Buz and Helen’s boys in their grandparents’ backyard and getting into the fruit cellar there. It had a blocked-off wooden door at the back of it we were told to leave alone,” Kenny said.
So of course the boys found a way to open it and with flashlights, found a tunnel that led to another wooden door. They couldn’t open it but discovered later that it opened into somebody else’s fruit cellar. When Kenny asked about it, he got paddled and was told to quit snooping. By the time he was in high school, he’d done enough research in old newspapers at libraries around the county to discover that fruit cellars were good places to store and hide hooch and the tunnel system a good place to move it around if you thought you might get raided. And if you wanted to buy or sell some, you didn’t have to openly carry it across the street.
“I was an investigative journalist even then. Just didn’t know it. Del? Dammit, where are you?”
“Oh, come on, Abigail Staudt and Gentle Oaks weren’t running bootleg hooch.” Charlie tested the strength of a step.
“I can’t believe anyone in this place did that or the other awful things about unwed mothers either,” Elsina said.
“Gentle Oaks was built long after the days of prohibition. And Abigail Staudt bought her present house something like thirty or forty years ago from Bjorn Sievertsen, the owner of the Myrtle Pool Hall before Kenny’s father.”
“Charlie, that old enlarged photo up with the TV at Viagra’s where the punks with sloppy grins are leaning against that ancient car? They were infamous bootleggers in Floyd County, many of them from the best families in Myrtle.”
“Enough of the rural-fable stuff. I’ve got a plane to catch and I’ve found the stairs. We have to go up there and call for help. They are murdering helpless old people right over our heads. All we have to do is push up the door at the top of the stairs.”
“Who is murdering helpless old people?” Kenny asked.
“The other helpless old people
.” Charlie reached the top of the stairs by feel—felt her head hit the door in the ceiling, actually.
Elsina Miller said, “She’s right. We must go up there and stop it.”
Charlie made the mistake of opening her eyes as she pushed and the door did open, but onto blinding light. Someone grabbed her arms and pulled her out of the hole in the ground. She heard the door slamming on the others trying to follow.
“Put the mat back and move that old washing machine on top to keep the others down there.” Great-aunt Abigail Staudt’s voice came victorious out of the blinding light.
CHAPTER 38
CHARLIE COWERED IN the knee space under one of the nurses’ stations, the one with the cat door. Where were the Mexicans, dammit? The only people she’d seen since being yanked out of the cellar were residents. Wandering.
Ben had let go of Charlie to haul heavy metal over the door to the cellar on Abigail’s orders, and some of the attendees were wandering off even as Charlie’s vision began to return. The Fatties were there in their wheelchairs grinning, minus teeth, dirty eyeglasses, and shoes.
The lunatics had taken over the asylum—with the help of Abigail Staudt and Ben the watchman. If it had been only Abigail’s sisters and relatives “pillowed,” that would make sense, to spare them further indignities. But that left out Darla and the nonrelatives. Abigail and Ben might have snuck through the underground tunnels to murder patients in their sleep, perhaps with the help of Marlys Dittberner inside. Or they might have talked people like Sherman Rochester into doing it for them.
Could the authority of Myrtle’s witch of decency and creator of proper history be powerful enough to impose her creed upon the confused realm of senile dementia? She had apparently been bossing the town around for years. Maybe some of them remembered that much.
Sherman and Gladys had been among those straggling off when Charlie’s vision had returned, he without shoes, pants, and hat, but with his oversized suit coat covering his bum and Depends. Had he been a bootlegger once? When he was a young punk?