Editing New Ways Old Grudges Werewolf KarstnerLtd (section)

=Riddles=

Was Karstner totally on the up-and-up? It's never been clear, especially in light of the company's contracting with the state and federal governments during a time when unethical experimentation was hardly unknown in the United States. He strongly disavowed Nazism and his only son earned a Silver Star fighting in Europe as a paratrooper, but his pronounced German accent always made some people skeptical, even in a part of the country known for its Germanic population. It's mostly a question for old men and women, as few people born after the late '40s have any direct exposure to Karstner or his company.

Are there any chemicals left? The EPA, possibly because of local lack of interest in federal interference in anything, never got around to listing it as a Superfund site, and the only survey ever done occurred in 1983, which is when the barbed wire went up. Local farmers and ranchers get on with plowing and raising herds because they have no choice and most by now are far enough removed from the 1930s that they don't think or talk about the aftermath of chemically enhanced Dust Bowl storms on their properties. There's never been a survey of that, so nobody really knows how far any contamination went. The groundwater is still drinkable, except for those times when fracking gone wrong makes it flammable, but that's a recent phenomenon.

What's up with the ghosts? Locals who live near the old company building claim that they've seen spectral hitchhikers in old clothes on the roadsides at dusk and dawn. In 1998 a town drunk put his truck in the ditch after, he said, swerving to avoid a baby that was inexplicably lying in the road in the middle of the night, but when he staggered out to look for it with a flashlight, there was nothing there. Nobody ever bought Karstner's old house after he committed suicide, and it's still there, abandoned and slowly falling apart - like his corporate building, his house is too inconvenient and expensive for anyone to want to renovate or demolish.

Were there any other Karstner holdings anywhere else? Most people of all ages say there weren't, but there are still two or three old-timers, men who turned his dirt back in the '30s and '40s, who say he wasn't alone. Their stories have changed a bit with the years and cheap booze, but they all hold a few points in common: Karstner quietly signed a contract with the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology as the academic year ended in 1946, bringing in a long-lost Americanized rich cousin in a last-ditch effort to keep some aspect of the company viable. He allegedly spent a soaking wet summer there doing nobody-knows-what, but in August the contract was terminated, there was a bitter public disagreement and an undignified brawl, and he was back at his old plant in September. One of the old timers swears he met the cousin in Rapid City in late 1946 and saw him there again at high noon in July in early 2005, and the man hadn't aged a day. Most people don't put a lot of stock in the old men's stories and mark them down as being inspired by Thunderbird, Ripple and Night Train.