The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel

by James Renner

  Katy pantomimed jerking off. The mushrooms arrived and she helped herself to the biggest, blowing away the heat with those cupid lips.

  “Have you come up with any theories?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” she said. “A lot. It’s weird thinking there was some stranger out there who knew everything about me. It’s like I have no secrets with him. Like we shared some relationship I didn’t choose. I think he must know the worst things I’ve ever done, the stuff I meant to keep to myself. Like, he probably even saw stuff like what I did with Mr. Murphy behind the track utility shed when I was fourteen. And yet, I guess he was in love with me in spite of these things. Creepy. To the max. But theories? The best I can do is that somehow it’s all just a big coincidence, that he was writing about some imaginary girl who just happened to have done everything I did in real life. Or maybe we were psychically linked or something. It’s … ineffable, right? I always liked that word. Funny word. What about you? Have you figured it out yet?”

  “No clue,” he said. “But it’s pretty cool.”

  “Not really.”

  He leaned back, rubbing his fingers through his too-gray hair. How old do I look to her? he wondered. “Other than this, what’s the weirdest thing that has ever happened to you?”

  She laughed. “In Cleveland Heights? Nothing weird happens in the Heights. It’s the safest, most boring suburb of the city, haven’t you heard? Maybe once some mother forgot to pack her princess a snack for lunch, but that’s about it. Haven’t you been there? I left to find weirdness. My life was sooooo boring. Until this. Be careful what you wish for, right?”

  “No strange encounters when you were alone? No one peeping in your windows? No one being too aggressive?”

  Katy reached out and grabbed his arm with both of her hands. They were warm. Clammy. He could feel her sweat on him and it excited him. “Oh, fuck,” she said.

  “What?”

  “David.”

  She’d said his name. It was like an incantation, a seal closing, somewhere in his mind.

  “David,” she said. “I think I might have seen him. Once. Holy shit. How could I have forgotten? Yes. Yes, it might have been him.”

  “Who might have been him?”

  “This guy. When I was ten. Or eleven. I was waiting for my mom to come pick me up in front of Big Fun in Coventry. You know, that cool toy store with the old lunch boxes and shit? I was twirling around this lamppost out front. And I look up and there’s this guy walking toward me like he knows me. He has khakis and a windbreaker—one of those Members Only jackets. It was April. I must have been ten. I see him cross the street and walk past a couple other kids and come straight at me, watching me the whole time. And he opens his mouth to say something and I remember thinking, Who does this guy think I am? Maybe he thinks I’m his niece or something, because he looks like he knows me and wants to talk to me but I don’t know him.”

  “He was the Man from Primrose Lane?”

  “No. Shut up a second. No, he wasn’t. What I was going to say was that this guy was almost to me and all of a sudden this old man comes running over at top speed out of nowhere and slams into the guy. Wham! Knocks the man right into the brick wall outside Big Fun. Scared the shit out of me. I ran inside and when I finally looked out again, the old man was chasing the guy across the street. At the time, all I could think was that maybe he owed the guy some money. But that old man. I think that was him. It could have been. He at least sort of looked like the Man from Primrose Lane as far as I can remember.” She slowly let go her grip on his arm. “Sorry,” she said. “I got freaked out a little. Goose bumps.”

  His mind buzzed with possibilities. Was this the reason Sackett was also interested in Elaine’s cold case? Had the detective found other threads linking Katy to Elaine’s abduction? “Did you fill out a police report?” he asked.

  “No. I mean, I didn’t even tell my parents. What would I have said? That I saw two men fighting in Coventry?”

  “Don’t you think it’s possible that the man in the Members Only jacket wanted to harm you? And that the old man intervened?”

  “Really? Looked like the guy remembered me. He probably thought I was someone he knew.”

  “So why did the old man attack him?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I was ten. If the other man wanted to molest me or something, why didn’t the old man come back and tell me so after he chased him away? Why didn’t the old man go to the police?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here.”

  “I know,” she said. “Right?” She drank her beer and looked at the photographs on the wall again. They were not amateur, after all, she noticed distantly. The lighting was too crisp and they shared the same fluffy cloud background. People were weird. Maybe that was the simple message here. “Why do you think Members Only wanted to hurt me?”

  “Because it’s a story I’ve heard before,” he said.

  “Shut the front door.”

  David nodded. “My wife. Her twin sister was abducted when they were ten. The man would have gotten my wife, too, if some strange guy hadn’t shown up in a car and chased him away. No one ever saw the kidnapper or the strange man again.”

  “Is that why … shit. Sorry. None of my business.”

  “Is that why she committed suicide?” he asked. He saw the Cavalier bearing down on the Dollar General at seventy miles an hour, Elizabeth staring forward in a trance—or had she been smiling? “Postpartum depression was likely the trigger. But yes, I think so. Elaine’s abduction … it was like…”

  A Rube. The ball clunked into a lever that set a domino tumbling forward and over a ledge.

  “… it set off a chain reaction of events that inevitably led to my wife committing suicide. It was always in the cards. Just a matter of when, really.”

  “You miss her?”

  “Every second of every day,” he said. “At night I can still feel her lying next to me. And I don’t mean I can ‘feel’ her lying next to me. I mean, I can feel her skin against mine. It’s like an amputated limb, I guess. That ghost sensation that takes up the missing space of what was there before. She was cold. She was unkind at times. And she’d rather flip someone the bird than get to know them. But beneath all that was this warm being, this beautiful girl only I knew was there. And that’s why I miss her. Because I’ve never met anyone else quite like that.”

  “I wonder if we crossed paths. Was she anywhere near the Cleveland Heights/Coventry area when this abduction happened?” Katy asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “What else do you know about your wife’s case?”

  “Nothing. I never looked into it.”

  Katy laughed. “What? Why? I mean, that’s what you do.”

  “Because,” he said. “Because. Because. Because.”

  Katy let it drop. She was, in her own way, beginning to understand a little about him, too. This was an occupational hazard David did not love—the intimate bond that forms between a victim of circumstance and the interviewer. Frankly, it made him feel a little like a prostitute sometimes, all this trading of emotion for words, words, words.

  “There’s one big difference between my story and hers,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Members Only didn’t abduct anyone that day.”

  “Because the Man from Primrose Lane interrupted him,” said David.

  “It was so random, though. Why didn’t he just go around the corner and get the next girl?”

  “I don’t believe it was random.”

  “I’m missing something, I think. You lost me,” she said, laughing nervously.

  Instead of answering, David pulled out his wallet. Inside was a picture of his wife on a rocking chair in their apartment, reading a Christopher Pike book.

  “Oh, wow. Uncanny, right? If I just borrowed my mom’s preppy clothes and cut my hair an inch and, you know, didn’t wear makeup … maybe you wouldn’t mistake me for your wife, but I bet other people would. I
t’s the cheeks that make us look different.”

  “And the lips.”

  “There’s some serious psychological shit going down here, David,” said Katy. “Some fucking creepy-ass shit. Me and you. You and me. This cannot happen. Seriously. And not just because I have a fiancé. It’s like if Hayley Mills drowned at that summer camp and her boyfriend shacked up with her twin when she came home. Have you even realized yet that, if you’re right, about me being connected to this other abduction, you and the kidnapper have the same taste in women?”

  “I was nine when Elaine was abducted.”

  “I’m not implying, I’m just saying. It’s fucking weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You convinced me,” she said. “There’s a connection there, somewhere. So, what? The old man was this creep’s partner and he had second thoughts at the last moment?”

  “Both times?” asked David. He shook his head and shrugged. “I’ve got no explanation.”

  “Makes your job easier now.”

  “How’s that?”

  “All you have to do is figure out who knows me and your wife. Figure out where we crossed paths. The guy had to know us both. That has to narrow down your list of suspects.”

  “Good point. Assuming they are connected. It is possible it’s a coincidence.”

  Katy waved her hand at him as if swatting away the notion of coincidence as a whole. This was a girl who still believed in fate. “Where and when was your wife’s sister abducted?” she asked.

  “Lakewood, 1989.”

  “Hmmm. West side versus east side. How many people frequent both ends? Not many. Delivery guys, taxicab drivers, reporters. So, what, after Elaine, this guy in the Members Only jacket was hanging around, waiting for another opportunity, for ten years, before he tried to take me?”

  “Unless there are other missing redheads around here,” he said. “Or maybe he was in prison.”

  “And somewhere, for whatever reason, the Man from Primrose Lane is keeping an eye on him? Are these things usually this complicated?”

  “They only appear to be,” said David. “The explanation is always elegantly simple. I guarantee that when we find this man, we’ll smack ourselves for not seeing him sooner.”

  The waitress returned to ask about another round.

  “Could you tell me something?” asked Katy. “What’s with the clown nose pictures?”

  The woman rolled her eyes. Obviously, this was the 347th time she’d been asked this question. David doubted the credibility of her answer, which, he believed, she had concocted as a banal autoresponse to customers who wished to waste her time. “Mitch, the owner, he just wore this clown nose someone left here one night. His wife took a picture of him and hung it behind the bar. Then he took one of her. And then it became a thing.” The waitress shrugged and walked away.

  “That was a simple explanation,” said Katy. “But not exactly elegant.”

  “It was untrue.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Truth is always simple but it’s never that boring.”

  * * *

  She lived in the “up” of an old house rented out to college students near the university. He parked the Volkswagen out front and kept it idling. It was warm inside, warmer than the fall air outside, which felt like early winter. Katy turned to him, and as she did, her hair brushed over his jacket.

  “As far as first dates go, Mr. Neff, this is definitely one of my ‘Top Five’ weirdest.”

  “One of?”

  “I once went to see Rocky Horror with a trans woman who thought she loved me, but that’s a story for another day.” She smiled at him and his mind was a void of pleasant light. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She leaned to him, to his ear, and he felt the swell of her breast against his arm. She cupped her hand around his ear. The touch of her hand against his skin lit up his senses as much as they could be lit, and he was suddenly sad again to be numbed by medicine. This was a peak he wished to experience in full. “This is just to say…” But instead of finishing the sentence, Katy pushed her lips against him, parted them with her tongue, and gently, briefly, licked his lobe. Then she was back in her seat, rummaging in her purse for her keys. “I’m going to go in now,” she said. “You have my permission to jerk off to my Facebook albums tonight. Call me sometime? Let me know how your investigation is going, okay?”

  He watched her bound up the front steps and disappear into the house.

  * * *

  There was a message waiting for him when he returned home. Cindy Nottingham had stopped by the house and left her card. Wanted to talk. About what, she hadn’t told Aunt Peggy.

  Cindy was a blogger—one of Ohio’s most popular gossipmongers, a talking head on the cable news channels whenever a celebrity from Cleveland went to rehab or got a divorce. A few years ago, Cindy had worked with David at the Independent. It was his fault she’d been fired.

  That she was showing up on his doorstep now, as he began work on his first piece of journalism in nearly four years, filled him with unease. He was worried about what she knew. He was worried even more about what she thought she knew.

  It took the fun out of that nibble in the car. His sleep that night was broken and troubled. For that, and so many other reasons, he hated Cindy Nottingham.

  For the record, though, he never wished her dead.

  EPISODE SIX

  ALL EXCEPT ELAINE

  Elizabeth did not return to their cabin within the bowels of the cruise ship until well after two in the morning. She did not tell David where she had been and he did not ask. All David knew was that when she returned to him, she had changed. She glowed with a light he had never seen before. Elizabeth smiled. In the light of the bathroom, she smiled at the darkness where he lay as she brushed her teeth, and when she came to bed they felt and fumbled their way over, under, and into each other, laughing between long kisses until she fell asleep in his arms.

  When they returned to Ohio, to their apartment in Cuyahoga Falls, Elizabeth began training for a marathon. She was up every morning at five for a run before heading off to the library. On the weekends, she did 5Ks and half marathons on the valley trails that follow the old canal towpaths to Lake Erie. Her newly discovered optimism motivated David. He began submitting bigger stories to the editors at the Independent, who, until now, had only known him as the young man who did the movie and concert listings. His first seventeen proposals were shot down. But the eighteenth, a short piece on a local group of film fanatics who got together once a month to crash a bad family movie and yell obscenities at the screen until a manager kicked them out, got through and made the cover. His next pitch, a profile on Bill Watterson, the reclusive artist behind Calvin & Hobbes, was approved immediately and he spent the next four months—the rest of Elizabeth’s conditioning—working with the managing editor on a series of rewrites that left him feeling both mentally drained and emotionally fulfilled. This is what I’m supposed to do, he thought. This is what I’m good at.

  Elizabeth landed a job teaching music at a public school on the south side of Akron and David began to hunt for the article that would make his name. A part of him had always known what this article would be, and that part of him had always been too afraid to actually put it into words. The story had found him, so to speak. It had sought him out. It was the best kind of story, too—a mystery, a murder mystery. It was an elegant game of chess against an opponent who had already bested every detective assigned to the case. David thought he could do better. There was no logical reason for him to believe this. And it was naïve, dangerous, and delusional for him to feel it so strongly. The kidnapper is smarter than the cops, he thought. But not smarter than me. After the marathon, he knew it was time to prove it.

  “I want to write about Elaine,” he said.

  They were sitting at Aladdin’s, eating a plate of hummus by the window overlooking Highland Square. Since their wedding, Elizabeth had burned off twent
y pounds and her once-apple cheeks sat firmly against her bones in a way most men were drawn to. He liked her rounder. “I was wondering what you’ve been stewing about,” she said.

  “Stewing?”

  “You’ve been away. Somewhere in your head for a couple days.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve seen that look before, you know? In the eyes of the detectives who stop by every couple years asking the same old questions—did strange men ever come over to the house, did your dad like to gamble, why do you think he took Elaine and not you—that’s my personal favorite.” She took another bite of pita. “It’s a jonesing,” she said. “Just like a drug. You go deeper and deeper and deeper, thinking you just need a little more and then it’s done, but it never is.”

  “I just thought that maybe I could help,” he said. “See what leads are out there, what the detectives haven’t thought to look at.”

  Elizabeth reached out to him and took his hand. Before the piano bar, it had been like torture to get her to show affection in public. Sometimes it seemed she was making up for lost time. “I know. But I don’t want to go down that road again. And I don’t want to watch you go down there, either. Someone once told me that stories like this make ghosts out of the living. I think that’s true.”

  “How will you ever get closure?” he asked.

  “That’s the thing, David. There is no closure for this. Closure is for buildings, not people.”

  A line from the movie 2010, the one with Roy Scheider and John Lithgow in a spaceship bound for Jupiter’s moons, bubbled up from his subconscious mind. All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there. For David, it had always been this way—snippets of prose, dialogue from plays and movies, he was constantly bombarded with the echoes of other people’s stories. He supposed it was like this for any beginning writer. On some level his subconscious was always in “story” mode, searching for ways in which life reflected art, how the art he knew reflected his own. His mind hunted analogies, craved metaphor. That message from 2010, for example. It had been God’s warning to humankind, echoes of His first instruction to Man, the one about avoiding the Tree of Knowledge. All these stories are yours, except Elaine. Attempt no investigations there. When he’d learned about the Garden of Eden in Bible school, he’d wondered if God’s warning hadn’t been more of a dare, anyway, if deep down God had really wanted Eve to give that apple to Adam in order to set things in motion. Or what about this? Maybe He was just bored. Sitting there in Aladdin’s, he wondered the same about Elizabeth. Regardless of her true intentions, he understood that each of these stories—the Tree of Knowledge, the warning to stay the fuck off Europa, the request to not dig into Elaine’s case—eventually ended the same way.