by James Renner
Let that be another day, then, he told himself. Of course, he had other things to obsess over soon enough. A week later, he discovered the box.
* * *
The box was the size of a child’s coffin. Heavy cardboard, the kind they don’t make anymore, worn at the sides so that you could see the brown threads beneath. It sat on the cabinets above the copier in the editorial department of the Independent like a sleeping vulture, one word etched in thick magic marker on its side—BRUNE.
“Hey, Cindy, what’s in the box?”
“Oh,” she said, rolling her eyes in that decidedly Cindy way. “Don’t even get me started on that box. It’s a sick joke.”
From the writers’ den came the sound of Frankie Thomas’s laugh—high and juvenile, taunting and loving. “Don’t open the box, Davey. Don’t open the box! Save yourself!”
He followed Cindy into the writers’ den, where Frankie sat at a desk in the corner, his feet propped up while he read through a stack of legal documents. This was the beating heart of the Independent, the place where six-thousand-word feature articles full of bite and boom were written. Over its thirty-year history, the Independent had brought down crooked state senators and heads of business, the writers unafraid to follow the meager leads that the Plain Dealer reporters pitched into the streets as scraps. The paper was the voice of the struggling lower middle class of Cleveland, which is to say most of Cleveland. The writers who worked there wrote about the local boys who returned from the oil wars, about the toxins the steel companies dumped into the Cuyahoga, about the behind-the-scenes politics of the Plain Dealer—stories that would be left untold otherwise. These writers were underpaid, underappreciated, and loving it. These writers had never won a Pulitzer. They had never won a plaque from the local Order of Hibernians. The room smelled of old socks and McDonald’s, of cigarettes and fresh ink.
Frankie’s desk was orderly, his future stories arranged in separate folders to his right. Stapled to the wall beside him were the stylized covers for the features he had written—the one about the meth addict who kicked the habit and became a local rapper of some note, the one about a secret bar on the west side that only old mobsters and prosecutors knew about. Cindy’s desk … well, Cindy’s desk you couldn’t see. It was buried beneath a pile of flotsam: empty iced-tea bottles; pantyhose; a stuffed zebra; notes on a story she’d pitched seven months ago; a half-eaten bag of chips; twenty folders that contained no paper; a single shoe. Once a month, Cindy cleaned off her desk by pushing everything into a large garbage bag. There were five such bags in her Camry. David’s desk was next to Frankie’s. There was nothing on his other than a photograph of Elizabeth taken at their wedding.
“What’s in the box, Frankie?” he asked.
Frankie, a short guy with a light brown pompadour wagging constantly above his glacial-blue eyes, sat up and looked across his desk at Cindy. “Tell him about it.”
Cindy’s hair was a straight blond bowl and she had a round, dimpled face and childlike buck teeth. “Fuck you, Frankie,” she said.
“What?”
“Fuck you, Frankie.”
David lifted an eyebrow at the young man in the corner.
“Inside that box,” said Frankie, “is the greatest story never told. It’s the one Pulitzer this paper will ever publish. Many writers have tried to solve its secrets”—he nodded his head toward Cindy—“but so far it has only driven them insane for trying.”
“What’s in the box?” he asked again.
“In that box, my friend, are the last notes and personal effects of Ronil J. Brune, the Back Road Strangler, the man who raped and murdered perhaps as many as seven young girls in the early eighties. When he was executed in 2002, he had everything from his death row cell shipped here, in that box. Attached to it was a letter from Brune himself, in which he proclaimed to be innocent of the crimes for which he was executed. He said that the clues leading to the real killer were contained within the box. And if he’s telling the truth, and the state of Ohio murdered an innocent man, then it’s a once-in-a-lifetime story.”
“It’s a sick joke,” said Cindy. “Brune’s idea of revenge. He wants to use the media to cast doubt on his guilt, use us to torture the families of his victims. He wants to exert control on them even after his death.”
“He wanted to exert control, you mean,” David corrected.
“Wants.”
Frankie fidgeted in his chair, the smile gone from his face. “There’s a reason the box is not in the writers’ den,” he said. “There’s a reason we put it way the hell up there. And if you decide to open the box, you have to respect our … superstitions, and keep it out of the room.”
“It’s a haunted box?” David asked.
“Yes.”
“C’mon.”
But Frankie didn’t laugh.
“C’mon.”
“Look, all I know is that when we kept the box in here, some strange shit went down. Maybe it was the box. Maybe it wasn’t…”
“Right,” said Cindy.
“… but when we put the lid back on the box and moved it out of the room, it all stopped.”
“Stuff like what?” David asked.
“Like, every time I tried to fart, I sharted instead,” said Frankie. This busted David up and the three writers laughed until David’s side started to hurt and Frankie had snot dribbling out of his nose.
“When I opened the box, I got the worst headache,” Cindy said, her eyes going unfocused. “That night, when I went to bed, I dreamt I could feel a man’s hands on me.”
A few stray chuckles spat out of Frankie’s mouth before he could clamp it shut.
“I miscarried the next morning.”
“Jesus, Cindy!” said Frankie. “Too much. Too much.”
“There was a spot in my bedroom, that if you stood in it, you could smell a man’s cheap cologne for a week after that.”
“What happened to you, Frankie?” asked David, trying not to envision everything Cindy had just said.
Frankie shrugged. “Stuff,” he said. “I got mugged—beat to shit—outside by a homeless guy who the police later informed me was legally blind and couldn’t lift a hat. I woke up one morning and my dog had swallowed its tongue. All that’s incidental, though. There is, the best way I can describe it, a darkness. There’s a darkness in that box. You can feel it on you. Like something standing on your chest. I thought I might be getting clinically depressed or something. But when I closed up the box and put it away”—Frankie jumped up and held out his arms—“ta-da! Right as rain.”
“Seriously, David, leave the box alone,” said Cindy.
* * *
So he did what no other writer had been stupid enough to do: he took it home.
It weighed 78 pounds, making it a struggle for 145-pound David to first bring it down from atop the cabinets in the editorial wing—using a ladder he found in the storage closet—then from the eighth floor of the Western Reserve Building to his Sundance parked out front. He could feel the added weight in the trunk altering the performance of the car on the way home, down I-77. The car didn’t swerve in and out of traffic the way he had taught it to. It veered, rather than corrected. It hesitated when it should have punched through a hole in the rush-hour traffic. To David, it felt as if he had a sumo team sitting in the back.
He brought it into their first-floor apartment in Cuyahoga Falls, and set it on the table in their kitchenette with a dull thunk. Elizabeth had called him to say she was staying after work to catch up on grades and lesson plans (these late nights had increased steadily in the last few months but he didn’t think to question if she was really where she said she was). He was alone with the secrets the box contained.
His stomach rolled with excitement. It was the way he felt when a new Robert McCammon novel or Richard North Patterson mystery novel was published, an excitement for the information within. Except this was better. This was a mystery no one had read before. Sure, Frankie and Cindy had sorted through the pa
pers and had begun to develop stories of their own, but their interpretation of the material would have been quite different than his. The story he would glean from the documents would be entirely unique.
The lid slipped off with the slightest hint of a sigh.
* * *
“Do you remember what you said to me when we first met?” asked Dr. Popodopovich, the thin woman sitting behind the mahogany table.
“Yes,” said David.
“Then you understand my concern.”
“I can’t feel anything.”
“So let me take you off it gradually.”
“How long?”
“Three months.”
“No.”
“This isn’t like aspirin,” she said. “It’s much more like heroin.”
“You said it can’t kill me, the withdrawals.”
“David, before it’s over you’ll wish it could.”
Her name was Athena Popodopovich. She dressed in paisley prints that hadn’t been manufactured since the late sixties—God only knows where she bought them. Years ago, Dr. Popodopovich had worked as the traveling counselor and nanny for a fairly well-known rock band that had turned sober in the years since they had topped the charts. She understood ignominy better than most. She’d been there for David after Brune. She’d been there for him after Elizabeth had taken her life. She’d brought him back. Until now, he’d always followed her advice.
“You run the possibility of undoing everything we’ve worked on,” she said, a touch too firmly. “If your body hasn’t relearned how to manufacture the chemicals you need to not be sad, you could potentially become severely depressed before you recognize what’s happening. I’m afraid a crash like that might cause you to become dependent on this drug for the rest of your life. I’m afraid of what else it might cause you to do. And, frankly, I’m concerned for Tanner.”
That stung.
“Tanner’s going to stay with my father while I dry out,” said David. “I’ll be out of town, anyway. Working on this article.”
“Where are you going?”
“Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Near State College.”
“I thought this guy you’re writing about was from Akron.”
David shrugged. “No one knows where the Man from Primrose Lane was from. We know he died here. But he got his fake ID in Bellefonte. So he has some connection to that town, too.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to be in an unfamiliar setting while you go through withdrawals?”
“Why? Would I enjoy them more at home?”
“You’re five minutes from the hospital here. You know your surroundings. What if you become disoriented? Have you ever heard of dissociative fugue? It’s where you experience something so stressful your mind reboots and you forget who you are, sometimes forever.”
“How likely is that?”
“Rivertin is a new drug,” she said. “It’s the best thing we have for PTSD, but there’s a lot we don’t know about it yet. There’s a lot we don’t know about the side effects of coming off it so quickly. There is something called hypnagogic regression, an episodic memory—what you might call an intense flashback—which is quite unpleasant for the person experiencing it. The person reliving it.”
“You told me there was a, what, ninety-five percent chance I’d be sterile on the Rivertin, too, and now I have a four-year-old kid.”
“You’re sort of proving my point.”
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “But this not feeling anything is making me feel like an invalid.”
“Have you stopped taking it already?”
“No.”
Athena shook her head. “I don’t understand the rush. Three months isn’t that long. Let’s do this right.”
David didn’t want to wait. Suddenly it felt like all he did was wait anymore. He was beginning to sense how he had squandered the last few years of his life. No more waiting. Not for one day. He gathered his jacket and stood. “I’m sorry. I am. But I think this is going to be all right.”
“You’re not thinking rationally.”
“I know.” He turned to leave.
“David.”
He looked back at her. For the first time since he’d made up his mind to quit the pills, he felt nervous. He felt nervous because Athena looked scared. She’d always been so confident, an anchor to the real world for him. But he could see that she was afraid.
“When you crash, there’s going to be a time when you will want to reach for that phone and call me to save you. By then you’re going to have forgotten all these reasons you have for doing this. You’ll be in so much pain the only thing you’ll want is for me to come and save you. But here’s the thing. By the time you get there, you will have crossed a point of no return. If we give you the drug while your body is revving up to replace it, you’ll go into coma and we’ll probably destroy your liver while we’re trying to get you back.”
He smiled. “Give it to me straight, Doc. I can handle it.”
Her cheeks pushed back in a grin. “It’s going to feel like dying. Do you understand?”
He didn’t say anything.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.
“Me, too.”
* * *
David cheated.
He took Tanner in the middle of the night, dressed in footie pajamas and wrapped inside the blue blanket that he used to sleep with in the crib. He didn’t want to explain to Tanner, who could not yet grasp the concept of time enough to consider the passage of a week, that he was going to be away longer than he’d ever been gone before. It’s better for him this way, he told himself. He’ll miss me less if he doesn’t see me leave.
David wondered how he’d feel when he saw his son again, unfiltered by the drug. He knew he loved the boy more than he ever believed was possible. What would that be like without anything blocking that bond? It was something else he looked forward to. I could be a better dad. A dad who would know better than to go off like this in the middle of the night.
David’s father carried Tanner to the bedroom on the second floor of his large country home in Franklin Mills, a little town in the hills of eastern Ohio. He followed with a bag full of clothes, sippy cups, Yogo Bites, Tinkertoys.
It was past eleven and his father’s third wife, a tender woman he’d met five years ago at a Christian singles dance, was asleep and the house was silent but for the tick-tocking of the clock above the kitchen sink. They crept quietly back downstairs to the dining room table, a slab of driftwood oak that Berlin Lake had given up one Saturday afternoon. This was not the house David had grown up in. There were no memories here for him in the walls. To him, it had the feel of a vacation home or a place for convalescence, a cabin in the woods, a Walden Pond tuckaway. David’s father pushed a pie tin at him. Inside was apple betty and a runcible spoon.
“Thanks,” he said.
“How long will you be gone?” His father’s voice was deep and husky and it filled up the room to its last hidden nook, even in whisper.
“A few days. Maybe longer. Not more than a week.”
“I thought you were done with writing.”
“Me too.”
“What’s the story?”
“Mistaken identity. I guess you could call it an unsolved suicide. This old hermit was shot once in the stomach and then it appears he chopped off his own fingers and fed them into a blender. He bled out instead of calling an ambulance for help.”
“The Man from Primrose Lane?”
“You’ve heard the story?”
“On the weener radio,” he said. WNIR was the talk-radio station based out of Ravenna, a bastion of local gossip and prognostication. “They said the man was probably an old mafioso who snitched. They’re saying that the coroner might change her ruling.”
“I know. The bullet missed everything. In, out. He would have survived if he hadn’t cut off his own fingers.”
“How do you know the guy that shot him didn’t put the gun to his head and ma
ke him cut off his fingers?”
David shrugged. “The CSI people seem to think the way the fingers were severed suggests he did it.”
“That’s disturbing,” his father said, shaking off a shiver. “What about you? Are you doing okay?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You know. Where’s your head at?”
“I’m fine,” he answered. “I’m going off the drugs.”
“Your doctor know?”
“Yeah. She’s cool with it.” His father looked at him over the table, that certain long look of study he’d perfected as a father over the last thirty-four years. You can fool some of the people all of the time, he used to say. And you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you …
“But you can’t fool Dad,” his father finished. Reading minds, another mostly useless trait parents pick up without meaning to.
“She’s not cool with it, no,” he said.
For a moment, his father didn’t say anything. The gears inside turned and turned, processing an appropriate response. He knew his son was, generally, a responsible person. He’d picked himself up after the death of his wife, had raised his son and asked for little help. He was allowed the occasional bad idea. An odd kid, his own mother had warned him. Always wants to touch the stove to see if it’s still hot. “Well,” he said, finally, “I kicked cocaine cold turkey. You’ll get through it.”
* * *
There was a message on his cell phone when he returned to the Bug. It was from Detective Sackett.
“David, sorry about the late call. If you could, please stop by the station tomorrow morning. I’m in at eight.”