by James Renner
“Where’s Sully?” asked Trimble.
“Sick,” said the man in white.
“What’s your name?”
“My name’s Tanner,” the man said.
“Hello, Tanner.”
“Hello, Riley.”
* * *
The next morning, Cindy Nottingham ate a spartan breakfast while she read the Beacon Journal in the corner of her kitchen that got the most sunlight, fishing for something to blog about. Her eyes caught the story by Phil McIntyre that appeared below the fold: “Riley Trimble Dies in State Hospital.”
An overdose, it said. Somehow he’d ingested an entire bottle of Rivertin.
She’d have to ask David about it. Not that he’d talk to her, of course. But it was a good excuse to drag his name out again.
There was a knock at her door.
Cindy, who seldom received company, and never at this early hour, jumped. She set the paper down and walked to the front door. A young man stood there in a white polo. She opened the door a crack.
“Hello?” she asked.
“Hello, Ms. Nottingham. My name is Everett Bleakney. I represent a man who would like to pay you for a freelance assignment.”
“For real?” she asked.
“For real,” he said.
Cindy opened the door wider. “Who?”
“I can’t say. An anonymous donor. Someone who enjoys your work but wishes it was applied in other areas.”
“Such as?”
“Such as anywhere but here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“To put it simply, miss, my employer is willing to pay you five hundred thousand dollars to move away from Akron and never come back. He wants you to write your blog someplace else.”
* * *
On October 21, Detective Lieutenant Tom Sackett and Dan Larkey each, independently, received a manila envelope with a handwritten address.
Inside, they discovered three photographs. School pictures. One of Elaine O’Donnell, one of Katy Keenan, and one of a girl unfamiliar to them named Erin McNight. The upper right quadrant had been circled. A letter inside asked, Who is Dean Galt?
By the following afternoon, they had compiled enough circumstantial evidence to procure a search warrant for the photography studio and the Galt family home. They found the shrine to the redheaded girls. At the house, they discovered a trove of kiddie porn and an earring Galt had taken from Elaine’s body—a particularly damning token, as it was a piece of evidence police had never made public. In a box in the coat closet, they found a handgun that ballistics later matched to the bullet found in the body of the Man from Primrose Lane.
No one ever connected Elizabeth’s death to the attempted murder of the Man from Primrose Lane. But Galt went to prison and never came out.
* * *
On October 19, forty-year-old Tanner and his father shared a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black on the patio behind the house on Palisades, as four-year-old Tanner snoozed in his bedroom.
“What I don’t understand is, why didn’t you just go back all the way to 2008 and stop Galt from ever shooting the Man from Primrose Lane, from ever killing your mother?” asked David. His words were not accusatory. “For that matter, why not go back far enough to stop him from taking Elaine?”
“I will,” said Tanner.
David turned to look at his adult son.
“I read that book for the first time when I was thirteen,” said Tanner. “Obsession is, apparently, in our genes. I spent my twenties studying advanced theoretical physics. By the time I was thirty, I was interning at Tesla’s lab. I helped him develop and hone his machine. The important thing to me was always a reusable unit. Took an extra three years, but we did it.”
“Reusable. Why?”
“I look at it this way. By coming back here, I’ve essentially doubled the number of alternate universes, right? In half of them, you’re alive for my adolescence. In the others, you’re murdered by Trimble. All these universes radiating out from that point my egg arrived, like millions of trees with infinite branches. That’s just not enough for me. I wanted a reusable unit because now I’m going to go back to 2008, to save Mom. Save the Man from Primrose Lane. I get to see Galt arrested for his crimes again. I get to kill Trimble all over again. I can go back to when Trimble was five and strangle that cat in his sandbox. Think of all the realities that spawn from that. Eventually those in which you’re alive, in which we’re a family, will far outnumber those in which we’re not. To the point that it will almost not matter.”
“But that doesn’t change anything for you.”
Tanner made a raspberry sound. “I can find ways to enjoy the ride. Eventually I’m going to end up in the sixties. Woodstock, right? And I’ll have a gazillion dollars to play with. I’m going to live out my days on some island in the South Pacific, in the fifties. So don’t worry about me.” Tanner tried to smile, but David knew that he would find it very difficult to let go of his obsessions when the time came.
“I’m thinking about publishing the book that the other me wrote,” David said. “Maybe clean up the language a bit. Add some internal commentary. Get into characters’ thoughts a little. Make it read more like fiction than nonfiction. It’ll have to be marketed as fiction, of course. Could be a good read. Of course, I’ll need a good pseudonym.”
“Will you dedicate it to me?”
“Sure,” he said and laughed. He wanted to hold his boy. But Tanner was older. Older than himself. “When do you leave?”
“Whenever,” he said. “Soon. I was thinking, if it was all right with you, I mean, I was thinking about staying a little bit. Maybe long enough to go fishing?”
“Absolutely.”
“Play catch?”
“Definitely.”
David poured another finger of scotch and sipped at it as they looked out at all the stars of the Milky Way above.
ALSO BY JAMES RENNER
The Serial Killer’s Apprentice
Amy: My Search for Her Killer
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Renner is the author of two books of nonfiction that detail his adventures in investigative journalism: Amy: My Search for Her Killer and The Serial Killer’s Apprentice. His work has been featured in Best American Crime Reporting and Best Creative Nonfiction. This is his first novel. He lives in Ohio.
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by James Renner
All rights reserved
First edition, 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Renner, James, 1978–
The man from Primrose Lane / James Renner. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-20095-4 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3618.E5769M36 2012
813'.6—dc23
2011034948
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 978-1-4299-5024-4