The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  FOR TANNER

  “You’re going to be roped! And you’re going to be caged!

  And, as for your dust speck … hah! That we shall boil

  In a steaming kettle of Beezle-Nut oil!”

  “Boil it?…” gasped Horton!

  “Oh, that you can’t do!

  It’s all full of persons!”

  —DR. SEUSS

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Elizabeth

  Episode One. The World According to David Neff

  Episode Two. Sparko’s Tale

  Episode Three. Mental Cigarettes

  Episode Four. His Sherlock Ruffian

  Episode Five. Tanner’s Hobby

  Episode Six. All Except Elaine

  Interlude

  Part Two: Brune

  Episode Seven. Withdrawn

  Episode Eight. The Forger’s Tale

  Episode Nine. Feeding His Ghost

  Episode Ten. The House on Primrose Lane

  Episode Eleven. Things Elizabeth Never Told Him

  Episode Twelve. Confessions

  Interlude

  Part Three: Me

  Episode Thirteen. The Black Egg

  Episode Fourteen. The Burning River

  Episode Fifteen. The Uniks

  Episode Sixteen. Revelation

  Episode Seventeen. Coming Home

  Episode Eighteen. Beezle

  Interlude

  Epilogue

  Also by James Renner

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  He was mostly known as the Man from Primrose Lane, though sometimes people called him hermit, recluse, or weirdo when they gossiped about him at neighborhood block parties. To Patrolman Tom Sackett, he had always been the Man with a Thousand Mittens.

  Sackett called him the Man with a Thousand Mittens because the old hermit always wore woolen mittens, even in the middle of July. He doubted most people had noticed that the old man wore different woolen mittens every time he stepped out of his ramshackle house. Most people who lived in West Akron averted their eyes when they saw him or crossed the street to avoid walking by him. He was odd. And sometimes odd was dangerous. But Sackett, who had grown up just a few houses north of Primrose Lane, had always been intrigued. In a binder somewhere in his basement, alongside boxes of baseball cards and his abandoned coin collection, was a detailed list of each mitten he’d seen the old man wear—black mittens, tan mittens, blue mittens with white piping, white mittens with blue piping, and, once, in the middle of some long-ago May, Christmas mittens with candy canes and reindeer.

  On the short drive from the station to the little red house on Primrose Lane, it occurred to Sackett that he had not seen the Man with a Thousand Mittens since the day he had graduated from high school, twelve years ago. He recalled the old man shuffling down Merriman in front of his home, as his mother snapped pictures of his little brother, who had stolen his cap and gown and had stumbled around the lawn buried in maroon and gold rayon. He remembered how excited he had been a few days later, when the strange old man had appeared in a couple of those photos: blurry and distant, but there. As far as he knew, they were the only pictures of the man that existed.

  Sackett turned onto Primrose Lane, which was really nothing more than a long driveway, as the Man with a Thousand Mittens was the only person who actually lived on this no-outlet side street. Sitting in the shade of the leaning porch was the young man who had dialed 911. Billy Beachum. He was the only direct contact the old man maintained with the outside world.

  Billy Beachum was a delivery boy. Once a week, Billy drove his ’99 Cavalier to the house on Primrose Lane, delivered a box of essentials, and took the list for next week from the old man’s mitten-covered hands. There was rarely any conversation. It was Billy’s job to get everything on the old man’s list, no matter how loony the items seemed to be. He was given a credit card on which to charge the items. It was in the name of a business called Telemachus Ltd., a holding company whose true ownership was hidden behind a labyrinth of legal structures and subsidiaries. Bill was given three hundred dollars a month in cash to keep for his time and troubles—not bad for a sixteen-year-old with nothing but a cell phone and a hand-me-down car to his name.

  Billy had inherited this job from his brother, Albert Beachum, who had inherited it from his cousin, Stephen Beachum, who had inherited it from their uncle, Tyler Beachum, who had inherited it from who the hell knows because Tyler’s dead now. Billy was discreet and didn’t talk about his odd job with even his closest friends. He took pride in keeping secret his connection to the Man from Primrose Lane, as he took pride in delivering every item the old man asked for each week, a particularly hard game on the occasions when he asked for things like “a crisscross directory of Cleveland Heights, Ohio,” “a shed cicada skin,” or “a container, roughly ten inches square, that can persist in the elements of Ohio weather for fifty years.” Mostly, though, it was easy stuff—groceries, paperback novels, jerk-off magazines.

  The Beachums had kept their involvement secret for nearly thirty years. There was, in fact, only one thing that would permit them to break their silence—and that one thing had, apparently and unfortunately, occurred on Billy’s watch.

  “He won’t answer the door,” Billy said, by way of a greeting, as Sackett approached. “I think he might be dead.”

  The officer paused and sniffed the wet summer air. A dark tone of rot was unmistakable, though probably too faint for the boy to pick up, or he wouldn’t be sitting so close to the door. Sackett, who had recently recovered the body of a man who jumped off the Y-Bridge, a body that had gone undetected for a week because no one at the homeless shelter had reported him missing, recognized the smell for what it was and felt his stomach lurch at the fresh memory of the maggots he’d found crawling out of the bum’s nostrils, like living boogers.

  He looked at the young man, at the grocery bags resting beside him (containing food, a copy of Hustler, the latest Winegardner novel, and a Geiger counter—which had been an extremely challenging request, for as much good as it would do now) and quickly deduced Billy’s role. It explained a lot—how no one ever saw the old man at the convenience store, for example. Of course he had to have had someone running his errands. In a time when many teens text rumors and post salacious half-truths on Facebook, the policeman felt admiration for the young man—and those who had come before him.

  He rapped his fist upon the door; a deep, hollow sound. He knocked again, louder. “Police,” Sackett announced in a voice an octave lower than normal.

  Billy regarded him with wide eyes but didn’t move.

  “Do you have a key?” he asked.

  The young man laughed politely.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Sackett peered through the misty porthole set in the front door. It was too dark inside to see.

  Reflexively, he twisted the doorknob. The glass knob spun unhindered in his hands as the door clicked open with a shudder that seemed to ripple across the entire house. A puff of dust wafted through the narrow slit of dark between the door and the front wall, sprinkling the air with a galaxy of tiny motes. Was that the sound of a gentle sigh? Or was that in Sackett’s mind?

  “Holy crow,” said Billy. “I didn’t even try it. Sorry.”

  Sackett lifted a hand toward the young man. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  The house was a twentieth century Tudor, a large cottage-style home, and the front door opened into a narrow foyer. Beyond, Sackett saw steep stairs leading to a second floor. The sme
ll was worse here. Rank and deep.

  “Hello?” he said, his voice breaking in the middle like a teenager’s. “Is anyone here?”

  To his left was a thin coat closet that smelled of cedar. He knew what was in there even though he’d never stepped inside this house before. He couldn’t help himself. He watched his hand stretch out from his body and pull the door open. Inside were boxes and boxes stamped MISCELLANEOUS. The top box was open, revealing an assortment of mittens, in every color of the rainbow. There had to be at least a hundred pairs in there.

  By the time he turned back toward the stairs, his eyes had adjusted to the darkness well enough for him to notice the trail of blood leading from around the corner, where he assumed the kitchen was, into the living room a few steps forward and to his left. A body had been dragged across the dusty hardwood floor.

  Sackett unsnapped his sidearm but left it hanging loosely at his side as he walked into the living room.

  The trail ended at the body of the Man with a Thousand Mittens. The old man sat in a pool of dried blood at the center of the room, propped up against a toppled wooden chair. The only other furniture in the room was a single metal fold-out chair in one corner, beside an old lamp, resting on the floor. Each of the four walls was entirely concealed by stacks of paperback books that stretched to the fourteen-foot-high ceiling in tightly packed and ordered skyscrapers. The dead man’s head rested on his chest, his legs splayed out in either direction. Someone had cut off his fingers.

  Sackett leaned toward the body, carefully avoiding the pool of dried crimson surrounding it. The old man was dressed in a stained white T-shirt and khaki shorts. On the shirt was a black hole the size of a dime, a few inches below the sternum—a single bullet hole. Streams of maggots slithered out, landing on the hard film of blood with a sound that could have been a light rain against a window.

  That sort of wound, he knew, makes a man bleed inside. Most of the blood on the floor had, no doubt, come from his hands.

  Sackett stood and walked deliberately to the kitchen, following the trail of blood to its point of origin. It began at the blender.

  “Are those fingers?” asked Billy, eyeing the chunky, mold-crusted contents of the blender from the other doorway. “Oh, God,” he said. The young man heaved once. Twice. On the third heave, a half gallon of vomit shot out of his mouth and onto the floor, tainting Sackett’s crime scene with partially digested ham and cheese Hot Pocket and red Kool-Aid.

  “Feel better?” he asked.

  Billy nodded.

  “Next time someone tells you to wait outside, you think you might listen?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Good.”

  PART ONE

  ELIZABETH

  EPISODE ONE

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DAVID NEFF

  David Neff missed a lot of things about his wife, but the thing he missed the most was the way she used to sit on couches, leaning against one giant pillow, her knees tucked up against her chest, her legs trailing behind her as she watched a Lifetime movie or some ridiculous reality show. He pointed out to her once, before she died, that no man ever sits on a couch like that, that it was a uniquely feminine trait. It was a little thing that delighted him. He loved the carefree way she moved her feet to the rhythm of the lights on the screen. When he finally went through her things two months after she was in the ground, he’d found a photograph of her as a child, curled up on her parents’ sofa in the exact manner he remembered. He’d stuck the photo to the refrigerator. It was still there, next to the over-outlined caricature drawings of their four-year-old boy.

  Like most Thursday afternoons, David was on the living room floor, in front of the couch—her couch—with a bowl of SpaghettiOs in his lap, a bag of Kettle Chips to his right, watching an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants he’d seen five times, but TiVo’d anyway. The boy, Tanner, napped upstairs.

  David was a once-handsome man who had grown pudgy around the edges. His dark hair hung too long above his eyes, a bit too gray for thirty-four. Three-day-old stubble shaded his double chin. A dollop of dried ketchup was smeared across the front of his shirt, evidence of the barely won battle that had been Tanner’s lunch.

  The room around David appeared to be the remnants of a livable space that had been torn apart by some sort of laundry- and toy-filled IED. Every other week, Tanner’s great-aunt came by and picked the boy’s clothes off the mantel, lamps, and ceiling fan, laundered them, and returned them, folded, to the boy’s bedroom dresser. She collected the broken robots into dustbins, sorted stuffed frogs and Legos into their assorted tubs, and replaced the batteries in the boy’s plastic-ball shooter and tiny grand piano. It only took them two days to get the room out of order again. David didn’t mind the mess. And neither did Tanner.

  Because his wife’s death had been ruled a suicide, her insurance had not paid out and David had not been able to work a single day since. But he and the boy didn’t need the money. Royalties from David’s first book—The Serial Killer’s Protégé—had climbed to the seven-figure mark a couple years ago and sales remained strong, thanks, in part, to a Rolling Stone article that had forever labeled him as “the best true crime writer since Truman Capote.” David no longer kept track of how much he had in the bank, but he knew it was more than he’d ever imagined making in his life.

  After his wife’s death and until just a moment from right now, David had resigned himself to the fact that The Serial Killer’s Protégé would also be his only book, and that that was okay, because Tanner was alive and he could live out the remainder of his days keeping his boy safe and comfortable and happy.

  But then there was a knock at the front door.

  David wasn’t expecting company. Tanner’s aunt wasn’t due for a few days. He assumed it was a neighborhood kid pushing school band–sale candy, so he ignored it. But then the knock came again, too loud to be anything but an adult.

  He walked to the door and peered through the porthole. There was a man on his doorstep. A thin man with wire-rim glasses and a ring of hair circling a bald dome.

  Paul.

  David winced. He didn’t want to see Paul. He didn’t want to talk to Paul. It was Paul’s fault that he wasn’t able to grieve the way he sometimes felt he deserved—in a penniless gutter with other heartbroken souls.

  Paul Sheppard was his publisher, the man who had read David’s proposal for a book based on notes left behind by convicted killer Ronil Brune and recognized a modicum of talent. Before The Serial Killer’s Protégé, Paul had been an exclusively local publisher, the sort that shipped glossy copies of Cleveland Steelworker Memories and Cleveland’s Haunted History to local indie bookstores. Today, he kept an office in Manhattan.

  Reluctantly, David opened the door.

  “He’s alive!” Paul shouted, raising his arms in the air like Dr. Frankenstein.

  “Shhhh! You’ll wake the kid,” he said. He motioned for Paul to come in.

  “Sorry.” Stepping into the main room, Paul shook his head and whistled. “I saw this documentary on Discovery the other day,” he said. “It was about this woman who lives in Manhattan and she’s this ridiculous pack rat and never throws anything away. She had this path carved out in clutter she could use to get to the bathroom and kitchen.”

  “Yeah?” prodded David.

  “You’re like this far away from becoming that woman,” he said. “Her family had her committed, you know.”

  “Thank God you’re not my family, Paul,” he said, smiling a little. “Don’t sit on that!” He jumped to the recliner over which Paul was squatting and batted away yesterday’s Beacon Journal. Underneath was a plastic dish that had once held a microwavable Salisbury steak dinner. David tossed it to the far corner of the room, where it landed next to a wastebasket. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “I left you twenty messages. The only reason I knew you weren’t dead is you keep depositing my checks.”

  Paul sat on the chair as David collapsed on the sofa, sending a mostly emp
ty biggie-sized soda tumbling to the floor. “It is nice to see you,” David said sincerely. “How’s biz?”

  “You know,” said Paul, making a seesaw gesture. “Protégé is still selling. I think half the universities in the country are teaching it in their journalism programs, so that helps it move every semester. I just signed this new up-and-comer from Pittsburgh, whose manuscript knocks me out.”

  “It’s not a memoir, is it? Tell me it’s not another memoir.”

  “In fact, it is a memoir. It’s about an alcoholic steel smelter who went to prison for grand theft and, when he got out, cleaned himself up by slowly constructing a jet-powered semi truck in his garage. It wouldn’t kill you to blurb it.”

  “Is that why you came over?”

  “Of course not,” said Paul, a thin smile playing at one corner of his mouth. From his sports jacket pocket, the publisher pulled a bound galley of a book. He tossed it to David, who snatched it out of the air one-handed.

  On the front was a grainy black-and-white picture of a grassy hill soaked in summer heat. Atop the hill sat a 1970s-era police cruiser, its driver’s-side door ajar. Behind the car stretched a row of old-growth pine trees, gnarled branches like arthritic hands. David knew this photograph. He’d discovered it, in fact, tucked into a box labeled MISCELLANEOUS in the Press archives at Cleveland State. It was a picture of a crime scene, an artifact of one of the many unsolved cases he’d written about before he’d become completely obsessed with Ronil Brune. The title of the book was The Lesser Mysteries of Greater Cleveland. At the bottom was David’s name.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Your next book,” said Paul. “That’s just a mock-up, but I wanted you to see it, to feel the weight of it in your hands. It’s a good cover, no?”

  “It’s a great cover, Paul,” he said. “Only problem is, I didn’t write this.”

  “You did. It’s twelve of your best true crime articles from your Independent days, Beverly Jarosz, Sam Sheppard, Lisa Pruett. I cleaned up the language and moved things around a bit here and there—don’t look at me like that, you were still learning dramatic narrative structure back then—and I put them all together into this little trade paperback. Something for next summer’s beach crowd, I’m thinking. Something to tide everyone over until the next David Neff book.”