The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  Spencer opened his mouth to answer but closed it again, slowly.

  David stopped a foot away from the man in the chair. “Here’s the thing, Spencer. I don’t give a fuck what you’re up to. You’re not the first kid to get impatient. I promise you this, though. Nothing you tell me will affect your case in court. I’ll keep it in confidence. Strictly off the record and on the QT, as they say. In exchange, I’ll be sure to keep you out of my next book.”

  “A guy came by the house,” he said quickly. “About five years ago, before she got sick. My stepdad told this to me before his heart attack, in ’08. This man that came by the house asked the same questions you was asking. Except polite, you know. He was trying to find the Man from Primrose Lane. This would have been about a year before the guy was shot in his house in Akron.”

  “Who?”

  “Said his name was Arbogast.”

  “Fake name.”

  “Yeah. The guy from Psycho, right?”

  David nodded.

  “What did your mother tell him?”

  “Said he should go see Frank Lucarelli.”

  “Who is Lucarelli?”

  “He owns the pizza shop on top of Lamb Street.”

  “Why did she tell him to go see Frank?”

  Spencer shrugged. “She dated Lucarelli back in the day, before my dad come along.”

  “Your stepfather tell you anything else about this guy?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Okay. Thanks for your time, Spence.” David started toward the door.

  “David.” The voice came on a breeze, like the fluttering of a heavy curtain against an open window.

  She was sitting upright in bed, reaching out for David with pale fingers. The blanket had fallen away. She wore a thin pale green hospital gown underneath, spotted with old food. Or was it blood?

  He looked to Spencer, who had tucked his feet under him in some defensive move. “She doesn’t know about me, does she? Did she read my book?”

  “David was my biological father,” said Spencer.

  “David,” she said again.

  “She does this,” said Spencer. “Talks in the night. Calling out names.”

  “David,” she whispered, leaning closer.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You were always so handsome.”

  She lay back in the bed, then, and her eyes drifted back to the television.

  “What happened?” asked the receptionist from the doorway.

  “Another one of her spells,” said Spencer.

  “You should probably let her get some rest. Both of you.”

  Without saying goodbye, Spencer walked out of the room, and David followed, keeping space between them as they traveled the hallway to the exit.

  “I’d never hurt my mother,” he heard the man whisper.

  He considered driving to Lucarelli’s, but returned to the hotel instead. He had a hunch he was about to feel much worse. He was right. As he flipped on the television and sat upon the queen-size bed, the first brainstorm hit him like a seizure. A wave of electricity rippled across his neurons like an internal aurora borealis, misfiring axons as it went, causing him to simultaneously piss his pants, raise his right hand, and sneeze. Somewhere deep inside his amygdala, the wave washed up against an arrangement of neurons that housed a distant remembrance. For several minutes, David’s consciousness was elsewhere, reliving this memory in five senses:

  * * *

  It was dark. And warm. And he was enveloped by the sweet smell of his mother’s shoes. He sat upon them, a mound of heels and flip-flops and high-topped leather boots. The door was ajar and let in just enough light for him to see the redhead seated in the closet beside him, Melinda, his cousin, and she was about three years old. And, if she was three, that meant he was four.

  What is this? he tried to say, but nothing came out of his throat. David tried to move his hands. Though he could feel them, they would not obey. His pudgy little-boy fingers remained where they were, holding Melinda’s. They were hiding. He had always used the shoe closet for games of hide-and-seek, he remembered. This was the shoe closet inside her apartment, in Garretsville, the one-bedroom efficiency she’d rented after the divorce.

  Her voice carried across the apartment from the living room. One end of a conversation: “No. No. I know. Yes. What do you want me to do? He won’t take me back, goddamn it! He knows.”

  What if I’m trapped here? he wondered. What if this is like TiVo or something? What if, somehow, I hit “start over” and now I have to watch my life play out in front of me, again, for the next thirty years?

  He concentrated on opening his eyes (even though they were already open), on willing himself to wake up as if this were all a dream and not one of those episodic memories Dr. Popodopovich had warned him about.

  Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

  Whoever his mother was talking to, she was really worked up.

  “He knows,” she said again. “No, not about that. About us. He just doesn’t know who. And I wouldn’t tell him.”

  Melinda held his hands tightly and he felt his body lean forward of its own accord and bring his eyes around to the slit in the door. Outside, in the kitchen beyond the living area, his mother was pouring Wild Turkey into a bright red plastic cup. She was crying.

  “You know something?” she said. “You can go fuck your apologies, okay? You should have left me there. You should have left it alone.”

  He didn’t want to see this. Didn’t care about the nasty details of the divorce. (Except, he must, right? Because why did his mind bring him here? Here of all places?)

  Wake up!

  He felt his body rise into the air. He heard the sound of the ocean, of a violent rushing wind.

  Wake …

  * * *

  … up!” he yelled at the empty bedroom.

  He didn’t open his eyes, for they were still open. One moment he was rising into the darkness, the next he was sitting up in bed. The vertigo caused by the change in perspective was too much. He stumbled to the bathroom and collapsed in front of the commode. He heaved. Bile trickled from his mouth, dripping into the toilet. His throat stung.

  His forehead felt too hot for a normal fever. Someone knocked on his door. Loudly.

  “Who—”

  He vomited again. The knocking grew urgent. His entire body shook.

  The desk clerk, he thought. Someone must have heard me screaming and called the front desk.

  Knocking. He pulled himself to his feet and started for the door. He felt another one coming, another brain storm, a pulse of electricity behind his eyes, threatening to break like lightning. He knew he had to reach the door to unbolt it, to let help in. But he did not think he could get there before the storm hit.

  Here it comes, he thought.

  If it took him away, his body would fall to the ground, he knew. He might not wake up in time to eat or drink. He might fall on his back and suffocate on his own bile. Dr. Popodopovich had warned him it would be bad, but David had never considered the withdrawals might really kill him.

  He reached for the bolt just as the thunderhead broke in his brain. As he fell, he was unsure if he’d managed to unlock the door and turn the handle. He thought his odds were something like fifty-fifty. Ironic, he thought as he fell into another memory. I might be killed by the medication I took to keep from killing myself.

  He thought of Ronald Mallett, that physicist he’d interviewed for the Independent so long ago. Mallett had told him about a frightening theory, something called Zeno’s paradox, a lovely little physics conundrum: If an object falls, it must first reach a halfway point before it connects with the ground, and from there must again reach a midway point between that location and the ground. And half and half and half, etc. Was it really even possible to connect with the floor? Shouldn’t he only travel halfway there for infinity? To David, it didn’t matter. He was unconscious long before he collided with the floor. David’s mind was overtaken by another brain
storm triggered by the depletion of Rivertin in his system. Halos of electricity danced around his cerebral cortex and across his brain stem. It swallowed him up, consciousness and all, and delivered him into the realm of memory, a cascade of remembrances lost over the years but which the withdrawals rediscovered easily.

  * * *

  He was falling again, but slower. He looked around, as he had then, and found himself wrapped in the blanket of the bed he shared with his father. David was, what? Three? Four? After the divorce. He was wrapped in a cocoon of blanket that had caught him as he rolled off the bed and was now holding him suspended, inches above the floor, while his father slept the sleep of second-shift men. He could smell the bitter stank of Pabst, his father’s dinner, and wondered why he never drank the stuff now, because it was a smell he loved. He listened to his father breathing, his inhalations dragging on for longer than David’s little body could match. Sometimes it seemed like his father wasn’t breathing at all, and that scared him, he could feel the fright in him, because his father was all that was left. His mother had moved on. Was elsewhere. Sometimes he saw her, he knew, but the time, the space between those meetings was immeasurable and might as well be an eternity. His father could not die and leave him here alone. Please. Please. And the breathing began again. It always did. It always would, he reassured himself. He was thirty-four now, not three, and his father was very much alive. This was a memory. Not a dream. But dreamlike. It felt good to be here, wrapped in these blankets. He wished he would stay.

  * * *

  In the back of a Volkswagen now, a yellow thing his mom called a Bug.

  “Keep your head down, Davey,” she said, a beautiful thin thing with obsidian eyes, sitting in the passenger seat, holding him against the back seat with one hand. Her hair fell down her back, over a leather-braided jacket. Uncle Ira was driving. The car smelled like pot. He had just been abducted from his grandmother’s front yard.

  “We’re taking you home, Davey,” Uncle Ira said. “Don’t cry.”

  But he was crying, he realized. Big, sobby, choking gasps. He wanted his dad. His dad was at work and didn’t even know he was gone! What if he came home and forgot he had a son because he wasn’t there? What if he didn’t know how to find him? Please take me back!

  “Don’t cry, hon,” said his mom. But she was crying, too.

  * * *

  College. The first hot day of spring. May 4 at Kent State.

  David stood vigil in the Prentice Hall parking lot, on the spot where William Schroeder was shot and killed by a member of the Ohio National Guard in 1970. This was his hour to stand in Schroeder’s place before he was to be relieved by another member of the May 4th Task Force. Alumni on their yearly pilgrimage walked by in quiet reflection, some with children.

  “What’s he doing, Dad?” a little red-haired girl asked.

  “He’s paying tribute to Bill,” the man said. “Standing in his place. Bill was my friend. The one I told you about.”

  “It’s so sad,” she said.

  “It is. Come on, Katy, I want to find my old dorm.”

  And then there was that tugging sensation again, as if a great wind were pushing at him, pushing him back. David wondered if this might be what certain brain damage was like from the inside. Was this what they meant when they said, “My life flashed before my eyes?”

  David wondered if he was dead. He wondered, after a while, if there really was such a thing as death.

  * * *

  “I hate you,” he said to his stepmother, standing in the kitchen, papered walls, and yellow.

  * * *

  “I love you,” Elizabeth whispered in his ear. The smell of his old car: oil, leather.

  * * *

  “I love you,” his dad said to him, carrying David in his arms.

  * * *

  “I hate you,” said Riley Trimble as two police officers pulled him out of the courthouse. “I hate you forever!”

  * * *

  In bed. Sunlight on the sides of a dark curtain. The room in shadow. A shape beside him.

  “Elizabeth,” he whispered.

  David reached out at the shape and found that his hand worked. He was no longer a prisoner inside his own body. Somehow, he was manipulating this memory. Did that make it a dream?

  His hand found her body under the covers, her skin warm and alive, soft and covered in a thin and lovely down. She turned to him and he saw her outline in the dim light and he pulled her to his mouth. He kissed her. Gently. Then more. Her lips parted and her tongue set out to find his. He climbed onto her and she took him in her embrace, her lithe legs wrapping around his frame.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. “God, I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you,” she replied and reached down to his stiffened prick. She guided it quickly and he pushed into her. She moaned.

  “Elizabeth,” he whispered.

  Suddenly she stopped writhing beneath him.

  “What?” That voice. That voice was not Elizabeth’s.

  “What?” he said.

  An arm reached over to the bedside and clicked on the table lamp. Katy stared back at him, naked, with something close to actual alarm.

  EPISODE EIGHT

  THE FORGER’S TALE

  “He offered to fellate you?” asked Russo.

  David felt the eyes of the jury. He knew the old woman in the back row must be picturing the defendant going down on him and, to his horror, he felt the beginnings of uncontrollable giggles.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Could you describe the encounter for the jury?”

  “One night in November last year, I parked outside Riley Trimble’s trailer down in Steubenville, intending to basically stake out his house.”

  “And why would you want to do that?”

  “Well, by then, based on the files in Brune’s box and the grand jury testimony I had uncovered, I had become convinced that Trimble was at least an accomplice in the abduction and murder of Sarah Creston. Unlike Brune, though, Trimble was free to continue killing. I went to his place to see if I could catch him stalking young girls.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “I saw…” David clapped a hand over his mouth as a giggle bubbled up and out. He was quick to cover it with a cough. No one noticed except Elizabeth, who stared back at him with a look of concern he’d never seen on her face before. He tried to think of something sad. He thought of the autopsy pictures he’d seen of Sarah, the way the blood in her body had pooled on her back, painting it forever the color of a ripened eggplant, in sharp contrast to her alabaster face. That did it. He began again. “I saw …

  * * *

  … a company truck for a heating and air-conditioning business parked outside Trimble’s garage.

  An advertisement on the side promised HVAC SPECIALS! HEAT OR COOL YOUR HOME FOR LESS! He had hoped to find Trimble working in some butcher shop or shaping steel in a factory by the river. He hadn’t expected this. He had never considered the man he suspected of being the real child killer might have secured a job giving him easy access to thousands of homes. He felt sick.

  This is too big, he thought. I should turn this over to another reporter. Someone who’s been doing this for longer than a couple months.

  Problem was, nobody believed him. And it wasn’t a tidy mystery. Too hard to explain. A man had already been executed for the crime. Physical evidence was found on Sarah Creston that matched samples taken from Brune’s home and van. And now, after Brune is long dead, a rookie reporter thinks it was actually one of his scouts who was the serial killer? It was a tough sell.

  In for a penny, he thought, and sat back in his seat, eyeing the house across the street from the shadows.

  It’s difficult to keep track of long stretches of time when nothing happens to separate one moment from the next. How long had he been sitting there? Two hours? Five? He didn’t want to turn the car on to find out, didn’t want to risk Trimble seeing the dash lights from his home, where the f
lickering glow of a television set danced in a dark room beyond a picture window. He could have checked his cell phone but he was in the boonies of southern Ohio, a cellular black hole, and all the roaming had drained its battery. Minutes began to feel like seconds, hours like minutes, speeding up just to get to something, anything, until he noticed the TV was off.

  It was one of those country nights utterly devoid of light. A cloudy sky under a new moon, far from any city of note. He had to concentrate to pick up the faintest shadows across the street. He saw the outline of Trimble’s house, the tree in the front yard, the truck in the driveway. And something else, something nearer the door …

  David felt the wind suck out of him as if a ghost had punched him in the gut.

  Trimble was standing there, staring back at him, fifty feet away.

  Ever so slowly, Trimble was shuffling his feet toward the car, in a straight line, without lowering his shoulders, creating the effect of a man hovering in the air, floating to David rather than walking.

  If I move, will he come after me? wondered David. Or will he run away?

  Hell with it. He wasn’t going to let him get close enough to pounce. David reached over to the passenger’s seat where he had set the keys. In his haste, his fingers knocked the keys to the floor with a loud jingling. He bent down, fishing around the floor amid cans of soda and rolled-up McDonald’s bags.

  When he sat up, Trimble was at the window, staring back at him, his ruddy mouth open, his dark tongue lolling around inside like sentient cancer. He lifted a hand, shaped in a gaping circle, and moved it up and down like a piston. David’s head was so awash in numbing terror that it took a moment for him to realize Trimble was pantomiming a hand job.

  “Want me to touch you?” asked Trimble in a low voice. “Do you want me to suck your dick? What do you want? Do you want to watch me jerk off?” Trimble lifted his shirt and David saw that the man was not wearing any pants. A narrow, long, and erect penis rubbed a soapy trail of pre-cum against the window of his car.