The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  His imagination could get away from him if he let it. Especially when he was scared. If he let the fear in, if he let in the fear that had tightened its grip around his heart the moment he stepped into the clearing, if he let that fear run around inside him, there would be a cascading of delusions like this, he knew, and he would find himself running back to his car half out of his mind.

  His father had taught him how to control his fear. When he was twelve, David had stayed up through the night after watching The Exorcist on TV. The next day, his father had made him walk through the woods behind their house alone, all the way to the end of their property and back, to prove to David that there were no demons waiting for the opportunity to kill him. It had been a particularly frightening hike because the neighborhood kids had believed those woods to be haunted. Legend had it that the Native American tribe that had once occupied the area believed a demigod lived there, an imp that took the form of a cat and who would allow passage only by subjecting travelers to degrading acts of corruption and humiliation. But he had returned unscathed. Little had frightened him since.

  But now he was sure that something was watching him.

  Still, he couldn’t leave without seeing what was in the middle of the clearing.

  It was a stump, the stump of a gargantuan oak. He wanted to touch it, to feel its oldness, to find out if it was petrified. He didn’t dare. Whatever was darkening these woods came from this stump, from the roots that still thrived in the ground below.

  A single word was carved into it: BEEZLE.

  The word meant something to David, but not in this context. He knew of beezle from Dr. Seuss. Horton Hears a Who. The animals in that little gem of a story had planned to commit genocide on the Whos of Whoville by throwing their world (which existed on a speck of dust perched atop a flower) into boiling Beezle-Nut oil.

  He felt an urge to say the word aloud, to hear the sound of the word, the name, in this clearing. But the thought of the repercussions stopped him. What would happen here if he muttered such an invocation? He did not care to know. If this was the place Beezle called home, he didn’t want to meet him. Or It. And he certainly did not want to call it.

  And through the wrongness of the clearing, he felt something else. Or imagined it. The sensation surfaced as a picture in his mind as he tried to draw out the analogy. He thought of two bar magnets, placed such that their opposite polarities were close to touching. Slowly, the magnets scooted toward each other, gathering speed, and collided, then rested, at last. In some way, he was one of those magnets. And this clearing. No, this stump, the Thing it represented. This darkness was the other magnet and it pulled at him, promising a final rest for his soul if he would only surrender to it.

  David awoke to himself, just as he was about to step onto the stump. He blinked the daze out of his eyes, turned, and walked out of the woods. He forced himself to go slowly.

  In the car, David kicked it into gear and macht-schnelled the hell right out of there. He stopped at the nearest gas station and bought a pack of Marlboros. He unwrapped the pack and placed a cigarette in his mouth. He was too afraid of emphysema to smoke it, so he just rubbed his tongue around the filter and felt the weight of it between his lips. It calmed him immediately.

  * * *

  She’s cheating on you, David. She’s fucking the band director. They share an office, you know. She always stays after work so late. What is she doing there? She’s not grading papers, I’ll tell you that.

  Brune’s voice, nasal and meek, the voice of a good accountant.

  David looked at the clock above the kitchen sink. It was almost eight.

  He’s fingering her right now. He’s knuckles-deep, digging.

  “Stop it,” he said.

  He looked down. Brune’s Box of Fabulous Files was spilling over. David had gathered police reports from every jurisdiction that had cases of missing or murdered girls from the early eighties and nineties, trying to find a link, something definitive to tie Trimble to the crimes. He realized, sickly, what he was really doing. He was feeding Brune’s box. Adding evil to it. New tales of murder, added and mixed with Brune’s own handiwork. And as he added to the box, Brune’s voice grew louder within his head. He was feeding a ghost and the ghost was becoming more real.

  Why are you still wasting your time on this? I left these notes behind for a real journalist. Not you. Not some kid. You don’t have the stones.

  He had written one word on a blank sheet of printing paper.

  Beezle. Ha, Beezle. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

  He heard Elizabeth’s key in the door’s lock and shuddered because he knew what Brune had in mind, what Brune really wanted.

  Do it.

  Never.

  She’s a cheating cunt. Take her.

  No.

  Then do the world a favor and cash out.

  I might.

  You’re a coward. I don’t believe anything you say.

  “David?” her voice, her hand on his head, twisting his hair, loving.

  How he wanted to twist that hand behind her until it broke, until she couldn’t fight back. He didn’t have roach clips in the apartment, but he had tweezers that might work. And he had some spare wire and his car battery.

  “Go away,” he said. “Elizabeth, please. Go away for a bit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Go to your aunt’s. I’ll call you.”

  “David, talk to me.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Get the fuck away from me. Leave me alone.”

  She left. He never looked at her.

  Coward.

  She’ll be back.

  You’re getting weaker.

  She’ll be back.

  Let’s read some more. What do you say? Let’s read some more about my favorite Boy Scout, the apple of my eye.

  * * *

  “I’m planning to kill myself,” he said.

  Athena Popodopovich, the thin psychiatrist whose name he’d randomly picked out of the phone book earlier that afternoon, a week and a day after he had made Elizabeth leave their apartment, looked back at him with genuine concern and interest. “How will you kill yourself?” she asked.

  “I’m going to jump off the Y-Bridge.”

  “Well, that’ll be messy.”

  He watched for a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth but she wasn’t being cheeky. She was being blunt, being true.

  “You wouldn’t be the first of my patients to take a swan dive off the Y-Bridge,” she said. “I just figured a writer would be a little more imaginative.”

  “I thought about eating hot coals but that’s been done. Most suicides are clichés. The running car in the garage, the gun in the mouth, the hanging—”

  “The jumper.”

  “See,” he said. “It’s hard to find a new angle. Besides, the whole reason I’m at this point is because I can’t think original thoughts anymore. I can’t write anymore. My editor is going to figure that out soon. And then I won’t have a job.”

  “Why can’t you write?”

  “I need to hear my voice, in my head, you know, when I write. Sounding out the words, telling the story. That’s part of my process. I can’t hear my voice anymore.”

  “Why can’t you hear your own voice anymore?”

  “All I hear is Brune. Ever since I opened that box, I hear his voice. I think about him all the time. From the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep and then he’s in my dreams. I can’t get Sarah Creston’s face out of my head. Donna and Jennifer are there, too, but it’s Sarah mostly, because I have so many pictures of her.”

  “Are these voices telling you to harm yourself? To harm others?”

  David buckled. His chest heaved. He started to cry. Heavy sobs. “Yes,” he said. “There’s something inside me. I can feel it burrowing in.”

  Dr. Popodopovich sat up in her chair and wrote on a green form. “David,” she said in a calm and friendly voice not devoid of
amusement. “It’s possible you’re suffering from post traumatic stress disorder brought on by your exposure to these horrific stories. In a sense, you’re reliving these tragedies. I’ve seen this before in journalists who’ve covered the wars in Iraq. David, you’re going to spend the night at the Glenns; it’s a mental health facility just a few miles west of here. When someone tells me they intend to harm themselves I must do this, you see. But I will promise you that the nature of everything you have told me and everything you will tell me in the future will remain under the strictest of confidences. Do you understand why I have to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “The fact that you sought me out tells me you are stronger than you believe yourself to be. We’ll get you through this. And the first step begins right now.”

  He stared at his feet.

  “Look at me, David. We’re going to get you through this. David, look …

  * * *

  … at me,” Elizabeth said, as they walked back into the courtroom. “Just look at me, if they start attacking you, okay?”

  He nodded and walked to the witness stand. A moment later, the jury entered, and then Judge Siegel, and everyone stood. “Be seated,” he said.

  Synenberger was out of his seat in a flash. Out of the corner, he unleashed a hard punch.

  “Mr. Neff,” he said. “Are you crazy?”

  “Objection!” shouted Russo.

  Synenberger waved him away. “I’ll restate the question. Mr. Neff, are you suffering from any psychological impairments?”

  “I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it’s never been an impairment,” he said. In a room on the ninth floor of this very building, Russo had grilled him just like this, so he knew what to expect and how to answer. It had felt a little like training for a fight—but no matter how many times you punch a bag, it’s still difficult to avoid flinching when you’re up against the real deal.

  “But you are taking medication for this, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “If it’s not an impairment, why do you need to be medicated?”

  “Well, Mr. Synenberger, it’s sort of like being an alcoholic,” he said. “Some alcoholics can function, can do their job very well before their livers turn on them. In my case, I always managed to hit a deadline but I could feel something wrong inside.”

  “Like an alcoholic’s liver, except it was your brain, your mind that was not right?”

  David cringed a little. “Basically, yes.”

  “You were hearing voices. Hearing people who were not there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it possible you were also seeing people who were not there?”

  He thought of that awful night, of the homeless man outside their bedroom window, the one with the knife and the lame eye. But there was no way Synenberger could know about that. That was buried deep in his shrink’s notes, inadmissible in court.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m speaking about Gary Gonze. Your secret source for the book. Gary Gonze is not real, is he?”

  “Unfortunately,” he said, “Gary Gonze is very real.”

  * * *

  They drove back to Ohio in Katy’s car, a ten-year-old Saturn stuffed with CDs and vinyls of bands David had never heard of: Salt Zombies, the Decemberists, Neutral Milk Hotel.

  He’d returned his rental to the Enterprise in State College and paid the fee to have them ship it back to Akron. There were few perks to being silly rich, he’d come to realize, but convenience was one of them.

  Somehow, being in Katy’s car, in the passive passenger seat, he felt closer to her, closer even than during the seven times they’d had sex since she had arrived in Bellefonte. Sitting in the passenger seat of a woman’s car—that’s intimacy.

  At a stoplight in State College, she had leaned over and licked his lips. He had felt so dizzy he thought he might faint.

  “So what now?” she asked, pulling onto I-80 West.

  “We can take this all the way home.”

  “I mean what next, what next? What next with you?”

  “Oh.” He looked out the window, at the foothills of the Appalachians sweeping east in an impressionistic blur of green and gold. “Well,” he said, “not much, really. I just, you know, have to find a better suspect in the attempted murder of the Man from Primrose Lane so that I’m not put on trial. To do that, I have to, somehow, figure out who this ‘Arbogast’ guy is. The only guy we can assume had motive to kill the Man from Primrose Lane, if your memory is reliable, and memory so often is not, is the man who approached you outside that toy store in Coventry, only to be intercepted by the Man from Primrose Lane. Logically, that man was this ‘Arbogast.’ But logic is on vacation these days. You and Detective Sackett both believe that you are somehow connected to the abduction of my wife’s sister, Elaine, that perhaps the man who attempted to abduct you was the same man who took Elaine, and tried to take Elizabeth, only to be interrupted by … who? The Man from Primrose Lane again? I’d also like to know why my wife’s fingerprints were on that guy’s bed. Also, Tanner has swimming lessons Wednesday. So, there’s that.”

  “Do you still think the solution is elegantly simple?”

  “It always is,” he said.

  “Well, we at least have a last name to start with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “McGuffin,” she said. “That old man said the guy he made the IDs for was named McGuffin.”

  David laughed. “That’s not a real name, either,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a bad writer’s device. A McGuffin. It’s the object that everyone is after in a caper, or in a crime story or mystery. It’s something the plot centers around but which, in itself, is not of any real importance. It’s like the Maltese Falcon. Or the Arc of the Covenant, in Raiders. Or what’s in Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction.”

  “So no leads, then, on the Man from Primrose Lane’s true identity?”

  “Actually, the best clue to who he was is still in Akron. His house.”

  * * *

  At a rest stop east of Pittsburgh, one of those transient depots full of tchotchkes and fatty foods, they stopped to eat and to call home.

  “Dad!” yelled Tanner. “I painted Shadow green!”

  Shadow was the cat.

  “All of him?”

  “No. A little. It was an assident. He has a green spot now.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you coming home?”

  “On my way, buddy.”

  “Yay! Oh, Papa wants to say something.” There was a loud rumble as Tanner transferred the phone to David’s father.

  “’Lo?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Everything work out?”

  “It did.”

  “Good. Hey. There’s, uh … there’s stuff on the news out here. It started on the blogs. That girl, Cindy. She has pictures up on her site with you and a young woman.”

  “Great.”

  “Did you know that the woman you’re with in the pictures is the fiancée of Ralph Rhodes?”

  “I’m guessing that’s Joe Rhodes’s son.”

  “Right-o.”

  “Huh,” he said. Yes, he thought, Ralph Rhodes certainly is a toolbox. What did Katy see in that guy?

  “Well, the newspapers picked it up and figured out who the woman was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That she’s the one the Man from Primrose Lane was stalking.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Today’s headline from the Beacon: ‘Famous Writer Key Suspect in Death of Mystery Man.’ And below that: ‘Dates Woman the Victim Stalked.’”

  “Nice.”

  “Are you in trouble, David?”

  “No, Pop. It’s a misunderstanding. Build you up, tear you down. That’s the media’s job. I have Synenberger on it. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Mostly.”


  “Well, come on home.”

  “Be there in two hours.”

  Katy was closing her cell phone as David approached her in the colossal lobby. The look on her face said everything he needed to know.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, fuck! None of this would have happened if I hadn’t gone out with you,” she said. “That bitch got a picture of us in your car, dropping me off. I’m the one who cheated on my fiancé. I’m the one who that creep from Primrose Lane was obsessed with.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me who your boyfriend was?”

  Katy shrugged. “I don’t care about that stuff.”

  “His father is the leader of the Summit County Republican Party, owns the biggest lumber business in Ohio. Powerful family.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll give you this,” he said. “You’re certainly not boring.”

  “Ditto.”

  “Shall we, then?”

  Katy tossed him the keys. “Your turn.”

  * * *

  From the website ClevelandChic.com, posted October 18, 2012:

  YOUNG BOOKSLINGER CAN’T GET E’NEFF OF LOCAL WRITER

  Exclusive by ClevelandChic

  Who is this mystery woman smooching up to the ear of Akron’s famous true crime writer? According to neighbors, the YOUNG woman, seen in this picture with her tongue in David Neff’s ear, is a twenty-two-year-old Barnes & Noble employee named “Katy.” The young woman herself could not be reached for comment. Neither could Neff, for that matter. It appears the two may have escaped to a lovers’ retreat, where they can canoodle far from the gaze of ClevelandChic’s cameras.

  Neff, who was widowed in 2008 when his wife committed suicide by driving a car into a convenience store the day she was to be released from the hospital after the birth of their boy, Tanner, has remained in self-imposed isolation since the tragedy. Is this a sign that Neff is back in the singles scene? Or did Katy work her way into his heart through correspondence of some kind? Neff is easily reachable through Facebook, where Katy is one of his “friends.”

  Full disclosure: Yours truly worked with Neff for a spell at the now-defunct Independent. It is true we have our own history. While I thought we were friends, Neff stabbed me in the back and made up stories about me to the editor, eventually leading to my termination. He’s got a lot of fans, but ClevelandChic is not one. Take it from me, Katy, this guy’s a skeez.