The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  “I don’t need the money.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “Then why?”

  Paul glanced around the room, then back at David. “I think you need something to remind you why you were ever a writer in the first place,” said Paul. “A little New England collegiate lecture tour? Some free publicity in the trades? Groupies?”

  “True crime groupies are mostly middle-aged women who look like my high school home-ec teacher,” said David. “Nobody wants to buy a bunch of old stories. Anyone who wanted to read them has read them online already.”

  “Ah,” said Paul, raising a finger. “They’re not all reprints. Check out the table of contents.”

  “‘The Curious Case of the Man from Primrose Lane?’”

  “Your next project,” said Paul. “It’s the next mystery you’re going to investigate, the new piece we’ll use to market the book.”

  “The Man from Primrose Lane? Never heard of him. Who is he?”

  “Geez, David. Don’t you read the paper anymore?” Paul regarded his friend silently for a moment, studying his features, perhaps to discern if there was any trace of the old David Neff in there someplace. “You used to be the eternal optimist,” he said. “You thought you could solve all of these mysteries, remember?”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “Are you fucking blind? Look around you. What paid for this house? These toys? The Volkswagen in the garage? Your four-year-old son’s trust fund? You solved the Ronil Brune case. The most fucked-up case anybody ever heard of.”

  “I’m just a dad now.”

  “Four years is long enough to live in the dark. You told me once that you never felt better than when you were writing these articles and researching these cases. This is a new mystery to dive into.”

  “A little ironic, don’t you think?” asked David. “You want to pull me out of my depression by making me investigate some unsolved murder.”

  “There’s no dead kids in this one. At least not murdered ones.”

  “That you know of.”

  “Do you want to hear about it?”

  David rubbed his hands together distractedly. Was he already feeling a little rush? His heart stutter-stepped in his chest. His neck itched. Yes, he remembered this well. A jonesing, a craving for something he knew he shouldn’t accept. He imagined it was the way his mother must feel every time she saw a waiter pour a glass of wine in a restaurant. This was what almost ruined his marriage once upon a time. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “The Man from Primrose Lane was a recluse who lived on the west side of Akron, only about a mile from here, off Merriman.”

  “Right, I know Primrose. Wait. Are you talking about the old man who used to ramble down to the park in the middle of the summer sometimes wearing mittens?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “I saw him a few times after we moved here. Strange dude. Walked like he had somewhere important to go, except I never saw him anywhere except walking. Never at the store or in line for Chinese takeout or stuff like that. Never made eye contact. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. I always thought he looked a little like my Uncle Ira on a bender. He’s dead, I take it.”

  “Murdered.”

  “How could someone have a grudge against him if he didn’t know anybody? Was it a burglary?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. It seems personal. Whoever did it hacked the old man’s fingers off at the second knuckle and fed them into the blender. Sliced his palms to shreds. Then he was dragged into the living room and shot once in the stomach. Killer left him there to die. As much as they can figure, it took maybe a half hour for him to bleed out. The old man was forced to sit there and let it happen.”

  “Holy shit. When was this?”

  Paul repositioned himself in the chair, suddenly uncomfortable. “They found the man’s body on June twenty-first,” he said. “June twenty-first, 2008.”

  “Two days after Elizabeth.”

  Paul nodded again.

  “No wonder I didn’t hear about it.” David sighed loudly, then shook his head. “Suspects?”

  “The police are clueless, and I mean that quite literally.”

  “What was the guy’s real name?”

  “Well,” said Paul with a smile, “that’s where it gets interesting. When he purchased his house in 1969, he used the Social Security number of a man named Joseph Howard King, but that isn’t who he really was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A year after they find the body, the police get a call from the bank. Turns out this guy had about seven hundred grand in a savings account and another three and a half million in stocks and bonds. Using the name Joseph Howard King, he invested heavily in technology—Apple, Google, stuff like that. But the bank can’t find his next of kin, right? So they call the cops for help. By then, though, the detectives have been working the case for a year and they haven’t found this guy’s family, either. A probate judge gets involved because of the money. I mean, somebody’s going to collect a big paycheck as soon as they figure out who it should go to.”

  “That money’s probably the motive,” said David. “Four million dollars means four million reasons to kill him, if you’re an heir.”

  “Right. Except no family has come forward to claim it. So this judge appoints a man named Albert Beachum as executor of the estate. Apparently Beachum’s family had been running errands for the Man from Primrose Lane for years. He allows Beachum to draw money from the account to relocate the guy’s remains from his pauper’s grave to a bigger plot in Mount Peace Cemetery. And when Beachum says, ‘Screw the police, I want to hire a private eye to track this man’s family down,’ the judge says, ‘Fine,’ and lets him pay for his own investigator. The PI uses Joseph Howard King’s Social Security number to get his birth certificate. That has the guy’s parents’ names and the name of the hospital where he was born. So the PI goes and pulls the records from the hospital in the years leading up to and following King’s birth.”

  “He found Joseph Howard King’s siblings.”

  Paul touched his nose with one finger and pointed at David. “Bingo. Another kid named King with the same parents was born two years earlier at the same hospital. It’s the guy’s sister, Carol. So the PI’s really excited, right? He’s about to call this woman up and tell her she just hit the lottery. Except, when he does, Carol tells him that her brother Joe has been dead since 1932. Died in a car crash in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, at the age of six. The crash also killed Mom and Dad. Carol was at home with the babysitter.”

  “He stole a dead kid’s ID and disappeared to Akron, Ohio,” said David, his eyes wide and slightly unfocused, the look of a stoner in the afterglow of a good hit. “You know, I bet he came from Bellefonte. He probably read about the accident in the paper and remembered it years later when he needed to change his name for whatever reason. What are they going to do with the money now?”

  “Everyone is fighting over it. Carol wants it, of course. Figures since this mystery man stole her brother’s ID she has some right to it. She has a pretty big-time attorney working for her. The Beachums seem like nice people, but they’ve got a hand in this, too, and have retained their own lawyer. On top of that, you have the Summit County executive and the mayor staking claim. Law says if you can’t find next of kin, money goes to the state, but the city and county want a piece of it, too.”

  “And the police?”

  “The police haven’t said peep. And there’s one more twist to this, just to complicate the picture.”

  “Of course there is.”

  “Among the old man’s very scant personal effects were a bunch of battered notebooks.”

  David leaned forward. “And inside the notebooks?”

  “Inside is the life story of a girl he apparently never met, a record of every softball game she played in, every award of merit she won in school, every boyfriend, every minor traffic ticket. All the details of her life were collected in these notebooks in scrawled handwrit
ing they can only assume belongs to the Man from Primrose Lane.”

  “He was a stalker, huh?”

  “Of the highest degree.”

  “And this girl, she’s going after the money, too, I take it?” asked David.

  Paul shook his head. “Nope. She couldn’t care less. Which is a shame, because those notebooks are like love letters in places. Obviously, the old man cared a great deal for the girl, sorry, young woman, in his own twisted way. He never names her as his beneficiary, but almost implies … well, you’ll have to read the newspaper clippings.”

  David sat on the couch, staring into the air above the television. Periodically, he scratched at the stubble on his boyish face. Eventually his eyes settled on a picture of Tanner, resting on the mantel. The boy was about two in the photograph, his shaggy hair whipping about in the wind pulling out over the ocean behind him.

  “It’s a good story,” he said at last.

  “I know.”

  “Sounds like it’s been mostly reported, though.”

  Paul waved his hand in the air. “It’s been reported, but it hasn’t been written. And there’s still plenty mystery for you. Who killed him, who he really was, why he was stalking this girl…”

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” said David. “And if I was ready to start writing again, this would be about the perfect case. But I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  David stood up and motioned for Paul to follow. “Step into my office,” he said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  * * *

  David’s home was a sprawling high-ceilinged ranch built for an Akron homeopathic doctor in 1954. The architect had deferred to the bachelor doctor’s sense of style: modernism with a hint of refined hillbilly. Rock gardens sat on either side of the fireplace, used, currently, as rough terrain for a phalanx of plastic army men advancing on the kitchen. The walls lining the long hallway leading off the living room were coated in horse-hair paper, soft to the touch but frayed near the bottom where the previous tenants’ cat had rubbed against it. They passed Tanner’s room quietly. He lay snoozing in the middle of his bed, his knobby knees tucked under him, his butt pointed toward the sky—it was the only way he could sleep. At the end of the hall, through an oak door, was the so-called East Wing of the house.

  The East Wing was essentially two rooms connected by a wide threshold. David had converted the entire space into a workroom. Bookshelves lined the walls, many filled beyond capacity, paperbacks stacked three rows deep. Every so often the pattern of books was broken by Star Wars figurines David used for bookends. Han Solo kept a dog-eared copy of The Dubliners from slipping aside. Up front was a bar stocked with Dewar’s, some gin, and a mostly empty bottle of Jameson, a gift from Paul. The fulcrum of the two areas was occupied by a Tron arcade game, which, sadly, no longer worked properly—the laser cars could not be controlled and the contraption had a habit of shocking you whenever you maneuvered your tanks. At the far end of the East Wing was David’s desk, a monstrosity he’d found at an estate sale a week after his book broke The New York Times Top 15. Supposedly it had once belonged to the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald. David thought it might be cursed. The Edmund Fitzgerald was at the bottom of the lake. His wife was dead. And he hadn’t written a single page since he had paid five men to lug it inside. Mounted above the desk was the head of a brown bear, a curio that had come with the house.

  David lifted the front of the bar and stepped behind it. He fished a shot glass out of the cabinet above his head and set it down in front of his publisher. Into the shot glass went the rest of the Jameson.

  “Where’s yours?” asked Paul.

  “If I drink, I’ll lose my liver,” said David. “I’m up to a hundred and twenty milligrams of Rivertin a day. They tell me that if I drink on that, even a little, it’ll wreck my liver quick. Hell of a side effect, huh?”

  Paul blinked behind his glass.

  “And I’ve discovered that, to some extent, it was my anxiety that drove my writing. My paranoia. And now I never feel anxious.” David shook his head. “I’ve tried. All that comes out is trite garbage. I can’t write an original simile to save my life. It’s like … I dunno … it’s like I’m comfortably numb. No more panic attacks, no more night terrors. But no more stories, either. I can’t get to that place. And even if I wanted to come off it, I’d have to do it in stages. My shrink says it would take months to wean myself off the drug. So, when I say I can’t, I mean, physically, I can’t.”

  Paul upended the whiskey into his mouth. “Fuck,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  A long silence settled in. After a while, the sounds of a child stirring could be heard drifting down the hallway, squeaky springs under gentle weight, low grunts and sniffles. Tanner would be awake soon.

  “Look,” said Paul at last, “everything happens—”

  “Stop right there. Think about what you’re about to say.”

  “There’s a reason to things,” Paul continued. “I mean it. I don’t know why you were attracted to that story that gave you PTSD. But there’s a reason. Gotta be.”

  “You can’t say stuff like that to a guy whose wife drove her car into the side of a Dollar General at seventy miles an hour.”

  “The only reason you didn’t join her was because you were on the meds. Am I right?”

  David ignored him. “The universe is absurd. People want to make sense of it because we’re hardwired to find reason in the randomness. We look for patterns in the chaos. See omens in coincidence. We look at the random distribution of stars in the sky and pretend they look like animals, call them constellations. For some reason, we want to give meaning to the meaningless. If you go looking for the number eighty-eight, you’ll see it everywhere—the number of keys on a piano, the number of counties in Ohio—but it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Paul wiped a tear out of his eye. Impossible to tell if it was from laughter or from the sadness he felt for David, who no longer believed, who could no longer even write. “About the constellations,” said Paul. “I always thought that God put the planet here so we would recognize the artwork He wove into the universe.”

  David drew in a breath. He was about to say something more, but then his son spoke from the doorway.

  “Dad?” said Tanner. “I’m thirsty. Can I have a Fresca?”

  The boy’s head barely reached the doorknob, his dark hair crumpled and slept-upon. His brown eyes looked the size of half dollars below the ragged trim of his bangs. He was a skinny boy, four years old, with long arms and long fingers, piano-playing fingers. He looked more and more like his departed mother every day.

  “Think about it,” said Paul. “We’ve got time.”

  EPISODE TWO

  SPARKO’S TALE

  When David first met his wife—when David first really met his wife, because they’d been sitting in the same class for five weeks but had never had a conversation and she had never really looked at him, never considered him as a fellow human being—she hated everything about him.

  It was at Kent State, in the basement of the music department, in a classroom that smelled of wet chalk dust. The class was Music Appreciation or Music as a World Phenomenon or something. They both forgot in the years that followed. But they both remembered that she really did hate him there for a moment. Him and everything he was about.

  “Well?” the professor asked.

  They were listening to a CD recording of “Fanfare for the Common Man” piped out of the tinny speakers of the teacher’s stereo. For a moment no one spoke. The students avoided eye contact with their professor, lest they be called upon.

  “How does it make you feel?” the professor asked. “What emotion is the composer trying to evoke?”

  A suntanned young man in an armless T-shirt, sitting near the back, raised his hand. The professor nodded in his direction. “It makes me think of beef,” the young man said.

  Random chatter mixed with the deep sound of laughing approval.

 
; “Right, it’s from that beef commercial,” said the professor. “Anyone else?”

  From where he was seated, next to the door, David watched Elizabeth’s face shrink into a scowl, her bottom lip puffing out in a childish, yet sensual, pout. She was waiting for the professor to notice, he knew. He had watched her from this safe corner of the room since their first day of class, hoping to catch her eye in exchange for a smile. But she never turned in his direction. He had memorized the contours of her profile, that bump of an upturned nose, her round ears, attached at the lobe, holding back a cascade of straight hair the color of dying embers. She was, as those Eagles once said, “terminally pretty.” He had come to learn of her endearing idiosyncrasies, least of which was her desire—he assumed subconscious—for admiration and recognition. She finished tests ten minutes before anyone else. When it had been her turn to give a lecture on a major composer, she was the one who had picked John Cage and had actually scolded the poor boob who’d nodded off halfway through her presentation. She had flicked him, hard, on the right ear. But for it all, she was allotted a strange acceptance. David had been standing in the hallway, pretending to rifle through his backpack while he waited for her to pass by one day, and so had been present when the young man whose ear she had struck asked her to a movie. “Forget you,” she had said. David couldn’t stop the silly smile from stretching across his face as he remembered the way she had swished down the hallway without even looking in the jock’s general direction, leaving him stunned and downright weirded out. David lay awake often, wondering what it was about her that he was so drawn to. The only woman he knew who could be so cruel and lovely at the same time was his mother. The mystery of why Elizabeth thought she needed to keep her distance from the rest of the world attracted him. He craved her mystery. On some level, he suspected the search for that answer was more attractive to him than she was. He was smart enough to realize there was some perversion in that.