The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  “Fuck me,” said Elizabeth.

  “Soon,” he whispered. He brought the leather strap down across her upper legs.

  “David,” she panted. “David, not so hard.”

  He hit her again.

  “Ouch! David!”

  I’m going to make her bleed, the voice of Brune said in his mind. And I’m going to make you watch.

  Except it wasn’t Brune, he knew. No ghost, no ordinary psychosis could be this powerful. There were two explanations, he realized, and both options were equally frightening. This was either a complete nervous breakdown or …

  Say it.

  … or a possession. A possession by the darkness that haunted Brune’s box. That thing called …

  Beezle.

  He watched his left hand reach for the window latch.

  David focused his energy at the end of that funnel, on the vision of his hand unlocking the window and pushing it open for the diseased human on the other side. He willed himself to control that hand, like a quadriplegic might try to summon movement out of a finger. As far as he knew, he was trapped in his body forever unable to control himself, a bystander to another consciousness that now controlled his flesh.

  The homeless man leaned in the window and reached for Elizabeth. He reeked of rotted meat and somewhere in that ratty black jacket, David knew, was a knife.

  NO!

  With mad confidence, he stepped forward inside himself and, quite physically, felt his being push aside this Other. He fell forward, colliding with the man, who was already partway through the window. The bum reacted in fear and yanked his arm back out of the window with a low grunt. David slammed the window shut.

  “David, what the hell was that?” said Elizabeth. “Was that the window?”

  Shaken, still testing the limits of his repatriated motor skills, David didn’t say anything as he quickly freed his wife. She slipped the blindfold from around her head. She was sweating, panting from the unreleased tension.

  “Close the curtains,” she said, wrapping her arms around her breasts.

  He didn’t want to, didn’t want to go near that window. But he pretended that there was not a monster outside and forced himself to close the curtains. A quick glance revealed nothing but hedges and a single sodium light across the street illuminating the parking lot of a softball field.

  “If you want to finish what you started, I’m game,” she purred, offering to put one of the ties around her eyes again.

  But David just sat on the edge of their bed until she sighed and turned away. When she fell asleep he went into the bathroom and stood below the hot water until it turned tepid. Of course, there was no washing off the darkness.

  * * *

  In the morning, he waited for Elizabeth to leave for work, loaded the Brune files into his Sundance, and drove to a flooded rock quarry in Franklin Mills where teenagers built bonfires in the summer. Once it had been a community swimming hole, with a food stand and lifeguard towers, but now the snack shack listed to the side, its whitewashed walls gray and speckled where the paint had baked off. Claytor Lake, they’d called it. Private now. A good place to disappear cars. As good a place as any for an exorcism.

  With the care of a chef preparing a last supper, he hunted down the most perfect kindling from the surrounding woods and built up a pyre made of cedar and oak. It ignited on the first match and in a few minutes fingers of flame reached to the sun above. He returned to his car and lugged the box to the fire. Page by page, he fed the papers to the flames.

  As each new piece was destroyed, he regained a little courage. And he needed some courage before he could bring himself to do what came next.

  * * *

  “David, look at me,” said Athena. It was an emergency session and she had come in on her day off after he had called her cell phone.

  He did.

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder is serious stuff. There are veterans of war who come back and sometimes wake up to find they’ve accidentally bludgeoned their wife to death. Loss of control—these psychotic episodes, like the one you experienced last night, are not uncommon. Your brain chemistry is out of whack and that cannot be helped with therapy alone.”

  “I don’t want to be a zombie,” he said. “And if it was all some mental breakdown, how do you explain the homeless guy? Something summoned him to that window.”

  “David, in all probability the homeless man was never there. Just like Brune. Or Beezle. These things are not real. It’s your own voice you’re hearing inside your head. These are hallucinations. If they are allowed to progress, there may come a time when you will not be able to separate reality from the fiction you are creating. The world of your delusions will quietly replace reality. We have to help you, now.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I want you to go back to the Glenns. For a week, at least. I want you medicated. There’s this new drug, Rivertin, that shows promise for treating depression and anxiety. I was in on the trial study and if you really want to get better, this is the drug I’d recommend. It’s not something you can go on and then off again. Rivertin will get your chemicals balanced, but it takes time to prime your pump, to get your brain to start making those chemicals on its own again.”

  “How long?”

  “Years, David. Years.”

  “Will I be able to write?”

  Athena shrugged. “There’s no way to know. I’m sure that would be subjective and dependent on each patient. Will it make you think differently for a while? Yes.”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “Sure you have a choice, David. You can choose, today, to start getting better. Or you can choose to put your loved ones at risk. You could choose to let it go until you are no longer in control, until you no longer know that up is up and down is down.”

  He didn’t cry. He didn’t have it in him.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s …

  * * *

  … rock and roll,” said David, into the microphone set into the witness stand.

  “So you went away to a psych hospital,” said Synenberger. “How long?”

  “A month.”

  “A month. That’s a long time.”

  “It is.”

  “So you were actually still in the hospital when my client was arrested for these crimes after your old employer, the Independent, ran an excerpt from your book? A little essay that disgraced the Medina County prosecutor and forced the state’s attorney general to move the trial to Cleveland.”

  “Andy brought me a hard copy to edit from my room, in between group therapy sessions.”

  “You think because of your candor about your mental disorder the jury is more likely to believe your earlier statements about Mr. Trimble?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “But you fully admit that you wrote the book The Serial Killer’s Protégé at the height of your madness, before you sought treatment?”

  “I was in therapy.”

  “But not medicated.”

  “No.”

  “And we’re supposed to believe that a man whose own therapist warned him that he might confuse reality with fiction … we’re supposed to trust that that man was going after the truth?”

  “I never made anything up.”

  “Of course not,” said Synenberger. “Not on purpose.” He turned to Judge Siegel. “Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  Russo stood. “Redirect?”

  Siegel motioned to the floor. As Russo came out from behind his table, his young assistant returned with a manila envelope, which she handed to him. Russo passed it along to David.

  “David, would you please open that envelope and explain to the jury what is inside?”

  He unclasped the envelope and tilted it upside down. A piece of sixteen-millimeter film, four frames long, tumbled out.

  “Objection!” shouted Synenberger. “That is inconclusive and prejudicial. There is no way to determine who the girl in the photo really is or how old she may
be.”

  “You opened the door, Terry,” shot Russo. “We weren’t going to enter it into evidence. But since you started down this road, the jury can decide what it really shows.”

  “You’ve been given a lot of leeway,” Siegel said to Synenberger. “I don’t know why you went down that road, but it’s done. Go back to your table. Objection overruled.”

  Synenberger rummaged through a stack of papers at his desk.

  Siegel twisted in his chair to look at David. “Mr. Neff? Mr. Russo asked you if you recognized the object in your hand. Please answer his question.”

  “This is the piece of film I snapped off the reel that was in the yacht. It is four frames of sixteen-millimeter film that clearly shows Riley Trimble having sex with a blond girl who appears to be underage. I believe that girl is Sarah Creston.”

  * * *

  Two days after visiting Case Western, David loaded Tanner into the Bug and drove toward Lakewood, on the other side of Cleveland. It was a forty-five-minute haul, so he packed a few video games and a snack to keep the boy busy. He was taking his son to meet his grandparents for the first time, Elizabeth’s mom and dad, two people whom David had never met himself.

  Aunt Peggy, the sister of Elizabeth’s mother, had set it up for David. Had, in fact, been happy to do so. “Something that should have happened when Lizzie was still alive,” she’d said. Tacit in her statement was that it was partly David’s fault that it had not happened sooner. He did not tell her the real reason he needed to meet them now had more to do with the mystery of Elaine’s abduction than any family reunion.

  The O’Donnells still occupied the three-story Colonial on Edgewood in which Elizabeth had lived for eleven years. Elaine, ten. It was on the very west end of Lakewood, not far from the park. Ivy had taken three-quarters of the facade. Giant oaks kept it shaded during the hottest months. It was October now, and the wind cutting off Lake Erie was alarmingly frigid; the windows were already shuttered and wrapped.

  “Here we go, buddy,” said David, bringing the car to a stop against the curb out front.

  “Do they look like Mom?” he asked, eyes wide. Tanner unsnapped his belt and shimmied off his seat and out the door.

  “I don’t know,” he said, catching up to him and taking his hand. He was touched by his son’s fearlessness. This meeting was not awkward for him. That might make things go a little easier. “I’ve never met them.” Never even seen a picture, he realized.

  Mike, Elizabeth’s father, was at the door. He was a tall man with a full head of thick white hair. He wore a red sweater vest over a button-down shirt, khakis, and slippers. David thought he looked to be about sixty-five years old. Distinguished. A man with a quick smile for young children.

  “Hey ya!” he said, crouching down to Tanner’s height.

  “Hello,” said Tanner.

  “You look just like my little brother Tim.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Well, he’s fifty-eight now.”

  “Do I really look that old?”

  Mike laughed. “No. I mean, you look like he did back then, when we were little.”

  “Well, I’m not little,” said Tanner, who was conscious of his short stature, especially when he was among his library reading group peers. “I’m lots taller than some kids.”

  “Of course you are,” said Mike. “I can see that now.” Then, to David, “I see he’s inherited Elizabeth’s sharp tongue.”

  “No kidding,” David agreed. He shook Mike’s hand. Mike shook back firmly and met his gaze.

  “You better come in and meet Abigail,” he said. “She’s in back.”

  Mike led them through a large sitting room furnished with a mini-grand, two sofas, and a fold-out card table that appeared to be the battleground of some recent gentlemen’s poker night.

  “Your mother was an excellent piano player,” he said to Tanner, and as he walked past the piano his fingers glided across the keys. “Do you play, Tanner?”

  “No,” he said. “I have a recorder. And a harmonica. I can play the first measure of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar, but Dad has to help.”

  “Well, then you’re learning the essentials.”

  Beyond the sitting room was the dining area. A large table made of polished walnut took up most of the space, with just enough room left for a set of high-backed wicker chairs. A large abstract painting hung on the far wall.

  The kitchen came next: a high-ceilinged affair with two ovens, two dishwashers, two islands, and refrigerated units behind squarish wooden doors set into one wall.

  “Do you ever get lost in here?” asked Tanner.

  “Once,” said Mike. “And I’m still looking for the way out. So let me know if you find it.”

  A door at the other end of the kitchen opened onto a glass-walled twentieth century addition. On a wicker chaise, wrapped in a heavy blanket, reading a dog-eared copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, sat Abigail.

  “We have company,” said Mike.

  Abigail sat up and looked to her grandchild. She was a thin woman, her arms long and bony. Her hair held a hint of auburn and was twisted up with chopsticks. David saw some resemblance to his wife in her sunken cheeks and her diminutive upper lip. From behind thin reading glasses, she regarded Tanner sternly. “Come here, young man,” she said, pointing to the floor in front of her with one wrinkled finger.

  Tanner hesitated only briefly, then walked to her.

  “Turn around.”

  He did. When his back was to her, she winked at David.

  “Let me see your teeth.”

  He opened his mouth and waved his head around.

  “Are they okay?” asked Tanner.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “No concerns there. Now tell me, little one, do you know any poems? I delight in poetry. A fine poem always makes me smile.”

  “‘This is just to say, I have eaten the plums that were in your icebox and which you were prolly saving for breffast. Forgive me. They were delicious. So sweet and so cold.’”

  For a moment her sternness persisted. Then she chuckled. “Brilliant,” she said, reaching out and touching his cheek. “Williams is one of my favorites.”

  “Are you really my grandmother?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, how come I’ve never seen you before?”

  “That is a very good question for which there is no good answer. Silly grown-ups. Silly, silly grown-ups with their silly grown-up problems. I’ll make you a deal, Tanner. I’ll tell you all about it someday. But right now I have to talk to your father a bit. I have to talk to him about some of those silly grown-up things before it gets any later. Then we’ll all have supper. But for a couple minutes do you think you could go with … do you think you could go with Grandpa over there? He wants to show you the pool table in the cellar.”

  “Ever shoot pool?” asked Mike.

  “Never,” said Tanner.

  “Then I’ll show you some tricks.” He held out his hand and Tanner took it without a second thought and let his grandfather lead him out of the room.

  When they were gone, Abigail turned to David and removed her glasses. “You passed a wine rack on your way in. There’s a corkscrew hanging above it. Find us something red.”

  David obliged. As he returned, Abigail was lighting a thin cigarette with a match.

  “Do you smoke, David?”

  He shook his head.

  “Good. Bad habit. Especially with kids in the home.”

  He poured them each a tall glass, then sat in a wicker chair facing Abigail. She finished the cigarette, staring at the great lake outside as if she might be waiting for the Edmund Fitzgerald and its load of iron ore to come gliding into the harbor, just a little off schedule. When she finished, she picked up her glass with a shaky left hand and urged it to her lips.

  “I look back, David, and my biggest regret is not telling you about the history of depression and suicide that runs in my family. I feel that if I had, maybe
you would have recognized the signs…”

  “I was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the signs if she had been waving them in my face. I knew she was sad. Thought it was typical postpartum stuff. Then it was over.”

  Abigail nodded. “My uncle Steven was so determined, he took a bottle of aspirin, tied a noose around his neck, stood on the barn rafters, and then shot himself in the face with a Kraut handgun he stole off a dead German in World War II.”

  David waited for her to continue. He knew some things needed airing before he could start asking his questions.

  “I read your book, by the way. I watched the Dateline special on TV. Did she ever read your book?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a little too close to home,” said Abigail, nodding. She took another sip of the wine. “I’m so glad I got to meet Tanner. You have no idea. I know you probably hate me. That’s fine.” When he tried to reply, she waved his words away. “Hush. I know what I know. They were identical twins, David. She looked exactly like Elaine. It was hard enough seeing my dead girl’s face every day—there’s no closure with that arrangement, ever. But what was worse was her voice. Every time I heard her playing in the other room, talking to her My Little Ponies, on some basic level my mind always insisted that it was Elaine I was hearing, that she was back and her abduction had just been a nightmare.”

  “She knew your reasons,” he said. “She understood. But she didn’t accept it. I don’t think I could, either.”

  “I wonder,” said Abigail, eyeing him with something close to amusement. “I think maybe you could, if you found yourself in that situation. I bet you’d be surprised.”

  “Fortunately, we’ll never know,” he said.

  She looked away. “You’re up against the wall out there in Akron,” she said. “Read the papers. Read the blogs. Are you going to face charges in this man’s death?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. There’s a better suspect. I didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “One blog is saying the police found Elizabeth’s prints in the man’s house, somewhere.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Was my daughter stepping out on you, David?”