The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  “And there are additional concerns. Let’s say you discover a way to survive inside this larger egg for two hundred years. You get out, save Lincoln, ta-da! Couple things: one, you’re stuck in 1865. There’s no way to instantaneously jump back into the future; and two, even if you could, it would no longer be the future from whence you came!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It would be the future where Lincoln survived. The one where you were born and never went back to save him because he was never assassinated. If you somehow managed to get back to now, to 2036, there would be two of you. There would be you, the man who traveled back to save Lincoln, and the other you, who never left because Lincoln never died.”

  “Wouldn’t that be impossible?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be a paradox?”

  Tesla laughed. “You watch too many old movies,” he said. “No paradoxes, Mr. Neff. The universe will not end if you decide to go back in time to kill your grandfather before you were ever born. You’d just have a dead grandfather.

  “You see, what happens is this. With every choice, the universe splits. Should I go to the theater or to the opera? Well, there is one universe where I go to the theater and one in which I go to the opera. That’s overly simplified, of course.”

  “Schrödinger’s cat,” I said.

  He nodded. “Schrödinger’s cat, exactly. As soon as an observer enters the picture, SPLIT! In one universe the cat is dead. In one the cat is alive. Point being, Mr. Neff: you can never go home again. Lincoln will remain dead in this particular universe forever. No matter what.”

  I felt unsettled. All this searching, only to find a solution that, what? Exiled me to another universe? That was the price of knowing who killed Katy Keenan?

  “It is, I’m afraid, a rather silly invention,” he said. “In reality, does it really change anything? No. No, I don’t believe so. But what a magic trick, right?”

  “Have you sent messages back to yourself?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said, unscrewing the top of the egg. There was enough room inside for a wadded-up piece of paper.

  “Stock market?”

  “It’s tempting, no? Actually, Mr. Neff, I prefer to exist along my own timeline. Playing around with history only muddles the whole free will idea. Do we have free will if we know every outcome? Isn’t it the mysteries that make a life worth living?”

  “It’s a beautiful machine, though.”

  Tesla considered the egg and then the pedestal. He nodded and reached out to the column and massaged its chalky top. “Yes,” he said. “It is rather sleek.” He ran his hand along the top and then, quite to his shock, as his fingers crossed the center, there was a tremendously loud popping sound and suddenly there was another black egg. “Oh, dear,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. Although I thought I knew.

  “A message,” he said. “Although I have no intention of sending one.”

  “I always thought Mallett was mistaken about intentionality,” I said.

  He didn’t hear me. Tesla was busy unscrewing the black egg while trying not to drop the other one in his hands. Inside was a scroll of paper. He unrolled it. He read the message and crinkled his eyebrows in confusion.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  “It says, He has a stunner.”

  “Oh,” I said, withdrawing the weapon from my pocket and pointing it at Tesla. “Yeah. I do.” I fired the electrical impulse at the scientist. It connected with his chest and dropped him to the floor, rendering him immobile, but conscious. The two black eggs he held in his hands fell to the concrete and broke into a million little pieces. “Impossible,” he whispered.

  I spun around but Ilsa was gone, on her way to alert the guards.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “The uniks will hunt you down.”

  “I’ll be gone before they find me.”

  “Where will you hide? The egg is too small to travel in.”

  I bent to him and looked into his steely eyes. “Dr. Tesla, I’ve gotten to know many scientists over the years. Most of them on contract to our government, just like you. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that what you show the public is about ten years behind what you have already shown your employers. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Look at me, Tesla. I will kill you if you don’t give me what I need. You’re right, it is over for me here. In fact, your only hope is that I’m right and you do have a full-sized vessel, somewhere, that you’ve designed for the black ops or whoever you’re building it for. Because if you don’t, I will kill you before they kill me. What have I got to lose?”

  I knew he could see I was not bluffing.

  “Through the door. The code is 161803.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Wait,” said Tesla.

  I knelt to him again. “Yes?”

  “If it works…”

  “Send you a letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “You bet.”

  * * *

  We arrived at my compound in Peninsula shortly after I finished telling David the story of how I came to be here and how I survived, a long story that I must dish out in six parts to you, dear reader, over the course of the last section of this memoir—I want to share with you what happened with David, with us, and how the matter of his search for the man who murdered his wife concluded. That, of course, is the narrative thrust of this tale, right? So let’s not stray too far from it. I only share my story with you at all because it does have some bearing on David’s destiny, as my future has an impact on his present. Cause and effect are all jacked up at this point, I know. I went through it and I barely understand it. I hope, if nothing else, you come to believe that what we call the present is nothing more than perception and the concepts of cause and effect are mostly pointless.

  So say it with me. “Fuck it.”

  Now let’s get back to it.

  * * *

  We arrived at my compound in Peninsula shortly after I finished telling David the story of how I came to be here and how I survived. If you’re thinking about disappearing in plain sight somewhere in northeast Ohio, you would be hard-pressed to find a better spot for it than Peninsula. This quaint village is tucked away between Akron and Cleveland, bordered by the Cuyahoga River, two ski resorts, and a system of limestone quarries. Because of the ruthless town zoning board, it cannot be built up or gentrified. It is stagnant in time, like living in the postwar Americana featured in some old Twilight Zone episode. My home is atop a tall hill surrounded by trees, in the middle of twenty acres toward the north end, lined by fencing and security cameras. My neighbors think I’m paranoid. They, of course, have not lived through the forcible eviction of five hundred thousand people from Cleveland, a half million pissed-off refugees looking for something to loot. Should I live to experience that again—which, incredibly, seems like a real possibility—I’d like to know my property is well protected.

  Aaron dropped us off at the front portico where Mr. Merkl, my sometime attendant, waited to welcome us inside.

  “Should I prepare the guest room?” he asked. Mr. Merkl was a funny round man with a long mustache that made him look very much like a walrus in a nice suit. A loyal man. He could keep a secret or two. And has.

  “I think our guest’s stay will be quite brief. Some dinner, though. And Brandy Alexanders.”

  “Right,” he said and disappeared toward the kitchen as we walked inside. Aaron was already pulling the car into the garage.

  David whistled.

  I laughed. “Well, if I’m going to live in self-imposed imprisonment, I might as well enjoy it.”

  The house was a sprawling three-story brick French Colonial. Five thousand square feet, not including the home theater in the basement. Lots of cherry and walnut and delicious wainscotting. My favorite place in the entire mansion was the upstairs bathroom with the claw-foot
tub. I pulled David into the smoking lounge, off the foyer. Tall bookcases full of guilty pleasures nearly entombed the room. Leather couches faced each other in the middle, between which sat a table made of tortoiseshell, its legs made of smaller taxidermied turtles all the way down.

  “Apple. Google. Bear Stearns,” I said.

  “Bear Stearns?”

  I had forgotten I had once been concerned for justice. I shrugged. “The good guys should make a little money, too.”

  For a moment neither of us spoke. So much had been said already.

  “Want to hear something strange?” I asked, falling into one of the couches as my younger self sat across from me.

  David looked worried. “How much stranger does it get?”

  “I don’t know how far it goes. How many times we’ve obsessed over an unsolved crime for decades, shanghaied a time machine, and ended up in the past to stop it. I’m here because I needed a solution to Katy’s case. The Man from Primrose Lane came back to find Elizabeth and Elaine’s killer—she would have died that day, too, if he had not interrupted the crime. But there are other us’s out there. I’ve seen one or two along the way, never sure if they noticed me or not. In a restaurant. At a gas station in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. But there must be more than that. People other than us who think to do something similar, for whatever reason. There must be, because every time I make an investment in an upstart little company I know is about to make it big, there are other third-party investors snatching up the same stocks. A day before September 11, I dumped a bunch of stock, put it into gold. You should have seen the returns that day. There are many other time travelers out there. A shit-ton of people dumped stock that day. Why are they here?”

  “Speaking of 9/11,” he said. David looked a little sore. “You came all the way back here to save one girl and you let 9/11 happen?”

  “I wish it was that easy,” I said.

  Mr. Merkl was suddenly there with the Brandy Alexanders. He set them down and announced supper would be served in half an hour—cucumber soup, bay scallops in white wine sauce over fettuccini.

  “Why isn’t it that easy?” David asked as soon as he left.

  I sipped the drink and considered him, sadly. I was, in many ways, the embodiment of his mental impairment, the obsessiveness he tried so desperately to conquer. “You remember Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Man from Primrose Lane arrived in time before that happened. He thought, like you, that he had a chance to do something that would benefit more than just himself and the family of a dead girl.”

  “So why didn’t he stop it?”

  “He thought he did. He called in a tip to the FBI. He went to Oklahoma City. He cut the wires McVeigh had rigged to his homemade bombs in that U-Haul. It still went off. Still killed a bunch of people, a bunch of kids.”

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. But it scares the shit out of me. Think about it. It means someone knew what he was up to and planned around it.”

  “Who do you think?”

  “I don’t know. The government? Tesla? How about this—how about one of us?”

  “Ugh,” he said.

  “Damn right, ugh.”

  “You think something similar happened on 9/11?”

  “I called in a tip. I called in a bomb threat to the Bangor airport.”

  “Why? The terrorists left from Boston.”

  “They did this time. Where I came from, they left out of Bangor. They altered their plan. I think they did that because someone knew I would call in the tip to Bangor.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s another reason we keep to ourselves. We don’t know who we can trust.”

  “What else is different this time around?” David asked.

  “Other than Elizabeth not being abducted? A lot. And there’s no way to know how much is because of me and the Man from Primrose Lane and how much was changed by other travelers. There’s the butterfly effect to account for, too. You know, go back in time, alter something small, and it creates a cascading of events that occasionally leads to some big, unexpected change. Mostly it’s little stuff—the Mexican restaurant by the mall never went out of business because there never was a salmonella scare this time around, there was an extra season of Scrubs for some reason. But then there’s the big stuff; here, President Bush never crashed into the ocean during that Mission Accomplished photo op, North Korea never launched a nuke into Tokyo in 2007. And what the hell is with the Red Sox winning the World Series? Tell me a time-traveling Southy isn’t responsible for that.

  “There are fewer murders here,” I continued. “There was this girl named Tiffany Potter who was murdered in 1989—”

  “Tiffany Potter, the actress? From Bay Village? The one in all those independent movies?” asked David.

  “That’s her.”

  David reclined in his seat. “My mind is numb,” he said. “Enough. Enough.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now we simply have to find the man who murdered your wife, the guy who shot the Man from Primrose Lane. This would be the same man, I’m convinced, who got away from us during Elaine’s abduction, who got away from us again when he tried to abduct Katy. We need to find this man before he kills another girl and this whole sick cycle repeats itself.”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do this whole time?”

  “Well, yes. I brought all the notes and case files on Katy’s murder back with me—a murder that, now, has never occurred. I have most of the notes here. Names of suspects, names of friends, information about everything the girl did the first ten years of her life. Unfortunately, the police took the rest from the crime scene. We had a crazy idea. The Man from Primrose Lane and I. We were collaborating on a book. I was going to write it. The Man from Primrose Lane was going to illustrate it—he spent his spare time painting, those last few years—you should try it sometime. That’s what those paintings were for. They were going to be illustrations for a book about Katy and Elizabeth’s cases, about our search. Only we would change the names and sell it as fiction. Sci-fi. It was a goof. Something to pass the time. We hoped maybe we’d spot something while going through all the old notes from the cases. But now, maybe with a fresh pair of eyes …

  “A fresh pair of eyes? I’m you.”

  “Yeah, but none of us ever solved a crime. You got Trimble. You were different. We thought you were going to break the cycle. None of us ever had a kid. But you did. And with Elizabeth! Tanner never existed before. Of course, then your wife discovered your older self from another timeline, you became obsessed with the death of this man, the ‘Man from Primrose Lane,’ and started a relationship with Katy, the other girl who should be dead, and, well, everything got fucked again. So here we are. I’m out of ideas. I think we can help each other. I really don’t want to go to my grave knowing you’re going to crawl into that black egg when you’re fifty-eight and come back again.”

  David nodded. “Okay, then.”

  “You know, the solution…” I began.

  “… is always elegantly simple,” he finished. “Do you really believe that anymore?”

  “I do. I’ve always felt we’ve been missing the forest for the trees. That the answer has always been clearly visible. We just don’t know which way to look.”

  * * *

  The oddest part for David was seeing the autopsy photographs of Katy Keenan, a woman he knew was alive and well. It left him dizzy, disjointed. He prayed that everything he was experiencing was not some dissociative fugue brought on by withdrawals. He didn’t want to wake up back in some padded cell at the Glenns.

  The images were grainy, color copies of photographs. She was ten in the pictures. Naked. Placed upon a stainless steel slab. Her body had remained relatively preserved thanks to dry weather. But there was no skin around her face. She had been stabbed in the neck and the wound had allowed for the natural process of d
ecomposition to claim everything above her shoulders. Her teeth and jaws jutted from the decay like a homemade skeleton mask taken from some carny’s haunted house. This was a woman he knew, a woman he had made love to. Somewhere, he must have realized, there were probably similar pictures of Elizabeth, brought back by the Man from Primrose Lane.

  I shared with him the particulars of Katy’s case. Where the newspaper reports left off, I filled in pertinent details. The discussion ended with a top-ten list of suspects, some of which I’ve already shared with you. That list was the best I had ever come up with and I wasn’t even sure if the man who murdered Katy was on there.

  “But you saw him, that day you saved Katy from being abducted,” David said. “Did he look like any of these guys?”

  “It happened so fast,” I explained. “All these guys sort of look similar: white guy, bushy hair, glasses, round head, of Eastern European descent. Hell, our guy looks like half the population of Parma Heights.”

  “Yeah, but you saw him.”

  “For about five seconds.”

  “And you can’t say for sure?”

  I shook my head. “The closest, I think, is this guy.” I tapped Burt McQuinn’s photo, the elementary school principal. “But I can’t be sure. I followed McQuinn around for a while, after I interrupted the abduction. He never changed his routine. He didn’t seem to be a guy who had been caught in the process of committing a crime. When I made a point to let him see me in a convenience store, he acted like he didn’t recognize me. So, I don’t know.”

  “Any other similar murders around this guy? Where is he today?”

  “Still in Cleveland Heights,” I said. “I haven’t found another murder similar to Katy’s—or Elizabeth and Elaine’s. Here’s what I think happened. This guy, in this timeline, abducted Elaine, but was interrupted before he got Elizabeth. So he thinks maybe the intervention of the Man from Primrose Lane that day at the park was a coincidence, and after awhile he stalks Katy. When he goes to take her, he’s interrupted again! He’s interrupted by a man he must believe is the same dude who interrupted his first abduction. He knows now this isn’t a coincidence. What must he have thought? How could anyone else know what he was planning? Obviously, he wasn’t going around sharing his plans with people. He doesn’t know what the hell is going on. So he lays low. And then, what? He happens to be in Akron, maybe drives down the road as the Man from Primrose Lane is coming back from a walk, and recognizes him as his archnemesis? He kills him so he can start stalking again? Maybe Elizabeth was there when he went to the house with the gun. This case is a lot of maybes.”