The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  “It’s cruel.”

  “She’s a big girl.”

  It was useless arguing. So bullheaded I’d been. No wonder I had had so many wives. Only a woman as steely as Elizabeth could keep us in check.

  Five minutes after eight there came a light knock on the door. I followed David to the entryway, hobbling forward on my cane, feeling older than ever—in fact, I was no longer entirely sure how old I was. I always got confused when I tried to do the math. Since I did not age during the hibernation, I should have been about seventy. But I looked older than that. Certainly felt older. Maybe I had aged a little in the egg. A year for every seven, perhaps.

  He opened the door and there she was in a cotton dress that reached her ankles. Her hair was tied up in a bit of ribbon. When she saw David, she growled and jumped onto him, grabbing him around the waist with her long legs. She wore black Crocs, I saw. Katy planted a kiss on his lips and then hopped down. “Hello, David,” she said.

  “Hi,” he panted.

  She looked over at me, and for the first time in many years I felt that excitement in the pit of my stomach I used to get when spotting a beautiful woman across the room, one I wanted to dance close to at a wedding reception, in the dark, where we could whisper introductions into each other’s ears.

  “Hello,” she said. “You must be David’s father. I can see the resemblance! Holy cow, you guys look a lot alike.”

  Katy shook my withered hand. “Hi, Katy,” I managed to say. “Are you hungry? We have supper waiting in the kitchen.”

  “I’m famished,” she said.

  As we walked to the kitchen at the back of the house, she marveled at the paintings and tapestry.

  “Holy fuck, this is a big fucking house,” she whispered, taking David’s hand.

  We sat on stools around the island. David and I ate the rigatoni warmed up a bit; Katy ate hers cold. She was telling a story about how her father was angry with David, asking me what I would have done if a daughter of mine had run off with a famous author a few months before a wedding, when she suddenly stopped midsentence.

  “I know you,” she said.

  We let her work it over.

  “You’re so familiar. Your voice, too. Did you ever live in Cleveland Heights?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Huh. Ever come into the Barnes & Noble at Chapel Hill?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’ll come to me,” she said. “It’s right…” Her eyes widened in true horror. She backed away from the island, stumbling against the refrigerator. A copy of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” fell to the floor. She looked at David.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Kate, it’s okay.”

  “But you’re dead,” she said to me. “You’re that guy from the plaza, the one that beat up the other guy. You’re the Man from Primrose Lane. You’re dead!”

  David stood up and put an arm around her.

  “He’s not your dad,” she said.

  “No. He’s not. But he’s not the Man from Primrose Lane, either.”

  “So, his twin or something? Somebody help me out here. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  “Have a seat,” said David, pushing her toward the stool. She obliged in a dreamlike way.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m David Neff,” I said. “I’m him, in about forty years. I came … I came back in time to save you. That man from the plaza took you and killed you. I came back in time to stop that. But he got away.”

  Katy looked at David, her eyes welling up with tears of frustration and anxiety. He nodded.

  “That was the short version,” David said, leaning close to her, pulling her eyes to his with a comforting look. He put a hand on her chin, letting her feel him, know that he was there and all was safe. “Katy, do you want to hear the entire story?”

  She swallowed. “I … I always knew there was something. I’ve always, my whole life, I’ve felt like I was standing on the sidewalk under a piano tied up in a rope that was about to break. This. None of this ever felt real. I always felt like I was cheating, just living. I did. Holy shit, David. How long have you known?”

  “Not long,” he said. “It’s okay if you don’t want to hear it right now. Do you need some time?”

  “No,” she said. “Give it to me. Tell me what was supposed to happen.”

  * * *

  It took the better part of an hour to finish the tale. By then we’d consumed the pasta as well as a bottle of wine. Katy listened intently to every word, interrupting here and there for more detail. When I was through, she and David took a breather on the wraparound porch while I cleared the dishes. I felt a pang of jealousy but brushed it aside with some concerted effort.

  It had stopped raining and the stars were out. The air smelled like a riverbank, like renewal. David leaned against the railing while Katy fished inside her purse for an old cigarette. She put a Salem in her mouth and lit it with a lime-green gas station lighter.

  “It’s like one of those dreams, the ones where you’ve done something so wrong it’ll change your entire life and when you wake up you feel grateful that you’re still okay,” she said. “But I’m not waking up from this one, ever. Why did you tell me?”

  “I’d want to know if I were you,” said David. He watched her draw in the smoke, her mind inward, searching. “Did I do the wrong thing?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  She was quiet for so long then that David knew what she was going to say when she started talking again. “I can’t be with you,” she said.

  “Why? Because it’s too strange now?”

  Katy shook her head. “It’s against nature. It’s not right. It was never meant to happen.”

  “Maybe it was,” David said. “Maybe we all have a … a destiny or whatever. And maybe, if we have free will, maybe the only thing that can alter that is ourselves. People. Maybe this is what was supposed to happen if that man hadn’t abducted you originally.”

  “And what about Elizabeth?” she asked. “What was her destiny?”

  In truth, he hadn’t thought about that. Elizabeth’s death was so real to him he hadn’t considered, in light of the revelation of her murder, that she had a destiny cut short, too.

  “You see,” said Katy. “Your life has become so convoluted, you can’t tell what it was meant to be anymore.”

  “I haven’t tried to change history,” he said.

  “But you want to,” she said. “I can tell. Didn’t you listen to him? Again and again and again this happens. Elizabeth, me, now this other girl, Erin. What if she’s dead, too? Will you become so obsessed with finding her killer that you’ll go through the same routine all over again? Get back in the time machine, come back, live this weird hermit life? When is it over?”

  “We’ll find this guy,” he said.

  She sighed. She took his hands and looked him in the eyes. “You think you will. But you never do. That’s the point of this whole thing. It’s endless. You have to stop it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “That’s why I can’t be with you, David. I’m going back to Ralph, if he’ll take me back. I’m going to forget most of this, if I can. I need to.”

  “Is that going to make you happy?” he asked.

  “It will. In time. He’s a good man. I was happy before I met you.”

  David nodded. He averted his eyes. He looked out at the universe and imagined a world out there in which this conversation was not taking place. “I love you,” he said.

  “Don’t say that,” said Katy.

  Through the window, I watched her go. She didn’t look back at him and she never waved goodbye to me.

  David stayed the night, wrapped in a blanket on the couch in the den, surrounded by his ex-girlfriend’s homicide file.

  I wanted to hug him. Tell him everything was going to be all right. But that felt weirdly self-indulgent. And so I went to bed and cried some, too.

  * * *

  We
got an early start the next morning, with few words passing between us over a breakfast of bagels and lox prepared by Merkl. We arrived at St. Sebastian’s Home for the Criminally Insane shortly after ten o’clock.

  The hospital was a sprawling brick enclave surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence near Tappan Lake, in central Ohio. It had been the county hospital until 1975, when the state swooped in and snatched it up to house inmates too dangerous to live among the general population at Mansfield and Grafton. There were separate wings for those criminals committed by the state and civilians committed by private institutions pushed beyond their means to deal with their unique troubles. Its only entrance was a double gate controlled by two sentries.

  A guard waved us inside the paddock, where we waited in the Cadillac while the first gate closed behind us with a shudder and the second one opened. There was but one space for visitors, directly in front of three cameras, beside the entrance to the main building. Through the barred windows on the second floor, bald men in orange jumpsuits watched our every move. One of them was jumping on his bed. A floor below him, a woman rubbed her breast against a window.

  A skinny woman in a taut gray suit awaited our arrival on the front steps. She had straight black hair, freshly clipped, and she pursed her lips when she saw my cane. An insurance liability was all I was to her.

  “You didn’t say anything about a companion, Mr. Neff,” she said by way of a greeting.

  “This is my editor,” said David. “John McGuffin. John, this is Renee Habersham.”

  “You really should have cleared this with me.”

  “Is it a problem? Because I’d be happy to speak with the director if you—”

  “No problem,” she snipped. “This way.” Habersham turned on her dangerously tall heels and clunked toward the doors. We followed slowly and she had to wait for us every few feet until she was rolling her eyes openly at my feebleness. To be honest, I did play it up a little. “You’ll have to check your satchel, Mr. Neff,” she said as we reached a security checkpoint at the beginning of a long dark hallway.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said David. “The whole point of our visit is to go over the documents I have in here, with Riley Trimble. You’re welcome to go through it if you like, but I’m sure you’ll find no contraband. This was all okayed by your supervisor yesterday.”

  “Well, I’ve never allowed reporters through with their equipment.”

  “Oh,” said David. “I see the misunderstanding now. I’m not a reporter. I’m a writer.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Yes. Writers get to take their shit in there.”

  Habersham recoiled. The surprise only lasted a split second before it was replaced with cool loathing. “Very well, Mr. Neff. You seem to know your way around. I have priorities of my own to attend to.” With that, she walked away.

  “Aren’t there safety instructions we need to hear?” asked David.

  “No,” she said, without turning around or slowing her pace. “We only do that for reporters.”

  “You always did have a way with women,” I said.

  “Tell me she doesn’t remind you of our stepmother,” he said.

  “A little.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, come on, then, let’s go talk to this homicidal maniac.”

  * * *

  At the far end of the corridor, a long hallway that smelled of watery diapers, a bald man in a blue jumpsuit sat by himself, staring out at Lake Tappan beyond a wall of glass. His ankles were cuffed. His left wrist was secured to his chair. He bit at the nails on his free limb. He turned to us as we entered.

  Trimble’s frame had withered, his body a shell clinging to his skeleton. His veins stuck out from his long neck, like baby snakes wrapped in cheesecloth. There were open sores on his face. His eyes registered no emotion, those black-as-charcoal eyes. He smiled. A large toothy smile full of rivulets of drool.

  “David!” he shouted. He tried to get up, but the chains snapped him back into the chair. “David! I’m so glad you came to visit!”

  “Hello, Riley,” said David, sitting in the leather armchair nearest the serial killer.

  “My cat told me you were going to come see me soon.”

  “They let you have pets in here?”

  Trimble put a finger to his mouth. “Shhhh.”

  I took a chair beside David, measuring the man, trying to gauge how much was game and how much was real.

  “Riley, another girl is missing,” said David.

  Trimble laughed loudly. “Not me, not me, Your Honor! Not me! I been locked up tight. You put me here.”

  “I didn’t put you here.”

  Trimble looked sincerely confused. “No?”

  “No, Riley, you did.”

  “Right!” he said. “Right, right, right.” He clapped a hand over his mouth. “Shouldn’t have said anything. Mom told me not to. But you tricked me. You … you trickster, you.”

  “Doesn’t it feel better now that people know? Now that you’re not hurting people anymore?”

  “It feels better when I take my pills! One pill makes you smaller. One pill makes you tall! Yessir. They got this one, ooooooweee. Rivertin. Good shit. Good fucking shit!” He leaned forward in a conspiratorial way. “But they forget to tell you that your pecker stops working.”

  “Riley, I need your help. Do you want to help me? Do you want to help a little girl?”

  “A little girl?”

  David looked uneasy. If we showed this killer Erin McNight’s picture, were we then somehow responsible for what Trimble might do with that information?

  “Show me,” he said. “Let’s see. Is she pretty?”

  David looked at me. I knew what he was thinking. I shared his concerns. But we had few leads. It was worth a little risk, wasn’t it? I nodded for him to continue.

  David opened the satchel and took out Erin’s school photo.

  “Oh, yes,” said Trimble. “Purty. Wow. Nice freckles. Sun-kissed. Love that.”

  Over the next couple minutes David told Trimble the particulars of the case as we knew them. Trimble listened intently, but never looked up from the picture.

  “A serial killer,” he said. “You think it’s a serial killer. You do. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. So where’s the others? Show me more. Don’t hold out.”

  Reluctantly, David fished inside his satchel for the photos of Elaine and Katy.

  “Okay, I see. I see. A redhead killer. Did you question Charlie Brown? Ha! I always preferred blondes, you know. The Redhead Killer. Sounds like a book. Are you writing another book, David? Are you out to trick this guy, too?”

  “This girl is still missing,” said David, pointing to Erin’s picture. “She might still be alive. If you help us find her I’ll make sure people know you helped. I need you to think about the man who did this. Do you have any idea who took her? Who’s been stalking these girls? Did you ever meet anyone out there…?”

  Trimble took another look at the batch of photographs. I noticed a look of recognition spread across his face like a wave, and then it was gone, shielded. He’d seen something. Some clue we had missed. Then he turned the photographs around, one by one, and pretended to examine the back.

  “Spending a lot of time trying to solve this one, David?” he asked tauntingly. “How long will you keep digging before you give up?”

  We both knew the answer was forever. Trimble, it seemed, believed that was a kind of sentence in itself. He smiled at David, handing the pictures back.

  “Are you done?” David asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any ideas? Any theories? Where should we be looking?”

  “Why?” asked Trimble. “Are you going to transfer me to some secluded nuthouse on the beach? Why don’t you let me out of here?”

  “You put yourself here, Riley.”

  “Of course I did. Of course.”

  “Are you going to help or not?”

  “The problem wi
th you is you were never willing to put yourself in my shoes. Never willing to consider what it felt like to be me. That’s a lack of empathy, my friend. A sociopathic tendency.”

  “I don’t want to have sympathy for a serial killer.”

  “Look at those pictures, tell me what you see.”

  David flipped through the photographs. “I see girls with red hair. Freckles. I see a man’s fetish.”

  “Now look at them again,” said Trimble. “But this time imagine that these girls are not girls, but women, and your only reason for living is to find them and have them. How would you do that? How do you find such specific specimens?”

  David considered the picture of Erin for a minute, then put the photos back into his satchel. “I don’t want to do that, Riley. I don’t even think I can.”

  “You know you can. That’s why you’re afraid to try.”

  “You’re not going to help us?”

  Trimble smiled. “I’ve helped you already. But I’m not going to do all the work for you.”

  I had grown impatient with the games. “Who is it, Trimble?”

  For the first time, his gaze turned from David to me. Looking into those dark eyes was like trying to look at negative space. “Who are you?”

  “His name’s John McGuffin.”

  Trimble giggled. “Oh, okay. Right.”

  “Trimble, tell us what you know,” I demanded.

  “You know, I was not nearly as obsessed with those girls as you were,” he said, turning to David again. “Isn’t that ironic? Those girls don’t haunt me. They haunt you.”

  “Come on,” said David, standing up.

  “Wait!” said Trimble. “How many people have you found who knew each of these girls?”

  “A couple,” said David. “A handyman. A principal, maybe.”

  “Then I’ll tell you that there’s at least one more,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “You’re looking but you’re not seeing. Let me out of here, David. You could do it. Yes, you could. Let me out and I’ll get him for you tonight. Isn’t Erin worth that much?”

  “Riley, you had yourself committed. All you need to do is walk out the door.”