The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  I nodded. I knew what he meant. “How many trips to Loveland since you’ve been here?”

  The Man from Primrose Lane said, “Eight. But sometimes there’s no one there.”

  “I don’t want to think about that.”

  “No. I know.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  “I’m still looking for him.”

  “I’m familiar with Elaine O’Donnell’s case,” I told him. “It’s quite possible there’s a connection.”

  “I’m sure he’ll kill again if he gets the right opportunity.”

  “Do you want to help me get him?”

  The Man from Primrose Lane didn’t say anything for the span of thirty seconds, a long time in a room like that; I could hear the squirrels in the walls. “I don’t know if I can trust you,” he said.

  “What the hell do you mean? You’re me.”

  “No,” he said. “Not quite. Very different experiences shaped us following the events of 1989, when I saved Elizabeth and the universe split in two.”

  “Well, how different could we be?”

  “How’s Cleveland?”

  “Empty.”

  He nodded.

  “Why don’t you trust me?”

  “Been thinking about that day in the park when I tried to save the two little girls. I had all the time in the world to prepare. I thought I had plenty of time. I was still late. Though it’s possible he was early. And if he was early, the only explanation is that he knew about me. I think…”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s possible we’re tracking a time traveler. I think it’s possible I might be tracking myself.”

  “Come on. We couldn’t do that. We wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  “Didn’t you see the guy?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Did he look like us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. But I couldn’t see him well enough to tell if he was wearing makeup. Hell, if he came from the future, he could have used one of those Morph-tronic plugs Hollywood was abuzz about in the twenties.”

  “Well, it’s not me.”

  “No. I mean, I don’t really think so, I guess.”

  “Besides, it’s never that complicated.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s got to be someone you’ve overlooked. Some regular Joe with a deep dark side.”

  “I know the profile,” he said. “But I should have had plenty of time to save the girls. I don’t know how to explain that.”

  “How did the other us’s do? Did they stop their crimes from happening?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. They never came back to tell me how it went. We tend to keep our distance.”

  “I’ve got another problem.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at my knee. “You’ll need ID before you go to the hospital. Can it wait?”

  “The bleeding’s stopped because of that black junk, I think. But it hurts like a motherfucker.”

  “You’re three years early, too. Those eggs don’t work so well over long spans. Something gets jiggered in the process. There’s like turbulence or something. One fella we picked up was actually two days too late. Imagine that. Poor guy. Jumped off the Y-Bridge.”

  “Do you have someone who can help with identification?” I asked.

  The Man from Primrose Lane held up his mitten-covered hands. “Got a man in Pennsylvania. It’ll cost you. Course, I could lend you some money. Would that be a soft-money exchange? Would they call it laundering if the feds knew?” He giggled. “The only thing all those movies and books got right is time travelers really can make a killing on the stock market.”

  “When can we…”

  “I’ll have Albert take you in the morning,” he said. “Let me show you to your room.”

  “Actually,” I said, “do they still make ham and pineapple pizza around here?”

  “Of course,” said the Man from Primrose Lane. “I’ve got a deliveryman who leaves it on my doorstep if I set out the right amount plus a five-spot. I think he thinks I’m a leper. I always see him wiping his hands when he walks back to his car.”

  * * *

  Uncle Ira lay in a beige hospital bed inside the wing of Akron General reserved for the hopeless. I stood with David in the hall, peering through a large window into his room, at our mother, sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. This sight, I should say, struck me as quite odd, given the fact that our mother was not his kin. I had always believed Uncle Ira was a Neff, our grandfather’s brother. This day, we were learning, was full of revelation.

  On the drive to the hospital, David had called our father to see how he was dealing with the news, only to be greeted with indifference.

  “Is the rest of the family already there?” David had asked.

  “Why would they be?” our father had responded.

  “It sounds pretty serious. I believe he’s brain-dead. Someone from the family should be there to make decisions. Why wouldn’t you guys want to be there? He was your uncle, for God’s sake.”

  “What?”

  “What, what?”

  “He’s not my uncle.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re not related.”

  “But we called him ‘Uncle Ira.’”

  “He was a good friend of your mother’s a long time ago, when you were born. Your mom told you to call him ‘Uncle Ira.’”

  “But he looks like a Neff. That nose.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “But we’re from Ravenna, David. Everyone from Ravenna looks pretty much the same.”

  David and I didn’t discuss it but I’m pretty sure we were thinking the same thing and wishing it wasn’t, couldn’t, be true.

  Our mother looked up, saw David, and came to the door, shaking her head and her long raven hair as if to compose herself.

  “Come in,” she said.

  David stepped toward the door and I remained in place, glancing around at the hospital art.

  “Both of you,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I asked. My good knee suddenly felt as wobbly as the lame one.

  “I know who you are,” she said.

  I tried to speak, but something caught in my throat. Once, many years ago, I had sat in this hospital and watched our mother die from the effects of an aneurysm that would occur in March of 2016. I missed her so, even if I sometimes wondered if she wasn’t the real reason I fell in love with women I could never save.

  “Then I would very much like a hug,” I said.

  “Of course, David,” she said. “Of course.”

  * * *

  “I first met him in 1967, when I was nine,” our mother said. “I was walking home from school, down Water Street, and this old man grabs my arm and drags me into this abandoned mill. We were covered in this white dust but he was sweaty, so there were patches of wet around his chest and under his arms. He smelled like … like spoiled oranges. Something about that smell scared me more than anything else. It was like I could smell his intention and I knew he was going to kill me. After he was done with me.

  “But just as he’s got me against a wall and started to reach under my skirt, this other man shows up. From nowhere. He grabs the old man, pulls him off me. And I watched…” She paused to stifle a sob. “I watched Ira kill the man. Strangle him. ‘He needed killin’ or he wouldn’t stop,’ he told me. ‘He would have killed you, but not soon.’

  “And he left me there with the dead body and eventually I walked to a pay phone and called home. The police told my parents that it was a couple drifters. One had killed the other. Simple as that. Must have been a drifter that killed him, they said, because the man didn’t stick around to explain himself or take credit for it.

  “When I was sixteen, I was walking out of a movie theater in Canton when I literally bumped into him again. He was alone, coming out of the same movie. I was with a friend. I recognized him immediately, which he saw. ‘Are you living a
good life?’ he asked me. I told him I was, thanks to him. ‘Good,’ he said. I asked him out to coffee, the first time in my life I ever asked out a man, and he thought about it. He looked about fifty years old then. Old enough to pass for my father. He told me that would be okay.

  “So we started meeting. Once a month, at Brady’s, in Kent. We started sleeping together when I was nineteen. That was my doing. All my doing.”

  “You were with my dad when you were nineteen,” said David.

  She laughed in a way that raised the hackles on my neck. “Ira was very clear that if we were going to have that kind of relationship, I still needed to date people my own age, to treat him like he didn’t really exist. ‘Don’t count me in your decisions,’ he used to tell me. He should have told me who his father was but we never talked about his personal life. Said it was full of stupid pain, that the only thing he ever did that amounted to anything was saving me.

  “Well, everything turned upside down during the blizzard of ’77. Your father and I were at your grandmother’s cottage out on Berlin Lake. Stranded for three days. Nothing to do but eat, sleep, and, well … you know. A few weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant. Figured you were conceived during the storm. I was so excited, I went to Ira’s house with the news. He was so happy for me that he cared to ask about my boyfriend. When I spoke your father’s name his skin went dead white. I thought he’d had a heart attack. I was so frightened by that reaction, and he was so numbed by the … revelation, that he told me everything.

  “He told me he was a time traveler. That he’d been a writer who had obsessed over my unsolved murder for decades and he had traveled back through time, giving up his real life to find the man who had killed me. Except that wasn’t enough of a shock, right?”

  David’s skin was pallid now. My heart beat so loudly I heard it in my ears.

  “‘Fearful symmetry,’ he called it. Ira’s own father was my boyfriend. In the timeline he’d come from, Ira’s father had married some lady named Mary. Mary had given birth to Ira. By saving me, Ira changed all that. Ira’s father, your father, met me instead of this Mary.”

  David shook his head. “So, Ira is my … what? Half-brother?”

  Our mother ignored David and looked over to me. She assumed correctly when she figured I had the years and experience to see a little further than my younger self. “I think it’s a little worse than that,” I said.

  She nodded and looked away.

  “I don’t get it,” said David, looking at me. “What?”

  “Ira is actually our father,” I said. “Isn’t he?”

  She began to cry. She couldn’t look at us. But she gave a muffled, “Yes.”

  The man on the bed, the man who, genetically, was akin to a half-brother, was also our real biological father. Which made the man we had always believed to be our father … our grandfather? It was enough, I thought, to break my mind.

  The slow drone of the machines kept the quiet away until the doctor came by to turn them off. Uncle Ira went with a soft sigh that sounded like relief.

  * * *

  On the way out, David stopped by a kiosk inside that dark wing of the hospital to sign for Uncle Ira’s body to be transferred to a funeral home, where it would be cremated without a service. Our mother had it in her mind to spread his remains along the banks of the Little Miami in Loveland, as if it were some ancient rite that might settle the souls traveling backward there. She said she was going to take some sage with her to burn.

  David caught up to me in a hallway full of drawings made by the hands of child cancer patients, an unsettling place. “Look at this,” he said, holding up a clear plastic bag. Inside were Uncle Ira’s personal effects: his bolo tie; a severely wrinkled pack of Marlboros; his wallet, containing a little over $5,000 in cash; one of those pens you can turn upside down to see a woman lose her bikini. Also inside was a sealed envelope labeled: Davids.

  “Great,” I breathed. “Open it, then.”

  David did. It was a college-ruled piece of writing paper. His eyes scanned it and he whispered, “Hurm.”

  “Read it to me,” I said.

  “‘David. Forty-five years ago I let my obsession take my soul. It was as complete as any demonic possession and just as dangerous. I allowed it to happen, piece by piece, welcomed it even, because I thought it was for the greater good. It was not. Too late, much too late, I have come to realize that all I have done was pointless. I thought I was increasing the good of the world, when, if anything, I added to its misery. Everything happens for a reason, David. I now believe that if you try to alter fate, you will be damned just as I am. Let it go. Whatever you’re doing, whatever adventure has led you to be charged with murder, let it go. If they lock you away forever, be thankful that your imprisonment might cause this endless cycle to finally quit. I thought you might be different, having solved your case, having Tanner. But it has become clear to me, watching the news, seeing you with that other you, that you have caught the bug that eventually leads us to repeat this all again. Please forgive me. I could not bear the torment. So sweet and so cold.’”

  David folded the note and stuck it in his pocket.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He smiled, but it was a sad smile that wore down his face and made him look five years older. “Is this where we’re all headed?”

  “What, suicide? Fuck that. Erin is still out there and I want to see how it ends.”

  “He wanted me to die in prison.”

  “Then fuck Ira, too.”

  * * *

  I wasn’t the only one who thought that David would never see the inside of a prison cell. Larkey was waiting for us in the hospital parking garage, smoking a Pall Mall as we approached. His eyes grew wide as he got a good look at me without my disguise.

  “Motherfucker!” the man yelled. “I’d think he wasn’t dead if I hadn’t seen the corpse. You have to be his twin.”

  “This is ex–Special Agent Dan Larkey,” David said. I played mum.

  “Am I right?” he asked David. “I’m right, right? Twin brother?”

  “He’s related,” said David.

  “Fuck me,” shouted Larkey, stamping out his cigarette. “Who is he? I mean, who was the Man from Primrose Lane?”

  “I don’t think I have to say anything to you without my lawyer,” said David.

  “What if I said I came here when I heard of your uncle’s suicide, that I came here at the urging of my wife to tell you I don’t believe you killed anyone?”

  “Is that true?”

  Larkey nodded.

  “Why the sudden change of heart?”

  “I’ve worked homicides for thirty years. You get a feeling for the cold types. The wife-murderers. The serial killers. I had you pegged as a cold SOB, but you’re not. You’re as confused as we are. I saw that at the McNights’. As a detective, you look for the easiest possible solution. I asked myself, what’s the simplest answer? That the Man from Primrose Lane was murdered by a famous author after he learned his wife was having an affair with him, that the author then staged an elaborate car crash but left the Man from Primrose Lane bleeding all over the house? Why cover up one and not the other? It’s impossible to ignore the resemblance between Erin McNight and your wife. The Erin McNight crime occurs as soon as you’re arrested for Elizabeth’s murder? Fucking weird, right? I believe the real killer was waiting to see what would happen with the murders out on Primrose Lane. For more than four years, he was waiting to see if he got away with it. When he saw you arrested, he knew he had, and he immediately went after his prey. Isn’t it much more likely that one man is responsible for the murder of three women—Elaine, Elizabeth, Erin—who look so much alike? Yes. It’s always the simplest answer. End of speech.”

  “And Sackett?”

  “He’s going to need some convincing,” he said. “But his case is falling apart. Ballistics came back on your nine-millimeter. Doesn’t match. By the way, it didn’t take us long to figure out it’s your prints on the gun
and the toilet and not the prints of the Man from Primrose Lane, like he figured. That puts you at the scene, sure. But my guess is you have an explanation for that, too.”

  “So you’re here to help us?” I asked. “To work with us to find this girl?”

  “No,” said Larkey, standing up. “I mean, you can work on that if you want. We’ve got a task force of a hundred and fifty agents sweeping through northeast Ohio looking for her. If you have some solid leads, I’ll take them. But no more busting down suspects’ doors.”

  “Then why are you here?” asked David.

  “I’m here to protect you.”

  “From who?”

  “When it rains it pours, man,” said Larkey, rubbing his neck. “I’m protecting you from Riley Trimble. He killed two orderlies at the nuthouse and escaped earlier this morning.”

  EPISODE SEVENTEEN

  COMING HOME

  Back in 1996, I needed a doctor and a new identity.

  Albert arrived at the house early the morning after I met the Man from Primrose Lane. We climbed into the back of the Caddy. “To Bellefonte,” he told Albert. As we headed for western Pennsylvania, the Man from Primrose Lane shut the privacy shield between the front of the car and the back.

  “What’s in Bellefonte?” I asked.

  “The man who makes our IDs.”

  “He knows who we are?”

  “Of course not. Men like Frank Lucarelli attract attention. Better he never sees us.”

  It was going to take me a while to learn everything he had about obfuscation and misdirection.

  “Are we going to have Albert make the deal, then?”

  “No,” said the Man from Primrose Lane. “I’d never send Albert into such a dangerous situation. I have someone else in mind.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  He smiled. “As you may have figured out already,” he said, “I am not the first Dread Pirate Roberts. Not the first one of us to live on Primrose Lane, not the first Joe King, as it were.”

  “Another one of us gave you his fake identity?”

  He nodded. “If you take a good look at my papers, you’ll find that I’m supposed to be eighty-five, though I’m not quite that old. I arrived here in 1986 and was picked up out in Loveland by a young man named Tyler Beachum, Albert’s uncle. He brings me to the house on Primrose Lane, where I meet the man who lived there, just like you did. He’d come back to stop the murder of a young woman which had occurred in 1971. Point is, he’d made a solid deal with the Irish Mafia out in Philly, IDs in exchange for stock tips. He got me up and running, introduced me to his associates, transferred Joe King’s identity to me, and then put me in charge of keeping one eye and ear on Loveland at all times.”