The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel

by James Renner

  Finally, the Austrian finished.

  For a moment no one moved.

  And then Elizabeth stood and walked out of the room. The crowd parted to let her through. The Austrian sat quite still, staring at the book of music.

  “I’m done,” he said.

  He meant forever.

  In Belize, the Austrian disembarked and was never heard from again.

  * * *

  Elizabeth did not return to their room. She wandered around the ship for the better part of an hour, aimless, past the tucked-away cigar lounge, past the crew’s cabin, where a number of Brazilian women played table tennis on an old coffee table, past a massive laundry, until she found herself on a little deck at the very back of the boat that passengers were probably never supposed to find. The deck was empty. For the first time since she had boarded the Elation, there was no sign of human life, save for a slim bikini top slung over the back of one wooden deck chair. She stepped toward the railing.

  Ever since the day Elaine was taken, Elizabeth had resigned herself to the cold random reality of the world, in fact had embraced this view as a way of surviving. In this world, there was no room for petty optimism. And maybe that was all right, she had thought. Maybe instead of hope, she could orientate her life using probability.

  Unlike her twin sister, who had painted a still life of bananas at the age of six that could have hung in a SoHo gallery and been mistaken for an early Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth had always excelled in math, delighting in the way complex numbers fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose picture solved for x. By the time she was six, she’d recognized the formula of the Rubik’s Cube, and had taught herself how to fix it blindfolded if someone told her how many times they had twisted it. More than anything else, she loved probability. She loved watching shows like Deal or No Deal and knowing that half of America was watching with anxiety when Howie Mandel asked the participants if they would like to switch their case for the last one held by the model onstage, when all along she knew and understood mathematically why there was a higher probability that the larger prize would be in the model’s hands and that the participant’s best bet was always to switch out. In college, she had taken David to Atlantic City, where there were still a couple casinos that played two-deck blackjack, and taught him the basics of counting cards. She applied this pleasure to her day-to-day routine. Before making a run to the grocery store, she charted out, in her mind, the probability of an accident, based on the time of day (how many people would be on the road? was it a weekend? had school just let out? was there a local sports game or concert?), the condition of the road (had it just rained or snowed? was there construction in the area?), and the reliability of her vehicle (had David taken the Sundance and left the old Cavalier? when was the last tune-up? how old were the tires?). Then she would consider the necessity of taking such risk (can I do without peanut butter until the weekly trip to Giant Eagle? will the sauce still be palatable without the sherry?). Finally, she would weigh the probability of an accident against her need for the groceries. If that answer was somewhere south of an average person’s daily risk of such an accident (which she had come to approximate, through newspapers and experience), then she would make the trip. She used similar formulas when buying a new car, trying a new restaurant, buying Christmas gifts for David, selecting a new song to download, applying for a job, etc., et al. And sure, you could say we all do this to some extent. But very few of us do it this precisely. In numbers, she found a slight advantage against the randomness of life. The Austrian was a bug, a worm, a flaw in her system of computation. What Elizabeth had heard in the piano bar was hope. And hope frightened her. Because hope suggested that the odds could be beaten. Hope suggested that the simple act of wanting might lead to safety and happiness. That, of course, was not acceptable. It would not compute. Because she had wanted Elaine to be alive and that’s not what had happened.

  The sea was black glass, shattered by the wake of the giant boat. On the horizon she saw another cruiser, destined for ports unknown, just globes of light at this distance. She listened to the churning of the propellers.

  Three wooden posts ran horizontally across the open deck, providing a low railing. Elizabeth held on to the starboard wall and stepped onto the first rung.

  She weighed the probability that anyone would see her (there were no cameras, no one above had the right angle to see where her body would connect with the ocean), the probability that if someone did see her, the boat could send a lifeboat in time (simple equation of velocity and mass of the cruise ship and reaction time of the captain divided by her willingness to drown). The odds were heavily in her favor.

  Elaine’s kidnapper had known about probability, too, hadn’t he? He must have studied their movements for weeks, she had come to realize, learning their routines and waiting for that right moment when the odds of getting away with the crime were as high as mathematics would allow. How else could you explain it? There was always someone else in that park. Except for just then. How else could he have gotten away with it, if he hadn’t planned it precisely? Of course, there had been a variable in the equation—the man in the Cadillac. Elizabeth had spent many sleepless nights as a child pondering who that man had been; how he had known about the abduction and why he had never come back to tell the police or her family what he knew.

  She climbed onto the second rung.

  This was inevitable, she thought. An equation with one solution, its first factor that man in the van who stole her sister. The only variable in that equation was time. But in this equation, time was not a constant. Time was the measure of her life as she waited and hoped for Elaine to come home, the time it took to accept this would never happen, the time it took to understand that her sister was dead, the time it took for her to love David, the time it took for her to realize he was really better off without her. Time was as long as she could hold on.

  She stepped onto the top rail and leaned forward.

  And then something seemingly random occurred.

  “Elizabeth.” A man’s voice. From behind.

  She turned and there in the doorway was an elderly man in a Panama hat.

  “Elizabeth, come down,” he said.

  She shook her head defiantly.

  “Elizabeth, come down,” he said again. “Please.”

  “Why?” she asked. “What do you care?”

  “Don’t you recognize me?” he asked, taking off the hat. Underneath, his hair was thin and white. She imagined what he might look like with darker hair and a few less wrinkles and—and then yes, she did recognize him. His appearance here was no accident, but she could make no sense of it, either.

  “You were there,” she said at last. “You were the man in the Cadillac.”

  The old man held out his hand. “I’ll tell you everything I know if you just come down from there.”

  Elizabeth took his hand and let him guide her back to the floor of the deck. They stared at each other in silence for ten seconds. Twenty, thirty. Finally, she smiled.

  “It’s so warm out here,” she said. “Why in the world are you wearing mittens?”

  * * *

  He was in the bathroom, wiping off shaving cream and checking for nose hairs, when Tanner brought him the large ball bearing that was actually sort of a key.

  On Tanner’s third birthday, David’s father had bought the boy Mouse Trap, the board game, the one where players build an elaborate trap that is set off by a chain reaction of tilting and twisting mechanisms triggered by a rolling ball. Tanner had taken it upon himself to improve upon the original design. Using Tinkertoys, a funnel, and cardboard tubes he’d fished out of the recycle bin, Tanner had extended the trap by several feet. One day David had come home and the trap had taken over the kitchen. Tanner placed a red plastic ball into an old wrapping paper tube and there was a pleasing low percussive sound as the ball rolled down the length of the tube and spit out the other end, into a funnel which he’d duct-taped to the dining room table, and
then onto a stack of books the boy had tilted so that the ball was inclined to collide against the boot of the Mouse Trap game, where the rest played out as intended. It had taken David a moment to realize that the emotion he was feeling just then was fear, and another moment to figure out why. He had been frightened by the look in his son’s eyes, that extreme focus that could only mean tunnel vision, obsession overriding physicality. He knew the expression well because it was the same one he made when he got locked into a piece of writing, a sort of vacant comatose stare that had unnerved Elizabeth so much she had made him write in the back bedroom when they had lived at the apartment in the Falls, just so she didn’t have to see him like that. “Your zombie stare,” she’d called it. Perhaps it was genetic. In the morning, he moved the Mouse Trap into Tanner’s room. And little by little, Tanner improved upon it some more. The act of creating almost seemed to be driving the development of his mind, instead of vice versa. David even helped, when Tanner asked him to, or offered his input when Tanner ran out of fresh ideas. And now Tanner’s room was one giant Mouse Trap, a machine that still was started by placing a ball in a tube—in this case a one-pound extra-large ball bearing David had found at a garage sale in Kenmore.

  “Dad,” said Tanner. “Let’s do the Rube.” The Rube, as in Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist who had once imagined such similar trifles for the newspapers of the early twentieth century. A framed copy of one cartoon hung above Tanner’s dresser—David had found it online.

  David led Tanner back to his room. These days it took the better part of an hour to reset the Mouse Trap and it was never, ever used for purposes of actually playing the game anymore. This was serious business. What it really was, was art, David had come to realize. Let the other kids make macaroni reindeer. This was what his kid did.

  Scanning the room, David noticed his son had been tinkering with some improvements.

  “What’s it do?” he asked.

  “It’s a surprise,” Tanner said.

  Hesitantly, David lifted the ball bearing to the car track resting atop the dresser.

  “One, two, three … go!” yelled Tanner.

  David let go.

  The ball bearing shot down the track, picking up enough speed to roll around a tall loop before coming down the far side, where it disappeared into a tunnel. A second later, it came out the other side and collided with the handle of a broom that had been placed upside down against the nightstand. The business end of the broom fell forward, yanking a string that wound through a small pulley. The string was attached to a Tinkertoy that was propping open a spring-loaded pint-sized baseball bat. The Tinkertoy was pulled away and the bat swung a little too hard against the “play” button of a stereo that Tanner had rigged to play one of his father’s Jethro Tull CDs. “Aqualung” blared from the speakers as David watched the Tinkertoy rod continue a gravity-powered pendulum that brought it in contact with the lead domino in a methodically placed arrangement of brightly colored little bricks that, as they tumbled into each other, spelled out DAD. The final domino fell against another spring trap that released a plug in a bucket of sand. As the sand fell, the bucket rose in the air, lowering the shoe attached to it on the other side of yet another pulley. The shoe touched off another series of mundane but impressive devices that ultimately launched a stuffed cat across the room, where it fell through a basketball hoop and set off the original Mouse Trap endgame. Just before the trap lowered, though, Tanner reached down and pulled the mouse from underneath. David never questioned this habit—he understood his son well enough now to know that he would have felt genuinely guilty if anything he had constructed imprisoned something.

  “That was spectacular, kiddo,” he said, though he still felt a little unnerved. “Thanks,” said Tanner. “It took all day.”

  “Your best yet. Can you reset it for Aunt Peggy?”

  “Why are you leaving so much? Do you have a job again like Travis’s dad?”

  David turned his face sour. “It’s just some writing. Some reporting like I used to do…”

  “… when Mom was around?” he finished.

  “Yes.”

  “Was Mom pretty?”

  “You know she was. I tell you all the time.” Did his son sense, somehow, David’s true intentions for the evening? On some level, yes, David thought he did. That the boy was protective of a mother he never knew was both touching and troubling in some way.

  “Tell me how she was pretty.”

  “She was pretty like the sunbeams that dance through the windows in the morning.”

  “Aaaand?”

  “And pretty as an angel’s daydream.”

  “She was sooooo pretty…”

  “… that if you looked up ‘pretty’ in the dictionary, it would say…”

  “… Tanner’s mom.”

  “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”

  * * *

  “Can I make a confession?”

  “Sure,” said David. They were sitting in his Beetle, in the parking lot of the Diamond Grille. Katy had removed the cat ears. Her hair lay straight against her shoulders except for a few strands she had clipped around behind her head like some hippie tiara. She smelled like cheap shampoo and peanut butter. From the moment he had opened the door for her back at the apartment, she had been chewing at the nail of her left index finger. It was still at the corner of her mouth and he wondered, distantly, if she should be concerned about the amount of nail polish she surely must have ingested over the years. The first thing she’d done upon entering the car was turn his stereo to 91.3, the local independent music station. She’d sung along with an obscure Tori Amos song he’d never heard before. She wore a green dress over black stockings and a Ramones T-shirt. He knew she had never really listened to the Ramones. In spite of all this he found himself staring at her lips.

  “I hate the Diamond Grille,” she said. “Okay, not hate. Hate’s a strong word. The steak was good, actually. But last time I was there I sort of tongued a state senator. A married state senator. Or he tongued me. Anyway, we tongued. And if we go in there, that’s all I’m going to be thinking about and I’m afraid it might ruin the interview or whatever it is we’re doing.”

  “So, Larry’s, then?” he suggested.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know Larry’s. But yeah. Anything but here.”

  Other than her appearance, Katy was nothing like Elizabeth. Completely opposite polarities, Katy was the positron to his dead wife’s electron. No universe and no man could possibly withstand their combined forces. But both could be lovely on their own. Perhaps, he thought later, it was her differences that drew him in. Nothing about her reminded his heart of Elizabeth and so it didn’t hurt him when they were together. And that was something new.

  Twenty minutes later, they were seated at a booth inside Larry’s, a small hardwood bar on Market known for its fried mushrooms and paninis. The owner decorated the place with around a hundred framed photos of customers wearing clown noses. David wanted to know what had started this tradition but had chosen not to ask because he didn’t want to ruin the mystery. He had thought up his own explanation, that on the day the bar had opened, a clown had walked in after some Saturday afternoon birthday party and died of a coronary after eating a bowl of fried mushrooms and this was the owner’s way of keeping the clown’s ghost from haunting his bar.

  “What’s with the clown noses?” asked Katy, looking at a photograph of Don Plusquellic—Akron’s mayor-for-life—wearing a Bozo nose, hanging on the wall to her right.

  David shrugged. The waitress came with beer—Dortmunder for him, Stroh’s for her—and then returned to the kitchen to check on the ’shrooms.

  “Soooo,” said Katy.

  “So,” he agreed.

  “Don’t you have a tape recorder or a notebook or something?”

  “Nah. Whatever I don’t remember, I just make up.”

  She smiled thinly.

  “If I decide to use any of this, I’ll call you up and get it on the record. I�
��m still fishing around on this. Not actively reporting yet.”

  “Sounds like a clever way to make me feel comfortable.”

  “You should have been a reporter.”

  “I could’ve,” she said. “Ask away, Woodward.”

  “Did you know the Man from Primrose Lane? Ever met him?”

  “Don’t think so. But the detectives tell me I must have crossed paths with him a few times. Except … they showed me some of the man’s biography or whatever on me. And there’s a couple things in there that he couldn’t have known. I mean, no way was he there. Like, for instance, there’s details in there about a summer camp I went to out on Kelleys Island one summer. A 4-H thing. It was a small deal. Twenty kids. Five counselors. I know them all. I can tell you, he was not there. And there are details—what I ate, shit like that—from a vacation I took to Florida when I was eight. We stayed at my aunt’s house on Perdido Key. It was the off-season. We were the only ones around. He could not have known that stuff. The detectives believe he followed me around my whole life, observing almost everything I did. I can’t explain it, how he knows all that stuff, but I’m almost positive he wasn’t following me. He couldn’t have been. He doesn’t even look familiar.”

  “What else did the detectives ask you?”

  “They just wanted to know if I ever remembered seeing him. They showed me a photo of him. But he didn’t look like anyone I remember. But maybe I did see him when I was really young. I don’t know what I’ve forgotten, you know? But he’s not someone who I saw enough of that I would recognize him. They even hypnotized me.”

  “Did that do anything?”