The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel

by James Renner

  “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

  “Dunno,” he said. “Make a cool B&B. Aren’t all those places supposed to have ghosts for the tourists anyway?”

  “I don’t think many people summer in West Akron.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe I’ll rent it to college kids.” He tugged her arm. “C’mon. Let’s check out the things he left behind.”

  A lockbox hung on the front door. David’s lawyer had given him the code this morning, after the sale was finalized for an even quarter-mil. He entered the code, withdrew the key, an old steel key heavy like a secret. It tumbled the locks and the door clicked open with an audible ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  To the right was a light switch, which David tried. It didn’t work, but it was high noon, and Akron was enjoying a rare cloudless day. The light through the curtains illuminated the rooms a bit. David led the way. Katy held his hand tightly and followed, keeping the door open behind them.

  They looked in the closet, at the boxes of mittens. David took out a reporter’s notepad and jotted down the name of the company written on the sides of the boxes—Nostos, Inc., Dublin, Ireland. He also took a pair of mittens and tried them on. They fit. Wearing the dead man’s mittens made him feel queasy, though, so he stuffed them into his pockets.

  He turned toward the foyer. On the hardwood was the dried blood of the Man from Primrose Lane, long streaks trailing into the living room, ending in a crimson stain the shape and color of a wax seal.

  The room had remained relatively untouched since the coroner’s team had removed the body in 2008; Akron homicide detectives had taken the notebooks about Katy along with a few other items in 2009. Stacks of paperbacks still lined the walls. Mystery novels, mostly. Everything from Conan Doyle to James Patterson. Some horror novels. Some do-it-yourselfs—Wordworking for Dummies, Guitar for Dummies, even something called Surviving the Apocalypse for Dummies. A copy of Ulysses, spiral-bound, open to Episode 10, rested on the mantel below a dark square that suggested a mirror once hung there.

  “It smells like the library at Roxboro Elementary,” said Katy. “Do you think he read all these books?”

  “I’d bet on it,” he said.

  A single painting hung on the western wall, a reproduction—likely illegal—of The Persistence of Memory, the one with the melting clocks and the weird dead fish monster that was supposedly Dalí’s self-portrait.

  They traced the trail of blood back to its place of origin: the kitchen. The blender was gone, but David recognized the outline of the machine in a pool of petrified blood on the counter by the window. Katy investigated the cabinets. The Man from Primrose Lane had labeled everything. There was a specific place for rice (brown and white) and peanut butter (crunchy and not) and spaghetti and soup. The fridge had a shelf labeled MILK and ICED TEA but had been overcome with some form of bacteria or moss that smelled of living death. They didn’t open the fridge again. Katy pointed to something on the fridge, a magnet in the shape of a cat. It held a letter to the door. David recognized the handwriting at once.

  Baby’s coming. I’ll be by to see you asap. Get your walks in. Keep a smile on your face. Loving you. E.

  Had the police missed it or had they taken a picture of it for the file and moved on? David didn’t know for sure, but he thought it had probably been overlooked. He’d almost not seen it. There was something to be said about hiding in plain sight.

  Inside, David felt the unfamiliar grip of doubt tickling his heart. Welcome, my old friend. He pushed it away. No time for that. “I can’t explain it,” he said to Katy. “But there is some explanation. I don’t believe she was cheating on me. You’d have to know her. She just didn’t have it in her.”

  “Not like me, you mean?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I didn’t, you know.”

  “I know.”

  There were two rooms upstairs, not counting the tiny bathroom. To the right was a small studio. An easel stood in the center of the room upon which hung a half-finished canvas that David suspected had been stretched and framed by the mystery man’s own hands. It was a surrealist expression of a still life—an egg, hanging in midair, like Dalí’s clocks. But this egg was black and large. It was set against a half-rendered background that looked a little like part of the Cuyahoga Valley, but one where the trees were not organic but somehow mechanical. His brushstrokes were almost nonexistent. This was the painting of a patient man.

  In grade school, David had loved art class. He was surprised to recognize a sudden longing inside himself for the feel of a paintbrush in his hands. And the smell. He missed this smell of thick paint and cloth. It was as he remembered Miss Wolf’s art room in fourth grade. How much he had forgotten about his childhood. What else had he once enjoyed? If he ever again had time enough to spare for a hobby, David thought he might like to paint again. Maybe even finish this painting, he thought.

  It was the only painting in the room. The entire studio was bare except for this single work-in-progress and a squat table on which rested a pallet of earth-tone oil paint, dried to stone.

  “Where’d he store the finished paintings?” asked Katy.

  David shrugged.

  The other room was a bedroom. Orderly. Efficient. Two button-down shirts hung inside the thin closet next to a pair of slacks and a full-bodied worker’s suit spotted with paint. Atop the dresser was a bottle of Old Spice from the seventies. There was nothing inside the drawers except a ratty pair of shorts and a dead mouse. The sleigh bed was covered in three layers of sheets that were once tan but were now a mottled gray. The headboard had been removed, David deduced, by the Akron police.

  David walked over to the bed and put his face into the pillows. He paused, nodded grimly. “She was here,” he said. “I smell her perfume.” His chest hitched. He sighed loudly and steeled himself as best he could. A single tear streaked down his left cheek before he could catch it. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry, David,” she said.

  “I really thought … I don’t know. Christ, this looks bad for me.”

  “You didn’t do it,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Innocent men are convicted all the time. Guilty men go free.”

  “Trimble got his.”

  “Did he?”

  The Man from Primrose Lane kept his treasures in the basement.

  The concrete floor was warped and cracked, pieces jutting out so far it looked like it had survived an earthquake or two. But everything appeared to be dry and he smelled no mildew.

  “I’ll have to fix that floor if I ever decide to sell it,” he said.

  “Might be easier to level it and start over,” said Katy. “I know a guy can get you a good discount on lumber.”

  “Funny.”

  The room was full of turn-of-the-century essentials: boiler, fireplace, coal bin, sink. Arranged throughout were half a dozen rectangular shapes shrouded in bedsheets, leaning against oak support beams. Canvases, no doubt.

  He pulled the linen off the painting closest to them, with a ta-da flourish. He had expected a landscape. He had hoped for a self-portrait. What he got instead was …

  “Oh, shit,” said Katy.

  It was a painting of a girl who appeared to be about ten years old. She had a round face full of sunshine freckles and red hair cut in a bob. She was seated in a ride called the Whirling Dervish. David recognized it from Cedar Point, an amusement park an hour west of Cleveland. He’d been there many times himself as a teenager. The girl wore a white halter that fluttered in the ride’s jetstream. Her eyes radiated youth and serenity.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Katy nodded, cringing. “Fucking creep.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah. That’s somehow creepier.”

  “Look.” David pointed at the bottom right corner. The painting had been titled, simply, Katy. “I think these are all going to be you,” he said. �
��You want to keep going?”

  “Definitely. I have to see if there’s one of me in here painted from outside my bedroom window when I was sixteen. I can’t wait to have nightmares about it.”

  But that was the only one featuring Katy. The next revealed two identical twin girls, hand in hand, walking down a sidewalk, sipping Icees from opposite hands. It was labeled Elaine & Elizabeth.

  “Apparently, this one is my nightmare,” said David. There was no question anymore. Elaine’s disappearance was linked to Katy in some way. The Man from Primrose Lane had known it before anyone else. How? How could this hermit with no friends have found a connection that had eluded detectives for decades? And why was he interested, anyway?

  “Actually, this one is,” said Katy. She stood by another canvas, a portrait of a young man standing in a parking lot, holding a candle. It was David at Kent State.

  “What the fuck, Katy?” His head spun. He searched for meaning and found none. Because what meaning was there? And yet, he wasn’t surprised to find himself in a painting, too. Not really. After all, wasn’t he also a link between Elaine and Katy?

  “David, I think … I know this. I … I think I was here.”

  “Yeah, I think you were.” He didn’t care to discuss having relived that particular memory during his withdrawals. He just let it be. It was to the point that she accepted this. “Apparently so was the Man from Primrose Lane.”

  The next one looked like an advertisement for some Dirty Harry movie. It was a painting of a police officer standing in front of an outdated cruiser, pointing a pistol at the observer. David saw the shape of someone sitting in the cruiser, but couldn’t make out enough detail to determine if it was a passenger or a prisoner. The car was parked on a bridge. It was night inside the painting, the darkness broken only by the headlights. What was the cop aiming at? he wondered, but he was glad whatever it was had been left out of the picture—this particular painting scared him more than the others for reasons he could not grasp. It was labeled Incident on Twightwee Road.

  “Where is Twightwee Road?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. But that cop looks mad.”

  Only two canvases remained. Katy walked deliberately over to the one propped against the far wall and yanked off the blanket.

  This oil-on-canvas was titled Tanmay. It showed a middle-aged man of Indian descent, dressed in a white lab coat, his arms crossed and a smile on his face. In the background was an oddly shaped building of metal and glass that appeared to be melting, a familiar architectural wonder to anyone who has lived in northeast Ohio for a spell.

  “That’s Case Western,” said David.

  “He shouldn’t be hard to find.” Katy pointed to the scientist’s name tag. It read DR. TANMAY GUPTA. PROFESSOR OF ENTOMOLOGY. “What’s entomology?”

  “The study of insects.” David braced himself. “Are you willing to trade in all these prizes for what could be behind curtain number six?” he asked.

  There was a man behind that last curtain. And this painting was not titled.

  It was, David realized at once, a passable police-artist sketch, but with much more depth and color. It was the face of a handsome man with shaggy hair pushed below the line of his forehead in a queer way. He wore wide glasses and was dressed in a Members Only jacket. His eyes were the color of the spring sky but harbored no emotion. His mouth was pursed in a thin slit.

  “That’s him, David. That’s the man who came up to me in the plaza back in 1999, the one that old man jumped.”

  He nodded. “And likely the man who took my wife’s sister. The only man who had motive to kill the Man from Primrose Lane.”

  * * *

  Later, outside the house, he put an arm around her and looked back at his investment. It stared back at him with black-window eyes full of contempt. He might own it now, but David was still—and forever—a trespasser here. Unwelcome. Whatever secrets the house held, whatever had happened inside, he was never supposed to uncover. This was something he felt deep in his soul and worked to ignore.

  “Am I being paranoid,” he said, “or were those paintings placed there after the fact?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Katy.

  “Well, I mean, how did the police miss them? Did they really never go down to the basement?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no reason for me to be in one of his paintings,” he said, so quietly it was as if he were speaking to himself. “I’m not some girl he kept tabs on. I didn’t even know him.”

  “Can we please go?” asked Katy. “I feel like we’re being watched. Can’t you feel it?”

  David scanned the streets. An expensive Cadillac idled across the street in a driveway a few houses down. Otherwise they were alone. He led her back to the yellow Bug. “Dr. Gupta should be easy to find, at least,” he said. “The Man from Primrose Lane thought he was important. The question is, why?”

  * * *

  “There’s no Dr. Gupta in Entomology,” said the receptionist at DeGrace Hall the following afternoon.

  David had taken Tanner with him since he couldn’t wrangle a babysitter on short notice. Katy was slinging coffee at Barnes & Noble, which was fortunate because David still felt funny about the idea of going someplace with both his son and his, what?… girlfriend?… not-so-secret mistress?… paramour? As far as he knew, she had not formally canceled her engagement. She wasn’t talking about that part of her life and he was not asking. Maybe soon, he thought. But not today.

  Tanner was happy to tag along and had dressed the part—in the basement he’d found an old fedora that had belonged to David’s grandfather. David had helped him craft a “press badge” to stick in the band. Tanner carried a large notepad and a pen with him as he followed his father, who toted his old writer’s satchel.

  It had been a while since he’d been to Cleveland, longer still since he’d been to Case Western Reserve University. The campus was situated on the east side of town, just beyond the ghetto, near the symphony and museums. It had the look of a New England prep school, dotted with brick and sandstone buildings lousy with ivy. There was, however, one glaring bit of modernity. In the mid-nineties, CWRU commissioned renowned architect Frank Gehry to design its new school of management building. Its melting steel structure and overabundance of glass always made David feel as if he were staring through a window into an alternate reality, where the laws of physics were just a bit different.

  But no Dr. Gupta. No surprise there. This case was an endless Russian nesting doll: twist one piece apart and you find only yet another, and inside that one yet another, and another, and another.

  “We have a Tanmay Gupta, though,” the receptionist said as they started to leave.

  David stopped. “Yes. Tanmay. That’s him.”

  “He’s not a doctor,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I’ve never met him.”

  “You’re in luck. He’s right down the hall, in 101. I’ll get him for you.” She exited the office and was gone for only a minute before she returned with a boy who appeared to be all of thirteen.

  A wave of vertigo washed over David. Though this was obviously not the man from the painting, this young boy felt familiar to him. He wouldn’t even call it déjà vu. More like the memory of a memory in a dream. Something about this moment was very similar to the brain storms caused by the Rivertin withdrawals. The present had begun to feel like an episodic memory.

  “You’re Tanmay Gupta?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” he replied in a thick and slippery Hindi accent.

  “You have a father named Tanmay, who’s a doctor somewhere?” he asked.

  Tanmay shook his head. “No, sir. My father, his name is Bevin. He resides in Mumbai.”

  “How old are you?” asked Tanner, raising his pen to his lips.

  Tanmay laughed. “I turn sixteen this year. I graduated high school in Mumbai at fourteen.”

  “And you don’t know any other Tanmay Guptas?” asked
David.

  “No, sir. Not in America, that is. It’s a fairly popular name back home.”

  “Weird. I’m a writer, right? And I’m looking into the death of this guy from Akron. He had this … okay, I know this sounds a little strange … but he had this painting in his basement of some doctor at Case named Tanmay Gupta.”

  “I know no one from Akron. I am sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Maybe it wasn’t Case. Maybe I got the university wrong.” But he knew that was untrue. The Gehry building had been in the background. No. It was Case in the painting, he was sure of it. And didn’t the man look similar to this young boy? Similar enough to be related? They must be. His mind tried to make sense of it, but his thoughts dissolved into white noise behind his eyes. It was too much to figure.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Tanmay said. “Sorry I could not be of help.” Tanmay shook his hand and then turned toward the door.

  “Just out of curiosity, what do you study here, Tanmay?”

  Tanmay turned back to the writer and his son. “I am studying the hibernation cycle of the cicada; how their biological clock is set, how they subsist for seventeen years underground before springing forth from the earth. I am not sure this information would be of use to your murdered man from Akron.”

  “No. I suppose not. I was just curious.”

  Tanmay nodded. “Of course, there may one day be real-world application for my work,” he said, defending his own apparent obsession.

  “What sort of application?”

  “If we can come to understand the mechanisms behind hibernation, perhaps we can apply that knowledge to the biology of man. It is, after all, such a long way to Mars. Astronauts, they have to eat so much. But if you could trick them into sleeping the whole time, you could save so much on supplies, not to mention cabin fever.”

  David felt a chill run through his body. He shivered. “Sounds like coma,” he said.

  “No. Very unlike coma. Coma we can induce. But coma patients must be fed. In true hibernation, the metabolism slows down such that the body may need very little energy to survive. And this energy may be extracted from the body itself or, quite possibly, from a liquid solution of nutrients into which it could be submerged. We all did this at one time in our lives. Think of the womb.”