The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel

by James Renner

  There were other things to consider. What if somebody came by the place where I had parked the egg? Say, in 2003, when I was still hibernating inside and traveling backward through time? Would they see the egg at all? I had seen the little egg in Tesla’s laboratory, so I thought they would. Could they open it and ruin the whole experiment? When their arms entered the egg, would the limbs be ripped from the person’s body and sucked into the past as their torso remained anchored to the present?

  I had to find a place that no one would have visited between 1999 and now, 2036. But how are you supposed to find a place that no one knows about?

  I was standing outside Tanmay’s house, leaning against the Cushman, which had been recharged and re-tired, thinking about these terrible things as I checked my rucksack for the last time. I had packed $50 in change—mostly quarters—from the time period, as I figured paper money would surely deteriorate; flint and steel wool in a small metal box; a laminated topographical map of Ohio; various notes from Katy’s case file, wrapped in plastic and shut tight inside another metal container (in hindsight, I guess I could have put the money in there). That’s when I happened upon the inside pocket, a secret pocket I had not used for so long I had utterly forgotten it existed. Something was inside.

  I could smell the earthy sweetness of old tobacco, an exotic aroma these days. (Congress finally outlawed nicotine products in 2018.) If I was caught with this pack of Marlboros I would face a $2,500 fine. Of course, if I got caught now, that would be the least of my worries.

  In the glove compartment of the Cushman, I found a pack of matches behind a wad of napkins. The matchbook was from someplace called the Spitfire Saloon and looked as old as the cigarettes. The first one snapped off, but the second match lit. I touched it to the tip of the crinkly Marlboro and inhaled deeply. A small flame remained on the very edge of the cigarette tip, but it seemed to work just fine. I felt the hot smoke singe the lining of my lungs. The pain was welcome and tolerable. It reminded me of my very first cigarette, of which I had partaken inside the musty confines of Jake Johnson’s canvas tent during a summer at Camp Ritchie in 1989. That first taste had been just like this.

  Camp Ritchie had closed a year later and the Boy Scouts of that district were transferred to the new camp down the road a pace. Old Camp Ritchie was still there today, a creepy ghost town of a summer camp, its latrines and dining hall covered in a thick coat of kudzu vines. There was some reason the land could not be developed, something to do with the local water table. I had seen some pictures of the ruins on the lesser net a couple months before, on the site of a group of ghost hunters. State had purchased the property from the scouts and put up NO TRESPASSING signs, but the ghost hunters snuck in easily enough.

  I took another drag and smiled.

  * * *

  It took nearly five hours to drive from Vermilion to Camp Ritchie, in Loveland. A long time alone in the night. I listened to the satellite feeds of the brazen assault on Tesla Laboratories. A spokesman for the NFBI kept telling reporters that what I had stolen was a prototype for a new thermal generator. They said I planned to sell it to Canada on the black market—President Soros never missed an opportunity to promote hostility along our northern border. Around two in the morning, the spokesman reported that the uniks had taken me down in Toronto, and Canada was refusing to acknowledge the event. A military response was being weighed. And so it goes.

  In the darkness, I thought, too, about the old legend told by firelight on the shores of Lake Donahay, at Camp Ritchie, “The Ballad of the Loveland Frog.” According to the older scouts who took turns telling the story, a mythical and ancient creature roamed the woods around Loveland and along the Little Miami River. In the days before white men, the Shawnee Indians spoke of a monster that looked like a frog but walked like a man. It was covered in a slimy black ooze and was impervious to pain. They called it the Shawnahooc, or “river demon.” Adding credibility to the story was the tale of the Loveland police chief who, they said, was murdered by the monster when he came upon it lying on the side of Twightwee Road in 1986, electrocuted to death by some laser weapon the frogman had in its hand. The Loveland Frog, the older boys said with remarkable authenticity, liked to eat little scouts who wandered away from their troop.

  The story had terrified me as a boy.

  I pulled onto Twightwee as the first rays of my future-most sunrise peeked over the foothills of southern Ohio. The brush had grown up since I had last passed this way, but it was still recognizable. I was nostalgic for the summers spent here, smelling of briny lake water, entire days spent exploring the forests. I almost wished I could go back far enough to see it again. But then, Tanmay had already set the timer, hadn’t he?

  Just beyond the bridge on the Little Miami, a quarter mile from where the tall-timbered entrance to Camp Ritchie once stood, I brought the Cushman to a stop. For a second I worried about what to do with the vehicle, thinking if someone found the Cushman, they might search the woods and find the egg. Then I had to laugh. Forget the Cushman. Let them search. The egg—with me inside it—would have vanished by then, as it traveled backward through time.

  Once I got the black egg off the truck bed, it was surprisingly easy to maneuver. The ground was soft, a bed of nettles, and it rolled manageably between the rows of towering pines.

  How far in should I go? I figured far enough so that the vehicles passing by on Twightwee wouldn’t be able to see it from the road. Once I lost sight of the pavement through the trees, I went another hundred yards to be safe. Safe from what? Fuck if I knew.

  I came upon a wide pine and hoped placing the egg behind it would ensure a little more than a modicum of safety. I was momentarily surprised to find what appeared to be another black egg propped up against the back of the tree. But then I remembered Tesla’s demonstration and relaxed. This, of course, was my egg, already traveling backward through my timeline.

  I carefully placed the egg against the pine. It was absorbed by the egg already resting there until they became one in appearance, but two in reality. One in wave form. It made my head dizzy.

  My heart raced as I fingered the lever that unlocked the time machine. The top drew back with a long hissssssss. I placed my satchel snugly under the wide cushioned chair that took up most of the space inside. Then, with some effort, I climbed in.

  It felt nice. Still, sitting in the same position for thirty-six years had to cause nasty bedsores. Had Tesla or Tanmay taken that into account? I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Tanmay’s hibernation cocktail prevented every kind of infection but I had a horrible image in my mind of waking up with an abscess where my ass once was. Did the machine roll or wobble to prevent that? Tesla must have considered this and built something into the lining to stimulate muscle retention, right? But I didn’t know for sure. The egg didn’t come with an instruction manual.

  There was an odd smell, too. Almonds. Some kind of antiseptic in the lining of the fabric? Maybe.

  I took a minute. I was quite concerned, to tell the truth. I imagine I felt much like those first astronauts who strapped themselves to the tops of intercontinental ballistic missiles rigged to go into space instead of go boom, but boom they sometimes went. I knew there was a decent probability I could die in that egg, my body traveling back through time for … how long? It didn’t need juice to run. Just to start and stop. So, really, if the machine was noncorrosive and sealed airtight, could my remains hitch a ride to the moment of creation? Actually, this was a somewhat comforting thought. At least my death would be some kind of adventure.

  “Stop.”

  My hand on the hatch, I looked up. Ten feet from the black egg was a policeman, dressed in black. He had gray hair and a white beard. His sidearm was drawn and pointed at me. A nameplate on his breast said CHIEF EVERETT BLEAKNEY, III.

  “You’re that man from the news, David Neff.”

  “I am.”

  “Mind telling me what you’re doing in Loveland, sir? And what this thing is?”
/>   “It’s a time machine. I’m going back to 1999 to stop a little girl from being murdered.”

  His brow furrowed. “Step slowly out of the machine, Mr. Neff.”

  “I won’t. I’m sorry,” I said. “You can see I’m unarmed. This machine is no threat to you. You will not shoot me.”

  “Get out!” he shouted.

  I pulled the hatch down. As the world was shut out, I saw him rushing toward me.

  With a dull THUNK the lid closed. For a moment there was darkness, and then there was light, a dull glow from behind the fabric. There was a hisssss as the hermetic seal shut tight. A mechanism clicked on and began its perpetual job of scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air and converting it into breathable oxygen. The sheriff beat against the egg. I needed to hurry, in case he could damage it. Had he followed me? I wondered. Or had he somehow known where I was going?

  I secured my right arm into the contraption Tanmay had rigged with the antidote and timer, which, I saw, was counting slowly backward. With my free hand, I withdrew the hypodermic needle from the leather case and popped off the top. The liquid inside was a fuzzy yellow. With little hesitation, I injected Tanmay’s cocktail into my vein. I let the needle drop to the floor.

  Then I clicked open the little cover over the toggle that controlled the egg. It was in the “forward” position. I clicked it down and snapped the cover back into place.

  The lights dimmed. The pounding from the outside seemed to slow down, then stop, then begin again for a few moments. These new beats were strange and odd-sounding, like an echo of a sound. Somewhere, I heard my own voice twisted in reverse, “Eeem atoohush atawun li-aw oouh.”

  A few minutes later, all was silent.

  I was wondering when I would feel the effects of the medication when I realized I could no longer move my head. Seconds after that, my vision blurred and I knew nothing more for years and years and years.

  * * *

  David pounded loudly upon the door to Harold Schulte’s shitty little apartment in a forgotten corner of Rocky River and I braced myself for the confrontation.

  “Who is it?” came a pale and shaky voice from behind the door.

  “It’s David Neff,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Erin McNight.”

  “I don’t know who that is. I have a cold. Go away and come back tomorrow.”

  This time I rapped my cane against the door continuously until Schulte opened it. The chain was still attached and his bulbous head peeked through the space between. He was a pasty-faced man, bald on top, with patches of spindly white hair hanging in clumps just above his large ears.

  “I really cannot talk right now. Would you please come back tomorrow?”

  “You did some work at the home of Elaine and Elizabeth O’Donnell,” said David, “just before Elaine was abducted, and you recently worked at the McNights’, and now their young girl, Erin, is missing.”

  “That’s very sad. I’m sorry to hear that. But I didn’t have nothing to do with it. Or the O’Donnell girl. The police told me I was cleared.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind if we took a look around your apartment.”

  “Go away,” he said and began to close the door.

  I slipped my cane into the open space before he could shut it. I only meant to buy more time to convince him to let us in, but my younger self was, apparently, still full of the youthful vigor and impatience I had tempered over time. David kicked the door with enough force to pop the latch and send Schulte tumbling to the floor.

  “Christ,” I said. “Get in there before someone calls the cops.”

  David walked in and I hurried behind, flipping the door closed behind me.

  “Don’t hurt me!” said Schulte, crawling backward under a dining room table that looked like it had been salvaged from some old-lady yard sale.

  “Shut up, Harold,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  The apartment was immaculate and smelled of some powerful cleaning agent. A plastic-covered couch faced a box TV set from the seventies. On the wall hung pictures of Schulte’s youth, dozens of framed photographs of himself as a boy with ratty hair, tinted in that scummy-orange style of seventies-era cheap film stock. David walked down the hall to the bedroom.

  “Anything back there we don’t want to find?” I asked.

  “I told you, I didn’t have anything to do with Erin’s abduction. Or Elaine’s.”

  “Hey, uh…” From the bedroom, David stumbled on his words, groping for an appropriate name to call me. “Hey … um … hey, get in here.”

  I looked at Schulte.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  I walked to the bedroom to see what David had found.

  It was not Erin’s dead body but it was quite disturbing. I’d call it a shrine, I guess.

  It was a square room, about ten feet wide. Enough space for a bed and a desk. The walls were covered, I mean covered—floor to ceiling—with pictures and articles about the singer Chrissie Hynde. A picture of her in threadbare jeans, taken at some after-hours party when she was about seventeen. Glossy photos clipped from the pages of Rolling Stone. Chrissie lying supine on the floor at Swingos in Cleveland, giving the finger to the cameraman. A two-page article from the Plain Dealer about her rise from local phenom to national rock star.

  “Harold,” I called. “What the fuck is this?”

  Schulte picked himself up and waddled over, his arms hanging like vestigial limbs at his side. He looked at the room and simply shrugged.

  “You’ve got a little obsession going on here, don’t you?” asked David.

  “Maybe I do,” he whined. “But obsessions aren’t illegal, are they?”

  “Depends on how close you’re getting,” I said. “How close did you get to Chrissie, Harold?”

  He shrugged again and looked at his feet, pale white little feet with hairy feet knuckles.

  I had a hunch he had gotten very close, once. “Harold, did you try to abduct this girl when she was little?”

  He looked up at me, his eyes wide with fear. It was the look of someone who has had his mind violated by an alien probe.

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Well, obviously you didn’t. But why didn’t you?”

  “It was just a thought. I wouldn’t have hurt her. I just wanted to do something nice for her. I was going to buy her a present. She liked to talk to me on the phone. I was her friend. I just wanted to meet her. Her skin looked so soft. So soft and smooth.”

  “And what happened?” I asked.

  “You can’t arrest me for a thought.”

  “No, we can’t. So what happened?”

  “I was going to meet her. To pick her up. She said she would let me take her shopping. It was going to be our first date. She waited for me in front of that farm. The one that was replaced by the shopping mall? I left my car around the corner, in case anyone she knew was watching. They wouldn’t have understood. I wasn’t going to hurt her.”

  “But someone stopped you, didn’t they, Harold?”

  He looked at me closely. “How did you know?”

  “Did he look like me?”

  “No. He looked…” Schulte searched his mind for images. “He looked a little like if Fox Mulder, that X-Files guy? Like if Mulder had a brother who got kind of fat. He grabbed me and shook me and said nasty things to me and I got away and drove away and I never saw him again.”

  “Did you think Erin had soft skin, too?” asked David.

  Schulte shook his head. “Besides, she was a redhead.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t like redheads. Not like that. My mom was a redhead. That would be gross.”

  “Where were you yesterday around three o’clock?”

  Schulte stepped to a skinny dresser. He snatched up a folded piece of paper sitting on top, next to his wallet. He handed it to me. “I was at Wade Park. I go twice a week for counseling.”

  The paper was a dedu
ctible receipt from Wade Park and time-stamped 3:04.

  I shook my head. How could a creep like this guy be connected to so many girls yet not have anything to do with the crimes? I hate coincidences like this. It always muddies the water. Erin was still out there, somewhere. “Come on,” I said to David.

  “Stay away from Chrissie Hynde,” he said as he passed Schulte.

  “I’d never hurt her,” he said.

  “Sure you wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  “I’d like to propose something,” I said, as David drove the Caddy back to the compound in Peninsula.

  “This should be good,” he said. “Got another perv we can rough up a little while we waste more time?”

  “We should talk to Riley Trimble.”

  David laughed. He glanced at me sideways. “Trimble’s still locked up in a psych ward. He’s watched twenty-four/seven. And this isn’t exactly his MO.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he abducted Erin. I think he might be able to tell us who did.”

  David was silent for a moment. It began to rain that hazy, foggy rain, a gray curtain falling upon the world. Depressive weather. I was worried for him. I knew well the turmoil that grows inside us while we’re still young.

  “All right,” he said. “At least it’ll feel like we’re doing something. We’re past visiting time today, but I can set it up for tomorrow. I have to warn you, Trimble is no Hannibal Lecter. He’s smarter than he looks, but he’s still white trash. A selfish man. He has no reason to help us.”

  “You might be right. But he’s the only one we know who understands the mind of the man we’re hunting.”

  * * *

  Later that evening, while David sat in the den reading through the files on Katy’s murder, Mr. Merkl dropped by with a container of rigatoni and a giant salad he’d made at his house. Aaron stopped by, too, but only long enough to pick up his check and my weekly list of demands. Soon we were alone again, listening to the steady drumming of autumn rain against the westerly windows, waiting for Katy.

  “I’m not sure this is such a hot idea,” I said.

  “My mind is too full of secrets,” said David, not looking up from the papers in his lap. “I need someone else to know.”