The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel

by James Renner

  Larkey knocked loudly.

  “Hello?” he shouted.

  Nothing.

  “Hello? Dean? Hello? Erin?”

  “What now?” asked David.

  “What do you mean, what now? We go in.”

  “Isn’t it locked?”

  “What do you mean? The fucking door is wide open!”

  “Looks open to me,” I offered, catching my breath.

  With impressive and sudden force, Larkey kicked the door to the left of the knob with one booted foot. It exploded inward with a blast that shook the stairs. He leapt into the dimness, drawing his Glock and a pen-sized flashlight he held below the weapon.

  The studio was wide, about a hundred feet across, filled with rows of aluminum shelving upon which sat boxes of floppy middle-school yearbooks and binders full of loose pictures. A wall of windows painted-over white let in just enough sunlight to see. It was like a world illuminated by an eclipse, where matter seems ethereal, dreamlike. It smelled of grease and earth and vinegar.

  “Look,” said David. He pointed at a sofa sitting against the wall of windows. On the cushions was a pink and blue backpack. McNight was written on it in dark Magic Marker.

  “Erin!” yelled Larkey. “Dean, it’s the FBI. Are you in here? I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  There came a muted rustling from the corner of the room, beyond a black door set into the wall.

  “The darkroom,” said David.

  Larkey led the way. He put the flashlight in his mouth and used his free hand to push through the revolving door. “Stay here,” he mumbled. Then he replaced the light below the sidearm and jumped into the darkroom.

  We couldn’t see anything inside because of that revolving door but the smell of vinegar was much stronger and that rustling suddenly grew louder.

  “David! Get in here! Help me! Help!”

  David went first and I rushed in as fast as I could after him, knocking the cane against the floor. It took a second for my eyes to adjust. David, with his younger eyes, was faster. He was already at Larkey’s side when I could see again. They stood on either side of a metal cart. They were rapidly untying the small body that lay there.

  Erin appeared unscathed. Physically, at least. There was no sign of blood. No sign of trauma at all except for a pair of particularly nasty bruises along her ankles where the clothesline had been tied tight around her. She wore green shorts and a purple top. Her red hair hung around the top of the table like the impression of blood.

  Larkey sat her up and, with one quick jerk of his hand, pulled the duct tape off her mouth.

  Erin screamed in pain and cried with relief. She wrapped her arms around Larkey’s neck and sobbed into his shoulder.

  “Shhh,” he said, rubbing her hair. “Shhh.”

  For the first time, we looked around the room. The walls were covered in photographs of a common theme: redheaded beauties. Not just school photos. Candid shots, taken with a long-lens camera. There were Elaine and Elizabeth playing on a slide. Katy climbing onto a boat. Erin, through a window, watching TV in her bedroom. Several other girls I did not recognize. Hundreds of photographs. Dozens of girls.

  “Let’s get out of here before he comes back,” I said. “In bad mystery novels, the killer always comes back just when the heroes save the damsel in distress.”

  Larkey laughed but started for the door.

  David hung back with me, his eyes wide, his face full of some emotion I could not read.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s too easy,” he said. “I don’t trust it.”

  “Let it go,” I told him.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Larkey pried himself away from Erin, who sat wrapped in a red blanket in the back seat of a Berea cruiser, and joined us by the Cadillac.

  “What’s going on?” David asked.

  “We got a car at the Galts’ home,” said Larkey. “My guys. They just saw Dean walk inside. It’s about a mile from here.”

  “Let’s go,” said David.

  Larkey shook his head. “You guys go home. We’ll handle it. We got the girl. With your help, David. Now let us get Galt.”

  David sighed.

  “It’s over,” said Larkey. “Go home. Be with your kid. We’ll work out the murder charge in the morning. Clear you up. Oh, and don’t talk to the press. Okay? At least not yet.”

  David was shaking his head, his brow furrowed.

  “Go home,” Larkey said again. “It’s over.”

  * * *

  Back in the car, it was quiet. David was lost in his head.

  “What?”

  “My mind is fried,” he said. “I can’t get my thoughts straight. But there’s something…”

  “Postpartum depression,” I said. “You’ve spent a long time thinking about this guy. I’ve spent much longer. I built my life around that man, Dean Galt. I feel it, too. So anticlimactic. The Man from Primrose Lane used to say these cases make ghosts out of the living. Don’t let that happen.”

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “It’s not supposed to feel right.”

  David stopped talking and instead called his dead wife’s aunt, Peggy. He asked her to pick up Tanner and bring him home.

  “Can I meet him?” I asked. I thought that today of all days it would do me some good to be around innocence instead of further loneliness and fear. Maybe David would let him call me “Uncle.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And you owe me some more interviews,” I said. “I’d like to understand your thoughts, your motivations about all this.”

  “So you can turn it into a book?”

  “Now it has an ending.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But not today.”

  But, for David, there would be no tomorrow.

  * * *

  Detective Lieutenant Tom Sackett came to regret ever having met David Neff. He’d trusted him, had given him information about the Man from Primrose Lane’s case that he shouldn’t have. But then they’d found his dead wife’s fingerprints on the bed. They’d dug up her body and discovered she had been murdered, strangled. There was only one suspect. Only one man who could have committed both crimes. David Neff.

  It was the simplest explanation, and they’d taught him at the academy to always look for the most elegant solution.

  Then, somehow, he’d lost Dan Larkey. David had corrupted the agent’s confidence somehow. Larkey had called him that morning, said, “I have some doubts.” Based on what? A gut feeling? Please.

  That was the problem with FBI, Sackett knew. They were academics, prone to seek out more poetic story lines. They even consulted with psychics. Not sometimes, either. Like, all the goddamn time. FBI agents, even retired ones, were dreamers. And dreamers didn’t belong in Homicide. That was a dangerous mix.

  And yet Sackett had his cruiser lights on as he flew up I-480 to meet with Larkey at this new suspect’s studio, this Dean Galt. There was something about that writer, he granted that much. Something that made you want to believe him.

  Just then Sackett got another text from Larkey’s cell phone:

  We got Erin. Alive. Forget studio. Proceed to Galt residence. 1181 Parkman Drive. Berea.

  Twenty minutes later, Sackett turned onto Parkman, a side street in a section of town submerged in tall oak trees. He saw Larkey leaning into the window of a black sedan. Quickly Sackett parked his cruiser and jogged up to join the agent.

  “Dan, what the fuck is going on? Did you really find Erin?”

  At the sound of his voice, Larkey turned to him.

  Sackett stopped abruptly. His blood pressure rose so quickly he saw dancing specks form on his periphery, as his body overloaded on adrenaline.

  Larkey tried to speak but could not. There was a deep gash in the middle of his throat. Rushed air and thick gobs of blood shot out of the opening. To Sackett it sounded like feedback from an electrolarynx, one of those voice boxes cancer patients sometimes use. Larkey collapsed against
the driver’s-side door. Sloped against the wheel behind him was another dead agent, her eyes glazed and unfocused, a bullet hole in her temple.

  He knelt beside Larkey. “What the Christ happened?” he asked.

  Larkey’s mouth was working like a goldfish. He was trying to say something. Sackett understood that Larkey was dying.

  “What?”

  “T-t-t.”

  “Shhh. Don’t speak.”

  “T-t-t. T-t-t. T-trap,” he said.

  “What’s a trap? Was this a trap, Dan? Dan? Is someone walking into a trap? What’s a trap? Whose trap?”

  “T-t-t. T-t-t.”

  “Shhh. I heard it. I heard, ‘Trap.’”

  Larkey stopped. The blood continued to pour out of his neck. He looked up at Sackett and smiled. It was the smile of a good chess player who has suddenly seen checkmate, eight moves away.

  “What?” asked Sackett again.

  “T-t-t. T-t-tanner,” he said. And then he died.

  * * *

  She sat in her car, eyeing his house with disdain and jealousy and hatred.

  She would never be a journalist in the true sense of the word, Cindy Nottingham knew. Had known for quite some time. And that was fine, because true journalists didn’t make real money. The real money came with gossip, and she knew gossip. She had ways of drawing out secrets from people. People trusted her. Men trusted her more. Most men, anyway. Not David.

  She enjoyed watching him fall. She knew this and accepted it, not as something evil, but as a natural response to his hubris. She was no journalist. But neither was he. And now the world would see that, too. David was a hack. A onetime author who’d gotten lucky. That story had fallen into his lap. She should have written it. It had been hers to begin with. Brune, she knew, had wanted it to be hers.

  But men always took advantage of her, stealing her stories, stealing her rent money, stealing her virginity. Such was life in a man’s world. They deserved what she brought down on them.

  For about ten minutes Cindy had sat quietly in her car, across the street from David’s home—paid for by the book that should have been hers—wishing him ill. She had watched as Tanner got out of the car, led by his Aunt Peggy into the house. Such a beautiful kid. David didn’t deserve him, either.

  A black Cadillac pulled onto the street and Cindy hastily assembled her camera, snapping the long lens into place. She crouched behind the wheel and aimed it at the house. But the car didn’t pull into the driveway. Instead, it pulled up alongside hers.

  Busted, she thought. He must’ve recognized the car.

  The Caddy’s passenger window rolled down. The man behind the wheel looked strikingly familiar, but it was not David.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I’m a reporter, who the fuck are you?” she spat.

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not a very good reporter.”

  And then she did. It came to her in a flash. The only reason she hadn’t recognized him right away was because he was so out of place. He shouldn’t be here. This was wrong. Dangerous.

  He lifted his hand and in it was a shiny gun with a grip the color of old bones. It went off with a thunderous roar.

  Cindy never heard it.

  The bullet ripped through the portion of her brain devoted to auditory perception before the sound could be processed.

  * * *

  At the precise moment David was untying Erin McNight’s bindings, Katy Keenan sat down to eat at Larry’s.

  It was an early dinner, but there was no time to waste. They were rebuilding their relationship.

  This can work, she told herself. I know it.

  And really, Ralph had his moments. Sure, he didn’t read for pleasure. And he hated movies that didn’t contain explosions. But he was a companion on her long jogs in the evening, when she just wanted someone to listen. He was a great lay.

  David could never work, she told herself. Too wrapped up in himself. Literally, as it were, in his own Neverending Story. To even consider believing that story he’d told her the other night was to surrender to delusion. Poor man. Poor lonely man.

  Still.

  He was fascinating. Endearingly egotistical, yet insecure. Naïve, almost. Like a teenager. His mind full of constant wonderment. That was intoxicating to her.

  Ralph sat across from her in the same booth she’d shared with David not long ago. She ordered a mushroom basket.

  “I want to take you to Italy,” he said. “Next month. For a week.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  Her entire life had been a struggle for money. Her parents had never made enough for her to go on field trips. How much of this was wrapped up in her admiration for Ralph? She didn’t care to know.

  While her fiancé sipped his beer, Katy looked over to the framed photographs of Akron residents with clown noses. Black and white. Big and small. Was it some artistic statement that we all take ourselves too seriously? What was the real story behind it?

  And what was that written on the bottom-right corner of the nearest photo? She hadn’t noticed that before.

  Katy leaned closer.

  “Fabulous Pics,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her mind was working. Cobwebby synapses were dusted off in the furthest recesses of her memory.

  BAM!

  Katy’s eyes snapped open.

  “What?” Ralph asked again.

  “Fabulous Pics!” she shouted. She grabbed her purse. Thank God she’d driven. “Call a cab,” she said as she ran out the door.

  “Hey!” he shouted after her. But she ignored him and fled as quickly as her feet could take her.

  * * *

  David pulled into his driveway at just past eight in the evening. We didn’t see Cindy Nottingham slumped down in her car across the street. I didn’t notice the other black Cadillac parked just beyond it. We were discussing the nature of obsession. And how to be satisfied with an anticlimactic resolution. Cerebral jerk-off stuff.

  “You coming in?” he asked.

  “You bet,” I replied.

  There was a loud squealing of tires as a car took the turn up the street from David’s house at top speed. For a moment it looked like the car might tumble into the neighbor’s centuries-old oak, but it corrected and pulled into David’s driveway. Katy, her face flushed with excitement, leapt out. She had never looked so beautiful.

  “Fabulous Pics!” she screamed. “I know who it is!”

  David took her by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Calm down,” he said. “Breathe.”

  She did. She smiled up at him and I could tell she had finally allowed herself to love him.

  “The photographer’s son,” she said. “I forgot all about him until I saw their logo on a picture at Larry’s. The guy who took our pictures at school, he was all crippled and bent up. He had this son who helped him pose the children. He was like forty years old and had bushy hair like the guy in the shopping plaza that day. When he was taking my picture, there was this moment when I thought he might have brushed against my chest with his hand but he played it off like an accident. He told me that I had hair like his mother’s. He said my hair was prettier than any other girl’s in my whole class. If his father’s company also did the pictures for the other girls’ schools, it has to be him! It has to be!”

  There is a theory, a metaphysical, philosophical theory, that when an idea’s time has come, it will be recognized by several people at once. It’s a sixth-sense explanation for such things as why two authors sometimes come out with similar books in the same season. (For instance, there were two great fictional mysteries with Edgar Allan Poe as the main character, which came out within a month of each other, in 2006.) It explains how two scientists a world apart suddenly and independently discovered the AIDS virus. Or how Tesla and Edison emerged as inventors of electricity. However, I had never witnessed such a thing, and Katy’s tandem epip
hany made my skin crawl.

  “Shhh,” said David. “We know. They’re arresting him right now. We found Erin. She’s safe.”

  “What?” Katy slipped her arms under his and embraced him. “How?”

  “All the pictures had the same backdrop,” he said. “No one noticed it until we had Erin’s photo to compare to the others.”

  “Where did you find Erin? What happened to her?”

  “Come inside,” he said. “I’ll explain everything.”

  I followed them in. I had planned to tell Aunt Peggy I was a distant relative of his Uncle Ira, in town for the funeral. But Peggy was nowhere to be found. And neither was Tanner. The house smelled musty, unlived-in. It smelled like the house on Primrose Lane. And someone was singing. A familiar voice. The sound traveled softly down the hallway and filled the house. I knew the song. “Castle on a Cloud,” from Les Mis. “Who is that?” I asked.

  “My wife,” said David.

  We followed him to a door halfway down the hall. The music was coming from inside. I could tell now that it was a recording, clear but mixed with something like static or falling water. The door was locked.

  “Tanner?” David said. “Tanner, open up!”

  Then, distantly, “Dad?”

  “Hey, buddy,” he said. “It’s me. Open up.”

  The knob shook as Tanner’s young hands fidgeted with the lock. Then the door opened. The boy leapt into his father’s arms. I saw he was shaking. I assumed it was because he hadn’t seen his dad for a while. In their reunion, David accidentally tripped over a length of dominoes arranged on the floor, causing them to cascade across the length of the room, revealing a red number before setting off some contraption that caused a basket to fall on a plastic mouse. What “88” meant I never did find out. The number of a beloved sportsman, I supposed. I reached over to the microcassette recorder lying on top of the boy’s dresser and turned it off.

  “Where’s Aunt Peggy?” asked David.

  “In the East Wing.”

  “What’s she doing in there?”

  Tanner didn’t answer. His face was buried in his father’s neck. Was he crying? I couldn’t tell.

  “Why’d you lock your door?”

  “She told me to.”

  David laughed. “Why?”