The Man From Primrose Lane Part 29

"Does it matter?"

"The uniks will hunt you down."

"I'll be gone before they find me."

"Where will you hide? The egg is too small to travel in."

I bent to him and looked into his steely eyes. "Dr. Tesla, I've gotten to know many scientists over the years. Most of them on contract to our government, just like you. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that what you show the public is about ten years behind what you have already shown your employers. Where is it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Look at me, Tesla. I will kill you if you don't give me what I need. You're right, it is over for me here. In fact, your only hope is that I'm right and you do have a full-sized vessel, somewhere, that you've designed for the black ops or whoever you're building it for. Because if you don't, I will kill you before they kill me. What have I got to lose?"

I knew he could see I was not bluffing.

"Through the door. The code is 161803."

"Thank you," I said.

"Wait," said Tesla.

I knelt to him again. "Yes?"

"If it works..."

"Send you a letter?"

"Yes."

"You bet."

We arrived at my compound in Peninsula shortly after I finished telling David the story of how I came to be here and how I survived, a long story that I must dish out in six parts to you, dear reader, over the course of the last section of this memoir-I want to share with you what happened with David, with us, and how the matter of his search for the man who murdered his wife concluded. That, of course, is the narrative thrust of this tale, right? So let's not stray too far from it. I only share my story with you at all because it does have some bearing on David's destiny, as my future has an impact on his present. Cause and effect are all jacked up at this point, I know. I went through it and I barely understand it. I hope, if nothing else, you come to believe that what we call the present is nothing more than perception and the concepts of cause and effect are mostly pointless.

So say it with me. "f.u.c.k it."

Now let's get back to it.

We arrived at my compound in Peninsula shortly after I finished telling David the story of how I came to be here and how I survived. If you're thinking about disappearing in plain sight somewhere in northeast Ohio, you would be hard-pressed to find a better spot for it than Peninsula. This quaint village is tucked away between Akron and Cleveland, bordered by the Cuyahoga River, two ski resorts, and a system of limestone quarries. Because of the ruthless town zoning board, it cannot be built up or gentrified. It is stagnant in time, like living in the postwar Americana featured in some old Twilight Zone episode. My home is atop a tall hill surrounded by trees, in the middle of twenty acres toward the north end, lined by fencing and security cameras. My neighbors think I'm paranoid. They, of course, have not lived through the forcible eviction of five hundred thousand people from Cleveland, a half million p.i.s.sed-off refugees looking for something to loot. Should I live to experience that again-which, incredibly, seems like a real possibility-I'd like to know my property is well protected.

Aaron dropped us off at the front portico where Mr. Merkl, my sometime attendant, waited to welcome us inside.

"Should I prepare the guest room?" he asked. Mr. Merkl was a funny round man with a long mustache that made him look very much like a walrus in a nice suit. A loyal man. He could keep a secret or two. And has.

"I think our guest's stay will be quite brief. Some dinner, though. And Brandy Alexanders."

"Right," he said and disappeared toward the kitchen as we walked inside. Aaron was already pulling the car into the garage.

David whistled.

I laughed. "Well, if I'm going to live in self-imposed imprisonment, I might as well enjoy it."

The house was a sprawling three-story brick French Colonial. Five thousand square feet, not including the home theater in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Lots of cherry and walnut and delicious wainscotting. My favorite place in the entire mansion was the upstairs bathroom with the claw-foot tub. I pulled David into the smoking lounge, off the foyer. Tall bookcases full of guilty pleasures nearly entombed the room. Leather couches faced each other in the middle, between which sat a table made of tortoisesh.e.l.l, its legs made of smaller taxidermied turtles all the way down.

"Apple. Google. Bear Stearns," I said.

"Bear Stearns?"

I had forgotten I had once been concerned for justice. I shrugged. "The good guys should make a little money, too."

For a moment neither of us spoke. So much had been said already.

"Want to hear something strange?" I asked, falling into one of the couches as my younger self sat across from me.

David looked worried. "How much stranger does it get?"

"I don't know how far it goes. How many times we've obsessed over an unsolved crime for decades, shanghaied a time machine, and ended up in the past to stop it. I'm here because I needed a solution to Katy's case. The Man from Primrose Lane came back to find Elizabeth and Elaine's killer-she would have died that day, too, if he had not interrupted the crime. But there are other us's out there. I've seen one or two along the way, never sure if they noticed me or not. In a restaurant. At a gas station in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. But there must be more than that. People other than us who think to do something similar, for whatever reason. There must be, because every time I make an investment in an upstart little company I know is about to make it big, there are other third-party investors s.n.a.t.c.hing up the same stocks. A day before September 11, I dumped a bunch of stock, put it into gold. You should have seen the returns that day. There are many other time travelers out there. A s.h.i.+t-ton of people dumped stock that day. Why are they here?"

"Speaking of 9/11," he said. David looked a little sore. "You came all the way back here to save one girl and you let 9/11 happen?"

"I wish it was that easy," I said.

Mr. Merkl was suddenly there with the Brandy Alexanders. He set them down and announced supper would be served in half an hour-cuc.u.mber soup, bay scallops in white wine sauce over fettuccini.

"Why isn't it that easy?" David asked as soon as he left.

I sipped the drink and considered him, sadly. I was, in many ways, the embodiment of his mental impairment, the obsessiveness he tried so desperately to conquer. "You remember Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City?"

"Yes."

"The Man from Primrose Lane arrived in time before that happened. He thought, like you, that he had a chance to do something that would benefit more than just himself and the family of a dead girl."

"So why didn't he stop it?"

"He thought he did. He called in a tip to the FBI. He went to Oklahoma City. He cut the wires McVeigh had rigged to his homemade bombs in that U-Haul. It still went off. Still killed a bunch of people, a bunch of kids."

"What happened?"

I shrugged. "Don't know. But it scares the s.h.i.+t out of me. Think about it. It means someone knew what he was up to and planned around it."

"Who do you think?"

"I don't know. The government? Tesla? How about this-how about one of us?"

"Ugh," he said.

"d.a.m.n right, ugh."

"You think something similar happened on 9/11?"

"I called in a tip. I called in a bomb threat to the Bangor airport."

"Why? The terrorists left from Boston."

"They did this time. Where I came from, they left out of Bangor. They altered their plan. I think they did that because someone knew I would call in the tip to Bangor."

"Jesus."

"It's another reason we keep to ourselves. We don't know who we can trust."

"What else is different this time around?" David asked.

"Other than Elizabeth not being abducted? A lot. And there's no way to know how much is because of me and the Man from Primrose Lane and how much was changed by other travelers. There's the b.u.t.terfly effect to account for, too. You know, go back in time, alter something small, and it creates a cascading of events that occasionally leads to some big, unexpected change. Mostly it's little stuff-the Mexican restaurant by the mall never went out of business because there never was a salmonella scare this time around, there was an extra season of Scrubs for some reason. But then there's the big stuff; here, President Bush never crashed into the ocean during that Mission Accomplished photo op, North Korea never launched a nuke into Tokyo in 2007. And what the h.e.l.l is with the Red Sox winning the World Series? Tell me a time-traveling Southy isn't responsible for that.

"There are fewer murders here," I continued. "There was this girl named Tiffany Potter who was murdered in 1989-"

"Tiffany Potter, the actress? From Bay Village? The one in all those independent movies?" asked David.

"That's her."

David reclined in his seat. "My mind is numb," he said. "Enough. Enough."

"Agreed."

"So what now?"

"Now we simply have to find the man who murdered your wife, the guy who shot the Man from Primrose Lane. This would be the same man, I'm convinced, who got away from us during Elaine's abduction, who got away from us again when he tried to abduct Katy. We need to find this man before he kills another girl and this whole sick cycle repeats itself."

"Isn't that what you've been trying to do this whole time?"

"Well, yes. I brought all the notes and case files on Katy's murder back with me-a murder that, now, has never occurred. I have most of the notes here. Names of suspects, names of friends, information about everything the girl did the first ten years of her life. Unfortunately, the police took the rest from the crime scene. We had a crazy idea. The Man from Primrose Lane and I. We were collaborating on a book. I was going to write it. The Man from Primrose Lane was going to ill.u.s.trate it-he spent his spare time painting, those last few years-you should try it sometime. That's what those paintings were for. They were going to be ill.u.s.trations for a book about Katy and Elizabeth's cases, about our search. Only we would change the names and sell it as fiction. Sci-fi. It was a goof. Something to pa.s.s the time. We hoped maybe we'd spot something while going through all the old notes from the cases. But now, maybe with a fresh pair of eyes ...

"A fresh pair of eyes? I'm you."

"Yeah, but none of us ever solved a crime. You got Trimble. You were different. We thought you were going to break the cycle. None of us ever had a kid. But you did. And with Elizabeth! Tanner never existed before. Of course, then your wife discovered your older self from another timeline, you became obsessed with the death of this man, the 'Man from Primrose Lane,' and started a relations.h.i.+p with Katy, the other girl who should be dead, and, well, everything got f.u.c.ked again. So here we are. I'm out of ideas. I think we can help each other. I really don't want to go to my grave knowing you're going to crawl into that black egg when you're fifty-eight and come back again."

David nodded. "Okay, then."

"You know, the solution..." I began.

"... is always elegantly simple," he finished. "Do you really believe that anymore?"

"I do. I've always felt we've been missing the forest for the trees. That the answer has always been clearly visible. We just don't know which way to look."

The oddest part for David was seeing the autopsy photographs of Katy Keenan, a woman he knew was alive and well. It left him dizzy, disjointed. He prayed that everything he was experiencing was not some dissociative fugue brought on by withdrawals. He didn't want to wake up back in some padded cell at the Glenns.

The images were grainy, color copies of photographs. She was ten in the pictures. Naked. Placed upon a stainless steel slab. Her body had remained relatively preserved thanks to dry weather. But there was no skin around her face. She had been stabbed in the neck and the wound had allowed for the natural process of decomposition to claim everything above her shoulders. Her teeth and jaws jutted from the decay like a homemade skeleton mask taken from some carny's haunted house. This was a woman he knew, a woman he had made love to. Somewhere, he must have realized, there were probably similar pictures of Elizabeth, brought back by the Man from Primrose Lane.

I shared with him the particulars of Katy's case. Where the newspaper reports left off, I filled in pertinent details. The discussion ended with a top-ten list of suspects, some of which I've already shared with you. That list was the best I had ever come up with and I wasn't even sure if the man who murdered Katy was on there.

"But you saw him, that day you saved Katy from being abducted," David said. "Did he look like any of these guys?"

"It happened so fast," I explained. "All these guys sort of look similar: white guy, bushy hair, gla.s.ses, round head, of Eastern European descent. h.e.l.l, our guy looks like half the population of Parma Heights."

"Yeah, but you saw him."

"For about five seconds."

"And you can't say for sure?"

I shook my head. "The closest, I think, is this guy." I tapped Burt McQuinn's photo, the elementary school princ.i.p.al. "But I can't be sure. I followed McQuinn around for a while, after I interrupted the abduction. He never changed his routine. He didn't seem to be a guy who had been caught in the process of committing a crime. When I made a point to let him see me in a convenience store, he acted like he didn't recognize me. So, I don't know."

"Any other similar murders around this guy? Where is he today?"

"Still in Cleveland Heights," I said. "I haven't found another murder similar to Katy's-or Elizabeth and Elaine's. Here's what I think happened. This guy, in this timeline, abducted Elaine, but was interrupted before he got Elizabeth. So he thinks maybe the intervention of the Man from Primrose Lane that day at the park was a coincidence, and after awhile he stalks Katy. When he goes to take her, he's interrupted again! He's interrupted by a man he must believe is the same dude who interrupted his first abduction. He knows now this isn't a coincidence. What must he have thought? How could anyone else know what he was planning? Obviously, he wasn't going around sharing his plans with people. He doesn't know what the h.e.l.l is going on. So he lays low. And then, what? He happens to be in Akron, maybe drives down the road as the Man from Primrose Lane is coming back from a walk, and recognizes him as his archnemesis? He kills him so he can start stalking again? Maybe Elizabeth was there when he went to the house with the gun. This case is a lot of maybes."

"But nothing like this has happened in the last four years, since someone shot the Man from Primrose Lane?"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"What do you mean?"

"A lot of girls go missing from the inner-ring Cleveland suburbs. Little girls whose families couldn't care less if they come home for dinner-one less mouth to feed. Girls east of West 117 get pregnant at, what, the age of fourteen these days. No one keeps track of them. You've heard the names, you just don't remember them because they're not from Bay Village or Shaker Heights. Amanda Berry; Gina Dejesus; Ashley Summers. Maybe that's where he's hunting these days."

"Do any of the suspects in Katy's murder overlap with suspects from Eliz ... from Elaine's murder?"

"Good question," I said. "Several. Burt McQuinn, for one. McQuinn's daughter was on the same Lakewood soccer team as the O'Donnell twins. There's another guy-Curtis Detweiler. Worked for Katy's father and for a brief time, shortly before the abduction, had an affair with Abigail, Elizabeth and Elaine's mother. Police took a hard look at him, boy. But he was at a trade show at the IX Center at the time of Katy's abduction. Some guy who was filming a vacuum demonstration got Detweiler on his camera, in the background. No way he did it. Coincidences like that made it so hard for investigators. There's just so many suspects."

"Well, you could narrow it down a little with a criminal profile..."

"Thought of that, too. Had a Bureau guy look into it. Wrote up a report for me in 2015. The violence of the crime scenes suggests the person who committed these murders is very strong. This is someone of high intelligence-he was able to monitor these girls' behavior so that he could time the kidnappings to the second. In, out. He knew when they were alone. That takes dedication and planning. However, he probably worked a menial job-managing a restaurant, janitorial job, retail-mostly because he doesn't know how to relate well enough to his peers to command any sort of respect. Probably has some worthless college degree from a state school. Gets along with kids, is probably close to them in some way, either through work or some after-hours volunteering opportunity: library, museum guide, Big Brothers. Perhaps the most telling part is his choice of victim: redheaded girls with straight hair and freckles. He's very specific. He's probably of Irish descent himself."

"Along with half the west side," said David.

"Exactly."

"Where do we start?"

"I want to check in on all the top suspects," I said. "Knock on their doors. If they react like they've seen a ghost-remember, I am the exact double of the man they believed they killed, the Man from Primrose Lane-then we'll have our guy. Unfortunately, I'm old, David. But not too keen on dying yet. So I'd like you to come along."

David smiled wanly. "Not like I have much of a choice."

"We always have a choice, David."