The Man From Primrose Lane Part 34

"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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 deductible 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 pa.s.sed 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."

"It's cruel."

"She's a big girl."

It was useless arguing. So bullheaded I'd been. No wonder I had had so many wives. Only a woman as steely as Elizabeth could keep us in check.

Five minutes after eight there came a light knock on the door. I followed David to the entryway, hobbling forward on my cane, feeling older than ever-in fact, I was no longer entirely sure how old I was. I always got confused when I tried to do the math. Since I did not age during the hibernation, I should have been about seventy. But I looked older than that. Certainly felt older. Maybe I had aged a little in the egg. A year for every seven, perhaps.

He opened the door and there she was in a cotton dress that reached her ankles. Her hair was tied up in a bit of ribbon. When she saw David, she growled and jumped onto him, grabbing him around the waist with her long legs. She wore black Crocs, I saw. Katy planted a kiss on his lips and then hopped down. "h.e.l.lo, David," she said.

"Hi," he panted.

She looked over at me, and for the first time in many years I felt that excitement in the pit of my stomach I used to get when spotting a beautiful woman across the room, one I wanted to dance close to at a wedding reception, in the dark, where we could whisper introductions into each other's ears.

"h.e.l.lo," she said. "You must be David's father. I can see the resemblance! Holy cow, you guys look a lot alike."

Katy shook my withered hand. "Hi, Katy," I managed to say. "Are you hungry? We have supper waiting in the kitchen."

"I'm famished," she said.

As we walked to the kitchen at the back of the house, she marveled at the paintings and tapestry.

"Holy f.u.c.k, this is a big f.u.c.king house," she whispered, taking David's hand.

We sat on stools around the island. David and I ate the rigatoni warmed up a bit; Katy ate hers cold. She was telling a story about how her father was angry with David, asking me what I would have done if a daughter of mine had run off with a famous author a few months before a wedding, when she suddenly stopped midsentence.

"I know you," she said.

We let her work it over.

"You're so familiar. Your voice, too. Did you ever live in Cleveland Heights?"

"No," I said.

"Huh. Ever come into the Barnes & n.o.ble at Chapel Hill?"

I shook my head.

"It'll come to me," she said. "It's right..." Her eyes widened in true horror. She backed away from the island, stumbling against the refrigerator. A copy of William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say" fell to the floor. She looked at David.

"It's okay," he said. "Kate, it's okay."

"But you're dead," she said to me. "You're that guy from the plaza, the one that beat up the other guy. You're the Man from Primrose Lane. You're dead!"

David stood up and put an arm around her.

"He's not your dad," she said.

"No. He's not. But he's not the Man from Primrose Lane, either."

"So, his twin or something? Somebody help me out here. I feel like I'm going crazy."

"Have a seat," said David, pus.h.i.+ng her toward the stool. She obliged in a dreamlike way.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I'm David Neff," I said. "I'm him, in about forty years. I came ... I came back in time to save you. That man from the plaza took you and killed you. I came back in time to stop that. But he got away."

Katy looked at David, her eyes welling up with tears of frustration and anxiety. He nodded.

"That was the short version," David said, leaning close to her, pulling her eyes to his with a comforting look. He put a hand on her chin, letting her feel him, know that he was there and all was safe. "Katy, do you want to hear the entire story?"

She swallowed. "I ... I always knew there was something. I've always, my whole life, I've felt like I was standing on the sidewalk under a piano tied up in a rope that was about to break. This. None of this ever felt real. I always felt like I was cheating, just living. I did. Holy s.h.i.+t, David. How long have you known?"

"Not long," he said. "It's okay if you don't want to hear it right now. Do you need some time?"

"No," she said. "Give it to me. Tell me what was supposed to happen."

It took the better part of an hour to finish the tale. By then we'd consumed the pasta as well as a bottle of wine. Katy listened intently to every word, interrupting here and there for more detail. When I was through, she and David took a breather on the wraparound porch while I cleared the dishes. I felt a pang of jealousy but brushed it aside with some concerted effort.

It had stopped raining and the stars were out. The air smelled like a riverbank, like renewal. David leaned against the railing while Katy fished inside her purse for an old cigarette. She put a Salem in her mouth and lit it with a lime-green gas station lighter.

"It's like one of those dreams, the ones where you've done something so wrong it'll change your entire life and when you wake up you feel grateful that you're still okay," she said. "But I'm not waking up from this one, ever. Why did you tell me?"

"I'd want to know if I were you," said David. He watched her draw in the smoke, her mind inward, searching. "Did I do the wrong thing?"

"No. I don't think so."

She was quiet for so long then that David knew what she was going to say when she started talking again. "I can't be with you," she said.

"Why? Because it's too strange now?"

Katy shook her head. "It's against nature. It's not right. It was never meant to happen."

"Maybe it was," David said. "Maybe we all have a ... a destiny or whatever. And maybe, if we have free will, maybe the only thing that can alter that is ourselves. People. Maybe this is what was supposed to happen if that man hadn't abducted you originally."

"And what about Elizabeth?" she asked. "What was her destiny?"

In truth, he hadn't thought about that. Elizabeth's death was so real to him he hadn't considered, in light of the revelation of her murder, that she had a destiny cut short, too.

"You see," said Katy. "Your life has become so convoluted, you can't tell what it was meant to be anymore."

"I haven't tried to change history," he said.

"But you want to," she said. "I can tell. Didn't you listen to him? Again and again and again this happens. Elizabeth, me, now this other girl, Erin. What if she's dead, too? Will you become so obsessed with finding her killer that you'll go through the same routine all over again? Get back in the time machine, come back, live this weird hermit life? When is it over?"

"We'll find this guy," he said.

She sighed. She took his hands and looked him in the eyes. "You think you will. But you never do. That's the point of this whole thing. It's endless. You have to stop it."

"I can't."

"That's why I can't be with you, David. I'm going back to Ralph, if he'll take me back. I'm going to forget most of this, if I can. I need to."

"Is that going to make you happy?" he asked.

"It will. In time. He's a good man. I was happy before I met you."

David nodded. He averted his eyes. He looked out at the universe and imagined a world out there in which this conversation was not taking place. "I love you," he said.

"Don't say that," said Katy.

Through the window, I watched her go. She didn't look back at him and she never waved goodbye to me.

David stayed the night, wrapped in a blanket on the couch in the den, surrounded by his ex-girlfriend's homicide file.

I wanted to hug him. Tell him everything was going to be all right. But that felt weirdly self-indulgent. And so I went to bed and cried some, too.

We got an early start the next morning, with few words pa.s.sing between us over a breakfast of bagels and lox prepared by Merkl. We arrived at St. Sebastian's Home for the Criminally Insane shortly after ten o'clock.

The hospital was a sprawling brick enclave surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence near Tappan Lake, in central Ohio. It had been the county hospital until 1975, when the state swooped in and s.n.a.t.c.hed it up to house inmates too dangerous to live among the general population at Mansfield and Grafton. There were separate wings for those criminals committed by the state and civilians committed by private inst.i.tutions pushed beyond their means to deal with their unique troubles. Its only entrance was a double gate controlled by two sentries.

A guard waved us inside the paddock, where we waited in the Cadillac while the first gate closed behind us with a shudder and the second one opened. There was but one s.p.a.ce for visitors, directly in front of three cameras, beside the entrance to the main building. Through the barred windows on the second floor, bald men in orange jumpsuits watched our every move. One of them was jumping on his bed. A floor below him, a woman rubbed her breast against a window.

A skinny woman in a taut gray suit awaited our arrival on the front steps. She had straight black hair, freshly clipped, and she pursed her lips when she saw my cane. An insurance liability was all I was to her.

"You didn't say anything about a companion, Mr. Neff," she said by way of a greeting.

"This is my editor," said David. "John McGuffin. John, this is Renee Habersham."