The Man From Primrose Lane Part 4

"Marry me?" He meant it as a statement, but couldn't help the rising inflection at the end that marked his insecurity.

She smiled. Not the plastered-on smile she gave strangers, but the wide-open childlike smile that pushed out her cheeks like a chipmunk and revealed the little gap between her front teeth. "No," she said.

He had expected this.

"You don't want to marry me," she said, shaking her head. But her smile was still real, still warm. She pulled him up to her and kissed him, hard, on the mouth.

"But I do," he insisted. "That's why I'm giving you the ring."

"It's really pretty," she said, pulling it out of its place and slipping it onto her left ring finger. It fit perfectly. And she left it on, placing the box back in her purse.

"It's the ring my father gave my mom when they got engaged," he said.

"That's really sweet," she said. "But doesn't that mean it's cursed? Aren't they divorced?"

"Maybe we could reverse it."

Elizabeth kissed him again, snaking her arms around his neck. She leaned in to whisper something important in his ear. "Let's get some Chinese," she said.

Five minutes later, they were seated at a table inside the Evergreen Buffet, a busy Chinese restaurant populated by college students and obese townies from nearby Ravenna. David felt weak and shaky, his fingers slightly numb, like he was on laughing gas, but he came to realize that he was not disappointed. She'd said no, but was wearing the ring. She'd said no, but was smiling as if he'd done something really swell.

Maybe it's a test, he thought, as they ate in silence. A test to see how much I fight for it. Or maybe I'm not supposed to care. Maybe that's the trick. Maybe she wants me to get mad. Maybe ...

"I was a twin," she said.

He shook his head. He had forgotten that this revelation had come as she was falling asleep on his chest that first night.

"I was a twin," she repeated. "And when we were ten, I watched a guy take her. We never saw her again. It destroyed my family."

David realized that she was about to give him a peek inside her mystery and he was glad she was finally opening up. But there was a cold part of him, too, that wondered if she would remain as alluring to him once he knew the answer.

"There was a park around the corner from our house in Lakewood. It had a playground with monkey bars and this creaky wooden bridge and a hopscotch grid. Elaine was crazy about hopscotch. Anyway, we used to go there all the time by ourselves while my father cooked supper and waited for Mom to get home-she was an accountant in the city. One day we walked to the park and there was this van there, one of those white all-purpose vans contractors use? A guy was standing outside the sliding door on the side, pacing back and forth. Skinny guy. He had weird bushy hair. When he saw us approaching, he started calling out, 'Daisy! Daisy!' When we got closer, he waved to us. 'I can't find my puppy dog,' he said. 'Have you seen a little black Lab?' Of course, the only thing Elaine loved more than hopscotch was puppies, right? She goes running over to him and he's already opening that side door, swinging it down its track-I can hear it tumble down the shaky track, rumbling along. It must've been an old van. I'm right behind her as she reaches the van. I didn't think anything was really wrong, I just wanted to be with my sister. For a second he didn't do anything, just kind of stood there, looking at the both of us. I could tell he was scared. Isn't that funny? He was scared. And we weren't. And then we were. He grabbed Elaine's arm and flung her into the back of the van real quick, in one fast motion, just, boom, you know? And then he grabbed my arm and was pulling me toward the open door. But I had just a second more to take in the situation than Elaine and so I had the chance to brace myself and so he couldn't throw me in as easily. He got me halfway in, far enough for me to see Elaine kneeling on the metal floor back there, holding her head, which had opened in a long sc.r.a.pe above her left eye. Then I heard the honking. It was loud and constant, honk honk honk honk honk honk! He let go of me and I fell out, onto the gravel parking lot. 'Get the f.u.c.k in,' he said. I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I just sat there, in total shock. 'Suit yourself,' he said. He pulled the door closed and then ran to the driver's side and climbed in. All this time, the honking was getting louder. And louder. And then I saw a big Cadillac trailing down the road that ran along the baseball diamonds from the street, kicking up a trail of dust. It was going so fast, I could see it sliding all over the gravel. The guy in the van gunned it and took off through the baseball fields, cutting across to Clifton. When he got to the chicken-wire fence that marked the home-run line, he just kept going, tearing right through. The Caddy finally got all the way back to me and stopped on a dime. And another man got out and I remember thinking, here we go again, but what he said to me was, 'Are you all right?' I told him no, I wasn't all right. And I started crying. 'Where's your sister?' he asked. 'Where's Elizabeth?' I was crying so much I couldn't even correct him. All I could do was point at the van that was getting away. 's.h.i.+t,' he shouted. Then he got back in his car and tore off across the field after the van. I never saw her again. Or him. I ran back home. Told my dad what had happened. He left me alone in the kitchen and I climbed under the table with a b.u.t.ter knife, I remember, because I was sure that man was coming back for me. When my dad returned five minutes later, he called the police. They put men on every road leading out of Lakewood, but he was already gone. I don't remember much about the next few months. A lot of it was spent in my room, reading, trying not to listen to them argue downstairs. When they got going, they said some pretty mean things. Tossing blame, you know? Back and forth like a tennis ball. Sometimes my mother put my name into the mix, too, even though I didn't have a voice and was only ten G.o.dd.a.m.n years old, anyway, and it was really her fault for being at work so late. Maybe she needed to blame me to deflect some away from her and the man she shared a bed with. I know she did, because that summer they sent me to live with my mother's sister. 'For a month,' they said. But it turned into forever."

"G.o.d, Liz, I'm so sorry."

Elizabeth waved her hand at him. "That's not why I told you," she said. "I should have told you that there would never be Thanksgiving with the fam. I haven't seen my mom in thirteen years. Haven't seen Dad in seven. And I'm never going to introduce you to them."

He reached over and took her hand. Her nails were chipped and bitten down to the quick. They shook a little.

"I'm not family material," she said.

She pulled the ring off her finger, looked at it a moment, then tried to hand it back to David. He pushed back her hand gently.

"It's for you," he said. "I'm only giving it once. If you won't marry me, you still have to wear it. You can wear it forever and we can date until we're seventy. Put it on a chain around your neck if you want."

Elizabeth pulled the necklace out of the tube top. It was a simple imitation sapphire set in silver, a child's thing. "I stole this from Elaine's dresser before my mother cleaned it out. I can't replace it until it falls apart, I guess." Instead, she put the ring back on her finger.

"When you change your mind, you can propose to me," he said.

A tear fell into her chicken and broccoli. She looked up at him and smiled. "Okey dokey," she said.

There was one thing that annoyed him. He could take the coldness, the negativity, the migraines she sometimes got that kept her in bed for two days. He could forgive her forgetting his birthday and for always saying 'effect' when she really meant 'affect.' He could forgive her for leaving her blow dryer on his side of the bedroom vanity and for making him spray that floral stuff in the bathroom. He didn't mind all this because he never took for granted the way her bottom lip puffed out a bit when she was drunk or the way she twisted his hair in her fingers when he lay in her lap watching television. The only thing that really annoyed him, the only thing he just could not get over, was her love of Christopher Pike, a late-eighties teen-lit horror novelist she'd become obsessed with in her sister's absence.

Elizabeth, who was up every morning at five-thirty making a pot of coffee so strong she might as well be snorting c.o.ke, could not, no matter how hard she tried, ever fall asleep before midnight. It had been this way since Elaine's abduction and did not abate in the slightest with the unexpected addition of David's love and security. By that time, anyway, it was habit. The worst part about it was that it kept her awake when everyone around her was asleep; it kept her alone. The only way she found she could endure this quiet time was to read. And the only thing she ever seemed to read was Christopher Pike. Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil, the Final Friends trilogy, Remember Me.

"Why don't you read Poe or Tolkien or Bradbury?" he asked once when he caught her reading Last Act for the sixth time.

"I don't have the patience for description," she told him, as if it were something dirty and tabloid. "I don't want to read about the history of Hobbit tobacco for an hour."

And so it went. Elizabeth would march through the entire Pike canon in the course of a year and start again with Chain Letter in early January. Well, almost the entire Pike canon. There was one book she'd never been able to track down. Sati. The story of a young woman who claims to be G.o.d. It was out of print. Whenever they pa.s.sed a library book sale or Mac's Backs in Cleveland Heights, she was compelled to stop in so that they could spend twenty minutes searching for this rare hardcover.

One afternoon, a short time after David's awkward proposal, he found himself in Ravenna. He was working for a community biweekly newspaper that covered northern Portage County and the editor had sent him to the county seat to report on a nasty civil suit involving a development deal gone awry. It was not glamorous work, not the investigative journalism he'd dreamed of in college, but it was steady and he was grateful for the experience. On that particular afternoon, on his way to the Triangle Diner for a corned beef sandwich, he noticed a sign across the street that read GOODWILL BOOK SALE.

The place smelled of mildew, mothb.a.l.l.s, and desperation. Rows of seventies slacks in shades of brown and orange hung on tall racks to his right, paisley blouses to his left. Taking up the center of the room were a dozen card tables topped with boxes and boxes of books. A milk crate full of hardcovers was mostly hidden under a lime-green shawl someone had tossed aside. Under the shawl, lying atop the other books, was Sati.

His fingertips brushed the cover. He felt dizzy inside. He never thought he could be so happy holding a Christopher Pike book. He still believed in signs, then. And what else could this be? All her life, Elizabeth had been dealt the universal equivalent of a series of seventeens when the dealer always came up aces. Her sister. Her mother. Elizabeth had become an acolyte of probability and she wouldn't allow herself to bet on him in the face of such a losing streak. But this was a bit of luck. How might that change her?

He thumbed open the front page and felt his breath sucked out of his lungs in one long sigh. For Elaine, someone had written.

On the way home, he stopped at a McDonald's, where he gently ripped the signed page from the book, leaving no evidence of its presence. He crumpled the page into a wad and tossed it into the garbage.

Back in their apartment, David wrote his own dedication. For Elizabeth. Now you can move on. He meant from Pike, but also from Elaine. He wrapped the novel in polka-dot paper and got up at two in the morning so that he could secretly place it next to the coffeemaker before going back to bed.

David awoke at five forty-five to a strange twisting of his hand. He looked, to find a plain gold band on his ring finger. Elizabeth knelt on the floor beside him. Her eyes were smiling but her nose was pinched and wrinkly with emotion.

"One of the last things I remember," she said softly, measuring her words so they didn't catch in her throat. "Our eighth birthday party. Peggy got us grown-up gifts. The first time we'd gotten anything but toys, really. She gave me a magic set. With a top hat and little foam bunnies. I believed in magic then. She gave Elaine a book. Sati. Our parents pitched a fit. Said it would corrupt her mind or something. She hid it under her bed. But it disappeared. I think our dad pitched it." She began to relax. "I wanted to know what she knew."

"I get it."

"So marry me," she whispered.

He missed the process. The process involved in reporting, in writing; that tactile experience in the preparation of his work. As Tanner napped, David returned to the Edmund Fitzgerald desk for the first time in four years to see if the magic remained.

He sat down on the expensive leather chair and it sighed around him, welcoming him into its grip. So far, so good. He clicked on the desk lamp, one of those cla.s.sic green-gla.s.s types that adds its own ambience to a room. The bulb still worked, then. Next, he slipped open the shallow drawer above his lap. It smelled of pipe tobacco and cherry lozenges, delights of its original owner. Inside were several reporters' notebooks, narrow and thick pads of paper. His special pens were there, a box of them emptied into the well. Bic blues, inconspicuous tools he felt superst.i.tious about-he'd used Bic blues during his seemingly endless reporting on the Ronil Brune case. To David, Bic blues held all the power of a magic wand that chooses its owner. Also in the desk was a half-empty pack of Marlboros.

David picked up a notepad and three pens. He felt their weight and smiled a little as he set the items on his desk. He took a pen and flicked off the top, sending it across the room and behind the bar. On the front of the notepad he wrote: The Man from Primrose Lane. He set the notepad back down and considered it for a long moment. He liked the sharp and solid look of his handwriting. It pleased him. He had forgotten this.

The Marlboros, he remembered, served a purpose, too.

He opened the desk again and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the packet. He slapped the cigarettes on their end, and that felt good. Smoking was a process, as well. And the process, the ritual, quieted the hum of his mind so he could write. Though he didn't smoke, these were his cigarettes. They weren't normal cigarettes; they were mental cigarettes.

Digging into the pack with one impatient finger, he drew out a slightly bent Marlboro and placed it between his lips. He leaned back into the chair and closed his eyes. He tasted the acrid bite of the tobacco-tinged filter on his tongue. He smelled the nicotine and tar and formaldehyde with his nose. He felt the cigarette's presence between his teeth. He imagined himself inside some hick bar, taking a long drag and exhaling the smoke in wispy circles. He exhaled and listened to his breath in the silence of the room. His senses were satiated and they thanked him. Nearer the end, when Ronil Brune had tormented him from the grave and the first fingers of depression threatened to drag him into the earth, too, this process had always brought him back. Mental cigarettes, he'd called them. Elizabeth had understood.

This might work, he thought. I might be able to do this. This might be okay.

He felt relief. But a part of him knew it was a lie.

On the limited occasions when David felt up to venturing into public alone-to catch an R-rated movie or to play poker with a couple chums from college he kept at arm's length-he left Tanner with the teenage girl down the street, Mich.e.l.le. She was always available on short notice if he gave her $50 for a couple hours of her time. Tonight Mich.e.l.le was "watching" Tanner at his house, which likely meant texting her boyfriend with an episode of Grey's Anatomy blaring in the background as Tanner fiddled with some new contraption in his room.

Though it was the closest library to his house, David hadn't actually been inside the Akron Public Library since it had been renovated in 2004. He'd done all his research on Brune in Cleveland because the library there was a nice place to walk to during his lunch break and because he loved combing through the old handwritten notes of the Press reporters at the archive over at Cleveland State. The new building in Akron looked more like an IKEA. It certainly didn't promise adventure like Cleveland Public did.

In a corner on the third floor, David found the microfilm department, a gla.s.s-walled alcove with a row of those nifty new computer-scanning readers. He could have done all this online but David was a tactile learner who retained information better if he could work a machine or flip a yellowed page. He needed to hear it, see it, feel it firsthand, or else everything was pushed to the back of his mind with the other junk.

He pulled a couple white boxes from the June '08 drawers of the Beacon archives and sat in front of an empty machine. His fingers had not forgotten how to wind the stiff film. He began to motor the film forward, scanning headlines as he went. He instinctively paused for a second when he saw his name.

"Writer's Wife Commits Suicide; A 'Heartbreak,' Says David Neff." Though he'd been quoted, he had never actually seen the article. He'd never seen this photograph of her car, a mangled mess of metal jutting out of a brick wall. It threatened to unravel him. He continued forward.

He stared at the front page of the June 23, 2008, edition.

"Who Was the Man from Primrose Lane?" the above-the-fold article demanded to know. "And who wanted him dead?" went the subhead.

There was a photograph in the center of the paper, once a lovely color photo of the hermit's house, preserved after publication in the black-and-white purgatory of microfilm, lending it a dense and palpable essence of evil, of dark.

The author was Phil McIntyre, a staff writer whom David had met once or twice, and whose beat had been crime until he was promoted to politics. David scanned the article for prescient details.

At long last we know the name of the Man from Primrose Lane-Joseph Howard King. But who was Joe King?

"He was always nice to me and my brother," says Firestone soph.o.m.ore Billy Beachum, who delivered essentials to King. His brother has been appointed executor of King's estate until next of kin is located. "That's all I really want to say. I don't know how he could have made any enemies."

"I always thought he might be a radical terrorist," says neighbor Lucille Youtz. "One of the Weathermen, like that Bill Ayers guy."

"Probably an old gangster laying low," figures retired FBI Special Agent Dan Larkey, who has consulted on the case. "The past has a way of catching up with these guys."

Further in the story, a hint of more clues kept from the public eye: Yesterday, Akron homicide detectives were seen carrying several boxes from King's house but refused to discuss the contents. "This is an ongoing investigation," says Lt. Detective Mark Gareau. "The material taken from his home suggests a possible motive for his murder and may provide details that only Mr. King and his killer are privy to."

David combed through the front pages and local sections of a year's worth of Beacons. In September '08, McIntyre wrote a brief follow-up: "West Side Murder Still Has Officials Stumped." Not much in the way of new details, other than this cryptic statement from Gareau: "While it's true a young woman was recently interviewed by detectives, there is no indication she had anything to do with the crime. She is certainly not a suspect."

The real story came on May 17, 2009. It was a McIntyre special, a five-thousand-word Sunday feature that officially turned the Man from Primrose Lane into the stuff of legend. The headline read: "Police: 'Joe King Is Not Joe King. The Man from Primrose Lane Lived a Lie and Died a Millionaire.'"

David jotted down the salient facts of the case, circling each name as he went along. Before contacting any sources, he typically did a poor-man's background check on everyone, Googling their names, seeing if they had any criminal histories or weird hobbies. He had once written a profile on a local chess wizard without realizing the man was once roommates with Jeffrey Dahmer and had always kicked himself for the missed opportunity to play with that, thematically.

As he read on, he could feel the mystery surrounding him, comforting him like a new drug. Somewhere in his brain a switch flipped "on" and instructed his adrenal glands to release epinephrine into his bloodstream. But the serotonin reuptake inhibitor-his daily dose of Rivertin-made sure he didn't feel the sudden rush he so desired. No downs, no ups for David. Just the mellow in-between.

Patrolman Tom Sackett discovered the body in the living room ... shot in the gut ... his fingers chopped off ... the doork.n.o.bs and walls wiped of fingerprints.

"... died with at least $3.4 million in stocks and bonds," says Mike Weger of Confidential Investigations, the private investigative firm hired by Albert Beachum. "And another $700,000 in a personal savings account."

Weger tracked King's birth certificate to a hospital in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Using the city's birth records, he located a possible relative, another King born to the same parents listed on Joe King's certificate, at the same hospital, in 1928, two years before King was delivered there. The woman's name was Carol. She has since married and has changed her last name to Dechant. Weger found her in Pennsylvania. "And that's when things got really weird," says Weger.

Dechant informed the investigator that her younger brother had died in a car crash, along with their parents, in 1932. Whoever the Man from Primrose Lane was, he wasn't Joe King.

Later: Detectives were shocked to discover, inside the dead man's home, a box of composition notebooks that detailed the life of a young woman named Katy Keenan from age six to her eighteenth birthday. According to a source close to the investigation, Keenan claims she has never met the Man from Primrose Lane. She refused comment for this story. However, she posted this message on her Facebook wall: "I'd like people to respect my privacy. Something that hasn't been respected, apparently, for the last twelve years."

Though police do not consider Keenan a suspect, one detective, who asked to remain anonymous, believes she holds the key to this unsolved murder. He points to a pa.s.sage from the notebooks in which the writer admits to following her into a movie theater because he wanted to protect her from other men who might be interested in her. In another, he admits to being in love with her. "I don't believe that the killer's motive was money-there is no relative who stood to inherit his fortune-so what is the motive? One possible motive might be someone close to Keenan finding out about those notebooks and confronting the man about it and then things escalated and got out of hand," says the detective.

... Keenan's father has refused to speak with investigators.

But that still doesn't answer the question on everyone's mind-just who was the Man from Primrose Lane to begin with? "Look, that's not my concern," says Lt. Gareau. "My job is to find out who killed this man. I don't care if the guy was running from the law, or from creditors, or a nagging wife. Someone murdered him. And we're going to find out who did it."

When David finished reading, he reached into his breast pocket for the pack of mental cigarettes he'd brought along. He placed a Marlboro between his lips and rewound the microfilm to the beginning so he could read it again.

"Sir, you can't smoke in here," warned the man sitting behind the room's reception desk. David noticed the man was reading a copy of The Serial Killer's Protege. The thing about being a nonfiction writer, he'd discovered, was that most of your readers don't look at the author's photo on the back flap, the way they do with novels. Nonfiction readers seem to be less interested in the author than they are in the story.

"I'm not smoking," he said.

"Oh," the man said. "Well, good."

"What do you think of the book?" asked David. "I was thinking about picking up a copy."

"It's pretentious. Wordy."

"But you're almost finished."

"Well, I have to see how it ends."

David nodded and turned back to the newspaper article. "Fair enough."

Katy Keenan was not hard to find. Facebook. For a woman who claimed to covet privacy, she did nothing to help her cause. At least she didn't keep pictures of herself on her public profile-her avatar was a box of Count Chocula cereal. Katy Keenan was at the center of this mystery. He wanted to meet her tonight, while the thrill of the hunt was still strong. If he could win her trust from the beginning, the rest of his job would be a cinch-and he would have started with an exclusive interview, the best of omens.

At five after eight, David stepped into the Cuyahoga Falls Barnes & n.o.ble. He always left a little bit of chance to his reporting, and so he had not called ahead to see if she was, in fact, working that night. It wasn't that he believed Katy would be there if he was "meant to" or "destined to" meet her. He enjoyed the gamble, the randomness and luck of it. He liked the risk of f.u.c.king up.

It didn't smell like a bookstore, this Barnes & n.o.ble. It smelled like a Circuit City or a Target, that regulated-air and nothing smell. He missed the indie bookstore in Kent, where he'd gone once a week to pick up the latest issues of Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man, the one on Main Street that kept its door propped open even in the middle of winter-the aroma of binder glue, of cloth covers damp with humidity, of newsprint turned to dust.

He made his way toward the coffee nook. Behind the counter was a short man with a bad beard.

"Can I help you?" he asked. "Triple-snozzberry low-fat chocolate scone?"

"Is Katy working tonight?" asked David.

"Nah, Katy's not here, man," he said gruffly.

David turned away and wandered back through the aisle, toward the nonfiction shelves. His book wasn't turned to face out, like new releases and popular books were, but there were at least ten stacked in there.

Not really thinking-he was in a zone, a sort of autohypnosis that accompanied his early reporting, leading him to wander about in search of a narrative-David took a Bic blue from his pocket, pulled a copy of Protege from the shelf, and autographed it. He took another one and did the same. If they wanted to, one of the managers could sell these copies on eBay for some beer money. He was signing his fifth copy when he got caught.

"Holy f.u.c.k, what are you doing?" the woman said.

He looked up to find a young woman staring at him, her face a mixture of alarm and disgust. For a second he was sure he was looking at the ghost of his wife. Then his mind cleared and he saw that this woman was younger. Brighter, somehow. Her bone structure was more angular. Still the resemblance was unsettling. The young woman was dressed in All Star high-tops, patched jeans, a red-and-white-striped WHERE'S WALDO? sweater. A pair of white kitten ears held back her shoulder-length straight-as-satin red hair. On her s.h.i.+rt was a name tag. KATY.