The Man From Primrose Lane Part 9

For the record, though, he never wished her dead.

EPISODE SIX.

ALL EXCEPT ELAINE.

Elizabeth did not return to their cabin within the bowels of the cruise s.h.i.+p until well after two in the morning. She did not tell David where she had been and he did not ask. All David knew was that when she returned to him, she had changed. She glowed with a light he had never seen before. Elizabeth smiled. In the light of the bathroom, she smiled at the darkness where he lay as she brushed her teeth, and when she came to bed they felt and fumbled their way over, under, and into each other, laughing between long kisses until she fell asleep in his arms.

When they returned to Ohio, to their apartment in Cuyahoga Falls, Elizabeth began training for a marathon. She was up every morning at five for a run before heading off to the library. On the weekends, she did 5Ks and half marathons on the valley trails that follow the old ca.n.a.l towpaths to Lake Erie. Her newly discovered optimism motivated David. He began submitting bigger stories to the editors at the Independent, who, until now, had only known him as the young man who did the movie and concert listings. His first seventeen proposals were shot down. But the eighteenth, a short piece on a local group of film fanatics who got together once a month to crash a bad family movie and yell obscenities at the screen until a manager kicked them out, got through and made the cover. His next pitch, a profile on Bill Watterson, the reclusive artist behind Calvin & Hobbes, was approved immediately and he spent the next four months-the rest of Elizabeth's conditioning-working with the managing editor on a series of rewrites that left him feeling both mentally drained and emotionally fulfilled. This is what I'm supposed to do, he thought. This is what I'm good at.

Elizabeth landed a job teaching music at a public school on the south side of Akron and David began to hunt for the article that would make his name. A part of him had always known what this article would be, and that part of him had always been too afraid to actually put it into words. The story had found him, so to speak. It had sought him out. It was the best kind of story, too-a mystery, a murder mystery. It was an elegant game of chess against an opponent who had already bested every detective a.s.signed to the case. David thought he could do better. There was no logical reason for him to believe this. And it was naive, dangerous, and delusional for him to feel it so strongly. The kidnapper is smarter than the cops, he thought. But not smarter than me. After the marathon, he knew it was time to prove it.

"I want to write about Elaine," he said.

They were sitting at Aladdin's, eating a plate of hummus by the window overlooking Highland Square. Since their wedding, Elizabeth had burned off twenty pounds and her once-apple cheeks sat firmly against her bones in a way most men were drawn to. He liked her rounder. "I was wondering what you've been stewing about," she said.

"Stewing?"

"You've been away. Somewhere in your head for a couple days."

"Oh."

"I've seen that look before, you know? In the eyes of the detectives who stop by every couple years asking the same old questions-did strange men ever come over to the house, did your dad like to gamble, why do you think he took Elaine and not you-that's my personal favorite." She took another bite of pita. "It's a jonesing," she said. "Just like a drug. You go deeper and deeper and deeper, thinking you just need a little more and then it's done, but it never is."

"I just thought that maybe I could help," he said. "See what leads are out there, what the detectives haven't thought to look at."

Elizabeth reached out to him and took his hand. Before the piano bar, it had been like torture to get her to show affection in public. Sometimes it seemed she was making up for lost time. "I know. But I don't want to go down that road again. And I don't want to watch you go down there, either. Someone once told me that stories like this make ghosts out of the living. I think that's true."

"How will you ever get closure?" he asked.

"That's the thing, David. There is no closure for this. Closure is for buildings, not people."

A line from the movie 2010, the one with Roy Scheider and John Lithgow in a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p bound for Jupiter's moons, bubbled up from his subconscious mind. All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there. For David, it had always been this way-snippets of prose, dialogue from plays and movies, he was constantly bombarded with the echoes of other people's stories. He supposed it was like this for any beginning writer. On some level his subconscious was always in "story" mode, searching for ways in which life reflected art, how the art he knew reflected his own. His mind hunted a.n.a.logies, craved metaphor. That message from 2010, for example. It had been G.o.d's warning to humankind, echoes of His first instruction to Man, the one about avoiding the Tree of Knowledge. All these stories are yours, except Elaine. Attempt no investigations there. When he'd learned about the Garden of Eden in Bible school, he'd wondered if G.o.d's warning hadn't been more of a dare, anyway, if deep down G.o.d had really wanted Eve to give that apple to Adam in order to set things in motion. Or what about this? Maybe He was just bored. Sitting there in Aladdin's, he wondered the same about Elizabeth. Regardless of her true intentions, he understood that each of these stories-the Tree of Knowledge, the warning to stay the f.u.c.k off Europa, the request to not dig into Elaine's case-eventually ended the same way.

Let that be another day, then, he told himself. Of course, he had other things to obsess over soon enough. A week later, he discovered the box.

The box was the size of a child's coffin. Heavy cardboard, the kind they don't make anymore, worn at the sides so that you could see the brown threads beneath. It sat on the cabinets above the copier in the editorial department of the Independent like a sleeping vulture, one word etched in thick magic marker on its side-BRUNE.

"Hey, Cindy, what's in the box?"

"Oh," she said, rolling her eyes in that decidedly Cindy way. "Don't even get me started on that box. It's a sick joke."

From the writers' den came the sound of Frankie Thomas's laugh-high and juvenile, taunting and loving. "Don't open the box, Davey. Don't open the box! Save yourself!"

He followed Cindy into the writers' den, where Frankie sat at a desk in the corner, his feet propped up while he read through a stack of legal doc.u.ments. This was the beating heart of the Independent, the place where six-thousand-word feature articles full of bite and boom were written. Over its thirty-year history, the Independent had brought down crooked state senators and heads of business, the writers unafraid to follow the meager leads that the Plain Dealer reporters pitched into the streets as sc.r.a.ps. The paper was the voice of the struggling lower middle cla.s.s of Cleveland, which is to say most of Cleveland. The writers who worked there wrote about the local boys who returned from the oil wars, about the toxins the steel companies dumped into the Cuyahoga, about the behind-the-scenes politics of the Plain Dealer-stories that would be left untold otherwise. These writers were underpaid, underappreciated, and loving it. These writers had never won a Pulitzer. They had never won a plaque from the local Order of Hibernians. The room smelled of old socks and McDonald's, of cigarettes and fresh ink.

Frankie's desk was orderly, his future stories arranged in separate folders to his right. Stapled to the wall beside him were the stylized covers for the features he had written-the one about the meth addict who kicked the habit and became a local rapper of some note, the one about a secret bar on the west side that only old mobsters and prosecutors knew about. Cindy's desk ... well, Cindy's desk you couldn't see. It was buried beneath a pile of flotsam: empty iced-tea bottles; pantyhose; a stuffed zebra; notes on a story she'd pitched seven months ago; a half-eaten bag of chips; twenty folders that contained no paper; a single shoe. Once a month, Cindy cleaned off her desk by pus.h.i.+ng everything into a large garbage bag. There were five such bags in her Camry. David's desk was next to Frankie's. There was nothing on his other than a photograph of Elizabeth taken at their wedding.

"What's in the box, Frankie?" he asked.

Frankie, a short guy with a light brown pompadour wagging constantly above his glacial-blue eyes, sat up and looked across his desk at Cindy. "Tell him about it."

Cindy's hair was a straight blond bowl and she had a round, dimpled face and childlike buck teeth. "f.u.c.k you, Frankie," she said.

"What?"

"f.u.c.k you, Frankie."

David lifted an eyebrow at the young man in the corner.

"Inside that box," said Frankie, "is the greatest story never told. It's the one Pulitzer this paper will ever publish. Many writers have tried to solve its secrets"-he nodded his head toward Cindy-"but so far it has only driven them insane for trying."

"What's in the box?" he asked again.

"In that box, my friend, are the last notes and personal effects of Ronil J. Brune, the Back Road Strangler, the man who raped and murdered perhaps as many as seven young girls in the early eighties. When he was executed in 2002, he had everything from his death row cell s.h.i.+pped here, in that box. Attached to it was a letter from Brune himself, in which he proclaimed to be innocent of the crimes for which he was executed. He said that the clues leading to the real killer were contained within the box. And if he's telling the truth, and the state of Ohio murdered an innocent man, then it's a once-in-a-lifetime story."

"It's a sick joke," said Cindy. "Brune's idea of revenge. He wants to use the media to cast doubt on his guilt, use us to torture the families of his victims. He wants to exert control on them even after his death."

"He wanted to exert control, you mean," David corrected.

"Wants."

Frankie fidgeted in his chair, the smile gone from his face. "There's a reason the box is not in the writers' den," he said. "There's a reason we put it way the h.e.l.l up there. And if you decide to open the box, you have to respect our ... superst.i.tions, and keep it out of the room."

"It's a haunted box?" David asked.

"Yes."

"C'mon."

But Frankie didn't laugh.

"C'mon."

"Look, all I know is that when we kept the box in here, some strange s.h.i.+t went down. Maybe it was the box. Maybe it wasn't..."

"Right," said Cindy.

"... but when we put the lid back on the box and moved it out of the room, it all stopped."

"Stuff like what?" David asked.

"Like, every time I tried to fart, I sharted instead," said Frankie. This busted David up and the three writers laughed until David's side started to hurt and Frankie had snot dribbling out of his nose.

"When I opened the box, I got the worst headache," Cindy said, her eyes going unfocused. "That night, when I went to bed, I dreamt I could feel a man's hands on me."

A few stray chuckles spat out of Frankie's mouth before he could clamp it shut.

"I miscarried the next morning."

"Jesus, Cindy!" said Frankie. "Too much. Too much."

"There was a spot in my bedroom, that if you stood in it, you could smell a man's cheap cologne for a week after that."

"What happened to you, Frankie?" asked David, trying not to envision everything Cindy had just said.

Frankie shrugged. "Stuff," he said. "I got mugged-beat to s.h.i.+t-outside by a homeless guy who the police later informed me was legally blind and couldn't lift a hat. I woke up one morning and my dog had swallowed its tongue. All that's incidental, though. There is, the best way I can describe it, a darkness. There's a darkness in that box. You can feel it on you. Like something standing on your chest. I thought I might be getting clinically depressed or something. But when I closed up the box and put it away"-Frankie jumped up and held out his arms-"ta-da! Right as rain."

"Seriously, David, leave the box alone," said Cindy.

So he did what no other writer had been stupid enough to do: he took it home.

It weighed 78 pounds, making it a struggle for 145-pound David to first bring it down from atop the cabinets in the editorial wing-using a ladder he found in the storage closet-then from the eighth floor of the Western Reserve Building to his Sundance parked out front. He could feel the added weight in the trunk altering the performance of the car on the way home, down I-77. The car didn't swerve in and out of traffic the way he had taught it to. It veered, rather than corrected. It hesitated when it should have punched through a hole in the rush-hour traffic. To David, it felt as if he had a sumo team sitting in the back.

He brought it into their first-floor apartment in Cuyahoga Falls, and set it on the table in their kitchenette with a dull thunk. Elizabeth had called him to say she was staying after work to catch up on grades and lesson plans (these late nights had increased steadily in the last few months but he didn't think to question if she was really where she said she was). He was alone with the secrets the box contained.

His stomach rolled with excitement. It was the way he felt when a new Robert McCammon novel or Richard North Patterson mystery novel was published, an excitement for the information within. Except this was better. This was a mystery no one had read before. Sure, Frankie and Cindy had sorted through the papers and had begun to develop stories of their own, but their interpretation of the material would have been quite different than his. The story he would glean from the doc.u.ments would be entirely unique.

The lid slipped off with the slightest hint of a sigh.

"Do you remember what you said to me when we first met?" asked Dr. Popodopovich, the thin woman sitting behind the mahogany table.

"Yes," said David.

"Then you understand my concern."

"I can't feel anything."

"So let me take you off it gradually."

"How long?"

"Three months."

"No."

"This isn't like aspirin," she said. "It's much more like heroin."

"You said it can't kill me, the withdrawals."

"David, before it's over you'll wish it could."

Her name was Athena Popodopovich. She dressed in paisley prints that hadn't been manufactured since the late sixties-G.o.d only knows where she bought them. Years ago, Dr. Popodopovich had worked as the traveling counselor and nanny for a fairly well-known rock band that had turned sober in the years since they had topped the charts. She understood ignominy better than most. She'd been there for David after Brune. She'd been there for him after Elizabeth had taken her life. She'd brought him back. Until now, he'd always followed her advice.

"You run the possibility of undoing everything we've worked on," she said, a touch too firmly. "If your body hasn't relearned how to manufacture the chemicals you need to not be sad, you could potentially become severely depressed before you recognize what's happening. I'm afraid a crash like that might cause you to become dependent on this drug for the rest of your life. I'm afraid of what else it might cause you to do. And, frankly, I'm concerned for Tanner."

That stung.

"Tanner's going to stay with my father while I dry out," said David. "I'll be out of town, anyway. Working on this article."

"Where are you going?"

"Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Near State College."

"I thought this guy you're writing about was from Akron."

David shrugged. "No one knows where the Man from Primrose Lane was from. We know he died here. But he got his fake ID in Bellefonte. So he has some connection to that town, too."

"Do you think it's a good idea to be in an unfamiliar setting while you go through withdrawals?"

"Why? Would I enjoy them more at home?"

"You're five minutes from the hospital here. You know your surroundings. What if you become disoriented? Have you ever heard of dissociative fugue? It's where you experience something so stressful your mind reboots and you forget who you are, sometimes forever."

"How likely is that?"

"Rivertin is a new drug," she said. "It's the best thing we have for PTSD, but there's a lot we don't know about it yet. There's a lot we don't know about the side effects of coming off it so quickly. There is something called hypnagogic regression, an episodic memory-what you might call an intense flashback-which is quite unpleasant for the person experiencing it. The person reliving it."

"You told me there was a, what, ninety-five percent chance I'd be sterile on the Rivertin, too, and now I have a four-year-old kid."

"You're sort of proving my point."

"I'm sorry," he said at last. "But this not feeling anything is making me feel like an invalid."

"Have you stopped taking it already?"

"No."

Athena shook her head. "I don't understand the rush. Three months isn't that long. Let's do this right."

David didn't want to wait. Suddenly it felt like all he did was wait anymore. He was beginning to sense how he had squandered the last few years of his life. No more waiting. Not for one day. He gathered his jacket and stood. "I'm sorry. I am. But I think this is going to be all right."

"You're not thinking rationally."

"I know." He turned to leave.

"David."

He looked back at her. For the first time since he'd made up his mind to quit the pills, he felt nervous. He felt nervous because Athena looked scared. She'd always been so confident, an anchor to the real world for him. But he could see that she was afraid.

"When you crash, there's going to be a time when you will want to reach for that phone and call me to save you. By then you're going to have forgotten all these reasons you have for doing this. You'll be in so much pain the only thing you'll want is for me to come and save you. But here's the thing. By the time you get there, you will have crossed a point of no return. If we give you the drug while your body is revving up to replace it, you'll go into coma and we'll probably destroy your liver while we're trying to get you back."

He smiled. "Give it to me straight, Doc. I can handle it."