The Man From Primrose Lane Part 22

Stall.

"He told me not to shine the light in his eyes, so I never really got to see his face," said David.

Synenberger rolled his eyes. "Of course not," he said.

"'Give me the film,' the man said to me, 'Give ...

... me the film."

He handed the reel of old film stock to the man who stood in the darkness of the captain's bedroom. As he did, David b.u.mped the nightstand to cause a little noise. Still, he thought the man might have heard his sleight of hand, the brittle snapping under the shifting of objects upon the table.

"How did you find this?" he asked. "How did you know about this?"

David said nothing.

"I have a gun," the old man said. "Tell me."

"No," said David. He didn't know if the man had a gun or not. Quite possibly men like this carried weapons meant for killing. But this man sounded weak, like his grandfather used to sound after climbing a couple steps. David knew that the man did not have a gun in his hands at the moment, anyway-he could see them both and one was holding the film reel. In the waistband of his slacks? Maybe. But how quickly could he get to it?

Apparently the old pederast sensed his doubt. He launched himself at David. The film tumbled to the deck and suddenly the man was at David's neck with his scrawny hands. If his body was weak, his hands, at least, were quite strong. They choked David's throat closed. Long nails pinched into his neck.

Kill him! Brune shouted. David heard it not in his mind this time, but in his ears. Kill him! Kill him!

"Oh, I will," said the old man, leaning against him. He could feel the old man's growing hard-on under the thin slacks.

David sc.r.a.ped at the old man's chest, ripping open the b.u.t.ton-up flannel shirt. The man's chest was devoid of hair and slippery with lubricant. David had nothing to grip. He couldn't kick him, either; the old man had pushed him against a bureau and there simply was not enough room. He did the only thing he could think of; he grabbed the old man's nipples and twisted.

The old man screamed, letting David go. As soon as those cancerous hands released his throat, David shoved him away. He heard him smack against the wall. As David made for the door, the man scampered after him in the dark. There was no time to stop for the film. David ran for the ladder and the docks beyond.

"No!" the old man screamed. It was a high-pitched scream, the scream of the insane.

You f.u.c.ker! shouted Brune.

"I'm sorry!" the old man screamed, and for a moment David thought he was still talking to him. "I'm sorry, Beezle! He's too strong! I told you he was too strong! No! Please, no! Beezle!"

David slid down the ladder so quickly he stumbled and fell the last five feet, cracking his a.s.s on the dock. He didn't look back. He ran to his car, panting, afraid he was about to die of a coronary. And as he ran, he clutched at the thing in his pocket, the secret the old man didn't know about: four frames he'd managed to snap off the beginning of the reel.

He pulled off the highway halfway to Akron and rolled into a McDonald's parking lot. He walked inside and locked himself in the men's room. Then he brought out the film and held it to the light.

The four frames stood out like zoetrope drawings, freeze-frames of a despicable action that occurred in the past and could not be changed. Four single pictures. But that was enough. They were sitting on a couch. Sarah was on his lap, her pants stripped away. Her head lolled to the side, away from the camera so that only her chin and part of a cheek were visible. But it was her, without a doubt. There was no mistaking Trimble, either. He was looking at the camera and smiling.

Elizabeth kissed him on the forehead the next morning before she left for work. She didn't ask where he had been all night. They were separating. He could feel it. On this trajectory, separation was unavoidable.

He watched her walk out of their bedroom and wondered if this was the last time or if he could disappoint her again before she cut her losses and moved on, moved back into exile with Christopher Pike.

Only one way out, Brune whispered. Was his voice a little more distant this morning? David thought maybe. Also, it was in his head again. Not his ears. And David sensed desperation in the tone.

Already his body was beginning to tense up, preparing for the psychological a.s.sault of another day under Brune's spell. David leaned over the side of the bed for a moment, digging into the pocket of his jeans that lay on the floor, and returned to the pillows with the pack of Marlboros, his mental cigarettes. He stuck a coffin nail in his mouth and imagined himself lighting it, imagined himself inhaling the nicotine and tar and formaldehyde, and when Brune spoke again his voice sounded like it was coming through a transistor radio tuned to an AM station.

Jump off the bridge, David. It'll feel like flying.

It was that moment that David made up his mind to quit the paper. It would be, he knew on a basic level, a first step toward some kind of salvation.

He drove to Cleveland with the car's radio tuned to 90.3, a local NPR affiliate. He was not surprised to hear the news update, "Emergency crews this morning are responding to a fire at Edgewater Marina that has already claimed three large yachts, including one owned by retired county sheriff Gregory O'Reilly. No word yet on the cause of the fire, which started sometime around three a.m. Unconfirmed reports suggest O'Reilly may have been living on his boat. His family, when reached by phone, declined comment."

The editorial room at the Independent was bustling with young copy editors and music writers scrambling to push the latest issue to print. This excitement usually thrilled David, who liked to imagine himself walking through the Daily Planet on a day when renegades from Krypton threatened Metropolis and only he had the exclusive scoop from the Man of Steel. Today, however, the cacophony faded into murmur. He no longer felt a part of it.

"Motherf.u.c.ker!" yelled Andy.

David entered his office and shut the door behind him.

"Where the holy f.u.c.k have you been?" asked Andy. "Where's my story? It better be in your little man-purse there. Because, what the f.u.c.k? We got a cover to lay out and this baby gets sent to the printer at noon."

"I quit," said David.

Andy looked at him for a moment, his face a blank, as if something inside had shorted out. Then he smiled. "Ha! f.u.c.k you. That's good. That's good. Funny guy."

"I don't have your story, Andy," he said.

"All right. Cut it out, man. You wanna give me a heart attack?"

He didn't say anything. Just stood there and gave his editor a moment to catch up to reality. David suddenly felt boneless, held together by tape and wishes. Andy jumped up and came around his desk. Here we go, thought David. He prepared himself for the punch.

"You get points for coming down here and saying it to my face," he said, through clenched teeth the color of coffee. "But all that buys you is about another thirty seconds. If I were you, I'd get gone."

"What are you doing home?" asked Elizabeth as she returned to their apartment to find him on the couch at four-thirty that afternoon. She was dressed in a smooth Erin-green sundress, a sweater tossed over her shoulders to make it school-appropriate. Her neck, he noticed absently, was splotchy and red. Usually only he could make that happen. She must have run up the steps, he told himself.

"Where have you been?" he asked casually.

She shook her head. "Staff meeting. What's up?"

"I'm done with the Independent."

"They fired you?"

"I quit."

Elizabeth came around the table and snuggled up to David on the couch, where he sat watching a rerun of Unsolved Mysteries. She kissed him. "I'm so happy, David," she said. "You have no idea."

"I have to write one more story, though," he said. "I've got to do something with this Brune thing."

Elizabeth scrunched her eyes at him. "I hate that story. You've been weird ever since you brought that box home." She took his head in her hands and turned him toward her. "Why do you want to live in that world?"

"It's the real world."

"No, it isn't. These things are like lightning strikes. It's like you're only talking to people who have been struck by lightning and a.s.suming everyone else has been."

"This guy is still out there. Trimble is still out there."

"Let the police deal with him."

"The police don't believe me."

"Then promise me it'll be your last," she said. "When this one's done, promise you'll never write about this stuff again."

It felt like a lie, but he said it anyway. "I promise."

The first thing he did the next morning was visit the Medina Police Department, where he gave the strip of film to Sergeant Boylan. He spent the next hour and a half explaining to Boylan how, exactly, it had come into his possession. An a.s.sistant county prosecutor was called in. After he explained the story again to her, the county prosecutor graciously opted not to charge him with obstruction of justice (for tampering with a potential crime scene and f.u.c.king up their chain of custody).

"I'm still not sold," said Boylan. "All it proves is that Trimble is a creep. You can't see the girl's face. It's impossible to tell if it's even a child. Her chest isn't exposed. I'm not sure this is even p.o.r.nography."

"We could never present this in court," said the young APA. "The chain of custody is broken. Which is why reporters shouldn't run around playing cop. The rest of the film, I'm sure, was destroyed in the fire."

"We'll follow up on this," a.s.sured the policeman.

It was the response David had expected, the response he needed to push him to turn the story into a book. He would have to go after Trimble himself, the only way he knew how-with words.

And so when David left the station he drove to the nearest Barnes & n.o.ble. He'd never before given much thought to writing a nonfiction book. As a teen, devouring fantasy fiction from Tolkien to Stephen King, he'd considered writing similar stories one day, but all he had to show for it was a binder of hackneyed short stories, printed on typing paper that was turning yellow in the closet. He knew he could kick around for years searching in vain for an agent-he'd heard horror stories about the submission process from college professors. He hoped there was a way to bypa.s.s that, even if it meant publishing in a narrow market.

The "local interest" section was dominated by three companies. He found the names of the editors on their websites and emailed queries to them as soon as he returned home. His instinct, that a local publisher would be more apt to give an unproven writer a chance, was spot-on. David got offers from each, but in the end chose Sheppard Publishing mostly because he liked the cover designs for their series of ghost story paperbacks.

The next day, Paul Sheppard bought him lunch at a Chinese place on the east side and listened intently as David walked him through the murders of Jennifer Poole, Donna Doyle, and Sarah Creston; through Ronil Brune's arrest and conviction on the rape charges, and his execution by lethal injection for Sarah's murder; through the evidence he had uncovered that implicated Brune's young friend Riley Trimble.

"Whew," Paul said when David finished. "It's a good story. A long one, I think. It's probably going to take you nine months."

It took David three.

He set a grueling pace for himself, eager to rid his soul of Brune. The act of writing became a form of exorcism. Ten pages a day at first. By the end, he was writing fifteen pages in eight-hour shifts starting the moment Elizabeth fell asleep. She never saw him write a single word.

Brune's voice dissipated at once and by the third week was gone altogether. David's nightmares subsided. He gained twenty pounds, due in no small part to late-night writing sessions at Steak 'n Shake-he had discovered he craved fatty foods when he was "in the zone."

On July 19, 2007, David stopped writing. The ma.n.u.script was five hundred pages long, easily the longest project he'd ever worked on. He had no idea if it was readable. He wasn't about to let Elizabeth take a peek. A nagging voice in his head-his own, this time-suggested his book might read like crazy talk, like a terrorist's manifesto. He expected Paul to take one look at it before asking him if it was some kind of joke.

He copied it to disc and printed it out into a thick folder and mailed everything to Paul. He heard nothing for three weeks. He had just made up his mind that Paul had indeed thought the book was nothing but insane ranting and supposition when the phone rang and Paul's a.s.sistant, Heather, asked if he would drive up to Cleveland for a meeting.

"We're printing four thousand copies, hardback," said Paul, clapping David on the back as he walked into the office, located in an old Twinkie factory near Chinatown. "I don't know if it's going to sell or not. It's not going to be what people expect and that could turn off some true crime fans. What we're going to have on our side, for once, are the critics. They're going to love this."

"Yeah?"

"That stuff in there about how this story hurt your relationship with your wife. That's going to affect people. But one thing..."

"What?"

"We have to come up with a name for the old man in the boat."

"You mean, other than O'Reilly?"

"We'll never know for sure if that's who you saw."

"It was his boat."

"Maybe," said Paul. "But he's not dead. You know that. They found him alive, wandering around Lakewood. He's inst.i.tutionalized but he could still sue. And you never did see his face."

"No. I didn't."

They settled on the hard-boiled moniker "Mr. Shadow" for the mysterious old man on the boat. David didn't like it, but he accepted it. He also accepted the $2,500 advance Paul gave him that day. He used part of the money to take Elizabeth out to dinner.

But that night, long after David had begun to believe the voice of the executed rapist had been nothing but his troubled subconscious all along, Brune sprang his trap.

It happened while they were having s.e.x.

Elizabeth was perched atop his lap, naked but for a pair of striped ankle socks, sitting back so that he could watch her taut body move around his p.r.i.c.k. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s pulled up and down as she moved; her pale nipples, nearly as white as the rest of her, were erect and beady with sweat. Her eyes were half closed, watching him push into her.

It felt like he tripped.

One minute he was sitting on the edge of the bed, inside her. The next, it felt like he had stumbled during a walk. It was that feeling you get sometimes as you're just falling asleep and something in a dream jerks you awake again. Except he didn't feel awake. It felt like he was falling. His vision drew back and Elizabeth's body shrank inside a sort of darkened tunnel, not unlike the tunnel vision he sometimes experienced when he was focused on writing, except much more complete. He tried to move an arm, but discovered he could not. He tried to speak and nothing came out.

I'm having a stroke, he thought.

But then he watched his arm move. It was not the one he had commanded, not the right one he favored, but the left. He watched his left hand cup her right breast and knead it, hard. Elizabeth moaned louder.

"I want to tie you up," he heard himself say. "I want to hear you beg." But it was not his normal voice. It was different. Gravelly. More nasal. The voice of a good accountant. "Tell me you want it."

"Yes," she said, daring.

What the f.u.c.k is happening? he cried out in his mind. What the f.u.c.k is this?

"C'mere," he said. The perspective changed as his body moved from inside her, from the bed, and pulled Elizabeth after him. He saw himself remove several neckties from his closet, which his hands used to bind his wife's wrists together. He made the knots tight. Another tie became a blindfold. He made her kneel on the bed so that he could tie her to the frame. He smacked her a.s.s with enough force to leave a pink blossom behind. Elizabeth bit her lip and moaned.

His body stepped around to the large window beside the bed and drew the curtain back. David felt his blood turn to slivers of ice at the sight of the large, hulking homeless man standing in the dark outside their window, his face illuminated by the spa.r.s.e light of the bedroom lamp. The b.u.m's teeth were gone, except for a single bicuspid. One eye was milky. The other one stared back hungrily at the naked woman tied to the bed.

He watched his hand reach to the floor. His belt lay there.

"f.u.c.k me," said Elizabeth.

"Soon," he whispered. He brought the leather strap down across her upper legs.