The Man From Primrose Lane Part 5

"Uh," he said.

"What did you write in there?" she asked. "Are you the guy who writes all that Christian s.h.i.t in the Harry Potter books? f.u.c.k, man. We have to refund those things."

Katy s.n.a.t.c.hed the book from David's hands.

"Stay there while I call security." She turned toward reference.

"Wait," he said, reaching out for her arm and gently pulling her to a stop. She felt like velvet, like warm. "Look, this is really stupid. I don't ... look ... I don't ... this is really awkward, but..."

"You're blushing," she said.

"Well, I'm a little embarra.s.sed. I can explain about the book. I'm-"

"I know who you are," said Katy, a smile slipping over her face, pulling back to reveal her teeth in a decidedly Cheshire Cat, childish way. "I was just joshing you."

"Oh," he said, reaching out for the book. "Have we met?"

Katy rolled her eyes. "We're Facebook friends. You sent me an IM once. Don't you remember?"

David nodded. He had set up the Facebook account at his publisher's urging right before Protege came out. He didn't maintain it anymore. But he knew who did.

"Matt said you were looking for me?" said Katy. "After the stuff came out in the papers, some TV reporters came in here and tried to get me on camera. Everyone was told to say I'm not here, if someone asks."

David nodded. His mouth was dry.

"In the back of my mind, I always wondered if you'd track me down," said Katy, tilting her head to the side to consider him. "I think I knew that one day you'd come walking back through that door." She paused. "Karen Allen. Raiders. Get it?"

"Yeah."

"Except I don't give interviews," she said. "I f.u.c.king hate reporters. They made my life a living h.e.l.l."

"I'm not a reporter," he said. "I was an English major."

"That line usually works for you?"

"Actually, yes."

She gave him a once-over; shoes to his ruffly hair. "Where ya been, anyway? Where have you been hiding, David Neff? You write the best true crime book since In Cold Blood and then you disappear, pull a Dave Chappelle."

"Grieving."

"She was somethin' else, huh?"

He nodded. "She was."

"Okay, I'll talk to you if you want. But not here, okay? Come by my place tomorrow night. Six o'clock. Pick me up. Take me out to a nice dinner, maybe the Diamond Grille or something. You can afford it, right?"

Katy swiveled back on her feet, chasing a stray strand of red red hair away from her eyes. Can anyone wear that much black eyeliner and not be goth? he wondered.

"You ever get that feeling when you meet someone that your life is about to take a strange detour that maybe you'd be better off avoiding?"

He nodded again. "Couple times."

"Yeah," she said. "I bet." Katy reached behind David and pulled a book from the shelf. As she brushed by, he felt the whisper of her body. He smelled the lilac on her neck. These things should be making him feel light-headed and jittery, but he felt hardly anything. The meds were keeping this moment, this first real moment in four years, in check.

She grabbed the Bic blue out of his hand and began writing in the book. A moment later, she handed it to him.

"My cell phone and address," she said. "Call if you're going to be late. I mean it. I f.u.c.king hate waiting. For anybody. If you're late, I'm going to go to the movies with my toolbox fiance. We'll go see something really crummy, too."

He stood there for a moment, just looking at her looking back at him.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said. "You're just not what I expected." He started toward the checkout. He couldn't help a half-smile from forming. There it went. It was a particular smile he'd forgotten, one he hadn't used in a long time.

"And f.u.c.king don't beat off to my Facebook pictures when you get home," said Katy from behind him, loud enough for the woman flipping through Better Homes at the magazine rack to glance over at him as he walked by.

Tanner was asleep by the time he got home. He paid Mich.e.l.le and walked her to the door. Then he slipped back to his office, closed and locked the door, and did indeed spend the next twenty minutes jerking off to the Facebook pictures of his latest subject. When he was done, he felt spent and weird. But not guilty. Not even a little bit.

EPISODE FOUR.

HIS SHERLOCK RUFFIAN.

Once Elizabeth committed to the idea of getting married, a sucker's bet if there ever was one, she became enchanted by all the little ways she could gain control over the chaos of wedding planning. She saw the logistics of hosting a large party on their humble budget as a worthy challenge. There was not a cake-maker or caterer in all of Akron that she did not work over to some extent, no priest or minister she did not haggle with until their jaunty demeanors were frayed. One DJ, whom she instructed to meet her at a Wendy's in Cuyahoga Falls so they weren't on his home turf, was so insulted at her initial offering and rigid song list that he stood up and left without saying a word, leaving behind a tall Frosty and most of a cheeseburger. But what she put together out of five thousand dollars and persistence was more than either of them had imagined.

The ceremony was held at a Unitarian Universalist church in North Hill, on November 20, 2004. David arrived early, alone, in a slim tux, hoping to find a quiet place where he could review his vows. He started, for only a second, at the sight of smoke billowing from behind the podium. The air reeked of pot. But this was not weed. At least not that weed.

"Mom?" His mother's head popped up from behind the podium. She was a beautiful woman. Dark, raven hair. High cheekbones. Black-as-coal eyes. When she saw him, she stood quickly, the burning knot of wrapped leaves like a thick cigar in her left hand. "Hi, Davey."

"Sage?"

"I'm smudging the church," she said.

He nodded. She had done this for his high school graduation, too. Lynn Chambers, nee Freemantle, was a reformed hippie with a ten-year sobriety token in her purse and the serenity prayer on a laminated square she kept in her shoe. She had learned sage-smudging at the annual AA Founders' Day powwow in Akron some years back.

"Come here," she said.

"Ah. I don't want to smell like weed."

"It doesn't smell like weed. Don't be a baby. Come here."

David walked to her. She placed a hand on his shoulder and waved the other, which held the smoldering sage, around his head. "Anything not here for the highest and best good, be gone," she said. "You are not welcome. You are not wanted."

And there really was something, a gentle shift in the air, he thought. But perhaps that was just his imagination.

His heart was conflicted about his mother. The booze and the drugs had possessed her when he was young, spirited her away, left him to mature with his father and an abusive stepmother. But there had been moments of such wonder during sober lulls. Trips to museums and symphonies and cheesy horror movies. Sometimes she had even fought for him-once she had kidnapped him from his grandmother's front yard while he played, some misguided attempt to regain custody. For all the drama she invited into his life, he loved her fiercely and did not care to understand or even to ask himself why.

"Thanks, Mom."

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and then walked down the aisle, waving the burning sage in the air, trailing a veil of smoke behind her.

By two o'clock, the church had filled; a hundred people, nearly all David's friends and relatives. Elizabeth's aunt was there, sitting with some of Elizabeth's high school chums. Some Red Hats, too. But her parents were not invited.

David stood at the front, on a riser of spotty red carpeting, next to his best man, Wally, whom he'd known since grade school but seldom saw much of anymore, and the minister, a plump woman in a flower-print gown. The congregation rose on some cue David had missed and suddenly Chip, a raggedy-haired man he'd met at summer camp ten years ago, was playing the "Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back on a synth he'd set up in the corner. Elizabeth stepped through the doors. As soon as Chip saw her, he dutifully switched to "Here Comes the Bride." The joke wasn't funny anymore, because the woman in that dress was not simply radiant or fetching, as those who were there would later claim; she was not glamorous or even lovely, as his father would tell him at her funeral-the woman in that dress was magical, and in an instant every last person in that little room knew and understood this, and more than a couple were moved beyond admiration into fear.

The dress was secondhand, from Once Upon a Bride. It was plain, straight, and had no train. It wasn't even white, really, but eggsh.e.l.l. But it fit as if it had been designed for her by a third-generation dressmaker at the end of a long career. The faux-satin fabric lay upon her form like a suggestion of a dress, slipping over her skinny tomboy hips, down her long slender legs. It slung around her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in a way that suggested the gentle firmness David knew, and wrapped around her freckled shoulders in thin strips of ribbon. Her hair, that wispy red hair he so loved to trace his fingers through, that hair was twisted up in a windy-do that revealed her milky-pale neck, her tiny ears. She wore no makeup. Her cheeks blushed with wonderful insecurity, her eyes sparkled in the flashes of ten disposable cameras as she walked, alone, to David.

He took her hand as she came to him and when she clasped to him he could feel her shaking. She felt like living lightning.

When it came time for his vows, he pulled the crinkled paper from his pocket with a shaky hand.

"I don't know why I love you but I do," he said, looking at her, at her eyes. "When I saw you that first day of cla.s.ses it was like I had been waiting all my life just to meet you. It was like I finally understood my purpose. I will spend the rest of my life protecting you, Elizabeth, protecting you from all the randomness you see in the world, against all those probabilities. I swear I will never let anything happen to you or to us. Not as long as I'm alive."

"David," she said. "I've wondered a lot about whether I love you, because I never thought I could really truly love anyone. What they don't tell you is that love is faith and, well, faith is unpredictable. It has its own rules that I don't understand. I do love you, David. I know I do. I love you because in spite of the odds against any real happiness in this world, I believe we can be happy. You made me believe. Because you made me happy."

Besides the ill timing of a furry convention on the other side of the Holiday Inn Express off I-77 in Canton, the reception was a fine party. There was plenty of prime rib and chicken cordon bleu and a cookie cake and an open bar with middle-shelf liquor both dark and clear. By sundown David was buzzing on wine. He watched a line of nervous young men joking to each other as they awaited a turn with the bride for the dollar dance.

"I'm happy for you," someone said, from just behind him.

David turned to find his uncle Ira, an older man with wispy white hair and a long face. "Thank you."

"I got you a little something, kiddo," he said, handing David an unwrapped book.

It was a thin moleskin, filled with patient lines of thin-lettered handwriting.

"When I was young, I was in love with words. Copied down my favorite bits. Poetry, mostly," Ira said, his voice a powerful wind of whiskey. "Lots of Williams in there. He uncovered the rhythm of life, the balance of it. How reality is understood through imagery. The forms behind things. The light and the darkness there. If you're going to be a writer, you have to know this man."

David smiled, though he was unsure what exactly his uncle was trying to say.

He thumbed through it as Ira walked away, reading snippets about plums and red wheelbarrows. He waved a thanks at the old man, but Uncle Ira was already lost in some low conversation with David's mother across the dance floor. So he tucked it inside his tux and waited for his turn to dance with his wife again. He wondered if they might have kids one day and, if so, what they would look like. He thought of growing old with her, what sort of adventure that might be. He thought of all the vacations and long Sundays he had to look forward to and felt the warmth around him, the warmth of the wine and the friends and the immediacy of the moment and all the promises of the future.

He hadn't spoken to Jason Parker in several months, even though David kept the young man on salary. He thought of Jason as his "Sherlock ruffian." He was to David as the local beggar kids had been to Sherlock Holmes: a source of unbiased information, a trusted ally, a proxy when needed. A writer's life, even the life of a writer in retirement, requires a couple close a.s.sociates. When he needed someone to run to the drugstore to refill his psych meds, he called Jason, who didn't judge and wouldn't gossip. When he needed weed, he called Jason, who had friends who grew that sort of thing. Jason read and answered the emails that came in through the website and politely declined requests for interviews with David. Twice a week he picked the mail up from the post office and sorted through it, pitching everything David didn't need to know about. Sometimes threatening letters came in the mail and David would ask Jason to have his people look into it. Sometimes that meant background checks, which he was good at, and occasionally that meant showing up at the letter-writer's door late at night, which he was great at.

Sherlock ruffians are hard to come by. David had met his at a Black Keys concert at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. It was his first journey out since the accident. He had wanted to clear his head, fill it up with music. Halfway through their set, a rode-hard hipster had tried to pick a fight with him, but then some Herculean blond-haired man had stepped between them and pulled David out the back door. "Bad press, man, punching a douchebag in a bar," the man had said. "I'd hate to have my sister see that on the news. She's a big fan." He had walked David back to his car and had handed him a business card (it read: Jason Parker: Cowboy, Astronaut). The next day, David mailed him a signed copy of his book for his sister. She wrote back. In her letter, she talked about her brother, who had moved in with her after her MS progressed. She casually mentioned he needed a job. David hired him immediately, dispatching him on errands at times created just to give him something to do. And when Jason's sister died a year later, David paid for the funeral.

The morning after he met Katy, David called Jason.

"Hiya, boss," said Jason. "What can I do you for?"

"Met a girl last night said she was my friend on Facebook."

"Ahuh."

"Are you using my Facebook to pick up girls?"

"f.u.c.k, man. I didn't mean to do anything wrong. Look, they know I'm your a.s.sistant and not, you know, you, before I hook up with them. And it's not like it happens every day. It's a very rare thing. Like ten times I did it or something."

"I'm not mad," said David, though, to tell the truth, he was, a little. His intern was using David's profile to mostly promote his d.i.c.k and not the book. But why not? What was David doing with either his d.i.c.k or his book these days?

"I'd be mad. It's a really s.h.i.tty thing to do," said Jason.

"And you let them know you're you right away?"

"Oh, yeah. Right away. Right off the ... whatever. You know, from the first email they know. Then, sometimes, they want to talk about what you're really like and because I know you they think I know what you're like so we start talking. I never tell them anything important, of course. Then after a couple more emails I'm usually like, 'Just come over and have a beer,' and sometimes they do."

"Do you remember a girl named Katy?"

"f.u.c.k, yeah, I do. Redhead. Kinda goth. Or maybe new wave synth. She wants your junk, bad. I didn't get with her, though."

"Did she ever say anything weird? Anything about being on the news or anything?"

"Uh, just that the police wanted to talk to her father and he told them to f.u.c.k off. He's a contractor. A big redneck. Why you so interested? Should I get in touch and arrange something?"

"No," said David. "Actually, you should probably just let me work the site again. This is the kind of thing blogs-or, G.o.d help me, Gawker-would love to blow out of proportion if they got wind of your game."

"Coolio," said Jason, though David could tell he'd hurt the young man's feelings. "Gotta warn you about something, though."

"What's that?"

"Not all of the emails that come in are positive."

"It's okay. I'm used to bad reviews."

"Nah, man. Dark stuff. Especially lately. I think this one woman who is a witch or Wiccan or whatthef.u.c.k put a spell on you. Said she sent a demon after you. Oh, and you get gay stuff, too. A lot of English professors would like to polish off your k.n.o.b. I get rid of that s.h.i.t. Delete. Delete. Delete."

"Thanks, Jason."

"You got it. Anything else I can get for you?"

"Not right now. But soon enough, I think."

The detective bureau of the Akron Police Department was located within the crowded confines of the munic.i.p.al building on High Street, a boxy brown office tower that appeared claustrophobic even on the outside. The bureau occupied the back corner of the sixth floor. It was painted a nauseating orange and beige that for some reason reminded David of corned beef.

"I'm here to see Detective Sackett," he said to the woman seated at the desk below the orange-as-a-plastic-tangerine counter.

"Take a seat," she replied, without looking up.

Detective Tom Sackett, David had learned, was the only police officer a.s.signed to the Joseph Howard King homicide. A rookie. The youngest detective on the force. Obviously, he was someone the department could dump the case onto and still pretend they were doing something. Sackett was also the spokesperson for the case. Both the communications director for the Akron PD and the chief had pa.s.sed the buck to young Sackett when David had phoned them earlier in the day. "Talk to Sackett," Chief Gareau, who had also been promoted since the original Beacon articles ran, had said. "He's your man. That's his case. Knows it better than any of us."

Doubtful, David thought.

When he got Sackett on the horn, the detective had sounded really eager to talk. And that was a plus. If he couldn't get any comment from the chief, at least he could get a lot of comment from the detective, even if it did turn out to be a bunch of Keystone Kops hyperbole. That had potential for good characterization.