Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [100]
Sheppard shook his head.
“Here’s the hole in your story. Or the hole your story falls through. It comes back to the watch. Are you listening closely?”
Sheppard lit his pipe.
“You claimed that when you first came to consciousness, you saw your wallet lying under the bed, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“You stood, saw Marilyn, then took her pulse—which was how the blood got on your watch’s crystal and wristband, correct?”
“Go on.”
“You heard someone in the living room, raced downstairs, saw somebody, pursued him to the lake, struggled, and were once again overcome.”
Sheppard said nothing.
“The duffel bag with your watch in it was found halfway up from the lake. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“That means that Marilyn’s killer left your wallet under the bed and your watch on your wrist after knocking you unconscious the first time. Then he ransacked the house, taking nothing of value—not your wife’s gold watch or the drugs in your medical bag or the guns—and after his struggle with you on the beach, after knocking you out again, this same burglar then removed your ring, watch, and keys and then what? Abandoned this loot on his way off the property. Why not take it since he was home free? Why go back in the direction he came? Was that the genius of the setup? Did the person framing you anticipate this implausibility? Or did you simply run out of time, racing around that dark, quiet, horrifically lonely house with Marilyn dead and your boy asleep in his bed and you all alone, injured and needing to come up with a believable story? You’re not much of a storyteller, are you, Doctor?”
“Enough,” Sheppard said.
Sometimes, when Sheppard thought back to that night, he couldn’t distinguish what was real from what wasn’t.
For instance, when he remembered the moment he woke to the sound of Marilyn crying his name, he wasn’t sure if he went back to sleep or not. How long, he often wondered, did it take to bludgeon someone twenty-seven times? He thought he might have heard the blows themselves, or that he’d heard two voices, Marilyn’s and another person’s, though sometimes there were more than that. Or had he heard their grunts, Marilyn’s and her attacker’s—sounds like lovemaking and that of blunt-force trauma, of an object hitting bone, something heavy enough to dent a body but not shatter it? He couldn’t be sure.
He remembered running up the steps and pulling at the banister, and the breeze off the lake, and then, as his momentum carried him forward, seeing the form in their room that became the bushy-haired man he fought later. But in reverie-memories he came through the door and felt the blow—it was like being struck by a wave—before seeing anything. So which was true?
As a doctor, he knew the disorienting effects of the neurological trauma he’d suffered, that it wasn’t surprising for his memories to be so jumbled, but in the end this diagnosis wasn’t much of a comfort.
Or he remembered looking at Marilyn’s punched-in face and shattered mouth and then heard someone downstairs and racing out of the room; at other times it seemed he’d stumbled into Chip’s room to check on him and then heard someone downstairs. And he would wonder if he’d dreamed about checking on Chip out of guilt because it wouldn’t have been the first time he hadn’t given the boy a thought.
Yet the memory could unfold in perfect sequence: the dream, Marilyn screaming, the race upstairs, the blow, the coming to consciousness, the sound of the intruder downstairs, the sight of the intruder by the patio, the race down the steps to the beach, the struggle, and then waking up at dawn and seeing his home in the morning light, and knowing that Marilyn lay dead in the bedroom. Or there might only be his dream of cradling his daughter in his hands