Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [11]
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“People don’t just walk away from everything like that.”
“No, not usually.”
“They have jobs,” Sheppard said. “Family.”
Pepin shrugged. “We don’t really have an extended family. And I’ve got plenty of money. But like I said, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Pepin indicated the ring on Sheppard’s finger. “Have you been married long?”
Before Sheppard spoke, he considered the question, as if it were anything but straightforward. His entire life, his whole psyche, seemed collapsed into the state of being married. Even though Marilyn was dead his marriage remained an eternal present, as necessary as a shark’s need to keep swimming, so quantifying it seemed impossible—let alone with a word like long. “Yes,” he said.
“Alice and I had talked about just … leaving. Walking away from everything.” Pepin raised his hands. “From our lives.”
Sheppard squinted.
“There was nothing holding us here,” Pepin continued. “Nothing holding us anywhere. No kids. It’s just been us. For thirteen years.”
“So?”
“So we’d come to the end of us. Does that make sense?”
In his mind, Sheppard saw Marilyn again. It was fall and she was wearing her old school sweater and leaning against the patio’s screen, her back to the lake, a cigarette in her hand. He said something to her—he was rocking in his chair when he spoke—and her face darkened, and she threw her ashtray at his head, the glass shattering against the chair back and spraying his cheek. By the time he looked up from his bloody fingers she was already out the door, Sheppard hearing her car start and then the tires peeling, and yet he remained right where he was, listening in the silence that followed to the waves lapping below and feeling his wound dry.
“Go on.”
“We needed to do something new. Something radical.”
“Why?”
“To save us.”
“From what?”
“From ourselves,” Pepin said. “So she’d proposed we just leave.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Last year.”
“So why didn’t you leave then?”
“I guess I didn’t think we needed saving.”
“But you did today?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Sheppard could tell the man was relaxing, that something had shifted. He was swiveling back and forth in his chair confidently, riding a gentle current of truth. If earlier in the interrogation Sheppard thought he’d had the upper hand, he’d lost it now.
“Because I realized she was right.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I don’t have to tell you that,” Pepin said.
“You might want to if we charge you with murder.”
“I might,” he said, “but I think I’ll wait until you do.”
Sheppard sat back and rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “What did you do after you bought these tickets?”
“I drove to Alice’s school to see her.”
“What time did you get there?”
“Around a quarter to nine.”
“Anyone see you? People Alice worked with, can they put you there?”
“Sure.”
“So what happened?”
“I found her in her classroom and told her about the trip, that we had to leave immediately.”
“What was her reaction?”
“She said no.”
“She give you a reason?”
“She didn’t believe I really wanted to go, that I was doing it out of pity for her. Maybe, I don’t know, because I’d missed my chance.”
“So?”
“We fought about it.”
“You were angry with her.”
“No, but I was desperate.”
“And why was that?”
“Because we were in danger,” Pepin said.
“Of what?”
“Ending. We’d been … going through a bad time. Alice had been very depressed and losing a lot of weight. It affected her behavior.”
“How?”
“It made her short-tempered. Delusional. She was … impossible to live with.”
“Had you talked about separation? Divorce?”
Pepin shook his head. “But I was at my wit’s end.”
“But you couldn’t convince her to run off.”
“No.”
“So what did you do?”
“She was leaving with her class for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History, so I waited in the car for her … ”
“And?”
Pepin took a deep breath.
It was amazing, listening to him walk the plank of