Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [140]
He ran down the stairs, falling at the first bound and sliding down to the landing on his ass and one palm—he still carried the flashlight in the other—and leaping right into the living room, then rolling his ankle so badly it sounded like a bundle of sticks snapping. He lay clutching it for a second, fetal, and was up again, back down on his knees, and up once more. He hopped at first, moaning when he put weight on the foot, and made it out to the porch, sure he heard Dr. Sam behind. Once into the yard, he turned and saw Sheppard standing inside—or at least a black form in a white shirt.
Down the steps toward the beach with the doctor pounding behind, at the boathouse he almost jumped the rail and thumped down the steps onto the sand. His back cracked when Sheppard hit him, a crunch that shot right up to his neck—and the doctor was now on top of him, swinging at his face like a drunk, his arms as unwieldy and soft-limbed as if he were asleep, his grip weak. Eberling kicked at his midsection, lifting his whole body up, and pulled at the collar of his T-shirt so hard that it tore away, Sheppard flying over his body and then landing in the water behind him.
They faced each other on their knees, Sheppard’s hands at his sides. He looked disoriented, drugged.
Eberling hammered his jaw with the flashlight—a massive blow that landed the doctor face-first in the water, and Eberling mounted his back, took his neck in his arm, and twisted the chin toward him violently. “Why did you get to have her?” He shook him. “Why you?”
But the doctor couldn’t hear anything now.
Eberling let him drop into the water again and stared for a moment at his bare white back. He took the T-shirt floating like a jellyfish and used it to staunch his own wound. Then he turned, gimping along the wave break toward Huntington Park, broke right, up the hill into the woods, and once he was webbed deep in a thicket, once he thought twice of being found with such evidence, he threw the shirt away and blindly climbed out.
Mobius shook his head.
“No closure,” Mobius said. “No real ending.”
They didn’t speak for a long time.
“Unless,” Mobius said, “you’re lying.” He limped to the cell door, wrapped his hands around the bars, and pressed his rottweiler’s mouth to the gap. “I’ll give you one more chance. Did you kill your wife?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Mobius let go and sat down. “On the other hand,” he said, “it’s perfect in a way.”
Sheppard had gone white with rage. “Perfect?”
“No one really knows what happened to her,” Mobius said. “Maybe not even you. Isn’t that remarkable? Sometime between twelve thirty and four fifteen that morning, Marilyn was sucked into a wormhole—whether we believe you or not.”
Sheppard picked a chip of pipe stem from his tongue.
“Only she knows,” Mobius said. “And all we can know of her now is what we imagine.”
Sheppard lit his pipe, blew a stream of sweet-smelling smoke.
“That’s true for us all,” he said.
Once Sheppard stopped crying, purging thoughts of the dead boy from his mind, he and Marilyn got up from where they’d sat and went down to the boathouse hand in hand, and already his spirits had lifted, even more so when Marilyn told him what she was making for dinner, that everything would be fine for the party tomorrow—she’d taken care of everything—and then Marilyn kissed him, let him slide his hands under her blouse and lift her up, wrapping her legs around him so he could feed on her breasts, making no excuses and not stopping him. He could feel her added weight from the child inside her, more of her all over, and it was all so different, something had changed in her some time ago, a resistance not just to him and what he wanted but to her own awareness of what she needed; it had all somehow completely broken down. She let herself down and undid his trousers, slipping out of her own shorts and panties as well, climbing his body again as