Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [151]
She was sitting on the daybed with Sam now, stroking his hair. He was sprawled there in the shape of an S, facing her, his corduroy jacket on, hugging himself, his mouth open. He looked like Chip, like a boy. There was just room enough to lie alongside him and she did, listening to him breathing …
She woke. She was cold. She thought to wake Sam but it would take the same effort as it did Chip, and he slept down here all the time. She walked up the stairs to their room and took off her clothes in the dark, folding them neatly and setting them on the chair, putting on her pajamas and then getting under the cold sheets. She was tired of sleeping alone. She didn’t care anymore if Sam woke her up. She’d asked him to push the mattresses together last week, or buy them a new bed. “I want to feel you next to me at night,” she’d said. She’d remind him tomorrow.
Waiting for sleep to come, she couldn’t help it: she thought about Dick Eberling, first about his body revealed in that window as he cleaned it, the plaited armadillo shell of muscles along his stomach, his dark skin browned. She bit her lower lip gently, remembering how he’d looked at the floor and asked if she could like someone like him and then, “For a long time?” It made her sad. Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like—to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To accept it, with all of the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.
To her delight, she heard footsteps slowly rising up the stairs and entering the room. She turned around and saw his approaching form.
“Sam?” she said.
“So,” Mobius said.
“So,” Sheppard said.
“Quid pro quo.”
Sheppard reached under his chair and held up the manuscript.
“Is this the only copy?”
“No. But it is the original.”
Sheppard slid it through the bars. Mobius hefted the pages.
“You have until tomorrow morning to read it,” Sheppard said.
“All right.”
“Then you’ll tell me everything I need to know about Alice Pepin.”
“Everything you need to know is right here.”
“No, it’s not,” Sheppard said. “There’s no ending.”
“There will be,” Mobius said.
Sheppard folded up his chair and carried it with him to the guard, who buzzed him out. “He’s a suicide risk,” Sheppard said. “Check his cell every ten minutes. And get a doctor over here immediately. Have his bandages removed and the gauze confiscated. I don’t want him to have anything he can hurt himself with. Get two other guards and strip-search him. And recheck his cell. Strip his bed. Not even a blanket for the night. The only thing he can have in there is the book he’s reading.”
“Yessir.”
Despite those orders, Sheppard thought about Mobius all day. He called downstairs to the guard repeatedly and even returned to the cellblock twice. On both occasions he entered to the sound of Mobius laughing, then stood before the bars as he sat there with tears in his eyes, pointing to the page.
“This is killing me,” he said.
Seeing him calmed Sheppard down. Mobius’s gauze dressing had been replaced with plastic bandages, the guard had checked the cell three times to make sure, and when Sheppard called later that evening, Mobius had just finished dinner without incident. Over the phone, Sheppard could hear him cackling in the background.
Sheppard went to bed. He slept fitfully at first, then slipped into a deep sleep and dreamed, and when he woke he remembered the whole thing completely.
He was back on the beach, chasing down his wife’s killer. But the killer was Mobius, and his wife Alice Pepin. He finally tackled the little man, but he was remarkably strong and as slippery as a fish. When Sheppard tried to punch him, he whiffed, and when he tried to grapple and pin him, Mobius reversed the hold and threw him to the sand.