Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [80]
“I’ve tried to put all that behind me,” Sheppard said.
Mobius smiled. “It’s pretty to think you could.”
Sheppard puffed some more on his pipe.
“So,” Mobius said.
“So?”
“Quid pro quo.”
“Go on.”
“In exchange for the whole truth about Alice Pepin, I get two things.”
“I’m listening.”
“First I want to hear from your lips everything that happened on the last day of your wife’s life.”
For a moment Sheppard remembered Marilyn’s smashed face turned toward him where she lay on the bed, her forehead covered in crescent-shaped gashes, her upper incisor ripped out, her pajama top pushed above her breasts and her panties pulled down, her pubis moist and glistening, her legs pinned under the bed’s crossbar, blood whipped across the walls of the whole room as if a wet dog had shaken itself out right there, haloing outward over her bed and his, covering the walls, even flecking the ceiling. Around her whole head, like a lacquer-thick nimbus, there was blood as well. Sheppard kneeled on her mattress to check for a pulse. Nothing.
“What’s number two?”
“I want to read David’s novel.”
“Why?”
Mobius laughed. “To see how I came out.”
Sheppard tapped his pipe clean.
“All right,” he said.
Mobius clapped his hands together, then rubbed them. “Shall we get started?” he said.
“Where would you like to begin?”
“At the beginning, naturally.”
“There are many places to choose from.”
“Start that Saturday morning,” Mobius said. “July 1954.”
That morning, Marilyn Sheppard woke to the sound of a bottle rocket.
Judging by the light in the room, it couldn’t have been much past seven, but already kids were shooting off fireworks in anticipation of the Fourth tomorrow, as they’d been doing all over the neighborhood during the past several weeks. Marilyn didn’t mind, but the noise terrified their English setter, who now sat curled in the corner of the bedroom, shivering and drooling. “Kokie?” Marilyn said, and sat up in bed, slapping the covers twice. “It’s all right, Kokie. Up.” The dog sighed and stayed put, staring at her mournfully. Of course, all loud sounds scared the poor girl. The noontime siren sent her scrambling under the kitchen table. When bad thunderstorms gathered over the lake, she pushed into the bathroom and huddled there next to the toilet, her thrumming rattling her collar. When Marilyn and Sam fought, it sent her cowering. And lately it had been an endless cycle of random terrors: the crackles of Silver Salutes, reports of Indian Uprisings, the occasional White Whirls or bursts of Red Chrysanthemums exploding over the water, followed by the fusillades tonight—a pre-Fourth show over Lake Erie—and the big finale tomorrow. Then what? Marilyn imagined another week of kids using up whatever fireworks they hadn’t shot off. Couldn’t she take the poor dog somewhere quiet? To her father’s house, maybe? But he lived an hour away and she was already short of time.
Another bottle rocket flew past the window, its little jet sounding like paper tearing, followed by a small clap. Kokie whimpered.
Marilyn got out of bed and pressed her lips to the screen. “You’re scaring my dog!” she yelled.
On the beach below, two boys in bathing suits burst from the bushes laughing, each with a quiver of missiles. The baby inside Marilyn kicked twice—or else those were spasms—and the pain was so sharp she had to rest her weight on the sill.
Please, God, let this one be a girl, Marilyn thought, if only for the company and another member of the beleaguered Girls’ Team: someone to marvel with her at Sam’s inability to do a single household chore, not simply because he didn’t want to but because he didn’t know how. Look at that bed, she thought, gazing at his unmade bed by the window. The man could crack a person’s chest and massage his heart back to beating, but for him making up the bed was an imponderable mystery. Let this one be a girl, so on days like today that consisted