Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [97]
Hearing her when she stepped onto the dock, he turned around and, when she was close enough, took her in his free arm and kissed her neck, training the hose on the boat with his other hand. “You’ve ruined my surprise,” he said.
“Which was?”
“That I was going to have this all cleaned up before you got home. Plus the bedroom and even the bathroom. But I guess you beat me to it.”
“Not all of it.”
“Sorry I left this place in such a state. I’m glad you didn’t bother.”
“I haven’t been down here in days.”
“Well.” Sam shook his head once and then closed his eyes, as if he could fall asleep standing there.
“What is it?” she said. “What happened?”
“I don’t … ”
“Tell me, love.” She put her arms around his waist.
“A boy … got hit by a truck. He was only eight. It just backed into him. He had massive internal injuries. He came in conscious but died almost as soon as we got him on the table. The father … he really lit into me afterward.” He dropped the hose and put his hands on his knees and began to sob, covering his eyes with his hands. “I just don’t know why it’s bothering me so much.”
He was shaking so hard she bent over and made him sit down, then she sat herself and held him. She’d seen him cry like this over patients only twice, and he now was trying so hard to hold back his sobs that he wheezed.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I did everything I could to get his heart going, but it was futile. And his father … he called me a killer. He said I killed his son. I’m sorry, Marilyn, I’m so sorry. I came home early to clean up. But I was too late.”
She told him, gently, to hush, to be quiet, and wrapped her arms around his still trembling shoulders. His body was hot with the effort and remorse. The breeze picked up and she shook too, chilled. Because what she felt, more than love for Sam, was how close she’d come to a perilous slip. But she was safe now. There was no harm. She was back, and Sam was nowhere but here; she was grateful for that—for knowing, and for this child, and for a great many things, and most of all to have been so blessed by luck.
• • •
“Let me tell you some of the things about your case that baffle me,” Mobius said, “the questions I can’t get out of my mind. Maybe you can answer them, because every piece of evidence is so ambiguous and contradictory that I find myself wondering sometimes if the Devil himself, or whatever animating spirit of evil traffics in our world, decided to turn your life into a hellish game—a labyrinth where the truth keeps falling down holes as you stumble through the maze.”
“I don’t believe in the Devil,” Sheppard said.
“What do you believe in?”
“Consciousness.”
Mobius rolled his eyes. “You called your neighbors—the Houks, Spen and Esther—first thing that morning, around five forty-five. Your first words to him over the phone were, ‘My God, Spen, get over here quick, I think they’ve killed Marilyn.’ Why they, Doctor?”
“Detective.”
“It’s such an interesting mistake with the pronoun. Did you really think you’d seen multiple people in the house, or was it just a slip of the tongue? Or were your injuries—the blood in your mouth and on your chipped teeth, the contusions on the right side of your face, above your right eye, and on the back of your neck, not to mention the broken cervical vertebrae there—so severe that you were completely disoriented, that your brain, playing tricks on your short-term memory, had somehow split the first form you claimed to have seen as you ran up the stairs into two? Did the man who first knocked you out become a second, the one you claimed you chased down to the lake, who overpowered and then knocked you out—again!—and conveniently left you there to soak in Lake Erie, your body half in and half out of the water? Was it simply one person