Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

Author:Adam Ross [Ross, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Police Procedural, Spouses, Mystery & Detective, Married People, General, Literary, Family & Relationships, Mystery Fiction, Spouses - Crimes Against, Marriage, Fiction, Marital Conflict
ISBN: 030727070X
Google: zm3ozVKJ8WYC
Amazon: B0036S4A1S
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2010-06-22T07:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, when Sheppard thought back to that night, he couldn’t distinguish what was real from what wasn’t.

For instance, when he remembered the moment he woke to the sound of Marilyn crying his name, he wasn’t sure if he went back to sleep or not. How long, he often wondered, did it take to bludgeon someone twenty-seven times? He thought he might have heard the blows themselves, or that he’d heard two voices, Marilyn’s and another person’s, though sometimes there were more than that. Or had he heard their grunts, Marilyn’s and her attacker’s—sounds like lovemaking and that of blunt-force trauma, of an object hitting bone, something heavy enough to dent a body but not shatter it? He couldn’t be sure.

He remembered running up the steps and pulling at the banister, and the breeze off the lake, and then, as his momentum carried him forward, seeing the form in their room that became the bushy-haired man he fought later. But in reverie-memories he came through the door and felt the blow—it was like being struck by a wave—before seeing anything. So which was true?

As a doctor, he knew the disorienting effects of the neurological trauma he’d suffered, that it wasn’t surprising for his memories to be so jumbled, but in the end this diagnosis wasn’t much of a comfort.

Or he remembered looking at Marilyn’s punched-in face and shattered mouth and then heard someone downstairs and racing out of the room; at other times it seemed he’d stumbled into Chip’s room to check on him and then heard someone downstairs. And he would wonder if he’d dreamed about checking on Chip out of guilt because it wouldn’t have been the first time he hadn’t given the boy a thought.

Yet the memory could unfold in perfect sequence: the dream, Marilyn screaming, the race upstairs, the blow, the coming to consciousness, the sound of the intruder downstairs, the sight of the intruder by the patio, the race down the steps to the beach, the struggle, and then waking up at dawn and seeing his home in the morning light, and knowing that Marilyn lay dead in the bedroom. Or there might only be his dream of cradling his daughter in his hands as Marilyn watched from the water, so quietly, so lovingly, and this made him think about dreams he’d had as a boy—in his most vivid, a giant owl caged in his room burst free when he entered and he had to jam his hands into the sides of its beak to protect himself—and how the dreams were unmoored from time, were a kind of time in and of themselves. Though over the years, the events came to seem unmoored from time too.

The outline of the intruder once he came downstairs by the patio door: he was large, Sheppard’s size and build, and his hair seemed to stand straight up, a bushy crew cut. He could tell the blacked-out form had turned to see his own blacked-out form, then run from the house.

Often,

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