Mr. Peanut (55 page)

He saw Mobius watching him from across the walkway.

“Remember the beginning?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Of your book,” Mobius said. “‘There was Alice, underneath the wreckage. Either she was killed instantly or Pepin was there, right by her side, inserted just before the fatal moment. He held her hand, they exchanged last words, and he eased her into death.’”

“No!” Pepin said, running down the steps with the phone to his ear. “Please!”

Mobius held up something small and black in his other hand. “Boom,” he said.

Above the whale were twin puffs of smoke and a simultaneous discharge—two bursts as loud as M-80s—that drew all eyes to the ceiling. Alice was somehow the only person standing underneath, she too looking toward the sound, so she didn’t see Pepin running up to tackle her.

The blackness was followed by a dead silence, then moans and screams and cries. A snowstorm of fiberglass and polyurethane dust clouded the room blindingly, seeming to fall and rise at the same time. Alice wasn’t beneath him, and he could barely see his own hand, though within
moments there was a slight clearing, a settling. People stood up, children too, mummy-white and caked in this billowing plaster, wandering in circles at first and coughing, some with the wherewithal to help whoever was lying beside them, others frozen on their knees, stunned by disaster, their hands on their thighs as they knelt upright like plaster sculptures of samurai. The whale was shattered all around them, its shards white with the dust, like pieces of a hatched dinosaur egg.

Alice was nowhere in sight. It was as if she’d been sucked down a wormhole. There was, between his knees, just her imprint: a snow angel he ran his hands through until he could see only the black floor.

HERE’S HOW IT (ACTUALLY) ENDED:

After David finished writing the book, he wept.

Because no matter how she died, he thought, in fact or in his imagination, there was an inescapable feeling of complicity. Art was no exorcism, at least not for the artist, and these other things he knew to be true: there were no detectives, no contract killer, nothing at all. Only nothing. And then, because his wishes had been fulfilled, there came a much darker realization: he’d never shake this guilt, would always be stuck in this place. So the
David who left this chair now to walk the world from here on out, the one who carried on as if this were
past
, could only be half-real. An avatar.

HERE’S HOW DAVID’S
BOOK
ENDED:

Pepin returned to his apartment, sick with defeat, with the waiting at the perimeter of the museum and then the endless walking and the futile inquiries with the authorities until finally his only recourse was to flee home.

When he arrived at his building, he saw himself reflected in the front door, his body white from head to toe, caked with dust. But the doorman was gone, the security monitors were off, and the elevator was stuck, apparently, on his floor. On the stairwell’s windowpane,
EXIT
was painted in red.

As you often do in dreams, he climbed like a moonwalker, in airy bounds, leaping from landing to landing, taking ten steps at a time. In fact, he was just running.

He stood at their door, which was slightly ajar, and went through into the kitchen, where she was at the table, showered, in clean clothes, with a plate of nuts in front of her. On the blue cylindrical container, Mr. Peanut tipped his top hat and smiled. She’d cried herself into a kind of exhaustion, her face cramped at the cheeks, mashed at the brow, her eyes red, her cheeks as bathed and streaked as a tearful infant’s. Manuscript pages were strewn everywhere, though she held only one in her hand.

He stopped right where he was.

“Is this how you end it?” she said. “Is this what you want?”

“Where did you get those?”

She bunched the page in her fist. “They were sitting here on the table.” Then she threw it at him.

“That’s impossible.”

“You must really hate me,” she said, “to have dreamt this up.”

Pepin picked up the page she’d thrown and read it.

“I didn’t write this,” he whispered.

She suddenly went wide-eyed, as if she’d seen something in the back of her mind or behind his back.

Pepin heard footfalls and turned around. Nothing there, but then the door slammed with a bang.

“You kill my joy,” she said softly, then took two handfuls off the plate and shoved them into her mouth.

For a second he couldn’t believe his eyes because the physiological impact of the allergen knocked her right over backward, still seated in her chair. “Don’t!” he screamed and was at once on top of her, pulling her
hands from her face. And already the transformation was occurring, the swelling like a werewolf reversion, her lips inflating and curling away from her teeth, her fingers and cheeks fattening, hives rising everywhere, a pink distention rashing along her neck, chest, and hands.

“Call nine one one,” she gasped.

A mixture of nut and saliva had collected in the corners of her mouth, and she was gagging while he screamed her name. Then he ran to the bedroom and pulled open her bedside drawers, the EpiPens missing in both and in the medicine cabinet and her purse as well, its contents now spilled out across their bed. She’d thought it through. She
knew
.

He ran back and kneeled before her, pausing at the sight, his hands held up in terror. She was squeezing her neck as if she were choking herself, her face gone purple as violets, gone blue.

There was nothing to be done but he did it. Her esophagus had swollen shut. He rammed two fingers into her mouth, pressing them past her swollen tongue as far as he could into her puckered throat, trying to clear her airway. If someone had walked in, it would’ve looked like he was killing her, stuffing her mouth with his hand. But instead he was doing something he’d never been able to, something that should’ve been done long before this, something else he’d dreamed of. He pressed into her with all the strength he had, her hair bunched in his other fist for leverage. Would this be the last thing she remembered? Would it be their last embrace? He reached as far as he could, which wasn’t far enough, trying to touch her where she’d touched him, trying desperately to reach back to a time when they were happy, when they didn’t know then what they knew now—all the way to her heart.

First and foremost, I’d like to express my gratitude to Gary Fisketjon, friend and editor, whose extraordinary work on this book was integral to its realization. Several books on the Sam Sheppard case provided essential background information: Jack P. DeSario and William Mason’s
Dr. Sam Sheppard on Trial
, Cynthia L. Cooper and Sam Reese Sheppard’s
Mockery of Justice
, and Paul Holmes’s
The Sheppard Murder Case
. James Neff’s
The Wrong Man
deserves particular praise for its compassion, scope, and utterly convincing presentation of evidence old and new, and so I must express my tremendous gratitude to its author. My endless appreciation is extended to my agents, Susanna Lea and Mark Kessler, for their tireless advocacy. To several readers: Kalen McNamara, whose keen insights and numerous discussions were a boon, as well as the comments and suggestions of Phoebe Carver, George Cassidy, Diana Fisketjon, Emily Milder, and Frank Tota. Thanks to Nick Paumgarten for pep talks. Thanks to my brother, Eban, for help with Hastroll’s menu, among many other things. For their time and expertise, I am grateful to Drs. Dan Canale, Donna Crowe, and Tiffany Hines. Special thanks to Ann Teaff and the Harpeth Hall School for the year as writer-in-residence to complete the first draft. Thanks also to Richard Dillard for introducing me to the work of Hitchcock, and, by circumstance, to my wife. Starting never would have been possible without the faith and encouragement of my parents. As for finishing, all the love and support required for that came from Beth.

Adam Ross lives with his wife and their two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.