The Tutor - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Abrahams is the author of eleven previous novels, including Last of the Dixie Heroes, Crying Wolf, A Perfect Crime, The Fan, and Lights Out, which was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife and four children. Visit his Web site at www.PeterAbrahams.com.

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Master of psychological suspense Peter Abrahams returns with an ingenious tale of an ordinary family that unknowingly invites the agent of their destruction into their own home.
When Scott and Linda Gardner hire Julian Sawyer to tutor their troubled teenage son Brandon, he seems like the answer to a prayer. Capable and brilliant, Julian connects with Brandon in a way neither of his parents can. He also effortlessly helps Linda to salvage a troubled business deal and gives Scott expert advice on his tennis game. Only eleven-year old Ruby--funny, curious, devoted to Sherlock Holmes--has doubts about the stranger in their midst who has so quickly become like a member of the family. But even the observant Ruby is far from understanding Julian's true designs on the Gardners.
For Julian, the Gardners are like specimens in jars, creatures to be studied-- and manipulated. Scott is a gambler with no notion of odds, festering in the shadow of his more successful brother. Linda is ambitious, hungry for the cultured stimulation Julian easily provides. Brandon is risking his future late at night in the town woods. And Ruby--well, she's just a silly little girl. And in that miscalculation lies the Gardner family's only possible salvation.
In "The Tutor, Peter Abrahams creates a living, breathing portrait of an American family, their town, their secrets, their dreams--and a portrait just as compelling of the menace they welcome into their home. It is his most chilling, suspenseful novel to date.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

of psychological suspense Peter Abrahams returns with an ingenious tale of an ordinary family that unknowingly invites the agent of their destruction into their own home.

When Scott and Linda Gardner hire Julian Sawyer to tutor their troubled teenage son Brandon, he seems like the answer to a prayer. Capable and brilliant, Julian connects with Brandon in a way neither of his parents can. He also effortlessly helps Linda to salvage a troubled business deal and gives Scott expert advice on his tennis game. Only eleven-year old Ruby funny, curious, devoted to Sherlock Holmes has doubts about the stranger in their midst who has so quickly become like a member of the family. But even the observant Ruby is far from understanding Julian s true designs on the Gardners.

For Julian, the Gardners are like specimens in jars, creatures to be studied and manipulated. Scott is a gambler with no notion of odds, festering in the shadow of his more successful b

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Linda Marx Gardner awoke from a dream and felt her husband’s erection against her hip. Not nudging it, not demanding; just there. Earlier in her marriage, or maybe more accurately very early, on predawn mornings like this, the bedroom dim and shadowy, Linda would have taken hold of Scott and started something. Those predawn somethings, their bodies still loose and heavy with sleep, would usually turn out pretty good, sometimes better than that.

Linda got out of bed. In her dream she’d been frantically erasing words from sheets of pink paper, but the words themselves were all forgotten. As she went into the bathroom, Scott made a little sound in his sleep, one of those soft grunts that indicate agreement. She had a funny thought, not like her at all: was he erasing something too?

Then she was in the shower, her appointment book opening up in her mind, time blocks dense with her neat writing. There was going to be an overrun on the Skyway account, most of it from the photography screwup, but not all. Linda tried to figure out where the rest of it came from, letting go of everything but work so completely that she jumped as she caught sight of Scott through the steamy glass, his naked back to her as he stood before the toilet. She called to him: “Can you wake Brandon?”

Scott said something she didn’t catch because of the shower’s noise, almost a roar—when they’d renovated instead of moving up from West Mill to Old Mill, they’d used nothing but the best, in this case the 10-Jet Tower from Kohler’s Body Spa collection—and when she looked again he wasn’t there. The water, hot and pounding, felt so good she could have stayed there all day. Linda turned off the shower at once.

She got out, reaching for a towel with one hand, flushing the toilet with the other. Scott always forgot, or didn’t bother, or something. Her watch, on the granite sink top—black granite streaked with midnight blue, the nicest feature in the whole house—told her she was running two or three minutes late, nothing to be all tense about. She took a deep breath.

“Bran? Bran? Bran? Bran?”

Over and over. The word penetrated Brandon’s dreams, twisted them out of shape, finally woke him.

“Brandon? You awake, buddy? It’s late.”

Brandon came awake enough to know he had the covers pulled way up, know that he was totally warm, totally fuzzy, totally unable to get up or maybe even move at all. He got one eye open, not much, just enough to peer at his father through gummy lashes. His father: towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream on his face, razor dripping in his hand.

“I’m really not—”

“Forget it, Brandon. You’re going to school.”

“I feel like shit.”

“You’re going. And watch your language.”

Brandon didn’t say anything.

“Show a little life. Sit up or something. Don’t make me come back here.”

“All right, all right,” Brandon said, but the only thing moving was that one eyelid, closing back down.

“And this room is really getting out of hand.”

Brandon, almost asleep, barely caught that last bit. The inner fuzziness repaired itself quickly, knitting up the little hole poked through by his father and then some.

*  *  *

A cut-glass prism dangled in the window of the bedroom across the hall from Brandon, a window that always caught the first light. As Brandon sank back into deep sleep, the sun blinked up through the bare tree limbs out back, sending a ray through the prism. A tiny rainbow instantly printed itself on the calendar hanging on the opposite wall, and not only that, but precisely on a special square, the one with the birthday cake drawn inside, eleven flame-tipped candles burning on top.

That rainbow, quivering slightly on her upcoming birthday, was the first thing Ruby saw when she opened her eyes. She held her breath. This was proof of God’s existence. That was her first thought. She’d barely begun to deal with it, and its backpack—that’s how some thoughts were, they carried backpacks—that God took a personal interest in her, Aruba Nicole Marx Gardner, before her mind got going with the facts: sun, east window, prism, a rainbow that had to land somewhere, coincidence. That was the way Sherlock Holmes would see it, and she respected Sherlock Holmes more than anyone on earth. Didn’t love him—Dr. Watson was the lovable one—but respected him.

Still, coincidence could be tricky. Take that time she’d been eating a baloney sandwich and reading a story about a frog, she must have been four, when she’d suddenly puked all over the place, including on Brandon beside her in the backseat, frog and baloney getting all mixed up in some way. That was how she saw it, and hadn’t touched baloney since. But she could hear Sherlock Holmes: “A long car trip and a winding road? One could produce the same result with peanut butter and a penguin.” Elementary, my dear Ruby.

The rainbow moved on, sliding off her birthday, off the calendar, ballooning along the wall, warping around the corner of her open closet, vanishing in the shadows within. The spinning earth did that, stuck the rainbow in her closet. There would be lots of backpacks to that thought, but Ruby didn’t get to them. Some commotion kicked up down the hall, only the sharp notes getting though her door, like when one earphone conks out.

“Scott? Didn’t I ask you to get Brandon up?”

Muffle, muffle.

“Well he isn’t, as usual, and it’s five after seven. Brandon, get up now.”

Muffle.

Then came sounds of movement, and Bran yelled, “Fuck. Don’t fuckin’ do that,” in that deep new voice of his, ragged at the edges, that vibrated the walls, and Ruby knew that Mom had ripped the covers off him, which always worked. The sounds that followed—Bran getting up, banging around in his room, crossing the hall to the bathroom they shared, turning on the shower—faded as Ruby took The Complete Sherlock Holmes off her bedside table and found her place: “The Speckled Band.” Just from the title, she knew she was going to like it.

Speckled. A word she’d never spoken. She tried it out loud for the first time. “Speckled. Speckled.” Her stuffed animals watched in silence from their perches on bookshelves. A strange word, with a kind of power, if that made sense, and maybe not power completely for the good. Freckled was on the good side, heckled a bit nasty, speckled different in some way she didn’t know. The garage door opened under her room and her dad’s old Triumph rumbled out, sounds that were far, far away. I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis, with which he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him.

Yes, that was it, what was so special about him. As Ruby read, her room went still, began to lose its physical properties, became less solid. The bachelor lodgings at 221-B Baker Street went the other way. Ruby could almost hear the crackle of the fire Mrs. Hudson had had the good sense to light, could almost—

“Ruby! Ruby! Ruby, for God’s sake!”

“What?”

“I called you six times.” Mom, probably dressed for work, probably standing at the top of the stairs, that impatient look on her face, when the up-and-down line between her eyebrows appeared. “Are you...