Trust No One (41 page)

He rolls the chair over to the computer. Stuck to the monitor is a Post-it note, the words
Write what you know and fake the rest
have been written on it. He finds the novel on the desktop, along with five others. He double-clicks
Crime Writer Working Title
and then starts scrolling through it. Right away he can see it’s longer. In this version Gerald Black, the crime writer in question, has found a way to sneak in and out of the nursing home so he can carry on his killing spree. Gerald sneaks into the back of a laundry truck, as if he’s escaping a prison from a 1960s movie. Jerry wonders if that’s how he’s been sneaking out, but can’t recall any laundry trucks.

Gerald, it seems, is replicating the crimes from within his books, but nobody suspects him. The police believe an obsessed fan is responsible. Eddie, the orderly hero, believes Gerald may be responsible, and that Gerald has been faking his illness all along. To what end, Jerry can’t fathom. Living in a nursing home isn’t living the dream, and if you’re that good at faking an illness, then you may as well fake your innocence and find another way to not get caught. It’s something Eddie hasn’t been able to figure out either—or at least explain. Jerry’s diary entries are forced into the narrative, but they don’t quite work, because the entries are from a man who is genuinely losing his mind, not from a man making it all up. Seeing his words in these pages makes him feel even more violated and continues to blunt the edges of guilt he might have felt for dropping the orderly to his death.

Jerry picks his journal back up. He reads the second entry and sees that it starts to divert from the entry that Eric has written in his book. Maybe the ratio is going to change the same way it does between his good days and off days.

The third entry starts with the words
Don’t trust Hans
scrawled several times across the top of the page. His heart does that hammering thing it’s been doing lately, and he can sense Henry’s presence, his curiosity piqued. He looks up at the doorway to make sure his friend isn’t standing there watching him. He isn’t.

Jerry carries on reading.

The words at the top of the page here aren’t mine. I mean, they are mine, because it’s my handwriting, but I didn’t write them. I mean, okay, I wrote them, but I don’t remember writing them. The words are big and black, written with a marker, like a point being forced, and I can only assume Henry wrote them, Henry who would wear the author’s hat, Henry who sometimes occupies my thoughts and takes control of my life. I don’t know when he wrote them, or why. I’ve spent all morning thinking about it, and this is what I’ve come up with—nothing.

Eric has been asking me questions about the diary, about my past. My life is like a jigsaw puzzle to him, and I’m not sure why he’s so interested, but he is. It turns out—and I don’t know if this is more sad or funny—that one of the reasons he asked me to keep a diary is because I confessed to a crime that never happened. I don’t even remember confessing—but he was telling me I’ve been getting a little mixed-up between what is real and what is make-believe. When he first told me, I thought it was the setup to some awful joke. The more he insisted, the madder I got at what felt like an accusation. Finally, another of the nurses confirmed it was true. I’ve been telling people—telling and really insisting—that I kept a woman locked in my basement for two weeks before killing her, which would be a really neat trick since I’ve never owned a house with a basement. Eric is trying to convince me to write in the diary every day, because he thinks it will help ground me to what is real. He’s asked to read it, but I won’t let him. I hide it in my drawer when I’m not writing in it. I used to have a couple of hiding places back in what I’m now calling
Jerry’s Normal Life
. I remember I had a floorboard under my desk that I could pry up, but I can’t remember where the second one is.

Today is a bad day. It’s bad because I can remember that Sandra (my wife) is dead, and that Eva (my daughter) never comes to see me. Looking back at the previous entries it seems I only write when I’m having a good day. I should start putting in the date, because I have no idea how long I’m going between entries.

Don’t trust Hans.

I don’t know why I would have written that. Why Henry would have.

And yet . . . with those words is some kind of recognition, a sense that I have written them before. If I had to guess, then I would say perhaps it was in the original Crazy Diary. This is Version II—Version I was written as Jerry’s Normal Life phase entered the Madness phase.

I miss Sandra. I know she’s dead, but I don’t
know
know, if that makes sense. It’s like having somebody come along and tell you the sky is green when it’s actually blue. That’s how it feels, and the memory of those few days with her lying on the floor are feeling more and more like they belong to somebody else, that they belong to one of the characters I’ve given life to.

Don’t trust Hans.

Really?

I’m off to breakfast now (good news? For some reason I have the urge to say that—but nothing really to say). Oh, and thinking about it, I think I should be calling this a Madness Diary, not a . . . wait, strike that. A Madness Journal. That has a better ring to it.

Once again, Jerry is able to recall writing these journal entries. But he can’t remember the actual events described. For all intents and purposes, this is the Madness Journal of a stranger.. The biggest takeaway from the entry is Past Jerry’s conviction of a second hiding place. It lines up with what Current Jerry thinks, because that will be where the original journal is hidden.

He reads the next entry and it’s more of the same, as is the following one, words that belong to him but are somehow associated with someone else. He puts the journal down. He moves to the doorway and listens for movement. Hans is no longer in the garage but definitely somewhere in the house. He can hear his friend opening and closing drawers.

Don’t trust Hans.
The earlier entry was clear on that, but didn’t provide an explanation. It could have just as easily warned: don’t trust Henry. Or don’t trust Jerry, because he sure as hell can’t trust himself, can he?

If Hans isn’t to be trusted, if the author with the Alzheimer’s monkey on his back is to be believed, then standing in the doorway isn’t the way to go about finding an answer to all this. Nor is confronting his friend. He sits back down behind the desk and picks up the journal. He notices the structure of the entries begins to topple and the prose is too loose on occasion as Jerry starts to lose control of the plot. He suddenly realizes how he’s reading these entries, as if they’re part of a novel, a story about a fictional character. And in some ways they are, aren’t they?

He rolls up his sleeve and looks at the marks on his arm. An idea is coming to him. He looks back at the journal. Chunks of it have been stolen and inserted directly into Eric’s manuscript and portrayed as the journal entries of his protagonist. These entries come off as very realistic because they come from a genuine source. They are the ramblings of a madman. Mad, he thinks, because Eric made him that way. He looks back at the marks on his arm, and suddenly he knows. The same way he’s able to predict the ending to nearly every movie and TV show he’s seen, the same way he knows what’s waiting for him on the last page of any novel. He knows that Eric injected him not just on the days he was going out and hurting those women, but also on days he couldn’t push his story forward. Eric would inject him just for the purpose of making Jerry’s world more miserable than it is, just so Jerry would write about it.

He carries on with the journal. Here’s the first instance of being found wandering in town. Past Jerry has no memory of it, and nobody knows how he got there. He reads the entry slowly, looking for the details, but there are none except for a gold locket that Past Jerry finds in his pocket that evening when he’s back in the nursing home. He thinks he must have stolen it, so he hides it in the back of one of his drawers.

Current Jerry tilts his head back and closes his eyes and tries to think back to the phone call he had earlier today with Eva. She said the jewelry was found there, jewelry from the women who were killed. Eric must have given those pieces to him.

And if that theory is wrong? What if the next entry is Past Jerry detailing how he escapes, how much he enjoys a good, old-fashioned bloodletting? What if? Only he doesn’t think it will. He’s not that guy. Like he told Hans earlier, Sandra would never have married that guy.

And like Hans told you, buddy, the Alzheimer’s is a wild card.

Following entries find Past Jerry confessing to more crimes from his books: a couple of homicides, a bank robbery, a kidnapping, even to being a drug dealer. He wonders if this was a natural progression, or something Eric orchestrated for his research. Past Jerry is found once again wandering in town, and when he’s taken back to the nursing home he finds another piece of jewelry in his pocket, and he has no memory of how he left the home.

“Jerry?” Hans, calling from somewhere in the house. “Jerry, come down here a moment.”

Don’t trust Hans,
Henry says.

But how can he not? After everything Hans has done for him?

He finds Hans in the master bedroom, the bed shoved to one side of the room, the contents of the drawers tipped out, clothes on the floor, jewelry forming a pile on the bed.

“You think some of that belongs to the girls?” Jerry asks, looking at the rings and necklaces and earrings.

“I don’t know. Probably his wife’s. But that’s not why I called you,” he says, and he holds up an eight-by-ten envelope. “Check it out,” he says, and he tips the envelope up.

Jerry is expecting more rings and necklaces to slide out. He’s expecting something that can explain what happened to the woman whose house he woke up in today.

And that’s exactly what he gets. Four small ziplocked plastic bags and four photographs that together tell a story. “I found it taped under the bottom drawer,” Hans says. “Bloody amateur.”

Jerry reaches out to pick up one of the bags.

“Don’t touch them,” Hans says. “Don’t get your prints on them.”

“Why not? The police are going to know I was here.”

“We don’t want them thinking you brought these things with you.”

“What are they?” Jerry asks, pulling his hands back.

“It’s hair.”

“What?”

“Hair,” Hans says, and Jerry can see it now, each of the four bags holding a little less hair than you’d find on a toy doll. “Four bags, four victims. He took jewelry to plant on you, and he took hair for himself. He probably found it more personal.”

“And the photographs?”

The photographs have all landed facedown. “Well that’s the best bit,” Hans says, and he flicks them over one at a time, like a blackjack dealer, each image worse than the other, not in terms of quality but quantity. Four photographs virtually the same, each showing four dead women. Except the last one shows Jerry Grey in the background, snoozing on the couch.

The horror at what these girls went through is too much for Jerry, and he finds he can’t speak. He moves to the edge of the bed and sits down just as his legs are beginning to give out. “Those poor girls,” he says, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.

“You didn’t do this,” Hans says.

“That doesn’t make what happened to them any less painful.”

“No, but it means you’re not responsible.”

“Not directly, no,” Jerry says.

“You want to explain that?”

“Eric killed them because I told him he had to write what he knows. He killed them because he knew he could get away with it by framing me. If I’d never gotten sick, if I were still at home and still had my old life, then I’d have never met Eric. Those girls would still be alive.”

“It doesn’t work that way. If it did, we’d all be responsible for everybody else’s actions all the time. Eric did this, not you. You didn’t hurt these girls, Eric did,” Hans says.

Together, Jerry thinks, they have just taken care of a serial killer.

“There is one small problem,” Hans adds, and any relief Jerry was starting to feel at not being a killer disappears, replaced by a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“What kind of problem?”

“The police are going to think you planted them here.”

Jerry doesn’t know what to say. Henry, on the other hand, knows.
He’s absolutely right, but that doesn’t mean you should trust him.
“But the photographs—”

“Could have been taken by you.”

“Not the last one.”

“Could have been taken with a self-timer.”

“The police will figure out when these photographs were printed, and where, and will see it was probably on Eric’s computer.”

“Which you’ve had access to,” Hans counters.

“Not for long, though.”

“They won’t know that. The police might think you’ve been here all day, after leaving the knife at the mall. Look, Jerry, in saying all of that, I think you’ll be okay. At the very least it will mean they’ll investigate him, right? They’re going to look into all the days those girls were killed, and they’re going to find a pattern. Maybe they’ll rip the place apart and find even more evidence. Maybe they’ll find some poor girl buried out in the garden. It could be the wife suspected something too, and she might talk. Could be this jewelry that belongs to the wife originally came from the girls.”