by Paul Cleave
Before he can ask what this is about, Mayor leans forward and starts the proceedings. “Does the name Belinda Murray mean anything to you?”
Belinda Murray. Jerry compares the name to faces from the past, scanning through them the way fingerprints are scanned on TV shows, image after image flicking by. He doesn’t get a hit. Yet . . . there is something familiar about it. “I know the name.”
“You want to tell us about her?” Mayor asks.
He wants to, but . . . “I . . . can’t.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know who she is.”
“You just said you know the name,” Jacobson says.
“I know, but . . .” He runs the name against the faces again. “I just don’t know from where.”
“That could be my fault,” Eric says, and everybody looks at Eric, except Jerry, because he’s looking at the two cops who look annoyed with Eric. Eric follows it up. “I asked him earlier this morning if he knew the name. I’m sorry, probably—”
“Shouldn’t have?” Mayor asks.
Eric shrugs. “That might be where he’s remembering it from.”
“You’re right, you really shouldn’t have done that,” Mayor says.
“And why not?” Nurse Hamilton asks, glaring at Mayor. “Jerry was the one who told the name to us, and we’re the ones who gave that news to you. Don’t sit there trying to make out we’ve done something wrong here when all we’re doing is trying to uncover the truth.”
“You’re right,” Mayor says. “I’m sorry, and we’re grateful for your help. However, we’re here because he did tell you her name two days ago, so where was he remembering her from then?”
Jerry doesn’t like being talked about as if he’s not in the room. It makes him feel like an object. A subject. “Who is Belinda Murray?” he asks.
They all look back towards him.
“I don’t know who she is,” he says.
“Perhaps show him the photograph,” Nurse Hamilton says.
Jacobson nods, and opens up a folder that’s resting on his knee. He pulls out a photograph and hands it over to Jerry. It’s an eight-by-ten glossy of a blond woman with blue eyes and a beautiful smile, a girl-next-door smile, a midtwenties girl with all sorts of hopes and promises who would have had all sorts of men queuing across all sorts of miles for the chance to date her. Jerry already knows where this is going. Of course he does.
“You think I killed her,” he says.
“And why would you say that?” Mayor asks.
“Look, detectives, I may be losing my mind, but not enough to miss the obvious. This,” he says, and spreads his arms to indicate the room and all that is in it, “is an interrogation. You’re here because this girl is dead, and I’m sorry about that, I really am, but I don’t know her and I didn’t hurt her.”
“It’s because—” Mayor says, but then stops when Nurse Hamilton holds her hand up to him.
“Let me explain it to him,” she says.
Mayor looks at his partner, and his partner gives him a small why not shrug.
Nurse Hamilton angles the chair so she can face Jerry almost full on, and she takes his hand in both of hers and leans forward. He can smell coffee on her breath and she’s wearing the same perfume his sister-in-law wears. He can’t remember his sister-in-law’s name, or the last time he ever thought about her, but he can remember how she looks, and can imagine she had a hand in Sandra’s decision to leave him. He pictures the two of them slumped on couches, their feet up, drinking wine and listening to music and his wife saying it’s all too tough, her sister telling her she’s young enough to start over, to cut Jerry loose and find some guy half her age. Suddenly he wishes it were a picture of the sister-in-law they were showing him, not a complete stranger.
“Jerry, are you feeling okay?”
“What?”
“You left us for a little bit there,” Nurse Hamilton says.
“I’m fine,” he tells her.
“You sure?”
He thinks about it for a few seconds. “I’ve been better.”
“Tell me if things become too stressful, okay?” she says.
“Are you going to get to the point or not?” Mayor asks.
She ignores him. “Okay, Jerry?”
“Tell you if things become stressful. I’ve got it,” he says, Sandra and her sister fading from his thoughts.
“Do you remember where you are?”
He doesn’t need to look around. It’s a simple question and they must really think he’s a special kind of stupid to be asking him this, but he still looks around anyway, just to make sure. “Of course I do. I know who I am and where I am. I’m in a nursing home because I have dementia. I was placed here because my wife decided to divorce me rather than let me stay at home. I’m here because Captain A takes over sometimes and I wander.”
“Who the hell is Captain A?” Mayor asks.
“It’s what he calls the Alzheimer’s,” Nurse Hamilton says. She turns back towards Jerry. She still has his hand between hers. “Do you remember what you did for a living?”
He nods.
“Tell me.”
“I used to write books,” he says. “I wrote ten of them.”
“You wrote thirteen. Do you remember two days ago, when you were sitting in the garden?”
“Thirteen? Are you sure?”
“The garden, Jerry.”
He’s spent a lot of time in the garden. He was there today. Probably yesterday and the day before, but when every day is the same, how can you tell one apart from the other?
“Not really,” he says.
Without even looking at the two detectives, Nurse Hamilton puts her arm out to the side and slightly behind her, her index finger raised in a Don’t say a word gesture. “You were in the garden and you were pulling out the roses, remember? You said you were helping. You said you used to help your neighbor the same way.”
“I did?” he asks, unable to remember the neighbor, unable to remember two days ago, unable to remember he wrote thirteen books and not ten.
“I took you by the hand and we sat down in the shade and I gave you a drink of water, and we talked for a while. Do you remember what we talked about?”
“Roses?” he asks, but really it’s just an educated guess. Then he thinks about what she’s saying, about what he does for a living. “It was about the books.”
“He doesn’t remember a damn thing,” Mayor says, loosening the top of his tie. He sounds frustrated. Jerry thinks he’s probably had a lot of frustrated cops in his novels. These guys probably drink a lot of coffee and have a lot of ex-wives and eventually they snap. The room is getting warmer, no doubt the five of them helping to raise the temperature, and he wants to get out of here. Not just out of this room, but out of the care facility. He wants to go back home.
Nurse Hamilton looks back to Jerry after having thrown Mayor another of her angry looks. Jerry doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those. “Jerry, do you remember Suzan?”
Jerry frowns and tilts his head a little, gritting his teeth at the same time. Of course he remembers Suzan. She was his first. He remembers finding her door unlocked and walking through her house, trying his hardest to not make any noises, and not making them. “How do you know about her?”
“It’s okay, Jerry,” she says, and tightens his hand. “Tell us about Suzan.”
He shakes his head.
“Trust me, Jerry. Please, you need to trust me.”
“With a z,” he says.
“That’s right.”
He lowers his voice. “In front of the detectives?”
“They’re here to help you.”
He looks over at them, these two men staring at him, one with his tie askew, the other not wearing one, both of them in need of a shave. Neither of these men look like they want to help. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” she says, and so it is said and so it is law. That’s the thing about Nurse Hamilton—he can imagine even
if he did completely forget about her, he would still follow her orders.
He starts talking normally again. “Suzan with a z is somebody I used to know when I was younger. She used to live on my street, and I—” He looks back at Nurse Hamilton. “Do I have to carry on?”
“No, Jerry, you don’t, because Suzan with a z doesn’t exist. She’s a character in one of your books.”
“She’s a . . .” he says, then stops midsentence. Suzan with a z. From a book. A couple of synapses fire off somewhere in the Jerry gray matter and there he is, sitting at his computer, trying to come up with a name for the character, and he wanted something relatable but also a little different. When it came to the main characters those names could be tough because you had to get them right, the name had to match the character, a good name would make a character feel far more genuine.
He remembers writing the scene, getting to the end and then going back over it, adding some and deleting some. He remembers every single detail, as if it were only yesterday he labored over the keyboard. He remembers writing a scene from Suzan’s point of view, and then deleting it, the book moving forward, going through editing, cover design, then the big day when it was set free into the world, and by then he was already working on the next book. He understands exactly what Nurse Hamilton is saying. He made up Suzan. She is a combination of words on paper, born from his need to write, his need to entertain, his need to pay the mortgage.
“Jerry?”
He looks back at Nurse Hamilton. She’s staring at him. “She’s a character,” he says. “Sometimes I get her mixed up with the real world.” He directs that last bit to the cops, and then gives a small appropriate laugh to prove they’re all friends here, nothing going on, just a lighthearted misunderstanding. But it doesn’t work. If anything, it makes him sound like a madman. And he knows what madmen sound like—he’s created enough of them.
“Belinda Murray is in the real world,” Mayor says.
“Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, her hands still on Jerry’s, “two days ago when we were sitting in the garden, do you remember telling me about Belinda?”
“Belinda from the books,” he says, trying to sound confident, sure that’s where she’s from but unable to remember her.
“I just said—” Mayor says, but then stops talking when Nurse Hamilton throws him another Nurse Hamilton look.
“No, not from the books,” she says to Jerry. “Belinda is a real person. You spoke to me about her.”
He runs the name against the Jerry Grey database. No match. “Are you sure?”
“This is useless,” Mayor says. “I say we just take him down to the station and talk to him there. We’ll get in somebody more qualified.” Nurse Hamilton looks towards him, and this time he doesn’t back down. “Come on, even you can see this is a waste of time,” he says.
“What’s happening?” Jerry asks.
She turns back towards him. “Jerry, Suzan with a z, you know she doesn’t exist, you see that, right?”
“Of course,” he says, feeling embarrassed he ever made that mistake, and promising himself never to make it again.
“She isn’t the only one,” Nurse Hamilton says. “Over the last year that you’ve been here, you—”
“Wait, wait, hold up a second,” Jerry says, shaking his head. “There’s some kind of mistake. I haven’t been here a year. I’ve been here . . .” He looks at Eric and gives him a shrug. “What? Two months at the most?”
“It’s been a year,” Eric says. “Eleven months to be exact.”
“No,” Jerry says, and starts to stand up, but Nurse Hamilton keeps hold of his hand and pulls him back down. “You’re lying to me,” he says.
“It’s okay, Jerry. Calm down, please.”
“Calm down? How can I be calm when all of you are making these things up about me.”
“You have been here for a year, Jerry,” she says, quite forcefully too.
“But—”
You’re Jerry Grey, the man with Alzheimer’s as his sidekick, how can you argue this? How can you argue with Nurse Hamilton? Her word is law.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. “And in the eleven months you’ve been here, you’ve confessed to a lot of crimes.”
“The first time you did it, buddy, it was quite a shock,” Eric says. “Nurse Hamilton here was getting ready to call the police, but there was something about what you were saying that was familiar. I’m a big fan of your books, and I quickly figured out you were describing a scene from one of them.”
“Since your time with us, you’ve confessed to a lot of make-believe crimes that you remember doing,” Nurse Hamilton says.
“They seem so real to you,” Eric says.
“Two days ago we were in the garden and you told me a story,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she glances at the photo, and Jerry knows what she’s about to say—the same way he always used to be able to predict how TV shows and movies would end one quarter of the way through. Is that where they are now? One quarter of the way through his madness? And the Madness Journal? Just where in the hell is it?
“You told me about a girl you had killed. You said you knew her, but you didn’t say how. Do you remember this?”
He doesn’t remember that at all, and he tries to remember. Hard. He knows that’s a thing people probably tell him, to try and think harder or try and remember better, as if he can tighten his brain muscles and put in the extra effort. But it is what it is, and in this case what it is is a whole lot of nothing. “I remember the garden,” he says. “And . . . there was a rabbit. Wally.”
“You stabbed her,” Mayor says.
“The rabbit?”
“Belinda Murray. You murdered her in cold blood.”
Nurse Hamilton puts a hand on Jerry’s knee when he goes to stand. “Wait, Jerry, please. Despite the fact Detective Mayor here is behaving in extremely poor taste, it’s what you told me. You said you knocked on her door in the middle of the night, and when she answered it you . . . you struck her. Then you . . .” she says, and she looks away from him, and he knows what it is she doesn’t want to say, and he wonders how she is going to say it, and she says, “had your way with her. Then you stabbed her. You told me all about it.”
“But if I’ve been here for the last year then—”
“It was just before you were sentenced here,” Mayor says. “A few days before the shooting.”
“What shooting?”
“That’s enough, Detective,” Nurse Hamilton says, then she looks back at Jerry. “Think about the girl, Jerry.”
But he doesn’t want to think about the girl because there is no girl. This Belinda Murray is only as real as the other characters he’s written about. “What shooting?”
“There was no shooting, Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she sounds calm. “The girl. Do you remember her? Belinda. Do you remember seeing her before you came here? It was a year ago. Look at the photograph again.”
He doesn’t look at the photograph. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he says, the statement directed at everybody in the room.
“Please, Jerry, answer the questions so these two men can be on their way.”
He looks at the photograph again. The blond girl. The attractive girl. The dead girl. The stranger. And yet . . . “When I think of Suzan, it’s like I know her, but this girl . . .” He lets the sentence peter out. “The thing is she does look familiar. Doesn’t feel familiar, but I do recognize her. And the name—I’ve heard the name before. When did I hear it?”
The cops are staring at him. He thinks about what he just said and wishes he hadn’t said any of it. He wishes Sandra were here. She’d be on his side.
“We think he should come with us,” Mayor says to Nurse Hamilton.
“Is that really necessary?” she asks.
“At this point I’m afraid it’s the next step,” Mayor says, but Jerry doesn’t think he sounds afraid.
They all stand up then. “Am I
going to be put into handcuffs?” Jerry asks.
“That won’t be necessary,” Mayor says.
“Can I play with the siren?”
“No,” Mayor says.
They start to walk out of the room. “Are you coming with me?” he asks Nurse Hamilton.
“I’ll meet you there,” she says, “and I’ll call your lawyer along the way.”
He thinks about that for a few seconds. “Can you ask the detectives if I can play with the siren?”
“Don’t make us put you in handcuffs,” Mayor says.
“Detective—” Nurse Hamilton says.
Mayor shrugs. “I’m just kidding. Come on, let’s get out of here—this place gives me the creeps.”
DAY FORTY
This entry isn’t going to start with good news or bad news, but with weird news. Two pages have been torn out from this journal, the two pages after the last entry. You didn’t do it, and you didn’t write in them either because you me us we are still sane. Two blank pages gone. However, it’s possible Sandra tore them out for one of two possibilities. She wants you to think you wrote an entry and can’t remember it, for which there seems no motive. Or she found the journal, was reading it, and spilled something on those pages and had to tear them out. It means being more careful now about leaving the journal out.
Eva took you to lunch yesterday. It was just the two of you, which is something you hardly ever get to do. She took you to a restaurant that has a view of the Avon river out one side, and the hills out the other. Her friend is a chef there, and she prepared a special lunch that wasn’t on the menu, one she was working on to add within the coming weeks. She’d come over and asked what you thought, never taking up too much of your time, so many smiles and so much happiness that even if you and Eva hadn’t liked the meal, neither of you would have been able to say anything. You didn’t talk much about the future with Eva, or about the wedding, instead you chatted about her music, she told you some more stories of her big trip overseas, she told you that one of her friends from school was having a baby, and that having a family is something she and Rick have been talking about. You asked if she was pregnant, and she laughed, and said no, not yet, but maybe in a couple of years. She told you that before she started writing song lyrics, she had been thinking of trying to write fiction. Just short stories. Not the kind of stuff that Henry Cutter comes up with, but stories based on slice-of-life moments she had seen when traveling, moments that eventually got turned into music. She asked if you would look over some of her work. She said she’d love some feedback, and you know she’s doing this for you, not for her, but to be asked was such a thrill.