Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  “They all look the same,” Jerry says, “and I only ever saw it from the back.”

  Hans gets his phone out. He uses the GPS function and gets a location on where they are. He brings the car to a stop when the blue dot on the screen is in line with Jerry’s house, only with one house between.

  “That’s the one,” Jerry says.

  “You sure?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  Hans kills the engine. “We climb the fence. We try to figure out if anybody is home. If not, then we go in. If the lights are on, we wait until they’ve gone to bed, then sneak in. You’re sure you know where the journal is?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  The house they’re parked outside is a two-story house with a concrete tile roof and a flower bed jammed full of roses that catch at Jerry’s clothes as he passes them. They move quietly across the front yard and to the gate that enters the back. It opens quietly, and a few seconds later they’re at the fence line. Hans boosts himself up and confirms it’s the right house while Jerry continues to look at the house they’ve just snuck past. He can see the glow of a TV set, the glow of lights, but nothing to suggest they’ve been heard.

  “This is it,” Hans whispers, then drops to the other side. Jerry climbs over, landing in a backyard that still feels as though it’s his. Up ahead is where the pool used to be, but now it’s a paved area with a long wooden barbecue table and a pair of outdoor gas heaters. There are no lights on inside the house.

  They reach the deck and the sun lounger where they had left Mrs. Smith. Jerry half expects to see her still lying there, but it also won’t surprise him if she comes storming through the gate waving her hockey stick any second. A cat sits outside the door—it stares at him, then shifts its attention to Hans before running away. Jerry reaches into his pocket for the key. A moment later he has it in the door.

  “What if it has an alarm?” Jerry asks, keeping his voice low.

  “Then we run,” Hans says. “Just stay quiet. I can’t tell if they’re not home or if they’re asleep.”

  “I thought you could tell these things.”

  “Just open the door.”

  He is expecting the key not to work, expecting one more problem in a day full of them. The key won’t work and the lock picks won’t work either, but it turns effortlessly. He slowly opens the door. He knows this house. He spent most of his adult life in this house. He knows every shape, every flaw, he knows where the floorboards creak, what doors squeak, and he knows where the secrets are buried. Or, in this case, the wall they are hidden behind. His heart is already hammering, but when he steps across the threshold into the house it hammers even more, so loud that if there are people asleep upstairs it’ll be his heart that wakes them.

  They close the door behind them and pause and listen, Jerry’s heart louder now, his breathing heavy. There is no beeping keypad. No alarm. His hands are sweating. He left the key in the lock, otherwise right now it’d most likely be sliding from his fingers onto the floor. In his mind he can see Eva upstairs in her bedroom doing her homework, or talking on the phone to one of her school friends. Sandra is in the lounge reading a book, or working on her next court case. Jerry can see himself behind the desk of his office, plugging away at the word count. He tries to draw in a deep breath, but it catches in his throat, and then it’s like swallowing a golf ball. Hans puts a hand on his shoulder and he almost jumps.

  “Calm down, Jerry,” he says, keeping his voice low. “The sooner we get the diary, the sooner we can get out of here.”

  “It’s a journal,” Jerry whispers back. His eyes have adjusted somewhat to the dark. “Step where I step,” he says, and then he starts to walk.

  Hans steps where Jerry steps. The furniture makes black holes in the living room. When they reach the hall, he remembers the boards around the door can complain sometimes, so he makes a big show of stepping over them, then a big show of walking down the side of the hallway and not the middle, and the door to the office—his office—is open. They get inside and they close the door, shutting them off from the outside world, Jerry more relieved than ever to have had the room soundproofed.

  “Well? Do you think there’s anybody home?” Jerry asks.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Let’s just get this done,” Hans says, and he takes his cell phone out and uses the light to look around the room. For a few moments the office is Jerry’s again. His desk, his couch, his bookcase, his framed King Kong Escapes poster on the wall. Then he sees all the subtle differences. The books are different. The computer is different. Different knickknacks on the bookcase mixed in with some of his own, different stationary on the desk, a different monitor, the belongings of a different man, belonging to a different life. He wonders why the police didn’t tear up the floors and pull the walls down in search of evidence. But perhaps they thought the case looked pretty clear cut.

  He makes his way past the desk and to the cupboard in the corner of the room. He opens it. Inside are boxes that, if Gary is anything like him, will be full of receipts and bank statements and all the other joys of being taxed in multiple countries that people don’t think about when it comes to being a writer. There’s a set of small plastic drawers full of stationary, a set of headphones hanging from a hook in the wall, a pile of magazines, some reams of paper. He starts dragging everything out, hoping he’s going to find the hidden space, hoping it’s not just something from one of his books, like that time, he suddenly remembers, when he went and bought cigarettes. His heart rate is heading back from extremely elevated into the more comfortable zone of very elevated. It only takes a second for muscle memory to kick in—once the cupboard is empty he lowers his hand and presses his finger into the corner. Out pops the opposite corner. He pulls the board away and hands it to Hans, and then . . .

  And then he does nothing. He stares at the cavity, suddenly too frightened as to what may be in there. Or what may not.

  You have to look, Henry says. Looking back is the only way to be able to move forward. You didn’t come all this way not to.

  He looks.

  The first thing he sees is a bottle of gin. He gets it out. It’s half-empty. He unscrews the lid and breaths in the aroma, the smell a brief visit to his old life.

  “There’s time for that later,” Hans says, taking the bottle off him and putting it on the desk.

  Jerry reaches back into the hole and the second thing he pulls out is the gun. He holds it loosely from the base of the handle, the way someone would handle it if they were surrendering to an Armed Offenders Unit. It’s a revolver. For a moment he can remember sitting on the floor next to Sandra. He’s spinning the chamber of the gun like they do when playing Russian roulette. He flicks the latch with his thumb and the cylinder opens out to the left. Each of the holes are full, but one of the bullets is only a casing, the contents of that casing having ended up inside his wife. Hans reaches over his shoulder and takes the gun off him.

  Don’t trust Hans.

  Probably worried Jerry is going to turn it on himself.

  “Keep looking,” Hans says.

  He keeps looking. This time his fingers close on the journal. He looks at the cover, at the smiley face Eva drew, the eyes glued to the cover, one of them foggy, one of them clear. Dad’s coolest ideas is written neatly above the face, The Captain Goes Burning on the spine. He opens the cover, and there are his words, words from another life filling the pages.

  “It’s really here,” he says.

  “Let me take a look,” Hans says, and reaches back over.

  But Jerry doesn’t hand it over. Instead he clutches it to his chest. When he looks back at Hans he sees his friend looking annoyed, and for a moment, the briefest of moments, there is something in Hans’s face, something that reminds Jerry that Hans always seemed to know the dark side even better than his darkest characters. Then Hans smiles. Jerry realizes he’s being silly, and that everything is okay.

  “Pleas
e, Jerry,” Hans says. “I think it’s better if I look. You’re too close to it. Too emotional. I can give you the truth in a nicer way.”

  Jerry decides that Hans is right, that he won’t try to twist the journal into the best possible nonguilty narrative the way Jerry would. Hans carries the journal over to the couch and sits down, the phone going with him, not leaving a lot of light for Jerry. Jerry reaches back into the cavity and finds the flash drives. Then his hand touches something long and cold, and he adjusts his grip and puts his fingers around it. It’s a knife, no doubt the one used to kill the florist. An image flashes through his mind, of Sandra picking up his jacket and finding the blade in the pocket. It begs the question—if there is going to be a tactile link to a memory, why one that pales in significance to him being a murderer? Why does picking up the knife remind him of Sandra finding it, when picking up the gun reminds him of nothing?

  There’s a reason why you’ve always conveniently forgotten those things.

  Eric was drugging him to cover up the murders he committed. But what about Suzan with a z, Sandra, and the florist? The doctors would say he’s been repressing the horrible things he’s done, but is that really what’s going on here?

  No. There’s more going on here, Henry says. Keep looking. You’ve found your journal, but mine is still in there.

  Was Henry keeping a journal too?

  He puts the knife on the edge of the desk and goes back to the hole. He closes his hand around some loose pages.

  The missing pages from his journal.

  You always thought Sandra was stealing them, Henry says.

  But it wasn’t Sandra, it was his alter ego, the man who makes bad things happen.

  That’s what they pay me for.

  He sits in the office chair. He turns on the desk lamp, not caring if anybody sees the light from outside, and Hans doesn’t seem to care either because he doesn’t say anything. He seems too engrossed with the Madness Journal.

  Jerry begins to read.

  It may be his handwriting, but they are definitely not his words.

  They are the words of Henry Cutter.

  DAY THIRTY-EIGHT

  It’s day thirty-eight and you feel great. You taught Mrs. Busybody across the road a lesson today, Future Henry. She wandered over here in her pastel-colored outfit recently to tell you how you were ruining the whole neighborhood, and no doubt she’ll wander her way back within the next few hours to come and see you again after what you’ve done. The way I see it, you were presented with two options. Option one was to tidy up your garden and make her happy, to mow the lawns and pull the weeds and conform like everybody else on the street. Or there was option two. Which is what you went with. Option two was to go over to her house and make her garden look worse than yours. It’s funny how she got under your skin so much, but she did, and not only have you helped her with her own garden, but you’ve put her into book number thirteen. You wanted to give her a real Hansel and Gretel vibe, make her the crazy old witch that tries turning children into casseroles, but since you don’t write fairy tales you’ve given her a cameo instead as the local cat lady who chews her fingernails down to the nub as she stares out her kitchen window watching life pass her by before being raped by a clown. Cameos are things you give people who upset you. Somebody ducked into the parking space you were waiting for? Fuck you—you’re dead on page twenty-six. Somebody give you a bad review? Fuck you—you’re the local pedophile on page ten. Doctor Badstory told you you have dementia? Fuck you.

  Writing about her wasn’t enough, which is why you went over and ripped out every single rose in her garden, roses she was so proud of. She was there every day checking on them, her husband ten years in the grave and all things considered, that made him one lucky bastard.

  Another neighbor—some old tart who turned a hundred years old the same year the Titanic sank—saw you, and you thought . . . well . . . you thought why not do what Henry Cutter always does? And kill people off? But tearing out roses is a long way from tearing out throats, and killing people is only for the books—but you’d be lying to yourself if you didn’t admit there was a moment, albeit a very brief one, where you imagined her bleeding to death on the ground, her face riddled with confusion and pain. But that didn’t happen, and no doubt she’ll tell Mrs. Smith that she saw you, but the thing is you don’t really care. What’s the worst that can happen? You already have Alzheimer’s. Who cares if she calls the police and you have to pay a fine. It’ll be worth every penny.

  When Mrs. Smith comes over later, just smile at her, and tell her how much fun you had ruining her pride and joy. Then laugh at her, because the one thing people hate in life is being laughed at.

  So there you go, Madness Journal. Another bullshit day out of the way on this road to . . . hell, I don’t know.

  Jerry places the journal entry down. His first thought is that he has no recollection of having ever written it, certainly not from Henry’s POV. His second is that Henry is a complete asshole. Was Henry more than just a pen name? Did he actually become Henry when he sat at the keyboard? Jerry begins to understand his critics a little better but is baffled by how he ended up becoming an internationally bestselling author. Not with this guy at the wheel.

  He hopes Henry wasn’t actually at the wheel.

  Surely not. Sandra would never have lived with him.

  The same way she never would have married a killer?

  Well, that’s what they are here to prove.

  Or disprove. I don’t like that you think of me as an asshole, especially when all I’m doing is trying to help you.

  Jerry looks back at the pages. Henry never existed, not in the beginning, but perhaps the Alzheimer’s gave birth to him. Perhaps Henry grew enough to occasionally take control. There’s no other way to explain the journal.

  “Can I have the journal?” he asks Hans.

  Hans doesn’t look up as he keeps on reading it. “I’m not done with it.”

  “Just for a minute. I want to check something.”

  Now Hans looks over. “About the day Sandra died?”

  “Something in the beginning.”

  Hans seems to think about it, and Jerry is suddenly sure his friend is about to say no, but then he relents and tosses it over. “Make it quick,” he says.

  Jerry flicks through to day thirty-eight, but there is no day thirty-eight. There’s a day forty. Before day forty are the torn edges in the margin where pages have been removed. His concern about being Henry becomes concern for the other things he’s done, the ultimate concern being Henry is the one who killed Sandra. He flicks back to the first page. He can actually remember sitting at his desk writing some of this stuff. Day one. Your name is Jerry Grey, and you are scared. . . . You lost your phone yesterday, and last week you lost your car, and recently you forgot Sandra’s name. Day four. You won’t be able to hold Sandra’s hand and watch her smile. You won’t be able to chase Eva and pretend you’re a grizzly bear. Day twenty. People often think that crime writers know how to get away with murder, but you’ve always thought if anybody could, it’d be Hans. Day thirty. There’s a couch in the office. The Thinking Couch. You’ll lie there sometimes and come up with ideas for the books, work on solutions, lie there and listen to Springsteen cranked so loud the pens will roll off the desk. Then day forty, and here Past Jerry has no memory at all of what he’s done to Mrs. Smith’s roses, and that’s because it wasn’t Past Jerry who tore them out, but Past Henry. He used to think Sandra was tearing the pages out, but no, it was him. Or Henry. One of them was tearing them out to protect him, to keep the bad things he was doing a secret.

  He scans through more pages. The truth is in there, other bad things, and suddenly he knows without a doubt that he didn’t kill Sandra. It was Henry. Henry Cutter, writer of words, destroyer of lives.

  He tosses the journal back to Hans.

  “What is it you’re reading there?” Hans asks.

  “Just some notes,” Jerry says, and he goes back to the loo
se pages, of which there are another dozen or so. There are more things he has done here as Henry. The whole thing with the spray-paint—that was Henry. He wrote about it before doing it. He had the can of spray-paint on his desk when he was writing the entry. He was getting ready to walk out the door and sneak across the street, and oh how he was looking forward to it. He knew Mrs. Smith would suspect him, but he didn’t care. He would deny it. He would suggest she leave the neighborhood because somebody seemed to have it in for her.

  That’s what Henry wrote.

  And where the hell was Jerry then?

  He carries on reading. Henry develops a crush on the florist. A few days before the wedding he decides to sneak out the window to go and see her. Jerry remembers that day. Not sneaking out the window, but he remembers being at the flower shop, the woman who helped him, who drove him home, the woman who died the night of the wedding.

  It’s looking like Henry isn’t a dessert guy, but a rape and murder guy.

  There are more pages. The truth is so powerful it hurts, his head feels tight, the horror and the anger at what he has done is swelling inside him, his brain feels like it’s going to pop. Here’s an entry titled WMD Plus a Bunch of Hours Plus Don’t Trust Hans Plus a Bunch of Other Shit. It starts with Henry waking up on the couch with blood all over his shirt. He checks his body for cuts, he counts his fingers and toes, and comes to the conclusion the blood isn’t his. He suspects it might have been from his neighbor, he says My first thought is the silly old trout from over the road, that she’s come over and asked me to trim back the hedges and instead I’ve trimmed back her arms and legs, sculpting her body back to a limbless blob.

  He checks on Sandra. She’s fine. Then he hides the shirt under the floorboards where spiders and mice can eat it over the next hundred years. Henry can remember speaking to Nurse Mae earlier in the evening, but not what they spoke about. He says it’s like looking through fog.