“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.