“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.