Jerry opens his hand and lets the hair fall onto the seat next to him. “Say she isn’t dead,” he says, much quieter now.

“We’re going to have to cuff you now, Jerry, okay?” Chris says, keeping his voice calm while his partner sucks in deep lungfuls of air.

“He said Sandra is dead.”

“He shouldn’t have said that,” Chris says.

“No, he shouldn’t have. It’s not funny.”

Chris gets out of the car. He opens the back door and tells Jerry to climb out. When he’s out, Chris tells him to turn around, then he slips a pair of handcuffs on him. Jerry has the feeling he’s been handcuffed before.

“Is she though?” he asks.

“Is she what?” Chris says.

“Dead.”

Silence for a few seconds, then Chris starts nodding. “She is, Jerry. I’m sorry,” he says, and Jerry can’t even make it back into the car. Instead he falls down on the side of the road, his knees banging heavily into it, his hands cuffed behind him, and he tips onto his side and starts sobbing into the asphalt.

DAY FIFTY

You actually started the Day Fifty entry earlier today, got two paragraphs into it and tore those pages out and tossed them into the trash because your thoughts were too jumbled, your spelling too messy, you couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say because you were too upset. Tearing out the pages and starting from scratch seemed the way to go, as if by doing so, you could delete the events of the day. If only it were so simple (yet in a way it is. If I don’t write it down, it will become easy for you to forget. Not now, but when the Dark Tomorrow comes). There are, it turns out, some speed bumps. You were, it turns out, premature in your decision to part ways with the Madness Journal. You need the journal to help remember who you are, because this disease you’re pretending you don’t have, well, you have it. You can’t kid yourself anymore.

The speed bumps.

Let’s start with Nicholas, the lawyer you came up with for the novel number unlucky for some. Nicholas—the no-good son of a bitch who you trusted, who you gave life to, who let you down because Mandy, your editor, didn’t like him. What happened? Why didn’t she like him?

Mandy said that for the first time you’ve taken an edit backwards. They were hard words to hear. Bloody hard. So for the last week you’ve been taking Nicholas back out of the story. Mandy said to take your time, but doesn’t she get there is no time? If Captain A has his way, you won’t be able to write your own goddamn name let alone rewrite a novel. Captain A, by the way, is the new name you’ve given the disease, because when that Dark Tomorrow arrives, it’ll be Captain A steering the ship. You’re really all at sea with this manuscript, partner. You sent the revised manuscript to Mandy two days ago, and she rang this morning and said maybe it was time to look at getting a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter! One more thing to add to the I can’t believe it list.

That’s Nicholas and Mandy for you. You do know that Mandy is looking out for your best interests. You know that. It just, well, it’s just the entire thing. You’ve let her down, and you’ve let yourself down.

Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, is a different story. Mrs. Smith isn’t just your neighbor, but also the mayor of Batshit County. She has her own Captain A steering her own ship. A while ago she complained about your garden (though good ol’ Hip-Hop Rick did spend a day in the yard a week ago, mowing and weeding and pruning and making things look nice before Sandra’s upcoming surprise birthday party), and now she seems to think you tore the roses out of her garden, but come on, you’re a forty-nine-year-old crime writer who has better things to drink than rip out her damn roses. Ha—not drink. Do. Better things to do. Yesterday, however, the police got involved, and now Sandra is angry because she took You Know Who’s side of the argument.

Basically here’s what happened—yesterday you all woke up to see the word CUNT had been spray-painted onto the front wall of Mrs. Smith’s house, the C on the front wall, the U covering the width of the door, the N on the wall next to that, and the T on the window. Nobody saw anything happen because it probably happened at night, and Mrs. Smith didn’t hear a thing because years of nagging her husband to death have perforated her eardrums. Naturally she came over and banged on your door. Of course she did. You’re the go-to guy when people have had obscenities painted on their walls. Somebody spray-painted the word asshole on your door? Go see Jerry. Fucktard on your letterbox? Go see Jerry. Shitburger on the car? Go see Jerry. So she came and saw Jerry while Sandra was at work, and Jerry told her he had no idea what in the hell she was talking about, and she pointed out that Jerry had the same goddamn color spray-paint on his fingers, which Jerry pointed out wasn’t paint, but ink, because he’d written one hundred and ten goddamn names on one hundred and ten goddamn place cards the previous night for the wedding, and he’d been using a felt, so stop accusing him of spray-painting on her wall when, obviously, she was a cunt and everybody in the street knew it, giving everybody in the street a motive.

The words were barely out of your mouth before you regretted them. Mrs. Smith, though she is nosy and annoying, didn’t deserve to be spoken to like that, especially after what was done to her house. There was a time when you were very neighborly with her. In fact, back in the day of book tours, when your family would go with you, it was Mrs. Smith who would look after your house and fetch your mail and feed the cat while you were gone. You and Sandra went to her husband’s funeral, and she always popped over with muffins on Sandra’s birthday. So of course you regretted saying those things, you regretted that somebody had done this mean thing to her, and most of all you regretted that Captain A had changed you into the type of person who could be blamed for anything wrong on the street.

You slammed the door on her.

It was an hour later when the police arrived. They asked to look at your fingers, but by then you’d cleaned up, of course you had—you do shower, you try to stay clean, and hygiene isn’t a crime. They asked if they could look around. Of course by then you had phoned Sandra, and she had come home, and she told them no. She said she wouldn’t allow them to treat you as suspect, but if there was evidence to suggest otherwise, then she would gladly allow them to search the house once they obtained a warrant. They asked if they provided you with a can of spray-paint, if you could paint the same word that appeared on the neighbor’s house so they could see if there was a match in technique. You actually thought they were kidding, and laughed, but they actually did want a handwriting sample on a scale where the letters were five feet high. Sandra told them no. She told them she was sorry for what had happened to Mrs. Smith’s house, but that neither her nor you had anything to do with it.

Is it possible you did this without being aware of it? one of the officers asked.

No, you said. And it wasn’t possible. You’d know if you had done it.

They said they would talk to others in the neighborhood, and would get back to you. As soon as they were gone Sandra asked if you had done it. You said no.

Are you sure?

Of course I’m sure.

Show me the hiding place, she said.

What hiding place?

The one beneath the desk.

How the hell do you know about that?

Just show me.

So you showed her. After all, you had nothing to hide. You hadn’t spray-painted Mrs. Smith’s house. You pushed the desk aside and got out the screwdriver and pried up the loose floorboard.