Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  Today is a bad day. It’s bad because I can remember that Sandra (my wife) is dead, and that Eva (my daughter) never comes to see me. Looking back at the previous entries it seems I only write when I’m having a good day. I should start putting in the date, because I have no idea how long I’m going between entries.

  Don’t trust Hans.

  I don’t know why I would have written that. Why Henry would have.

  And yet . . . with those words is some kind of recognition, a sense that I have written them before. If I had to guess, then I would say perhaps it was in the original Crazy Diary. This is Version II—Version I was written as Jerry’s Normal Life phase entered the Madness phase.

  I miss Sandra. I know she’s dead, but I don’t know know, if that makes sense. It’s like having somebody come along and tell you the sky is green when it’s actually blue. That’s how it feels, and the memory of those few days with her lying on the floor are feeling more and more like they belong to somebody else, that they belong to one of the characters I’ve given life to.

  Don’t trust Hans.

  Really?

  I’m off to breakfast now (good news? For some reason I have the urge to say that—but nothing really to say). Oh, and thinking about it, I think I should be calling this a Madness Diary, not a . . . wait, strike that. A Madness Journal. That has a better ring to it.

  Once again, Jerry is able to recall writing these journal entries. But he can’t remember the actual events described. For all intents and purposes, this is the Madness Journal of a stranger.. The biggest takeaway from the entry is Past Jerry’s conviction of a second hiding place. It lines up with what Current Jerry thinks, because that will be where the original journal is hidden.

  He reads the next entry and it’s more of the same, as is the following one, words that belong to him but are somehow associated with someone else. He puts the journal down. He moves to the doorway and listens for movement. Hans is no longer in the garage but definitely somewhere in the house. He can hear his friend opening and closing drawers.

  Don’t trust Hans. The earlier entry was clear on that, but didn’t provide an explanation. It could have just as easily warned: don’t trust Henry. Or don’t trust Jerry, because he sure as hell can’t trust himself, can he?

  If Hans isn’t to be trusted, if the author with the Alzheimer’s monkey on his back is to be believed, then standing in the doorway isn’t the way to go about finding an answer to all this. Nor is confronting his friend. He sits back down behind the desk and picks up the journal. He notices the structure of the entries begins to topple and the prose is too loose on occasion as Jerry starts to lose control of the plot. He suddenly realizes how he’s reading these entries, as if they’re part of a novel, a story about a fictional character. And in some ways they are, aren’t they?

  He rolls up his sleeve and looks at the marks on his arm. An idea is coming to him. He looks back at the journal. Chunks of it have been stolen and inserted directly into Eric’s manuscript and portrayed as the journal entries of his protagonist. These entries come off as very realistic because they come from a genuine source. They are the ramblings of a madman. Mad, he thinks, because Eric made him that way. He looks back at the marks on his arm, and suddenly he knows. The same way he’s able to predict the ending to nearly every movie and TV show he’s seen, the same way he knows what’s waiting for him on the last page of any novel. He knows that Eric injected him not just on the days he was going out and hurting those women, but also on days he couldn’t push his story forward. Eric would inject him just for the purpose of making Jerry’s world more miserable than it is, just so Jerry would write about it.

  He carries on with the journal. Here’s the first instance of being found wandering in town. Past Jerry has no memory of it, and nobody knows how he got there. He reads the entry slowly, looking for the details, but there are none except for a gold locket that Past Jerry finds in his pocket that evening when he’s back in the nursing home. He thinks he must have stolen it, so he hides it in the back of one of his drawers.

  Current Jerry tilts his head back and closes his eyes and tries to think back to the phone call he had earlier today with Eva. She said the jewelry was found there, jewelry from the women who were killed. Eric must have given those pieces to him.

  And if that theory is wrong? What if the next entry is Past Jerry detailing how he escapes, how much he enjoys a good, old-fashioned bloodletting? What if? Only he doesn’t think it will. He’s not that guy. Like he told Hans earlier, Sandra would never have married that guy.

  And like Hans told you, buddy, the Alzheimer’s is a wild card.

  Following entries find Past Jerry confessing to more crimes from his books: a couple of homicides, a bank robbery, a kidnapping, even to being a drug dealer. He wonders if this was a natural progression, or something Eric orchestrated for his research. Past Jerry is found once again wandering in town, and when he’s taken back to the nursing home he finds another piece of jewelry in his pocket, and he has no memory of how he left the home.

  “Jerry?” Hans, calling from somewhere in the house. “Jerry, come down here a moment.”

  Don’t trust Hans, Henry says.

  But how can he not? After everything Hans has done for him?

  He finds Hans in the master bedroom, the bed shoved to one side of the room, the contents of the drawers tipped out, clothes on the floor, jewelry forming a pile on the bed.

  “You think some of that belongs to the girls?” Jerry asks, looking at the rings and necklaces and earrings.

  “I don’t know. Probably his wife’s. But that’s not why I called you,” he says, and he holds up an eight-by-ten envelope. “Check it out,” he says, and he tips the envelope up.

  Jerry is expecting more rings and necklaces to slide out. He’s expecting something that can explain what happened to the woman whose house he woke up in today.

  And that’s exactly what he gets. Four small ziplocked plastic bags and four photographs that together tell a story. “I found it taped under the bottom drawer,” Hans says. “Bloody amateur.”

  Jerry reaches out to pick up one of the bags.

  “Don’t touch them,” Hans says. “Don’t get your prints on them.”

  “Why not? The police are going to know I was here.”

  “We don’t want them thinking you brought these things with you.”

  “What are they?” Jerry asks, pulling his hands back.

  “It’s hair.”

  “What?”

  “Hair,” Hans says, and Jerry can see it now, each of the four bags holding a little less hair than you’d find on a toy doll. “Four bags, four victims. He took jewelry to plant on you, and he took hair for himself. He probably found it more personal.”

  “And the photographs?”

  The photographs have all landed facedown. “Well that’s the best bit,” Hans says, and he flicks them over one at a time, like a blackjack dealer, each image worse than the other, not in terms of quality but quantity. Four photographs virtually the same, each showing four dead women. Except the last one shows Jerry Grey in the background, snoozing on the couch.

  The horror at what these girls went through is too much for Jerry, and he finds he can’t speak. He moves to the edge of the bed and sits down just as his legs are beginning to give out. “Those poor girls,” he says, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.

  “You didn’t do this,” Hans says.

  “That doesn’t make what happened to them any less painful.”

  “No, but it means you’re not responsible.”

  “Not directly, no,” Jerry says.

  “You want to explain that?”

  “Eric killed them because I told him he had to write what he knows. He killed them because he knew he could get away with it by framing me. If I’d never gotten sick, if I were still at home and still had my old life, then I’d have never met Eric. Those girls would still be alive.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. If it did,
we’d all be responsible for everybody else’s actions all the time. Eric did this, not you. You didn’t hurt these girls, Eric did,” Hans says.

  Together, Jerry thinks, they have just taken care of a serial killer.

  “There is one small problem,” Hans adds, and any relief Jerry was starting to feel at not being a killer disappears, replaced by a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “The police are going to think you planted them here.”

  Jerry doesn’t know what to say. Henry, on the other hand, knows. He’s absolutely right, but that doesn’t mean you should trust him. “But the photographs—”

  “Could have been taken by you.”

  “Not the last one.”

  “Could have been taken with a self-timer.”

  “The police will figure out when these photographs were printed, and where, and will see it was probably on Eric’s computer.”

  “Which you’ve had access to,” Hans counters.

  “Not for long, though.”

  “They won’t know that. The police might think you’ve been here all day, after leaving the knife at the mall. Look, Jerry, in saying all of that, I think you’ll be okay. At the very least it will mean they’ll investigate him, right? They’re going to look into all the days those girls were killed, and they’re going to find a pattern. Maybe they’ll rip the place apart and find even more evidence. Maybe they’ll find some poor girl buried out in the garden. It could be the wife suspected something too, and she might talk. Could be this jewelry that belongs to the wife originally came from the girls.”

  “But you believe me, right?”

  “Of course I do, but I’m not the one who needs convincing. This guy has been exposed and taken care of because of you, not because of the police, and they’re not going to be too thrilled being made to look foolish by a crime writer dealing with Alzheimer’s. They’re going to look for any angle that could suggest your involvement. The flip side to that is you’ll be cleared, and once the media gets hold of the story, you’ll be a hero. The country won’t like a hero being convicted.”

  “I’m not a monster,” Jerry says, and the relief is back . . . it’s back and it’s growing, it’s spreading its wings.

  Hans is staring at him. He has that look he gets when he’s trying to figure something out.

  “What?” Jerry asks.

  “Let’s not forget the others,” Hans says.

  “What others?”

  “The others you’ve killed.”

  Jerry thinks about Sandra, he remembers the florist, and Suzan with a z, whose real name is lost to him now. He looks down at the photographs, three of them representing women he has killed. Thoughts of his own innocence may have been premature.

  “Is it possible I haven’t killed anybody?” Jerry asks.

  “Two hours ago we dropped a man to his death,” Hans says.

  “Other than him,” Jerry says.

  “Possible? Anything is possible,” Hans says.

  “Anything is possible,” Jerry says, letting the words hang in the air for a few seconds before chasing them with the reality. “But you think I did.”

  “I’m sorry, buddy.”

  “So now what?”

  “Well I can keep looking around while you read the journal. Since he hid these,” Hans says, nodding towards the bags of hair and photographs, “then it stands to reason he might have hidden something else. It’s not uncommon for people to have more than one hiding space. Ultimately we—”

  “That’s right! I haven’t told you yet, but I wrote in my journal that there is a second hiding place!” Jerry says.

  Hans looks excited. “Where?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  “Well what did you say?”

  “Just that there’s somewhere else. I think it’s where I used to hide my writing backups.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need to remember, Jerry,” Hans says, sounding urgent. “And we need to head to your house and find it.”

  “I need a drink.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Who knows when I’ll get another chance? Plus it might help me think.”

  Hans slowly nods. “After all you’ve gone through today, you probably deserve one. Hell, I think we both do.”

  They head out to the kitchen and Jerry leans against the bench while Hans goes through the cupboards. Hans finds a couple of glasses and sits them on the table, then starts going through the pantry. He finds what he’s looking for. Not quite what he’s looking for—there’s vodka, and no gin, but it will have to do. He grabs some ice from the freezer. There’s no tonic anywhere, so he ends up making a couple of vodka and orange drinks. They sit down at the table. All very social, Jerry thinks.

  All very mad, Henry thinks.

  “Why are you still wearing the gloves?” Jerry asks.

  Don’t trust Hans.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With Eric being dead already, the police are going to figure out I’m involved.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And when they talk to me, they’re going to figure out you’re involved.”

  “Not if you don’t tell them.”

  “You don’t want them to know?”

  “Of course not. I want to help you out, buddy, but I’d also really like to avoid jail too.”

  “What if I forget that and tell them?”

  “If you forget, you forget. But if you remember, and don’t drag me into it, then the police never need to know I was here. Look, Jerry, I know it’s not right of me to ask this, but I want you to take the fall for what happened to Eric. The police will go easy on you, and if they don’t . . .” Hans says, and doesn’t finish.

  “If they don’t what?”

  “You’re already a killer, mate. I’m just trying to help. I don’t want to be punished for trying to help you out.”

  Jerry looks at his glass, then slowly sips from it. Not as good as a gin and tonic, but better than nothing. He sips a little more. It’s a fair point, he thinks, then tells Hans as such.

  Hans starts sipping from his own drink. “You remember my dad’s funeral?” he asks.

  Jerry looks up. He shakes his head. He wonders where Hans is going with this.

  “The night before the funeral, you took me into town and we ended up at a bar that had run out of gin. You started bitching at the bartender, asking him what kind of bar it was, and he said the kind of bar where people who complain get their teeth kicked out. We ended up drinking these,” he says, taking a sip. “Only time I’ve ever had them. It’s not . . . I don’t know the word,” he says.

  “Not masculine enough?”

  Hans nods. “I knew you’d know. You’ve always been a gin-and-tonic guy, ever since we met.”

  Jerry finishes his drink. He considers whether he wants a second. “I remember you brought bottles to me when I got sick.”

  “Sandra wouldn’t let you drink, and she took your credit card off you so you couldn’t go and buy them. I would bring five of them to you at a time. I have no idea where you hid them, but maybe it’s the same place you hid the—”

  “In the garage,” Jerry says, and he can remember it, can remember a tarpaulin beneath a bench, covering the gap behind the chain saw and the circular saw, and that was where he hid them, behind renovating tools that belonged to a much younger version of Past Jerry, back when Eva was a small girl and his books were still to be given life. He didn’t hide all of the bottles there, the rest were under the floor of his office. He can also remember a tarpaulin on his office floor, all laid out ready to catch the mess that a far more recent version of Past Jerry was going to make, one from last year.

  “You got through them pretty quickly,” Hans says.

  Only the bottles weren’t under the floor, were they, Jerry? Henry says. No, under the floor was reserved just for the gun that wasn’t there and the journal that also wasn’t there. Th
e only thing under there was a shirt you can’t remember getting bloody.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Hans says. “You got a bad rap. Not one of the worst I’ve ever seen, but pretty damn close.”

  Jerry isn’t listening to Hans. Instead he’s listening to Henry. He’s thinking about the floorboards. About the original journal. How it wasn’t under there. The gin wasn’t under there either. Nor the gun. Because it’s just like he said in Madness Journal 2.0—there’s another hiding place.

  “Maybe—”

  “Stop talking,” Jerry says, and he puts his hand out. He’s thinking about what he wrote in the journal. He’s thinking about those bottles of gin.

  “Jerry? Are you okay?”

  The writing backups weren’t under the floor, but he kept them somewhere safe and secure. Somewhere close. They wouldn’t be in the garage, or the kitchen, or a bedroom. Wouldn’t be somewhere he’d have to go looking for.

  You used to hide them. You were paranoid somebody would come into your house one day and steal your computer, steal everything you worked with, steal your next big idea.

  “Were my writing backups found?”

  “Backups? I have no idea.”

  He thinks about his office. Remembers the layout. His mind is becoming warm, the vodka and juice flowing through all the neural pathways in his brain, quickly fogging his thoughts the way it will to somebody who hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in nearly a year, but it’s clearing things in other areas as those thoughts link across time, the way alcohol can do that, linking images, dragging out the random, and he’s back in his study where he’s pouring himself a drink, and those bottles of gin . . . well now, they weren’t hidden under the floorboards, were they . . .

  “The backups were hidden. I always hid that stuff,” Jerry says.

  “Under the floor maybe?”

  “There was nothing under the floor.”

  “Then where? Think, Jerry, come on, you’re almost there, you’re—”

  “Shut up,” Jerry says.

  It has to be somewhere else big enough to fit a few bottles of gin. Where? Not the bookcase. Not the desk. Nothing hidden in the wall. Nothing in the roof. Nothing under or inside the couch.