Read Trust No One for Free Online

made of oak that reminds Jerry of a church door. It all looks familiar to him, but doesn’t feel familiar, as if he hasn’t lived here but saw it once in a movie. He can’t even remember what the name of this place is. This life that is now his isn’t his at all, but belongs to a man from the same movie this nursing home is from, a man who confesses to murders of women who never existed, a man whose wife hates him, this man becoming less and less of the Jerry he used to be.
    “Don’t make me go in there.”
    “Please, Jerry, you have to,” Eva says, taking off her seat belt. When he doesn’t move, she reaches across and takes his off too. “I’ll come and visit you again tomorrow, okay?”
    He wants to tell her no, that tomorrow isn’t good enough, that he’s her father, that she wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him, that when she was a baby he once tweaked his back while bathing her and could barely walk for a week, that he once dropped a jar of baby food and cut his finger picking up the pieces, that he once thought about calling an exorcist after undoing her diaper and seeing the mess she had made. He wants to tell her he put Band-Aids on her knees and tweezed out splinters and bee stings, that he brought back teddy bears from faraway countries and then, when she was older, brought back fashion from those same places. These things he can remember. He can’t remember his parents. He can’t remember his books. He can’t remember this morning. The least Eva can do, he wants to tell her, is not make him go in there. And the very least she can do is come in with him. But he says none of this. It’s the way of the world, the natural cycle, and he’s thirty years ahead of schedule, but that’s not her fault, it’s his, and he can’t punish her for that. He takes her hand and he smiles, and he says, “You promise?”
    The big front door of the home opens. Nurse . . . Hamilton, her name comes to him as she walks towards them, stops halfway between the big oak door and the car and smiles at them. She’s a big woman who looks like she could bear-hug a bear. Her hair is a fifty-fifty mix of black and gray, and looks like it was last styled in the sixties. In her late fifties or early sixties, she has the exact kind of smile you want to see on a nurse, the kind of smile your grandmother would have. She’s wearing a nurse’s uniform with a gray cardigan over top that has a name badge pinned to it.
    “Do you promise?” he asks again.
    “I’ll do my best,” Eva says, looking down for a moment, and that doesn’t sound like a promise at all. He keeps smiling as she carries on. “You have to do your best to stay put, Jerry. How you made it into the city from here I don’t know,” she says, and nobody knows, least of all him. It’s a fifteen-mile walk to the edge of the town, but it’s another five on top of that to where he was found. He also can’t think why he went to the library. Maybe to see his books, maybe to see other books, maybe to fall asleep and get kind of arrested. They get out of the car just as Nurse Hamilton reaches it.
    “Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she’s smiling and shaking her head just a little, in a Well, we’ve all been very amused at your antics way. “We’ve missed you all day.” She puts an arm around his shoulders and starts walking him to the door. “How you keep sneaking out is a mystery.”
    “Can I have a word with you?” Eva asks the nurse once they get inside, and the nurse nods and Jerry imagines it will be more than one word, and that those words are going to be about him finding his way into town, and that none of those words are going to be friendly. He’s left standing in a foyer near a reception desk with another nurse behind it while Eva and Nurse Hamilton disappear. The nurse from behind the desk smiles at him and starts chatting, asking him if he enjoyed his time at the beach. He tells her he did, which is no doubt what she was expecting to