Read Trust No One for Free Online Page A

hear. When Nurse Hamilton and Eva come back, Eva tells him to be well, and he tells her he’ll do his best. When he goes to hug her, she pulls back a little at first, but then puts her arms around him. He doesn’t want to let her go when she pulls away a few seconds later, but more than that he doesn’t want to cause the kind of scene that proves Eva and Sandra made the right decision to put him in this place. He watches her go, then stands in the doorway and watches her car disappear through the trees.
    “Come on, Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she puts her arm around him again. It’s warm and heavy and comforting. He can smell coffee and cinnamon. He wants to smile back at her, but finds he can’t. “Let’s get you some dinner. You must be hungry.”
    She leads him down to the dining room. They walk past people and Jerry looks at them, these people with other problems, and the way they’ve all been left here by their families makes him think of them as the rejected and the unwanted, and then he thinks of himself as their king, then he thinks he’s being too harsh in thinking that, that everybody here has a story and he doesn’t know what it is, but then he thinks that maybe he does know those stories but has forgotten them. He sits at a table by himself and puts his appetite to good use. Jerry is the youngest person in here except for one other guy whose skull is caved in on one side. A nurse is feeding him.
    When dinner is over he heads back to his room. It’s the same size as the bedroom he shared with Sandra. There’s a single bed with a striped duvet cover, alternating blacks and whites, the same goes for the pillow, and he finds it a bit of an eyesore. There’s a small flat-screen TV on the wall, a small stereo, and a small fridge that he’s hoping contains alcohol, but when he opens it he sees only bottles of water and cans of diet soda. On one wall is a small bookcase stacked with copies of his books, probably to remind him of who he is. The whole room is miniaturized, a reflection on just how scaled back his life has become. There’s a small private bathroom off to the side, and there’s the window that looks out over the garden that is now getting the last of the sun, the flowers closing up for the day. There are framed photos of Eva and Sandra, one of the three of them taken in London, the bright lights of the city behind them, a double-decker bus coming into view, a telephone box on the side of the street—all very quintessentially British. Eva is only a teenager in the picture. He picks it up, and suddenly he can remember that trip, can remember the flight there, the turbulence twenty minutes short of Heathrow that made Sandra throw up. He can remember the taxi ride into the city, but he can’t remember what book he was promoting, where they went after London, how long they were away. He still has the photograph Eva gave him earlier. He places it on the dresser next to the London photo.
    He moves to the bed where there’s a copy of A Christmas Murder on the pillow. He must have been reading it last night, and that’s where his confusion started. He remembers the way he looked at his daughter in the police station, the way he pictured her naked, and the feeling of disgust sends him rushing to the bathroom where he throws up into the toilet. He feels like a creepy old man who drills holes into school fences so he can add kids to his mental spank bank. What kind of man looks at his own daughter that way?
    The answer, of course, is obvious. A sick one. One who doesn’t know who his daughter is, one who even forgets who he is. He can feel them coming now, the dark thoughts, an army of them marching in his direction and, like always, he wonders how he got here. What he did in life to deserve this.
    He cleans himself up. He goes back into the room. He puts A Christmas Murder back into the bookcase. He starts to undress. When he slips his hands into his pockets to empty them, his finger presses