“Are you knocking?” Hans asks.

“I don’t have my key.”

“Seriously, Jerry, you don’t live there anymore. You need to wait for me on the street.”

“But—”

“Are the police around? Do you see them?”

“What? Why would there be police here?”

“You live in a nursing home. You’ve wandered off. You rang me earlier and I came and picked you up from a shopping mall. You don’t remember any of this?”

“None of it,” Jerry says, annoyed at Hans for still pushing this silly joke.

“You have to—”

“I don’t get it,” Jerry says. “I’m missing the joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I can see all my stuff through the office window.”

“That’s not your stuff.”

“Ring me back later when you’re making sense,” he says, then hangs up.

He knocks again, but there’s no answer. Either Sandra isn’t home or she’s in the shower. The phone starts ringing again, but he ignores it. He makes his way to the side gate, noticing that the shrubs they planted last spring have all been torn up and replaced by different ones, a layer of bark put down, a family of garden gnomes guardians to it all. He reaches through and unlatches the side gate, and when it swings open he’s staring at a yard that feels slightly out of whack. It takes him a few moments to figure it out, and that’s when he notices the pool has gone. When the hell did that happen? He’s used to losing things by the pool, but never has he actually lost the pool. The garden is different too, but the deck is the same, as are the pavers surrounding it, and he digs his fingers under one and lifts it. The key is still there. He steps up on the deck and opens the bag and at the same time looks through the windows of the French doors into the house. The world tilts further. He doesn’t recognize any of the furniture, and there’s a large painting on the lounge wall of horses running along a beach that he doesn’t remember ever seeing.

Sandra has finally done it, she’s kicked him out and the baker has moved in, all the furniture has been replaced, and she didn’t even have the decency to let him know. Maybe this is what Hans meant when he said he doesn’t live here anymore. He gets the key out of the bag.

“What are you doing here?”

He turns towards the voice. Mrs. Smith has always reminded him of a generic grandmother he’d throw into one of the books for some bad guy to toss down a flight of stairs. “Look, I appreciate your concern,” he says, “but I’m fine. And as you can see we’ve taken care of the gardens. Thanks for stopping by.”

That’s when he notices there’s one thing about her that he’s overlooked. She’s holding a hockey stick. She has both hands tightly wrapped around the handle, with the heel pointing in his direction. Is this a mugging?

“I’ve called the police,” she says, so this isn’t a mugging, and the words trigger a memory, the same woman saying the same thing, and he was sitting in a car when she said it, he was in the passenger seat and they were parked right there on the road, and who was he sitting next to?

“They’re going to lock you away for what you’ve done, for ripping out my roses and setting fire to my car.” She adjusts her grip on the hockey stick. “And for spraying that word on my house.”

“What are you talking . . .” he says, then the images all come rushing, so many of them at one time it makes him dizzy, so many he can’t make any sense of them. He sits down on the doorstep with Mrs. Smith watching him, looking as though she wants to wind up her arms and let loose with that hockey stick.

“Nobody is buying the Alzheimer’s bullshit, Mr. Grey, so stop playing that card. You’re a no-good, rotten son of a bitch who murders women for fun, and if you—”

“What?”

“If you think that you can sneak back into your old house and—”

“What?”

“And kill the new owners, well, you take one more step and I’ll put this through the side of your head.” She changes the angle of the hockey stick to make it look more threatening to prove her point. “I made the national side back in my day, so don’t think I don’t know how to use it.”

The national side? At what? Hockey-stick fencing? “What are you talking about?”

“You’re rotten inside, Mr. Grey. Mean to the core.”

“There is something wrong with you,” he tells her. “What kind of person makes up this shit?” Then he realizes he’s the kind of person who makes up this shit. He does it for a living. He’s a professional liar. A makeup artist.

“You just stay where you are,” she says, and prods the hockey stick at him. “Your wife is dead because of you.”

“What?”

“You killed her.”

Hearing her say that . . . well now, she shouldn’t have said it. Shouldn’t. Have. Said it. He grabs the heal of the hockey stick in both hands and then it’s a tug-of-war between them as he gets to his feet and pushes forward. He’s heavier and stronger and younger and madder and he pushes her easily back down the pathway. Her foot goes into the garden off to the side, she stumbles, holding onto the hockey stick to try and keep her balance, and suddenly he realizes what’s about to happen. As annoying as she is, the last thing he wants is her falling over and cracking her head open. He tries to keep his grip on the hockey stick to stop her from falling, but she’s too heavy, and the stick comes out of his hands. She loses her balance then and topples over, her ass hitting the ground a second before her back, her head hitting a second later, and as he stands there staring at her, he realizes what she said is true—Sandra is dead.

Your name is Jerry Grey, Henry tells him, and he’d forgotten all about Henry, camping out in the back of his brain, there to offer commentary along the way. You’re a crime writer who doesn’t live here anymore, your Alzheimer’s tips the world upside down and shakes the hell out of it. The police are coming for you, they’re coming for you. Oh, also, you shot Sandra.

But it’s Hans that is coming for him, not the police, Hans coming around the side of the house, Hans coming to a stop where Mrs. Smith is making friends with the lawn. She isn’t moving.

“What the hell, Jerry?”

“It . . . it was an accident.”

“Is she . . . ?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Hans leans down and checks for a pulse. He has to move his fingers around for a few seconds and tuck them into a wrinkle that makes his fingers disappear to the first knuckle, but then he nods and he looks relieved. “She’s still alive. Help me get her up onto the deck.”

They get her upright, each holding one of her arms over their shoulders as they lift her onto the deck. The sun loungers there haven’t been cleaned after the winter, they’re covered in dead leaves and cobwebs and bird crap, but between them they get her laid down on one. “We can’t just leave her like this,” Jerry says. “It’s too cold.”

“Why did you come here?” Hans asks. “You’ve remembered where the journal is?”

“No,” Jerry says. “I don’t even know why I came here.”

“Do you know where it is?”

Jerry nods. “The guy in there has it. The new owner of the house. Gary Somebody. It’s in there somewhere. That must be why I came back.”

“Then we need to go in and get it,” Hans says.

“She called the police,” Jerry says, looking down at Mrs. Smith.

“She said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then we don’t need to worry about her getting cold because they’ll be on their way.” He pulls Jerry back in the direction of the street. “If we have to, we can come back later.”

They reach the car. It’s not the same car Hans was driving earlier. It isn’t until Jerry is sitting down and putting on his seat belt that he realizes they’re not alone. Eric the orderly is slumped across the backseat, eyes closed and softly snoring.