The Bird Cage Read Online Free Page A

stake here!”
    She rose from her chair. Your fear of death, Edward Markham. Your bullying, Her answer to his question remained silent. “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. Please do not return until I call you. There is nothing you can see here that has any meaning for you. There is nothing for you to do at this time.”
    His expression was venomous as he laboriously pulled himself upright. So, fire me, she thought. If this test failed, if there was even a hint that the young man was damaged and she refused to proceed with Markham, he would fire her. She suspected that he already had someone else in mind to take over in that event. But not yet. Now he needed her. He understood that it would take time for a replacement to catch up, to learn enough to take the next step. Later she would not care. If it worked, she would publish, and she would quit, write a book, sleep. Later she would sleep.
    After Markham was gone, she stood at the side of the cold water bed for a short time. Sleep well, she thought. Pleasant dreams. One more night, just one more night for you, my young friend, then, soon after that, perhaps I can sleep well and have pleasant dreams.
    Jean sat in the hospital coffee shop waiting for Trevor, thinking of all the things he had talked about on the way to the hospital. He was an electrical engineer, divorced, his ex had taken off for Los Angeles, leaving him the house and mortgage, taking all the money, about growing up at the orchard, how he and Cody had fought, played together, fished, hiked. Monthly poker games with pals, books he liked, music… It had been a long slow drive and he never had stopped talking.
    She had called his mother the day before to get Cody’s address, and she had spent the rest of the day accepting that she had to find him, then denying it. Back and forth all day. Mrs. McCrutchen had been cheerful and claimed to remember Jean. She had been pleased to tell her where he lived.
    She might have had a heart attack at the wheel, Jean thought, not a flashback at all, but a heart attack or a stroke or something, and they had nothing to fear about driving, or swimming, or anything else. Strange memories surfacing didn’t have to mean anything else, just memories.
    Lying about it didn’t help, she thought with a soft groan. Thinking about it didn’t help either. Where had Cody gotten twenty-five thousand dollars? She visualized his apartment, almost monkish in its barrenness, and boxes and boxes of books stacked against the wall, unopened, unread for more than two years. Trevor had talked about that, too. Cody and his girlfriend, together for three years, had split.
    “He was in graduate school,” Trevor had told her, talking, talking about whatever came to mind. “She wanted to get married, start a family, but money was too tight, and he wanted that graduate degree. Horticulture. He broke it off after one big fight too many, I guess. It was a bad time. He dropped out of the program and bummed around for a couple of years, and just a year ago he started to save to go back. God, I hope it wasn’t drug money. Anything, almost anything but that.”
    Thinking about it, she shook her head. He wouldn’t have deposited it in the bank, not if it was from drugs. It had to have some legitimacy to be so open about it. That might be a start, a way to find him, tell him she was sorry.
    Abruptly she stood. Not again. Don’t play that over again. There had been a newspaper stand in the lobby, she remembered, and went out to get something to read, something else to think about.
    She took a newspaper back to the cafeteria, got coffee, and sat in a booth trying to read one article after another as if she were back in school, cramming for a test. Finally Trevor joined her.
    “How is she?”
    “Stable, a little improved, they said. They put a reclining chair in for Dad so he can stay with her. He won’t leave and I can’t go in, so here I am.”
    “Want some pretty bad coffee?”
    He shook his