The Bird Cage Read Online Free Page B

head, then craned to see the article and photograph below the fold. She had read it. A local woman had hanged herself. Trevor’s face turned ashen and he snatched up the paper.
    “You knew her?”
    “Elise Bronstein,” he said. “Good God! Elise!” He let the newspaper fall. “She was Cody’s girl friend. She attempted suicide after the break up.”
    Jean stared at him in horror. “You think she… Like your mother? Like you and me?”
    “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said raggedly.
    Back in the car he sat with both hands clutching the steering wheel, staring ahead blindly. “I saw her a couple of months ago. She was happy, with a guy, thinking about getting married. She and Cody… always stormy, fighting the last six months or longer. I have to find him!” he said. “He could be hurt, or something. Like us, like my mother.”
    He didn’t add like Elise, but Jean did in her head. “Let’s go back to his apartment, find out who gave him all that money. He must have a check book, someplace where he recorded the deposit. Online banking maybe.”
    He started the engine.
    “Keep talking, Trevor. Tell me about him, about Cody. Did you two keep in touch?”
    Driving very slowly, keeping to side streets through neighborhoods she had never seen before, he talked about his brother. “He was a daredevil as a kid, never afraid of anything. And smart, smarter than me. He wants to make a difference in farming, soil management or something, or he did before he dropped out. He was devastated when Elise attempted suicide. Blamed himself. We were planning to hike up in the Olympic wilderness in August, looking forward to it… ”
    Most of his rambling was meaningless, Jean thought, just random thoughts, memories of a man who loved his kid brother. They talked every week or so, and Cody had a cell phone. She made a mental note of that. They emailed each other more often than they talked, another note—there was a computer in that little studio apartment. They could search files or something. He worked as a groundskeeper somewhere, just another of a series of go-nowhere jobs while he tried to accumulate a little money before he got back in school. He had not been willing to take a real job with a real commitment, he wanted to get back on his own track, finish what he had started. He had not mentioned going away, leaving.
    Trevor was in the middle of another bit of trivia when he pulled up to the curb outside Cody’s apartment building and stopped talking.
    “Made it,” he said after a moment. “Jean, are we being stupid?”
    “No,” she said. “We are not. Let’s find his computer and see what’s on it. Maybe find his cell phone, check recent messages. Find out where he worked. Someone signed pay checks for him. Find out if he turned up at work this week. Like you said, we have to find him, get to the bottom of this. It seems as if everything going on revolves around him one way or another.”
    “Good thinking,” he said. “I’ve been too busy talking to think about a thing. I’ve never talked so much in such a short time in my life. Let’s go in.”
    Inside the dreary apartment, Jean checked the refrigerator that proved to be almost as barren as the furnishings of the place. No vegetables, no milk, no perishables. She searched pockets for a cell phone as Trevor began to search the files on a laptop that he had found under a lot of papers on the table. Jean found the cell phone and his check book in a wind breaker pocket.
    An hour later they considered the meager results of their searches.
    “He worked for a company called Markham Enterprises,” Trevor said. “They’re into a lot of different things, but primarily land development. Somewhere they have property that requires a regular crew of grounds keepers.”
    He drew in a long breath. “And that big check apparently was paid to him by the company, signed by Markham. That’s all he entered in his check book, just Markham.”
    She nodded. “I