The Hand That Feeds You Read Online Free Page B

Gordon setter, speaking in a calm monotone, and his dog got up and paced nervously in the office, even growling low and showing flattened ears. The point? That dogs can differentiate between neurotic behavior and behavior that is truly a threat.
    Did Bennett threaten the dogs?
    •  •  •
    Cilla helped me compose a condolence letter to Bennett’s parents. Bennett had shown me a picture of them. His old father was playing a button accordion in a farm kitchen while his mother danced in her apron. When Cilla asked me what he had told me about them, what I recalled was generic. He offered little and I wished I had asked more about them. Cilla advised me not to make the letter about my loss.
    My brother, Steven, asked one of his law firm’s investigators to ferret out an address for them since the police weren’t able to find one: M. Jean-Pierre and Mme. Marie Vaux-Trudeau in Saint-Elzéar, Quebec, a town of less than three thousand.
    “The parents don’t exist,” Steven told me when he next came to visit me in Bellevue. I was beginning my second week there and he had been coming almost every night. We sat on plastic chairs in the common room while on television Happily Never After was on the Investigation Discovery channel. Imagine filling an entire season with stories about spouses who killed each other . . . on their honeymoon. My roommate, Jody, had tagged along, knowing Steven always brought chocolate. She sported her earbuds to give us privacy, but I saw her turn off the sound.
    “You mean your investigator couldn’t find them,” I corrected him.
    “Next time, Steve,” Jody interrupted, “could you get the kind with bacon bits and salt?”
    “Bacon in chocolate?” Steven said.
    “Maybe I spelled their last name wrong,” I said.
    “My guy checked every derivation. There is no one by that name in Saint-Elzéar.”
    “Maybe I got the town wrong.”
    “He checked all over.”
    “They have to be somewhere. Someone has to tell them their son is dead.”
    “I had my guy check the town’s records for Bennett’s birth certificate. No one by his name ever lived there.”
    “I didn’t ask you to check on Bennett.”
    “I wasn’t checking on Bennett, I was trying to find his parents for you.”
    I knew my brother better than anyone else. We’d been inseparable as kids, and fiercely protective of each other, a pattern often found in the children of a manic-depressive. When our father was depressed, he ignored Steven, and when our father was manic, he attacked him. Bipolar disease is one of the rare instances where a predator and a victim can occupy the same body at the same time. It makes for an unfair fight.
    “Do you want my guy to keep looking for Bennett’s parents?” Steven asked.
    “Of course I do.”
    •  •  •
    After Steven left, Jody worked on her chocolate. “My creative-writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence had the same thing happen to her. She met this English guy online and fell in love.”
    “Why would your professor tell you about her love life?” I asked, though I could barely concentrate on Jody. I was stuck back at the moment when Steven had said that Bennett wasn’t born where he told me he was.
    “We’re required to meet privately for a half hour a week to discuss my writing. There’s nothing to say. We both know it. Turns out the guy was really twelve years old.”
    “That must happen all the time.” I reached for the bedside lamp to turn it off.
    “Wait. I finally figured it out. You’re the bad version of that actress, Charlotte Rampling—the sexy-lidded eyes that change from hazel to green depending on the light, the cheekbones. It’s been driving me nuts.”
    “The bad version.”
    “Also the short version,” Jody said. “My sister and I say we are the bad versions of Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. We watch a lot of old movies. Your brother, on the other hand, is sort of the good version of Nic Cage.”
    “I think he could go with that. I