The Rheinschilds
She’s worried about him. He’s always been obsessed with their work, but she’s never seen him like this. The hours he spends in his research lab, the dark circles beneath his eyes, all the mumbling in his sleep. He’s losing weight, and no wonder; he seems to never eat anymore.
“He’s like this superbrain with no body,” says Austin, his research assistant, who has grown from an emaciated beanpole to a much more healthy weight since Janson hired him six months ago.
“Will you tell me what he’s working on?” Sonia asks.
“He said you didn’t want any part of it.”
he showed up for his shift the next morning, half his face in a bandage, customers and coworkers all feigned to care.
“Oh my, what happened?” they all asked.
“Gardening accident,” he told them, because he couldn’t come up with anything better at the time.
“Wow, musta been one nasty hedge.”
At home he stews, he curses, then stews some more, for what else can he do? Argent knows he can’t tell the police the truth of what happened. He can’t tell anyone, because his fool friends have bigger mouths than he does. The Juvenile Authority and FBI have dismissed him as a dumbass yokel who concocted a lie and almost made it stick. They see him as a joke. Even his own half-wit sister managed to turn him into a joke of a man, and all because of Connor Lassiter.
Can you despise your personal hero?
Can you long to share in his light and at the same time want to slit his throat the way he almost slit yours?
Argent’s only consolation is that Grace is no longer his problem. He doesn’t have to feed her; he doesn’t have to scold her and make her mind. He doesn’t have to worry about her leaving the water running, or the gas on, or the freaking back door open for the raccoons. He can have his own life. But what is that life, really?
Argent knows that these thoughts will fill his head for months to come as he mindlessly scans canned corn and pocket-damp coupons. “Did you find everything okay?” his mouth will say. “Have a good one!” But his heart will be wishing them worms in their meat, disease in their produce, and swollen, rancid canned goods. Anything that will inflict upon them a small fraction of the misery that now resides within him.
• • •
A week after Connor’s escape, a visitor shows up at Argent’s door just before he’s about to leave for his morning shift.
“Hello,” the man says. His voice is a little bit ragged and his smile suspiciously broad. “Would you happen to be Argent Skinner?”
“Depends on who’s asking.” Argent figures this might be one of the feds, come to tie up loose ends. He wonders if he’s going to be arrested after all. He wonders if he cares.
“May I come in?”
The man steps forward a bit, and now Argent can see something that was hidden by the oblique morning light. There’s something wrong with the right half of the man’s face. It’s peeling and infected.
“What’s the deal with your face?” Argent asks, point-blank.
“I could ask the same of you,” he answers.
“Gardening accident,” Argent volunteers.
“Sunburn,” the man counters—although to Argent it looks more like a radiation burn. A person would have to lie beneath an unforgiving sky for hours to get a burn that bad.
“You oughta take care of that,” Argent says, not even trying to mask his disgust.
“I will when time allows.” The man steps forward again. “May I come in? There’s something I need to discuss with you. Something of mutual interest and benefit.”
Argent is not so stupid as to let a stranger into his house at the crack of dawn—especially one who looks as wrong as this man does. He blocks the threshold and takes a stance that would resist any attempt for the man to barge his way in. “State your business right there,” Argent tells him.
“Very well.” The man smiles again, but his smile seems like a silent curse. Like the smile Argent gives people in the ten-items-or-less line who violate the limit. The smile he gives them while wiping just a little bit of snot on their apples.
“I happened to catch that picture you posted of you and Connor Lassiter.”
Argent sighs. “It was a fake, all right? I already told the police.” Argent steps back to close the door, but the man moves forward, planting his foot in just the right spot to keep the door from budging.