And so Janson Rheinschild sits alone in his chair, turning all of his anger, his disillusionment, and his disappointment inward, until finally he feels his heart seize in his chest, knotting in the lethal cramp of cardiac arrest.
And he’s glad for it. He’s grateful that at last the universe has chosen to show him some mercy.
58 • Connor
The sign on the highway reads WELCOME TO AKRON, THE RUBBER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. The dark, threatening skies feel anything but welcoming. Connor finds himself white-knuckling the steering wheel and has to loosen his grip. Calm down. Calm down. It’s only a sign.
“The scene of the crime,” comments Cam from behind Connor, and then softens it by adding, “Of course, that depends on your definition of ‘crime.’ ”
Grace, still beside Cam in the backseat, is content to decipher personalized license plates and analyze them. “SSADAB. Dumbass spelled backward. ‘♥&SEOUL.’ Some Korean guy who got an Unwind’s heart.” Grace seems immune to the heightened level of tension in the car until they approach a highway patrol car parked on the shoulder.
“Go slow! Go slow! Go slow!” she says.
“Don’t worry, Grace,” Connor tells her. “I’m right at the speed limit.” How stupid if they get caught for speeding and captured at this point.
The woods are now broken by suburban subdevelopments, and as the road rolls by, Connor tries to find the spot where his, Risa’s, and Lev’s lives converged. He doesn’t even know if this is the same freeway. It feels like something not just from another life, but from another world entirely. A world into which he’s just initiated reentry. He feels like Frodo at the gates of Mordor. Who would have guessed that Ohio could hold such dark portent?
“Do you know what you’re looking for?” asks Cam from the backseat. “Akron’s a big town.”
“Not so big,” is Connor’s only response.
Connor knows that Cam’s presence on this journey is a necessary evil, but he wishes Cam were not sitting right behind him where Connor can’t see him, except for suspicious glances in the rearview mirror. Cam’s offerings of information have not won Connor over. There’s something fundamentally underhanded and opaque about the Rewind, or at least about his intentions. Giving him the benefit of the doubt could damn them all.
“I imagine you must know Akron pretty well.”
“Not at all,” Connor tells him. “I’ve been here only once.”
That makes Cam laugh. “And yet they call you the Akron AWOL.”
“Yeah, funny how that works.” Connor is actually from a suburb of Columbus, hours away, but Akron is where he turned the tranq on Nelson. Akron is where he became notorious. He didn’t even know where he was at the time. He only knew it had been Akron once they gave him the irritating “Akron AWOL” label.
“Center-North!” Connor blurts.
“Center-north what?” Grace asks.
“That’s the name of the school. Center-North High. I knew I’d remember it eventually.”
“We’re going to a school?”
“That’s ground zero. We’re looking for an antique shop near the school. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“You sure about that?” asks Cam. “Memory’s a funny thing.”
“Only yours,” says Connor. He punches the name of the school into the GPS and a gentle voice directs them with confident, if somewhat soulless, purpose. In fifteen minutes, they’re on the east side of town. They turn a corner and things look troublingly familiar to Connor.
The school looks exactly the same. Three stories of institutional redbrick that somehow looks as intimidating to him as the Texas School Book Depository had when Connor’s family traveled to Dallas and took a tour of the infamous building where Oswald shot Kennedy. Connor takes a deep, shuddering breath.
It’s midmorning on a Tuesday, so school is in session. It’s just about the same time of day that the fire alarm went off and all hell broke loose. Connor rolls them slowly past. Across the street are homes, but up ahead is a main commercial street.
“Anything specific we should be looking for?” asks Cam. “Any defining characteristics of this antique shop?”
“Yeah,” Connor says, “old stuff,” which makes Grace laugh.
He wonders what Sonia will do when she sees him. Then a horrible thought crosses Connor’s mind: What if she’s dead? Or what if she was caught and arrested for harboring Unwinds? He doesn’t voice his concerns, because if he doesn’t speak them aloud, maybe they won’t be true.
Connor slams the brakes, nearly running a red light. A pedestrian crosses the street glaring at them.
“Not much of a driver, are ya?” says Grace, then turns to Cam. “Did you know he almost killed Lev?”
“My driving’s fine,” Connor insists, “but this place is eating my brain.” He looks around, waiting for the light to change. “I don’t recognize any of this, but I know the shop can’t be more than a block or two away.”
“So drive around the school in a spiral that gets bigger,” suggests Grace. And then she adds, “Although since the streets ain’t round, it’s kinda a square spiral.”
“That’s called an Ulam spiral, by the way,” Cam says. “A way of graphing prime numbers. Not that you would know that.”
Connor gives him a disgusted look in the rearview mirror. “Is everyone in your internal community an ass?” Connor asks. It shuts Cam up.
They widen their search pattern until Connor hits the brakes suddenly again, but not because of a red light.
“There it is. It’s still there.”
The unprepossessing storefront of the corner shop has an understated sign that reads GOODYEAR HEIGHTS ANTIQUES. Being that it’s two blocks off the main thoroughfare, it doesn’t seem to be getting much business. Connor parks across the street, and they sit there in silence for about ten seconds. Then he unbuckles his seat belt.
“Well,” he says, “let’s go antiquing.”
59 • Sonia
She’s not surprised that the Lassiter boy has come here, but she is surprised by the company he’s keeping. That blasted Rewind is the last travel companion she’d expect to see him with. She doesn’t show her surprise though—and she doesn’t show how happy she is to see Connor either. As far as Sonia is concerned, authentic emotions are a liability. They always come back to bite you. Her poker face has served her well over the years, and on many occasions it has saved her life.
“So you’re back,” she says to Connor, putting down a lamp she had just repaired. “And with friends, no less.”
She makes no move to embrace him or even to shake his hand. Neither does Connor. He holds his distance—he too having learned the fine art of defensive dispassion. Still, he’s not as good at it as Sonia. She can tell how relieved he is to be here and how happy he is to see her. Even if he doesn’t wear it on his face, she can sense it in his general aura.
“Hello, Sonia,” he says, then smirks. “Or should I say Dr. Rheinschild?”
This is a surprise. She hasn’t heard the name spoken aloud in years. Her heart misses a beat, but she still doesn’t let the emotion show on her face, and she chooses not to respond to his accusation—for an accusation is exactly what it is—although she knows a nonresponse is as good as an admission.
“Are you going to introduce me to your little posse?” she asks. “Or have you still not learned any manners?”
He starts with the chunky, vague-looking woman who seems out of place in this trio—although to be honest, none of them really seem to fit together.
“This is Grace Skinner. She saved my life a few weeks ago.”
“Hiya,” Grace says. She’s the only one who steps forward to force a handshake on Sonia. “I hear you saved his life too, so I guess we’re in the same club.”