Among the Missing (2011)
“He spoke to her back as she was standing in an aisle of shelves, staring at a book. She was lost in thought. “Excuse me … ma’am?” he said.
His voice was gentle and plaintive, almost on the verge of cringing. She turned, and he was standing a short distance behind her—a young man with shaggy dark hair, somewhat shoddy in his dress. He had a prosthetic arm, a hook instead of a hand. She registered this immediately but composed herself almost at once. She looked at his face, as if she hadn’t noticed his arm. Polite. Quizzical.
“Ma’am?” he said. “Could you help me, please?” And she noticed that he adopted a loping, submissive posture.
He held up a few napkins in his real hand. “I’m trying to … get a grip on these,” he said, and slipped them in between the two prongs of his hook, which he could pinch open and closed, like mandibles. “I think I need to put a rubber band around them,” he said apologetically.
“Oh,” she said. He was younger than she, with a brown-eyed, scruffy handsomeness.
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