The Empty Chair (Lincoln Rhyme 3)

So it wasn't a trap at all, just a trick to slow them down. Sachs reflected too that the ammonia bottle wasn't intended to hurt anybody either. Garrett could have rigged it to spill on his pursuers, blinding them. But he'd perched it on the side of a small cliff. If they hadn't found the fishing line first and tripped it, the bottle would've fallen onto rocks ten feet below the path, warning Garrett with the smell of the ammonia but not hurting anyone.

She had an image of Garrett's wide, frightened eyes once more.

I'm scared. Make him stop!

Sachs realized Lucy was talking to her.

"I'm sorry?"

The deputy said, "Where'd you learn how to use that toad sticker of yours--that knife?"

"Wilderness training."

"Wilderness? Where?"

"Place called Brooklyn," Sachs responded.

Waiting.

Mary Beth McConnell stood beside the grimy window. She was edgy and dizzy--from the close heat of her prison and the bristling thirst. She hadn't found a drop of any liquid to drink in the entire house. Glancing out the back window of the cabin, past the wasps' nest, she could see empties of bottled water in a trash heap. They taunted her and the sight made her feel all the more thirsty. She knew she couldn't last more than a day or two in this heat without something to drink.

Where are you? Where? She spoke silentl

y to the Missionary.

If there had been a man there--and he wasn't just a creation of her desperate, thirst-crazed imagination.

She leaned against the hot wall of the shack. Wondered if she'd faint. Tried to swallow but there wasn't a bit of moisture in her mouth. The air enwrapped her face, stifling as hot wool.

Then thinking angrily: Oh, Garrett ... I knew you'd be trouble. She remembered the old saw: No good deed goes unpunished.

I should never have helped him out .... But how could I not? How could I not save him from those high school boys? She recalled seeing the four of them, watching Garrett on the ground after he'd fainted on Maple Street last year. One tall, sneering boy, a friend of Billy Stail's from the football team, unzipped his Guess! jeans, pulled out his penis and was about to urinate on Garrett. She'd stormed up to them, given them hell and snatched one boy's cell phone to call an ambulance for Garrett.

I had to do it, of course.

But once I'd saved him, I was his ....

At first, after that incident, Mary Beth was amused that he would shadow her like a shy admirer. Calling her at home to tell her things he'd heard on the news, leaving presents for her (but what presents: a glistening green beetle in a tiny cage; clumsy drawings of spiders and centipedes; a dragonfly on a string--a live one!).

But then she began to notice him nearby a little too often. She'd hear footsteps behind her as she walked from the car to the house, late at night. See a figure in the trees near her house in Blackwater Landing. Hear his high, eerie voice muttering words she couldn't make out, talking or singing to himself. He'd spot her on Main Street and make a beeline to her, rambling on, taking up precious time, making her feel more and more uneasy. Glancing--both embarrassed and desirous--at her breasts and legs and hair.

"Mary Beth, Mary Beth ... did you know that if a spiderweb was, like, stretched all around the world it'd weigh less than an ounce ... Hey, Mary Beth, you know that a spiderweb is something like five times stronger than steel? And it's way more elastic than nylon? Some webs are really cool--they're like hammocks. Flies lie down, in them and never wake up."

(She should have noticed, she now reflected, that much of his trivia was about spiders and insects snaring prey.)

And so she rearranged her life to avoid running into him, finding new stores to shop in, different routes home, different paths to ride her mountain bike on.

But then something happened that would negate all her efforts to distance herself from Garrett Hanlon: Mary Beth made a discovery. And it happened to be on the banks of the Paquenoke River right in the heart of Blackwater Landing--a place that the boy had staked out as his personal fiefdom. Still, it was a discovery so important that not even a gang of moonshiners, let alone a skinny boy obsessed with insects, could keep her away from the place.

Mary Beth didn't know why history excited her so much. But it always had. She remembered going to Colonial Williamsburg when she was a little girl. It was only a two-hour drive from Tanner's Corner and the family went there often. Mary Beth memorized the roads near the town so that she'd know when they were almost to their destination. Then she'd close her eyes and after her father had parked the Buick she made her mother lead her by the hand into the park so that she could open her eyes and pretend that she was actually back in Colonial America.

She'd felt this same exhilaration--only a hundred times greater--when she'd been walking along the banks of the Paquenoke in Blackwater Landing last week, eyes on the ground, and noticed something half buried in the muddy soil. She'd dropped to her knees and started moving aside dirt with the care of a surgeon exposing an ailing heart. And, yes, there they were: old relics--the evidence that a stunned twenty-three-year-old Mary Beth McConnell had been searching desperately for. Evidence that could prove her theory--which would rewrite American history.

Like all North Carolinians--and most schoolchildren in America--Mary Beth McConnell had studied the Lost Colony of Roanoke in history class: In the late 1500s a settlement of English colonists landed on Roanoke Island, between the mainland of North Carolina and the Outer Banks. After some mostly harmonious contact between the settlers and the local Native Americans, relations deteriorated. With winter approaching and the colonists running short on food and other provisions Governor John White, who'd founded the colony, sailed back to England for relief. But by the time he returned to Roanoke the colonists--more than a hundred men, women and children--had disappeared.

The only clue as to what had happened was the word "Croatoan" carved in tree bark near the settlement. This was the Indian name for Hatteras, about fifty miles south of Roanoke. Most historians believed the colonists died at sea en route to Hatteras or were killed when they arrived, though there was no record of them ever landing there.

Mary Beth had visited Roanoke Island several times and had seen the reenactment of the tragedy performed at a small theater there. She was moved--and chilled--by the play. But she never thought much about the story until she was older and studying at the University of North Carolina in Avery, where she read about the Lost Colony in depth. One aspect of the story that raised unanswered questions about the fate of the colonists involved a girl named Virginia Dare and the legend of the White Doe.