The Empty Chair (Lincoln Rhyme 3)

It was a story that Mary Beth McConnell--an only child, a bit of a renegade, single-minded--could understand. Virginia Dare was the first English child born in America. She was Governor White's granddaughter and was one of the Lost Colonists. Presumably, the history books reported, she died with them at, or on the way to, Hatteras. But as Mary Beth continued her research she learned that not long after the disappearance of the colonists, when more British began to settle on the Eastern Seaboard, local legends about the Lost Colony began to spring up.

One tale was that the colonists weren't killed right away but survived and continued to live among the local tribes. Virginia Dare grew into a beautiful young woman--blond and fair-skinned, strong-willed and independent. A medicine man fell in love with her but she rejected him and not long after that she disappeared. The medicine man claimed he hadn't harmed her but, because she rejected his love, he'd turned her into a white deer.

No one believed him, of course, but soon people in the area began seeing a beautiful white doe who seemed to be the leader of all the animals in the woods. The tribe, frightened by the doe's apparent powers, held a contest to capture her.

One young brave managed to track her down and made a nearly impossible shot with a silver-tipped arrow. It pierced her chest and as she lay dying the doe looked up at the hunter with chillingly human eyes.

He stammered, "Who are you?"

"Virginia Dare," the deer whispered and died.

Mary Beth had decided to look into the story of the White Doe in earnest. Spending long days and nights in academic archives at UNC at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, reading old diaries and journals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she found a number of references to "white deer" and mysterious "white beasts" in northeastern North Carolina. But the sightings weren't on either Roanoke or Hatteras. The creatures were seen along the "Blackwater banks where the Serpentine river flowes west from the Great Swamp."

Mary Beth knew the power of legend and how there is often truth in even the most fanciful tales. She reasoned that maybe the Lost Colonists, afraid of attack by the local tribes, had left the word "Croatoan" to lead off their attackers and escaped not south but west, where they settled along the banks of the, yes, serpentine Paquenoke River--near Tanner's Corner in what was now called Blackwater Landing. There the Lost Colonists grew more and more powerful and the Indians--fearful of the threat--attacked and killed them. Virginia Dare, Mary Beth allowed herself to speculate, interpreting the legend of the White Doe, might have been one of the last settlers alive, fighting to the death.

Well, this was her theory but Mary Beth had never found any proof to support it. She'd spent days prowling around Blackwater Landing with ancient maps, trying to figure out exactly where the colonists might've landed and where their settlement had been. Then finally last week, walking along the banks of the Paquo, she found evidence of the Lost Colony.

She remembered her mother's horror when the girl had told her that she was going to be doing some archaeological work at Blackwater Landing.

"Not there" the doughy woman had said bitterly, as if she herself were in danger. "That's where the Insect Boy kills people. He'll find you, he'll hurt you."

"Mother," she'd snapped back, "you're like those assholes at school who tease him."

"You said that word again. I asked you not to. The 'A' word."

"Mom, come on--you sound like a hard-shell Baptist sitting on the anxious bench." Meaning the front row in church, where sat those parishioners particularly worried about their own, or--more likely--someone else's, moral standing.

"Even the name is scary," Sue McConnell muttered. "Blackwater."

And Mary Beth explained that there were dozens of Blackwaters in North Carolina. Any river that flowed from marshlands was referred to as a blackwater river because it was darkened by deposits of decaying vegetation. The Paquenoke was fed by the Great Dismal Swamp and surrounding bogs.

But this information didn't relieve her mother one bit. "Please, don't go, honey." Then the woman fired her own silver-tipped arrow of guilt: "Now that your father's gone, if anything happened to you I wouldn't have anyone.... I'd be alone. I wouldn't know what to do. You don't want that, do you?"

But Mary Beth, fired by the adrenaline that had excited explorers and scientists forever, had packed up her brushes and collection jars and bags and gardener's spade and headed off yesterday morning in the wet, yellow heat to continue her archaeological work.

And what had happened? She'd been assaulted and kidnapped by the Insect Boy. Her mother had been right.

Now, sitting in this hot, disgusting cabin, in pain, sick and half delirious with thirst, she thought about her mother. Having lost her husband to wasting cancer, the woman's life was falling apart. She'd given up her friends, her volunteer work at the hospital, any semblance of routine and normalcy in her life. Mary Beth found herself assuming the role of parent, while her mother slipped into the world of daytime TV and junk food. Pudgy and insensate and needy, she was nothing more than a pathetic child.

But one of the things her father had taught Mary Beth--by his life as well as by his arduous death--was that you do what you're destined for and don't alter your course for anyone. Mary Beth hadn't dropped out of school as her mother had begged and gotten a job close to home. She balanced her mother's need for support with her own--the need to get her grad degree and, when she graduated next year, to find a job doing serious fieldwork in American anthropology. If that happened to be nearby, fine. But if it was conducting Native American digs in Santa Fe, or Eskimo in Alaska,

or African American in Manhattan, then that was where she'd go. She'd always be there for her mother but she had her own life to look forward to.

Except that now when she should be unearthing and collecting more evidence at Blackwater Landing, conferring with her grad adviser and writing proposals, running tests on the relics she'd found, she was trapped in a psychotic teenager's love nest.

A wave of hopelessness coursed through her.

She felt the tears.

But then she stopped them cold.

Stop it! ... Be strong. Be your father's daughter, fighting his illness every single minute of the day, never resting. Not your mother's.

Be Virginia Dare, who rallied the Lost Colonists.

Be the White Doe, the queen of all the animals in the forest.

And then, just as she was thinking of an illustration of the majestic deer in a book about North Carolina legends, there was another flash of motion at the edge of the forest. The Missionary came out of the woods, a large backpack over his shoulder.