The Empty Chair

move fast. I don’t think Lydia has much time left.”

    She was hiding in a dark, filthy bin that had been used to store grain long ago.
    Hands behind her, still dizzy from the heat and dehydration, Lydia Johansson had stumbled down the bright corridor away from where Garrett lay writhing and had found this hiding space on the floor below the grinding room. When she slipped inside and closed the door a dozen mice had skittered over her feet and it took every ounce of willpower within her to keep from screaming.
    Now listening for Garrett’s footsteps over the low-gear sound of the grinding wheel nearby.
    Panic was filling her and she was starting to regret her defiant escape. But there was no going back, she decided. She’d hurt Garrett and now he was going to hurt her back if he found her. Maybe do worse. There was nothing to do but try to escape.
    No, she decided, that wasn’t the right way to think. One of her angel books said there was no such thing as “trying to.” You either did or you didn’t. She wasn’t going to try to get away. She was going to escape. She just had to have faith.
    Lydia looked through a crack in the bin door, listened carefully. She heard him in one of the rooms nearby, muttering to himself and ripping open bins and closet doors. She’d hoped that he’d think she’d run outside through the collapsed wall in the burnt-out corridor but it was obvious from his methodical search that he knew she was still here. She couldn’t stay in the storage closet any longer. He’d find her. She glanced out through a crack in the door and, not seeing him, she slipped out of the bin and ran into an adjoining room, moving silently on her white sneakers. The only exit from this room was a stairway leading up to the second floor. She staggered up it, gasping for breath and, not having her hands for balance, bounding off the walls and the wrought-iron railing.
    She heard his voice echoing in the corridor. “You made him bite me!” he cried. “It hurts, it hurts.”
    Wish it had stung you in the eye or crotch, she thought and struggled up the stairs. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!
    She heard him ripping open closet doors in the room below. Heard his guttural moaning. Imagined she could hear the snick, snick of his nails.
    That shiver of panic again. Nausea swelling.
    The room at the top of the stairs was large and had a number of windows facing the burnt portion of the mill. There was one door, which was unlocked, and she pushed it open, stepped into the grinding area itself—two large millstones sat in the center. The wooden mechanismwas rotted; the sound she’d heard wasn’t the stones but the waterwheel, powered by the diverted stream. It still turned slowly. Rust-colored water cascaded off it into a deep, narrow pit, like a well. Lydia couldn’t see the bottom. The water must’ve drained back into the stream somewhere below the surface.
    “Stop!” Garrett cried.
    She jumped in shock at the angry sound. He stood in the doorway. His eyes were red and wide and he was cradling his arm, on which was a huge black-and-yellow bruise. “You made it sting me,” he muttered, staring at her with hatred. “It’s dead. You made me kill it! I didn’t want to but you made me! Now get your ass downstairs. I’ve gotta tape your legs up now.”
    He started forward.
    She looked at his bony face, brows knit together, his huge hands, his angry eyes. Into her thoughts came a burst of images: a cancer patient of hers, slowly wasting to death. Mary Beth McConnell locked away somewhere. The boy madly chewing his chips. The scuttling millipede. The fingernails snapping. The Outside. Her long nights alone, waiting—desperately—for a brief phone call from her boyfriend. Taking the flowers to Blackwater Landing, even though she didn’t really want to . . .
    It was all too much for her.
    “Wait,” Lydia said placidly.
    He blinked. Stopped walking.
    She smiled at him—the way she’d smile at a terminal patient—and, sending a good-bye prayer to her boyfriend, Lydia, hands still bound behind her, plunged headfirst into the narrow pit of dark water.

    The crosshairs of the Hitech telescopic sight rested on the redheaded cop’s shoulders.
    That was some hair, Mason Germain thought.
    He and Nathan Groomer were on a rise overlooking the old Anderson Rock Products quarry. About a hundred yards away from the search party.
    Nathan finally stated the conclusion he must’ve come to a half hour ago. “This