The Empty Chair

walls—a combination of hand-hewn logs and heavy boards nailed together. Outside the front window was a large field of tallgrass that ended in a line of trees a hundred yards away. The cabin itself was in another stand of thick trees. Looking out the back window—the hornets’ nest window—she could just see through the trunks to the glistening surface of the pond they’d skirted yesterday to get here.
    The rooms themselves were small but surprisingly clean. In the living room was a long brown-and-gold couch, several old chairs around a cheap dining room table, a second table on which were a dozen quart juice jars covered with mesh and filled with insects he’d collected. A second room contained a mattress and a dresser. The third room was empty, except for several half-full cans of brown paint sitting in the corner; it seemed that Garrett had painted the exterior of the cabin recently. The color was dark and depressing and she couldn’t understand why he’d picked it—until she realized it was the same shade as the bark of the trees that surrounded the cabin. Camouflage. And it occurred to her again what she’d thought yesterday—that the boy was much cagier, and more dangerous, than she’d thought.
    In the living room were stacks of food—junk food and rows of canned fruits and vegetables—Farmer John brand. From the label a stolid farmer smiled at her, the image as outdated as the 1950s Betty Crocker. She searched the cabin desperately for water or soda—anything to drink—but couldn’t find a thing. The canned fruits and vegetables would be packed in juice but there was no opener or any sort of tool or utensil to open them. She had her backpack with her but had left her archaeological tools at Blackwater Landing. She tried banging a can on the side of the table to split it open but the metal didn’t give.
    Downstairs was a root cellar that you reached via a door in the floor of the shack’s main room. She glanced at it once and shivered with disgust, felt her skin crawl. Last night—after Garrett had been gone for some time—Mary Beth had worked up her courage and walked down therickety stairs into the low-ceilinged basement, looking for a way out of the horrible cabin. But there’d been no exit—just dozens of old boxes and jars and bags.
    She hadn’t heard Garrett return and suddenly, in a rush, he’d charged down the stairs toward her. She’d screamed and tried to flee but the next thing she remembered was lying on the dirt floor, blood spattered on her chest and clotted in her hair, and Garrett, smelling of unwashed adolescence, walking up slowly, wrapping his arms around her, his eyes fixed on her breasts. He’d lifted her and she’d felt his hard penis against her as he carried her slowly upstairs, deaf to her protests. . . .
    No! she now told herself. Don’t think about it.
    Or about the pain. Or the fear.
    And where was Garrett now?
    As frightened as she’d been with him padding around the cabin yesterday she was nearly as scared now that he’d forget about her. Or would get killed in an accident or shot by the deputies looking for her. And she’d die of thirst here. Mary Beth McConnell remembered a project she and her graduate adviser had been involved in: a North Carolina State Historical Society–sponsored disinterment of a nineteenth-century grave to run DNA tests on the body inside, to see if the corpse was that of a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, as a local legend claimed. To her horror, when the top of the coffin was lifted off, the arm bones of the cadaver were upraised and there were scratch marks on the inside of the lid. The man had been buried alive.
    This cabin would be her coffin. And no one—
    What was that? Looking out the front window, she thought she saw motion just inside the edge of the forest in the distance. Through the brush and leaves she believed it might be a man. Because his clothes and broad-brimmed hat seemed dark and there was something confident about his posture and gait she thought: He looks like a missionary in the wilderness.
    But wait. . . . Was someone really there? Or was it just the light on the trees? She couldn’t tell.
    “Here!” she cried. But the window was nailed shut and even if it had been open she doubted he could hear her scream, feeble from her dry throat, from this distance.
    She grabbed her backpack, hoping she still had the whistle that her paranoid mother had bought her for protection. Mary Beth had laughed