The Empty Chair

Lydia couldn’t will herself to move.
    She felt paralyzed from the fear, from the hopelessness.
    Then she thought of her favorite TV show— Touched by an Angel —and when she thought of the program she had another memory, of the last time she’d watched the show. Just as it was over and a commercial came on, the door to her town house swung open and there was her boyfriend with a six-pack. He hardly ever dropped by for surprise visits and she’d been ecstatic. They’d spent a glorious two hours together. She decided that her angel had given her this memory just now as a sign that there was hope when you least expected it.
    Clutching this thought firmly in her mind, Lydia rolled awkwardly to her feet and started through the sedge and swamp grass. From nearby she heard a guttural sound. A faint growling. She knew there were bobcats here, north of the river. Bears too and wild boars. But even though she was limping painfully, Lydia moved as confidently toward the path as if she were making the rounds at work, dispensing pills and gossip and cheering up the patients under her care.

    Jesse Corn found a bag.
    “Here! Look here. I’ve got something. A crocus sack.”
    Sachs started down a rocky incline along the edge of the quarry to where the deputy stood, pointing at something on a ledge of limestone that had been blasted flat. She could see the grooves from where the drills had tapped into the dull stone to pack with dynamite. No wonder Rhyme had found so much nitrate; this place was one big demolition field.
    She walked up to Jesse. He was standing in front of an old cloth bag. “Rhyme, can you hear me?” Sachs called into her phone.
    “Go ahead. There’s a lot of static but I can just hear you.”
    “We’ve got a bag here,” she told him. Then asked Jesse, “What’d you call it?”
    “Crocus sack. What they call a burlap bag down here.”
    She said to Rhyme, “It’s an old burlap bag. Looks like there’s something in it.”
    Rhyme asked, “Garrett leave it?”
    She looked at the ground. Where the stone floor met the walls. “It’s definitely Garrett’s and Lydia’s footprints. They lead up an incline to the rim of the quarry.”
    “Let’s get after them,” Jesse said.
    “Not yet,” Sachs said. “We need to examine the bag.”
    “Describe it,” the criminalist ordered.
    “Burlap. Old. About twenty-four by thirty-six inches. Not much inside. It’s closed up. Not tied, just twisted.”
    “Open it carefully, remember the traps.”
    Sachs eased a corner of the bag down, peered inside.
    “It’s clear, Rhyme.”
    Lucy and Ned came down the path and all four of them stood around the bag as if it were the body of a drowned man pulled from the quarry.
    “What’s in it?”
    Sachs pulled on her latex gloves, which were very soft because of the sun. Immediately her hands began to sweat and tingle from the heat.
    “Empty water bottles. Deer Park. No store price or inventory stickers on them. Wrappers from two packages of Planters peanut butter and cheese crackers. No store stickers on them either. You want UPC codes to trace the shipments?”
    “If we had a week, maybe,” Rhyme muttered. “No, don’t bother. More details on the bag,” he ordered.
    “There’s a little printing on it. But it’s too faded to read. Anybody make it out?” she asked the others.
    No one could read the lettering.
    “Any idea what was inside originally?” Rhyme asked.
    She picked up the bag and smelled it. “Musty. Been inside someplace for a long time. Can’t tell what was in it.” Sachs turned the bag inside out and hit it hard with the flat of her hand. A few old, shriveled corn kernels fell onto the ground.
    “Corn, Rhyme.”
    “My namesake.” Jesse laughed.
    Rhyme asked, “Farms around here?”
    Sachs relayed the question to the search party.
    “Dairy, not corn,” Lucy said, looking at Ned and Jesse, who nodded.
    Jesse said, “But you’d feed corn to cows.”
    “Sure,” Ned said. “I’d guess it came from a feed-and-grain store someplace. Or a warehouse.”
    “You hear that, Rhyme?”
    “Feed and grain. Right. I’ll get Ben and Jim Bell on that. Anything else, Sachs?”
    She looked at her hands. They were blackened. She turned the bag over. “Looks like there’s scorch on the bag, Rhyme. It wasn’t burned itself but it was sitting in something that had.”
    “Any idea what?”
    “Bits of charcoal, looks like. So I’d guess wood.”
    “Okay,” he said. “It’s going on the