The Empty Chair

about this?”
    “Take a shower,” she responded.
    Culbeau laughed.
    Sachs added, “We don’t have time to waste on them.”
    The deputy nodded to the men. “This is a crime scene. You boys’re out your reward.” She nodded at the rifles. “You want to hunt, do it elsewhere.”
    “Oh, like anything’s in season,” O’Sarian asked sarcastically, dishing on Lucy for the stupidity of her comment. “I mean, hell- ohhh. ”
    “Then head back to town—’fore you bollix up your lives any more’n you already have.”
    The men picked up their guns. Culbeau lowered his head to O’Sarian’s ear and spoke quiet, angry words to him. O’Sarian gave a shrug and grinned. For a moment Sachs thought Culbeau was going to hit him. But then the tall man calmed and turned back to Lucy. “You find Mary Beth?”
    “Not yet. But we got Garrett and he’ll tell us.”
    Culbeau said, “Wish we got the reward but I’m glad he’s caught. That boy’s trouble.”
    When they were gone Sachs asked, “You find anything else in the mill?”
    “No. Thought I’d come down here to help you look for a boat.”
    As they continued down the path Sachs said, “One thing I forgot about. We ought to send somebody back to that trap—the hornets’ nest. Kill ’em and fill in the hole.”
    “Oh, Jim sent Trey Williams, one of our deputies, over there with a can of wasp spray and a shovel. But there weren’t any wasps. It was an old nest.”
    “Empty?”
    “Right.”
    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 couldsee 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 silently 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,