The Empty Chair

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 MaryBeth—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.
    He was real!
    Mary Beth grabbed one of Garrett’s jars, which held a dinosaur-like beetle, and slammed it against the window. The jar crashed through the glass and shattered on the iron bars outside.
    “Help me!” she screamed in a voice barely audible because of her sand-dry throat. “Help!”
    A hundred yards away the man paused. Looked around.
    “Please! Help me!” A long wail.
    He looked behind him. Then into the woods.
    She took a deep breath and tried to call again but her throat seized. She started choking, spit some blood.
    And across the field the Missionary kept on walking into the woods. He disappeared from view a moment later.
    Mary Beth sat heavily in the musty couch and leaned her head hopelessly against the wall. She glanced up suddenly; some motion had caught her eye again. It was nearby—in the cabin. The beetle in the jar—the miniature triceratops—had survived the trauma of losing his home. Mary Beth watched him troop doggedly up a summit of broken glass, open one set of wings, then spread a second set, which fluttered invisibly and lifted him off the windowsill to freedom.

. . . chapter seventeen
    “We’ve caught him,” Rhyme said to Jim Bell and his brother-in-law, Deputy Steve Farr. “Amelia and me. That was the bargain. Now we have to get back to Avery.”
    “Well, Lincoln,” Bell began delicately, “it’s just that Garrett’s not talking. He’s not telling us anything about where Mary Beth is.”
    Ben Kerr stood nearby uncertainly, beside the glowing mountain range on the computer screen connected to the chromatograph. His initial hesitancy had vanished and he now seemed to regret the end of his assignment. Amelia Sachs was in the lab too. Mason Germain wasn’t, which was just as well—Rhyme was furious that he’d endangered Sachs’s life with the sniping at the mill. Bell had angrily ordered the deputy to stay out of the case for the time being.
    “I appreciate that,” Rhyme said dismissively, responding to Bell’s implicit request for more help. “But it’s not that she’s in immediate danger.” Lydia had reported that Mary Beth was alive and had told them the general location where she was being held. A concentrated search ofthe Outer Banks would probably find her within several days. And Rhyme was now ready for the operation. He clung, of all things, to a bizarre good-luck charm—the memory of Henry Davett’s gruff