The Empty Chair (22 page)

Like all North Carolinians – and most schoolchildren in America – Mary Beth McConnell had studied the Lost Colony of Roanoke in history class: In the late 1500s a settlement of English colonists landed on Roanoke Island, between the mainland of North Carolina and the Outer Banks. After some mostly harmonious contact between the settlers and the local Native Americans, relations deteriorated. With winter approaching and the colonists running short on food and other provisions Governor John White, who'd founded the colony, sailed back to England for relief. But by the time he returned to Roanoke the colonists – more than a hundred men, women and children – had disappeared.

The only clue as to what had happened was the word "Croatoan" carved in tree bark near the settlement. This was the Indian name for Hatteras, about fifty miles south of Roanoke. Most historians believed the colonists died at sea en route to Hatteras or were killed when they arrived, though there was no record of them ever landing there.

Mary Beth had visited Roanoke Island several times and had seen the reenactment of the tragedy performed at a small theater there. She was moved – and chilled – by the play. But she never thought much about the story until she was older and studying at the University of North Carolina in Avery, where she read about the Lost Colony in depth. One aspect of the story that raised unanswered questions about the fate of the colonists involved a girl named Virginia Dare and the legend of the White Doe.

It was a story that Mary Beth McConnell – an only child, a bit of a renegade, single-minded – could understand. Virginia Dare was the first English child born in America. She was Governor White's granddaughter and was one of the Lost Colonists. Presumably, the history books reported, she died with them at, or on the way to, Hatteras. But as Mary Beth continued her research she learned that not long after the disappearance of the colonists, when more British began to settle on the Eastern Seaboard, local legends about the Lost Colony began to spring up.

One tale was that the colonists weren't killed right away but survived and continued to live among the local tribes. Virginia Dare grew into a beautiful young woman – blond and fair-skinned, strong-willed and independent. A medicine man fell in love with her but she rejected him and not long after that she disappeared. The medicine man claimed he hadn't harmed her but, because she rejected his love, he'd turned her into a white deer.

No one believed him, of course, but soon people in the area began seeing a beautiful white doe who seemed to be the leader of all the animals in the woods. The tribe, frightened by the doe's apparent powers, held a contest to capture her.

One young brave managed to track her down and made a nearly impossible shot with a silver-tipped arrow. It pierced her chest and as she lay dying the doe looked up at the hunter with chillingly human eyes.

He stammered, "Who are you?"

"Virginia Dare," the deer whispered and died.

Mary Beth had decided to look into the story of the White Doe in earnest. Spending long days and nights in academic archives at UNC at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, reading old diaries and journals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she found a number of references to "white deer" and mysterious "white beasts" in northeastern North Carolina. But the sightings weren't on either Roanoke or Hatteras. The creatures were seen along the "Blackwater banks where the Serpentine river flowes west from the Great Swamp."

Mary Beth knew the power of legend and how there is often truth in even the most fanciful tales. She reasoned that maybe the Lost Colonists, afraid of attack by the local tribes, had left the word "Croatoan" to lead off their attackers and escaped not south but west, where they settled along the banks of the, yes,
serpentine
Paquenoke River – near Tanner's Corner in what was now called Blackwater Landing. There the Lost Colonists grew more and more powerful and the Indians – fearful of the threat – attacked and killed them. Virginia Dare, Mary Beth allowed herself to speculate, interpreting the legend of the White Doe, might have been one of the last settlers alive, fighting to the death.

Well, this was her theory but Mary Beth had never found any proof to support it. She'd spent days prowling around Blackwater Landing with ancient maps, trying to figure out exactly where the colonists might've landed and where their settlement had been. Then finally last week, walking along the banks of the Paquo, she found evidence of the Lost Colony.

She remembered her mother's horror when the girl had told her that she was going to be doing some archaeological work at Blackwater Landing.

"Not
there
," the doughy woman had said bitterly, as if she herself were in danger. "That's where the Insect Boy kills people. He'll find you, he'll hurt you."

"Mother," she'd snapped back, "you're like those assholes at school who tease him."

"You said that word again. I asked you not to. The 'A' word."

"Mom, come on – you sound like a hard-shell Baptist sitting on the anxious bench." Meaning the front row in church, where sat those parishioners particularly worried about their own, or – more likely – someone else's, moral standing.

"Even the name is scary," Sue McConnell muttered. "Blackwater."

And Mary Beth explained that there were dozens of Blackwaters in North Carolina. Any river that flowed from marshlands was referred to as a blackwater river because it was darkened by deposits of decaying vegetation. The Paquenoke was fed by the Great Dismal Swamp and surrounding bogs.

But this information didn't relieve her mother one bit.

"Please, don't go, honey." Then the woman fired her own silver-tipped arrow of guilt: "Now that your father's gone, if anything happened to you I wouldn't have anyone . . . I'd be alone. I wouldn't know what to do. You don't want that, do you?"

But Mary Beth, fired by the adrenaline that had excited explorers and scientists forever, had packed up her brushes and collection jars and bags and gardener's spade and headed off yesterday morning in the wet, yellow heat to continue her archaeological work.

And what had happened? She'd been assaulted and kidnapped by the Insect Boy. Her mother had been right.

Now, sitting in this hot, disgusting cabin, in 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 Mary Beth – 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 on 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.

17

"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' 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 of the 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 argument with him, the man's tempered-steel gaze. The image of the businessman prodded him to return to the hospital, to finish the tests and to go under the knife. He glanced at Ben and was about to instruct him on how to pack up the forensic equipment when Sachs took up Bell's cause. "We found some evidence at the mill, Rhyme. Lucy did, actually. Good evidence."

Rhyme said sourly, "If it's
good
evidence then somebody else'll be able to figure out where it leads to."

"Look, Lincoln," Bell began in his reasonable Carolinian accent, "I'm not going to push it but you're the only one 'round here's got experience at major crimes like this. We'd be at sea trying to figure out what
that's
telling us, for instance." He nodded at the chromatograph. "Or whether this bit of dirt or that footprint means anything."

Head rubbing against the Storm Arrow's pillowy rest, Rhyme glanced at Sachs' imploring face. Sighing, he finally asked, "Garrett's not saying
anything?
"

"He's talking," Farr said, tugging at one of his flag-like ears. "But he's denying killing Billy and he's saying he got Mary Beth away from Blackwater Landing for her own good. That's it. Won't say a word about where she is."

Sachs said, "In this heat, Rhyme, she could die of thirst."

"Or starve to death," Farr pointed out.

Oh, for God's sake . . .

"Thom," Rhyme snapped, "call Dr. Weaver. Tell her I'll be here for a little longer. Emphasize 'little.'"

"That's all we're asking, Lincoln," Bell said, relief in his lined face. "An hour or two. We sure appreciate it – we'll make you an honorary resident of Tanner's Corner," the sheriff joked. "We'll give you the key to the town."

All the faster to unlock the door and get the hell out of here
, Rhyme thought cynically. He asked Bell, "Where's Lydia?"

"In the hospital."

"She all right?"

"Nothing serious. They're keeping her in for observation for a day."

"What'd she say –
exactly?
" Rhyme demanded.

Sachs said, "That Garrett told her he's got Mary Beth east of here, near the ocean. On the Outer Banks. He also said that he didn't really kidnap her. She went along willingly. He was just looking out for her and she was happy to be where she was. She also told me that we caught Garrett completely off guard. He never thought we'd get to the mill so fast. When he smelled the ammonia he panicked, changed his clothes, gagged her and ran out the door."

"Okay . . . Ben, we've got some things to look at."

The zoologist nodded, pulled on his latex gloves once more – without Rhyme's having to instruct him to do so, the criminalist observed.

Rhyme asked about the food and water found at the mill. Ben held them up. The criminalist observed, "No individual store labels. Like the others. Won't do us any good. See if there's anything adhering to the sticky sides of the duct tape."

Sachs and Ben bent over the roll and spent ten minutes examining it with a hand glass. She pulled fragments of wood from the side and Ben once again held the instrument so Rhyme could peer into the eyepieces. But under the microscope it was clear that they matched the wood in the mill. "Nothing," she said.

Ben then picked up the map that showed Paquenoke County. It was marked with Xs and arrows, indicating Garrett's path to the mill from Blackwater Landing. There was no price sticker on this either. And it gave no indication of where the boy had been headed once he'd left the mill.