Jeffery Deaver - The Empty Chair

When a bat shoots out a beam of sound to find them, moths fold their wings and drop to the ground and hide.

She was smiling at his enthusiastic lecture when she stopped suddenly and crouched. "Look out," she whispered. "There! There's a light."

Faint illumination reflecting off a murky pond. An eerie yellow light like a failing lantern. But Garrett was laughing. She looked at him quizzically. He said, "Just a ghost."

"What?" she asked.

"It's the Lady of the Swamp. Like, this Indian maiden who died the night before her wedding. Her ghost still paddles through the Dismal Swamp looking for the guy she was going to marry. We're not in the Great Dismal but it's near here." He nodded toward the glow. "What it is really is just fox fire – this gross fungus that glows."

She didn't like the light. It reminded her of the uneasiness she felt as they drove into Tanner's Corner that morning, seeing the small coffin at the funeral.

"I don't like the swamp, with or without ghosts," Sachs said.

"Yeah?" Garrett said. "Maybe you'll get to like it. Someday."

He led her along a road and after ten minutes he turned down a short, overgrown driveway. There was an old trailer sitting in a clearing. In the gloom she couldn't see clearly but it seemed to be a ramshackle place, leaning to the side, rusted, tires flat and overgrown with ivy and moss.

"This is yours?"

"Well, nobody's lived here for years so I guess it's mine. I have a key but it's at home. I didn't have a chance to get it." He went around to the side and managed to open a window, boosted himself up and through it. A moment later the door opened.

She walked inside. Garrett was rummaging through a cabinet in the tiny kitchen. He found some matches and lit a propane lantern. It gave off a warm, yellow glow. He opened another cabinet, peered inside.

"I had some Doritos but the mice got 'em." He pulled out some Tupperware and examined it. "Chewed right through. Shit. But I've got Farmer John macaroni. It's good. I eat it all the time. And some beans too." He started opening cans as Sachs looked around the trailer.

A few chairs, a table. In the bedroom she could see a dingy mattress. There was a thick mat and a pillow on the living room floor. The trailer itself radiated poverty: broken doors and fixtures, bullet holes in the walls, windows broken, carpet stained beyond cleaning. In her days as a patrol officer for the NYPD she'd seen many sad places like this – but always from the outside; now this was her temporary home.

Thinking of Lucy's words from that morning.

Normal rules don't apply to anybody north of the Paquo. Us or them. You can see yourself shooting before you read anybody their rights and that'd be perfectly all right.

Remembering the stunning blasts of the shotgun, intended for her and Garrett.

The boy hung pieces of greasy cloth over the windows to keep anyone from seeing the light inside. He stepped outside for a moment then came back with a rusty cup, filled, presumably, with rainwater. He held it out to her. She shook her head. "Feel like I drank half the Paquenoke."

"This's better."

"I'm sure it is. I'll still pass."

He drank the contents of the cup and then stirred the food as it heated on the small propane stove. In a soft voice he sang an eerie tune over and over, " Farmer John, Farmer John. Enjoy it fresh from Farmer John.. ." It was nothing more than an advertising jingle but the chant was unsettling and she was glad when he stopped. Sachs was going to pass on the food but she realized suddenly that she was famished. Garrett poured the contents into two bowls and handed her a spoon. She spit on the utensil and wiped it on her shirt. They ate for a few minutes in silence.

Sachs noticed a sound outside, a raucous, high-pitched noise. "What's that?" she asked. "Cicadas?"

"Yeah," he said. "It's just the males make that noise. Only the males. Make all that noise just from these little plates on their body." He squinted, reflected for a moment. "They live this totally weird life… The nymphs dig into the ground and stay there for, like, twenty years before they hatch. Then they come out and climb a tree. Their skin splits down the back and the adult crawls out. All those years in the ground, just hiding, before they come out and become adults."

"Why do you like insects so much, Garrett?" Sachs asked.

He hesitated. "I don't know. I just do."

"Haven't you ever wondered about it?"

He stopped eating. Scratched one of his poison oak welts. "I guess I got interested in them after my parents died. After that happened I was pretty unhappy. I felt funny in my head a lot. Confused and, I don't know, just different. The counselors at school just said it was because Mom and Dad and my sister died and they, like, told me I should work harder to get over it. But I couldn't. I just felt like I wasn't a real person. I didn't care about anything. All I did was lie in bed or go into the swamp or the woods and read. For a year that's all I did. Like, I hardly saw anybody. Just moved from foster home to foster home… But then I read something neat. In that book there."

Flipping open The Miniature World , he found a page. He showed it to her. He'd circled a passage headed Characteristics of Healthy Living Creatures. Sachs scanned it, read several of the list of eight or nine entries.

– A healthy creature strives to grow and develop.

– A healthy creature strives to survive.

– A healthy creature strives to adapt to its environment.

Garrett said, "I read that and it was like, wow, I could be like that. I could be healthy and normal again. I tried totally hard to follow the rules it said. And that made me feel better. So I guess I felt close to them – insects, I mean."

A mosquito landed on her arm. She laughed. "But they also drink your blood." She slapped it. "Got him."

" Her ," Garrett corrected. "It's just the females drink blood. The males drink nectar."

"Really?"

He nodded then grew quiet for a moment. Looked at the dot of blood on her arm. "Insects never go away."

"What do you mean?"

He found another passage in the book and read aloud, "'If any creature could be called immortal it is the insect, which inhabited the earth millions of years before the advent of mammals and which will be here on earth long after intelligent life has vanished.'" Garrett put the book down and looked up at her. "See, the thing is, if you kill one there're always more. If my mom and dad and sister were insects and they died there'd be others just like them and I wouldn't be alone."

"Don't you have any friends?"

Garrett shrugged. "Mary Beth. She's sort of the only one."

"You really like her, don't you?"

"Totally. She saved me from this kid who was going to do something shitty to me. And, I mean, she talks to me…" He thought for a moment. "I guess that's what I like about her. Talking. I was thinking, like, maybe in a few years, when I'm older, she might wanta go out with me. We could do things like other people do. You know, go to movies. Or go on picnics. I was watching her on a picnic once. She was with her mother and some friends. They were having fun. I watched for, like, hours. I just sat under a holly bush with some water and Doritos and pretended I was with them. You ever go on a picnic?"

"I have, sure."

"I went with my family a lot. I mean, my real family. I liked it. Mom and Kaye'd set the table and cook stuff on this little grill from Kmart. Dad and me'd take our shoes and socks off and stand in the water to fish. I remember what the mud felt like and the cold water."

Sachs wondered if that was why he liked water and water insects so much. "And you thought you and Mary Beth would go on picnics?"