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.