“You pissed us off,” I said, grinning. “Don’t do it again.”

“Jeez, I won’t,” he muttered, rubbing his stomach. He looked at me and jerked his chin toward Mom. “She’s got a stronger right hook than you.”

“Don’t I know it?” I said, smiling fondly at my mom.

Chapter 15

“Emily has to be kept safe,” Max said. “That’s the first priority.” The four of us—Derek, Gabriel, Max, and I—had regrouped at Jackson’s house that night. We’d driven in a roundabout route up the hill in one car, Gabriel’s BMW, and now we were seated at the dining table, eating pizza and salad, drinking wine, and plotting our next moves.

Derek hadn’t found anything criminal in Solomon’s or Angelica’s backgrounds. “Yet,” he emphasized. He had two people in his office looking through their finances. They were also looking into any questionable activities involving the Art Institute over the past few years. I hadn’t considered that connection, but Derek thought it was worth investigating because Solomon was such an important member of the faculty and the art community in general.

Once Derek finished talking, Max moved on to the subject of Emily.

“Her safety was the only reason I disappeared all those years ago,” he said. “I won’t let her be hurt again.”

“I agree with Max that we have to track her down,” I said. Unfortunately, I hadn’t heard back from Emily yet and I was more than a little concerned. Derek, my hero, had returned to Dharma an hour earlier with my battery charger. As soon as my phone began to charge, I checked my messages. There was still nothing from Emily.

There could be any number of reasons why she hadn’t returned my call. Maybe I’d called the wrong Emily. Or maybe I’d called the right one and she just didn’t want to talk to me. Or maybe she was out of town and forgot her charger like I had, or she hadn’t checked her messages yet. Or, worst-case scenario, she had been kidnapped by those two homicidal art professors and was tied up with duct tape in some closet somewhere. I preferred not to go with that possibility. Whichever way you looked at it, it couldn’t be a good sign that we hadn’t heard from Emily.

“One of us needs to track her down,” I said.

“Me,” Max said. “I’ll have to borrow a car. If I go tonight, I’ll be able to—”

“Max…” I just looked at him. “You said you didn’t want to risk her safety, but you want to be the one to go see her?”

“I can be careful,” Max argued.

I felt for him. I knew he was dying to see Emily—the problem was, we didn’t want Emily dying because she’d seen Max.

“I’ll go,” Gabriel said. “First thing in the morning.”

Max scowled. “You’ll scare her.”

“No, I won’t,” Gabriel said easily. “I’m a very charming guy. But that doesn’t matter, since she won’t even know I was there.”

“She won’t,” I assured Max. “He’s kinda scary that way.”

“And now you’re scaring me,” Max muttered, and chomped into another piece of pizza.

“I know it’s hard,” I said, reaching over to squeeze his arm. “But you need to sit tight for another day or so. Besides, you would completely freak her out if you just popped up out of nowhere. She thinks you’re dead. Remember?”

“Why should I sit tight?” he demanded. “I’m asking seriously. Why? I’m tired of hiding. Let’s push this thing wide-open.”

“Not until we know who’s running the show,” Derek said. “You want Emily safe, so we must go slowly. Until we have answers, you cannot be seen outside this house.”

“Nobody’s going to see me if I walk outside. There aren’t any neighbors for a thousand yards in any direction.” Max flopped back in his chair, clutching his wineglass. “And I can see from upstairs if any cars come up or down the hill. I think I’m pretty safe up here.”

“Maybe for a while,” I said. “But Solomon and Angelica both know me. They know my sister Savannah. They know you were friends with my brothers. So there’s a clear connection from my family to you. If they follow any of us, they’ll eventually wind up here. And God only knows what they’ll do to you when they find you.”

“Now who’s being paranoid?” Max said.

“It’s not paranoid if they’re really after you.” I laughed without humor. “I don’t want to be shot at again, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“All right, all right,” he said, waving his hands in surrender.

“Thank you.” I smiled briefly. “So Gabriel will go check on Emily tomorrow. And Mom and I made some progress with Crystal Byers and her sister today. We’ll find out tomorrow if Bennie Styles can give us some answers on ammo loading.”

“Sounds like a long shot,” Max said.

“It’s just a way of getting Bennie to talk about the people he knows in the gun community. The Ogunite church has some connections to the Art Institute. He might know someone who knows someone. You know how that works.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Max shook his head stubbornly. “I just have a hard time believing Solomon and Angie are still sitting around thinking about me. It’s been three years. Maybe they’ve moved on.”

“You know they haven’t.” I leaned forward with my elbows on the table and stared hard at Max. “Joe Taylor was killed four days ago. And yesterday someone took a shot at us. They haven’t moved on.”

He let out a slow, heavy breath. “I know. I just…Maybe I should’ve stayed at the farm and fought them on my own turf. Now that I’m here, I can’t do a damn thing. I’ve got too much time on my hands. I’m just sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

“Something will,” Derek said ominously.

“Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of.” Max pushed his wineglass back. “Okay, I’ll hang tight. But be sure to check on Emily tomorrow. I’ll feel better knowing she’s safe.”

“Got it covered,” Gabriel said.

In the morning, Derek took off for the city. We’d already decided the night before that he wouldn’t drive back to Dharma tonight and I was sort of okay with that. But he wasn’t.

“I’m coming back tonight,” he said, changing his mind as he pulled the car door open.

I leaned in close to him. “It’s not necessary.”

“As long as Max is in hiding and we don’t know who’s after him, I need to be wherever you are.”

I gazed up at him. “I won’t argue or complain if you want to come back tonight.”

“Good.” He grabbed my sweater and yanked me up against him. “I like a docile woman.”

I laughed. “Then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“Don’t I know it?” He grinned, kissed me thoroughly, then jumped into his car and drove off.

The Dharma farmers’ market was bustling by the time Mom and I arrived. After visiting Max the previous night, I’d decided to actively pursue the Crystal connection with some of the Ogunite members who loaded their own ammunition. I figured that connection would provide us with the fastest route to whoever gave Solomon those hand-loaded bullets—without having to confront the man face-to-face.

“I just hope we don’t have to buy a dehydrator to get information from them,” I whispered to Mom as we approached the Byers sisters’ booth.

“I’ve been using two old window screens to dehydrate my apples,” Mom said. “They still work like a champ after ten years.”

“Yeah, but can they make jewelry?”

“Hey, Brooklyn!” Melody chirped when she saw us.

We greeted them with hugs and congratulations on their new enterprise.

“Your booth is the prettiest one,” Mom gushed.

“I think so, too,” Crystal said, and did a little happy dance in front of us. Then she jutted her chin toward the next booth over. “But don’t say that too loudly. Mary Ellen Prescott over there thinks she’s the cat’s ass with her hair-product line.”

Mary Ellen stood surrounded by hundreds of long swatches of hair that were hanging from the crossbars of the booth. She worked as a manicurist in the Dharma hair salon, which explained her expertise with fake hair.

Mary Ellen was a shameless recruiter for the Church of the True Blood of Ogun, but they kept her on at the salon because she was a dynamite manicurist.