One Book in the Grave: A Bibliophile Mystery

against me, marveling at how complete I felt in his arms.
     
    Say what?
What was I thinking? That I wasn’t
complete
a moment ago? Ridiculous. I shoved that pathetic thought right out of my head. I was a complete person, damn it.
     
    “I can feel your mind working even when you’re silent,” he murmured, chuckling.
     
    “I can’t seem to shut it down once I get going.”
     
    He leaned back and made eye contact with me. “You’re right; I was angry. It was a knee-jerk reaction and I’m sorry.”
     
    “It’s okay.” I gave him a quick, hard hug; then I stepped away and took a sip of my drink.
     
    “No, it’s not.” He drank his beer, staring out the wide picture window at the front of the bar. “But I promise I wasn’t angry at you.”
     
    As Bob Seger’s whiskey-smooth voice wafted out from the jukebox, singing about secrets shared and mountains moved, Derek turned and looked at me for a long moment. “You know I’m in love with you. And I think you’re the smartest, most courageous person I know. So, yes, I’m angry at the thought that you might become some idiot’s target again.”
     
    My eyes stung with tears at his words. “I’m…I’m angry, too, Derek.”
     
    “I know.” He trailed his fingers along my forehead, smoothed my hair back. “Darling, I work in dangerous situations all the time. I’m used to it. I know how to protect myself. But you…the thought of you…” He shook his head, exhaled heavily. “The thought that you could be hurt and I would be powerless to stop it? That scares me to death.”
     
    I slipped my arms around his waist and held him. The bar was beginning to fill with the noontime lunch crowd, but I didn’t care. If people didn’t like public displays of affection, they would have to get over it.
     
    I pulled away finally and we both sipped our drinks in silence. After a minute, I faced him. “I need to rephrase what I said earlier. The
book
is the catalyst, not me. The book started everything. I’m just incidental.”
     
    “You could never be incidental, darling,” he said, holding back a smile.
     
    “Oh, stop it,” I said, smacking his arm, then rubbing the spot I’d hit.
     
    “All right. I think you’re spot-on about the book being the catalyst.” He nodded as though it had already occurred to him, which it probably had. “Unfortunately, whatever the killer had in mind, I believe we’ve played right into his hands.”
     
    My throat went dry and I glanced around the bar. “Do you think we were followed here?”
     
    “No,” he said firmly. “I was careful to watch the cars all the way over here.”
     
    “That was smart of you.”
     
    “Occupational hazard,” he said, and drained the last of his beer.
     
    “Must be. I never would’ve thought of it.” I tapped my fingers on the edge of the bar. “I’m more convinced than ever that Max had nothing to do with any of it.”
     
    “You know him better than I,” he said, “but one thing is certain: someone wants him out in the open.”
     
    “I hope we’re doing the right thing,” I said, then looked around for Gabriel. Right or wrong, we needed to get going.
     
    As if he’d been watching for the right moment to return, Gabriel walked up just then. He plunked a ten-dollar bill on the bar and said, “Let’s go find this guy.”
     
    We followed Sir Francis Drake Boulevard for almost fifteen miles. It was hardly a boulevard.
More like a two-lane country road,
I thought, as we wound our way up and down and around the rolling hills, through narrow, tree-shaded hollows and rich, open, green farmland, past pastures and ponds and farms so old they’d earned official state historic markers.
    We were close to the ocean and I could smell it in the briny air. We drove higher into the hills, past cypress trees surreally misshapen by years of blustery winds blowing in from the rough northern California ocean.
     
    “This is it,” Derek said, and carefully turned off onto a dirt road, then wound around another hill and climbed higher, past another two farms. Scattered across the hillside were black-and-white cows chewing grass. A wireand wood-post fence separated the pasture land from the road.
     
    “Are we there yet?” I muttered.
     
    “There’d better be someone at home when we get there,” Derek said.
     
    “And they’d better know where Max is,” Gabriel added.
     
    Finally, Derek brought the car to a stop on the narrow verge. Up the hill on our left was a