around her ankles. She didn’t want to forget to take the little thing home at the end of the day, but hopefully tonight no one would be shooting at her. She knelt and stroked the cat’s back. “You’re not very old. And we have to get you fattened up, but right now I have work to do,” she said and set out for the inn, leaving Suzy to her eating.
The sun felt good in the fifty-degree weather as she walked to the inn. Maybe they would have a return of warmer weather. Voices came from the back side of the cabin, and she climbed the steps and walked through the dogtrot to the back porch, where she caught sight of Trey.
Rats. She’d hoped he would not be here. Emma was tired of repeating that she only wanted to be friends. Just as she started to backpedal, he looked up.
“Emma,” he said with a nod.
“Did you find the bullet?” she asked.
“Yes. Judging from the position, even if you’d been standing on the porch, it would have missed you. Way too high.”
Trey was being extremely professional. She saw the reason why when Nate Rawlings stepped around the corner of the house with Sam and two more deputies. She recognized the older one. Martha Cooper was the first female hired by the Adams County Sheriff’s Department and had to be getting close to retirement age. Emma didn’t recognize the freckle-faced redhead holding a metal detector. “Good morning, Martha,” she said and nodded. “Sheriff.”
“Morning.” He nodded toward the deputy with red hair. “I don’t think you’ve met Chris Wilson. He’s from Vicksburg and is our unofficial photographer-slash-deputy.”
She exchanged nods with the young deputy and then turned back to the sheriff. “Have you discovered anything?”
“Nothing new, just the hole by the backhoe. Do you know why anyone would be digging around the slave cemetery?”
That had puzzled her last night. “No. Any type of excavation here at Mount Locust is strictly forbidden.”
“That’s what I thought,” Nate said. “I’d like you to take me through what happened again, this time showing me your movements.”
His request wasn’t unexpected, and Emma had been rehearsing the events in her mind. While the sheriff opened the recorder app on his smartphone, she glanced at Sam, and the memory of his arms wrapping around her last night rocked her heart. Why was she torturing herself this way? Shuttering her thoughts, Emma focused on Nate and took him through her actions, ending with jumping off the porch.
“Then I crawled to the woods there,” she said, and walked the path she’d taken. Scuffled leaves helped retrace her steps as the men followed.
“This is where I hid,” she said when they reached the live oak with limbs that dipped down to the ground. A curtain of moss swayed in the light northerly breeze.
“He wasn’t trying to be quiet,” she said, remembering the heavy footsteps. “He fired at me again, and there should be a bullet in one of these trees. Then I heard the sirens. That’s when he took off.”
“Do you think it could have been more than one person?”
She thought a minute. “There was really no way I could tell.”
The sheriff shut off the recorder and motioned to Chris, who was holding the metal detector. “Let’s see if we can find that bullet.”
He raised it, sweeping up and down the nearby tree trunks. When it went from silent to full sound midway up the trunk of a basswood tree, he stopped. “Should be here.”
After a brief search, Sam found the bullet embedded a good eighteen inches higher than Emma’s five-foot-three height.
“Either your shooter was a bad shot or he didn’t mean to hit you,” Sam said. “This is twice he fired over your head.”
“So he was just trying to scare me?” If so, he’d done a good job.
“Or scare you off.” Nate ran his hand over his short hair. “Get a trajectory on the bullet,” he said to Martha.
“Trey’s still using the laser kit,” she replied.
“Budget cuts.” The sheriff spat the words out. “Don’t see how the county expects us to do our job without the proper tools.” He turned to Sam. “Don’t suppose you have one?”
Sam shook his head. “We have the same problem. I don’t even have one trajectory kit.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Might as well see what Trey’s found. Tie a ribbon around the tree, and then see if you can find any cartridges with the metal detector.”
Martha and Chris stayed behind while Emma, Sam, and Nate trekked back to