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through everything I knew about Amber’s death. And the more I thought, the less sense it made.
    When the mountain flattened out and we reached the wide city streets, I decided it was safe to talk. “How much do you know about Amber’s nut allergy?” I asked.
    He allowed two cars to merge between us and his father’s vehicle but kept his eyes trained on the Mercedes, while he answered. “Enough to know she was deathly allergic. She was worried enough that she had her doctor come to the house and show me and my dad how to use the Epi-pen. Why?”
    “If she’d eaten gravy—or anything—with nuts in it during the party, wouldn’t she have had an immediate reaction? The police said it was around one in the morning when she went into anaphylaxis. The party ended before midnight.”
    “I think she would have had trouble breathing immediately, yeah. Maybe she got herself a midnight snack after everyone left?”
    I shook my head. “Come on, you know Amber didn’t snack . And, even if she had gone looking for something to eat, I took all the leftovers. So she couldn’t have eaten food from the party.”
    “You took them?” His tone of voice held the barest hint of employer/employee admonishment.
    “I donated them to a homeless shelter. Amber knew that’s what I did with all the leftovers when she entertained.”
    “Oh. Good idea.”
    He slowed the car as, up ahead, his father braked for a red light. I was itching to call Detective Drummond and tell him to ask the forensic investigators or the coroner—somebody—about whether there was such a thing as a delayed allergic reaction. Maybe they’d stop trying to pin the murder on me. I also made a mental note to tell him to find out if Loving Hands had any of the gravy left. I doubted they would; Deb made it a point to use every scrap of food that came her way. But if she hadn’t, they could test the gravy and see that it didn’t contain nuts. My heart started to pound with excitement, and I was pulling out my phone to call and ask her myself, when Felix slammed on the breaks and I pitched forward.
    “Hey!” I protested.
    “Sorry.” He jerked the wheel to the right, and we zipped down a side street.
    “What are you doing? Your dad didn’t turn off.” I dropped the phone back into my bag and turned to glare at him.
    “Settle down. I know where he’s going. We’re going to take a shortcut so we can get in position and watch him when he arrives,” he told me in a self-satisfied voice.
    “Oh. So, tell me, Sherlock. What’s his destination?”
    “You should know. Recognize this neighborhood?”
    I stared out the passenger window. Large stucco apartment buildings, boxy and close together, flashed by. I squinted into the dark and tried to make out something that looked familiar, but I couldn’t. I’m sort of spatially challenged. As in, whenever I visit Thyme in New York, she threatens to pin an index card to my shirt with her contact information on it in case I wander off and can’t make my way back to her apartment. As in, once, when Sage was living in D.C., I left her apartment near Chinatown to meet a friend in Georgetown for lunch. Instead of taking the Metro, I drove and somehow managed to travel from Point A to Point B—located about two and a half miles apart in the city’s northwest quadrant—via both Maryland and Virginia. So, no, I didn’t have the slightest clue where we were.
    “I give up,” I said.
    He eased the car into a parking spot and killed the engine. I grabbed my purse and met him on the sidewalk. He draped an arm around my shoulder, and I shivered as a crackle of electricity made its way up my spine. I told myself the chill was due to the cool night air and not the heat from his skin. He turned me about forty-five degrees to the right and pointed down a narrow alleyway.
    “See that brick wall with the gate set into it?”
    I looked in the direction he was pointing. “Yes.”
    “Behind that gate is the garden where we ate