Chapter 25
Keely wasn’t sure how long she sat on the couch, ignoring the occasional buzzing of her phone. It might have been minutes or hours. She was lost in a labyrinth of memories, bright childhood moments with Travis all mixed in with her darkest days under Adam’s influence.
If she did pick up her phone, it would be to send an SOS to Michelle. Instead she just sat there, hugging a fuzzy blue blanket around her shoulders and staring off into space. She felt so inundated by so many overpowering emotions all canceling each other out that it came together to create a sort of overwhelming numbness, like emotional white noise.
Eventually a knock sounded on her front door. When she didn’t respond, the knock got louder. She just stared at the wooden door, her mind blank. Finally, it opened.
“There you are,” Nick said with visible relief. He closed the door behind him and shed his jean jacket, leaving it crumpled by the wall next to his shoes as he kicked them off.
“Here I am.” Her voice came out ragged.
“Are you all right?”
“Sure.”
“Did your phone die or what?”
“Or what,” she answered.
“You can’t just ignore my messages like that.”
“Why not?”
“I was worried.”
“You were worried,” she repeated flatly.
“I didn’t know if you were okay or what you might have done,” he burst out. Then he clamped his mouth shut, like he instantly regretted his outburst.
“I’m not going to relapse, Nick.” She let out a laugh that sounded completely unhinged. It wasn’t exactly going to reassure him. “Though if anything were going to push me in that direction…”
“Travis told me.” He sat down on the couch with a heavy thump. “He shouldn’t have told you.”
“Why?” She reached out and hit her brother’s arm. It was annoyingly solid. “You think that I can’t handle as much as you can? You think that I haven’t been through worse than you? You have no idea, Nick!”
“Then tell me. Talk to me.”
“Why should I?” she shouted. “You didn’t talk to me!”
“You were in recovery!”
She threw the blanket off of her shoulders with a sound of frustration and stomped into the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Nick demanded.
“To bake a pie!” she shouted back.
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously!” She took a big bowl out of the cupboard and set it onto the counter so hard that it made an abrupt, angry sound. “I have work to do!”
She watched Nick from the corner of her eye as he walked in and sat down at the kitchen table. He just sat there, watching her. She studiously ignored him as she measured out flour for a pie crust.
The silence started to grate on her nerves, and she paused her work to grab her phone and start a playlist going. Feeling spiteful, she chose a group that she knew her brother hated.
Still refusing to look at him, she started cutting butter into tiny cubes.
“We need to talk about this,” he rumbled, his voice quiet and reasonable.
She wanted to stab him with the butter knife. Instead, she dumped the butter into the bowl of flour and mixed it with a vengeance, shoving flour over the top and then squeezing the cubes to a pulp with her bare hands.
“I couldn’t just move on with my life and pretend none of that ever happened,” Nick said from his seat at the kitchen table. “I wasn’t there when it all went down, but I was here afterward. I had to make sure that he didn’t hurt anyone else. I don’t think I would have been able to live with myself otherwise.”
“It had nothing to do with you,” she growled. “Any of it.”
“You’re my little sister,” he said helplessly. “I’m supposed to protect you.”
“How was that protecting me?” she demanded.
“I figured that if I got here too late to protect you from Adam, I could at least make sure he didn’t hurt anyone else. It was my penance, I guess.”
“Penance for what, Nick? You didn’t do anything! You didn’t owe me anything. This is all on me. My bad decisions, my horrible choices. Me!”
She drove her fist into the dough, which was well and truly mixed now. She threw a damp towel over the top and put the bowl in the fridge to cool.
“I knew it was weird for you to come to Pelican Point after Adam moved here,” she muttered as she dumped the bag of apples into the sink. She began washing them and setting them onto a fresh towel to dry. “It wasn’t lost on me that he died right after you came to town, either. But you said that you had nothing to do with it, and I let it drop. I believed you, Nick. More fool me.”
“But I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he protested. “I wasn’t even there!”
“You got Travis involved!” she shouted back. “That’s what you had to do with it. You stalked Adam for weeks and roped Travis into your vigilante bullshit, and now he has to pay the price!”
Nick stared back at her, open-mouthed.
She lowered her voice to a hiss and said, “What if the cops catch up with him? What if he goes to prison for this, or worse? That’s on you, big brother.”
He looked down, and she felt a twist of remorse. He had just been trying to do what he thought was right. His heart had been in the right place; it always was.
But God, she was just so angry. She was tired of lies. Tired of being underestimated.
“There has to be a way to make this right,” she said, thinking out loud.
Nick looked up. “What do you mean?”
She took a breath, sat down at the table, and then got up again. She felt too agitated to sit still, so she went back to the kitchen counter and started peeling apples.
“We have to find a way to help Travis,” she said.
“I don’t see how.”
She shot him a glare and then looked back down at her work, thinking.
All of the people who had come and gone in her time with Adam, people that Detective Riegler was looking for. What if they could steer the investigation toward them?
“Do you still have those recordings?”
“What recordings?”
“Travis said that’s why you were there that night. You had been spying on Adam, recording his conversations.”
“I might,” he hedged.
“Cut the bullshit, Nick.” She shot him another dirty look.
“Fine! Jeez.” He took a breath. “I deleted everything off of my computer shortly after it happened, just in case, but I still have it all on an external hard drive. Travis deleted the stuff from that night, obviously, but I have the earlier stuff.”
“Good. I want to listen to them.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I’ll recognize a voice. Maybe I can go back to the detective and give him a name.” She turned to her brother, no venom in her gaze this time. “We have to do something for Travis. It’s our fault that he’s in this mess, and it’s eating him up inside.”
Nick was quiet, considering. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll bring you the hard drive. But I’ve got to warn you, Keely, some of this stuff–”
“I’ll be fine,” she interrupted. “Whatever it is, chances are I’ve heard worse.”
The look he gave her was so sad that she turned away.
When his phone rang, she gestured for him to take it. She went back to peeling apples, her brain running a mile a minute in search of a way to ensure Travis’s safety.
“Hello?” Nick answered. Then, “This is he.”
A heavy silence as he listened.
“Yes, I can do that. Okay. I understand. Thank you, Detective.”
Keely spun to face him as he disconnected the call.
“Detective Riegler,” he confirmed. “He wants me to stop by the station and answer a few questions.”
“But why?”
“I’m not sure.”
Keely felt the color drain from her face. Instantly, her indignation turned to guilt. “It’s all my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“They asked me about you, in the interview. It didn’t seem like a big deal, I never thought…”
“It’s okay. What else were you going to do? I have nothing to hide.”
She gave him an incredulous look. “Aside from the fact that you were stalking him up to and on the night that he was murdered?”
“Aside from that, yeah.” He grinned. “It’ll be okay.”
She walked over to the table and sank into the chair opposite him. “I can’t see how.”
He reached out and took her hand. “It’ll all work out. Trust me.”
“I’m trying. But you have to trust me too.”
“Okay.” Nick’s gaze was steady. She saw grief and love and fear and trust all mixed together. “You’re right. We’re in this together.”