Chapter 26
When Nick called, Travis considered letting it go to voicemail. He fully expected his friend to tear into him for breaking Keely’s heart and betraying his trust all in one ill-considered speech. And he deserved it. Maybe that’s why he picked up.
“Hey.” Nick’s voice was surprisingly calm. “You busy?”
“No, I’m not busy. What’s up?”
“I got a call from that detective that questioned Keely.”
Travis’s pulse lurched and sped. He closed his laptop on the shift schedules that he had been working on and stood up to pace the confines of his apartment.
“We need to talk.”
“Okay. Are you coming here?”
“I’m at Keely’s place.” A pause. “She wants you to come back over.”
“Why?” he asked reflexively. He’d left hardly two hours earlier.
Then he winced. He knew why. She wanted his help keeping her brother out of trouble. Still, he found it hard to believe that she would let him back into her home after everything he had said. Maybe with her brother there as a buffer, she felt okay.
“Never mind,” he said before Nick could answer. “I’m on my way.”
He disconnected the call and picked up his car keys, but his hands were shaking so badly that he put them down again. It wasn’t a long walk to Keely’s place. He was better off in the open air than behind the wheel.
Maybe the walk would clear his head. He didn’t feel fit for conversation just yet.
Halfway out the door, he remembered that he had promised Scot dinner from the Bottlenose. He shot off a text saying that he wouldn’t be in for a while, that he needed to go to Keely’s house for a tough conversation first and could Scot call his order in and have one of the other employees deliver?
No problem, Scot texted back. Go get your girl.
Travis winced and pocketed his phone.
Keely wasn’t his girl. And now she never would be.
How had he gotten himself into such a mess? Scot was counting on him, and he would be lucky if he didn’t end up in jail. Worse, Nick might end up right there with him. The authorities were closing in. But where was the justice? Where was the sense in any of it?
Maybe if he had just turned himself in right away, they could have avoided all of this. With Rachel’s testimony, they might not even have charged him. But now, after waiting so long, there was no real hope of escaping this without jail time.
Maybe it was just as well. Maybe it was karma.
He could try to justify it all he liked, but he had killed two men.
Who did he think he was, that he could do that and just go on living his charmed life here in Pelican Point?
His thoughts weren’t much clearer at the end of the walk than at the beginning, but physically he felt a bit calmer. At least, he felt relatively calm right up until knocking on Keely’s front door. Stepping into her house, seeing her again, brought his blood pressure right back up to a frightening hammering that pounded through his veins.
She had her back to him, chopping apples at the kitchen counter. It had been just a few hours since they had last seen each other, but the gulf between them felt uncrossable. All he wanted to do was take her into his arms and comfort her, and the knowledge that he didn’t have the ability to bring her any comfort settled into his chest like a physical pain.
At a gesture from Nick, he settled awkwardly into one of the kitchen chairs. Even after he shed his jacket, it was uncomfortably warm in the small kitchen.
Three mugs of chamomile steamed on the kitchen table. The smell of apples and chamomile tea should have been soothing, but Travis felt queasy. He reached around behind his chair and opened one of the windows. A cool breeze came in off the ocean, bringing instant relief.
“I don’t have to go through with the interview,” Nick said, breaking the heavy silence. “I could call and say that I have a family emergency out of town.”
“That’s too suspicious,” Keely said without looking up from her work.
“And they’d probably just ask you to answer the same questions on the phone,” Travis told him. “Or get an actual warrant or something. If you refused to cooperate.”
Nick blew out a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, probably.”
“Anyway, how long would you stay away?” Keely dumped a cutting board full of apples into a big mixing bowl and squeezed lemon over them. Travis could smell the fresh citrus all the way across the kitchen. It hurt to look at Keely, her graceful hands and pale face, but it was impossible not to. “You can’t just run out on Chloe.”
“Of course not.”
“So you have to go in. You already told them that you would.”
“It could buy us some time, though. I could just reschedule.”
“Maybe.” Her expression turned thoughtful. “More time would be good.”
“Do you think I’m a suspect?” he asked miserably.
“Well, let’s see.” Her voice snapped back into an exasperated sort of anger. She turned toward them, gesturing with the large kitchen knife that she held in one hand. “You moved to town just after Adam did, and then he turned up dead. Add in the fact that he doped, used, and dropped your little sister, and yeah, Nick, I think you’re a suspect.” She cursed under her breath and tossed the knife into the sink. “I can’t believe you two.”
“It’s all just circumstantial.” Nick was trying to sound more sure than he felt; Travis could tell. “They don’t have any evidence. They’re grasping at straws.”
“You don’t know that,” Keely said. “How long were you following him? What if people saw you? Did you park outside his house? How many times?”
“Not right outside his house,” Nick hedged.
She cursed again and wrenched her fridge open so violently that the jars inside shivered and clattered together. Nick and Travis were quiet as she pulled out a lump of dough and started hitting it with a rolling pin.
“I don’t think that’s how you use those,” Nick joked weakly.
“Ha ha.” Keely shot him a sour look.
“What about everything that you recorded in the days leading up to what happened?” Travis asked.
“What about it?” Nick said.
“Is it enough to lead them toward someone else?”
“Mostly it’s just enough to show that I was stalking Adam during the weeks leading up to his death, which isn’t a great look for me.”
Keely made a strangled sound, like a hysterical laugh muffled and cut short. She was staring down at the pie crust that she was rolling out. She hadn’t so much as glanced at Travis since he had walked into her kitchen.
“Pretty sure just putting that mic in Adam’s car was illegal,” Nick said miserably.
“Could they have found the mic?” Keely cut in, her voice panicked.
“Travis removed it the night it all went down,” Nick said, shaking his head. “Otherwise we probably would’ve gotten taken in for this a long time ago.”
“What if we shared the recordings with Rachel?” Travis wondered out loud. “Maybe she could ID someone.”
“I still need to listen to them,” said Keely.
“Didn’t they already question Rachel?” Nick said. Travis forced his attention back to the subject at hand. “She would have identified the guys who were there if she knew who they were.”
“Maybe she didn’t know the big guys who were there that night,” said Travis, “but she might recognize the voices of the people he saw more often, the guys who arranged that meeting. Something to lead the detective in the right direction.”
“Maybe.” Nick didn’t sound hopeful. And he was right not to be; they were grasping at straws. The more he tried to think of a way out of this, the more hopeless Travis felt.
He typed out a message to Rachel, asking if she could meet again, but even as he did so, it felt futile.
“I might still have some numbers on my phone,” Keely admitted. “People who knew Adam.”
Nick looked horrified. “You’re not telling me that you saved the numbers of your dealers.”
She shot him a venomous look. “Acquaintances. Friends of friends.” She looked down and admitted with a grumble, “People who could put me in touch with dealers.”
“Keely!”
“Don’t you dare judge me!” She pointed at him with the rolling pin. “I was out of this mess! I never wanted anything more to do with Adam, with any of them!”
Nick looked down and wrapped his big hands around the mug in front of him. He looked down into the tea without drinking it. Keely seemed to deflate.
“And you never would have been in this mess if not for me,” she said miserably. “We all made stupid choices. Now we have to figure out how to disentangle ourselves from the whole thing.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Nick said. The hopelessness in his voice belied his words.
There was only one way out that Travis could see.
One of them would have to take the blame.
If he turned himself in, he could protect Nick. The cops would never have to know that Nick was involved. They could stop sniffing around, and they wouldn’t find anything to incriminate Nick and Keely.
Maybe if he turned himself in, they would take pity on him. Maybe they would even offer him a deal, let him off easy if he could help them round up some of the real bad guys. Maybe Rachel would be willing to work with him on that.
She was the true victim, after all. He didn’t see how they could pin anything on her, so she might as well come forward. So far she had only been careful to avoid further questioning out of concern for him.
The only thing that really ate at him was the people he had counting on him, Scot most of all. When Keely walked down the hall to the bathroom, he turned to Nick and held his gaze.
“If this goes sideways,” he said, “and I get arrested, I need you to promise me that you’ll take care of Scot.”
“You won’t be arrested,” Nick protested. “You can’t go to jail for this. Where’s the justice in that? You were defending someone who couldn’t defend herself.”
“Promise me,” he said again.
“Fine.” He took a breath. “Of course I’ll look after Scot. I’m not going anywhere. But neither are you, man.”
Travis was saved from having to reply when Keely walked back in and glared at them.
“What are you two whispering about?” she demanded.
Nick stood and said, “I’m going to go home and grab that external hard drive. And check on Chloe.” He sighed. “Keely, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said shortly. She went back to the kitchen counter, where she laid the top crust of her pie over the pile of apples and crimped the two layers together with quick, expert movements.
“I’ll be back in a few.”
He went out and left them in a deafening silence.
Keely put the pie into her preheated oven and set a timer while Travis sat at the kitchen table, feeling like something the cat had hacked up.
“I can go,” he said.
“No.” Keely’s reflexive response seemed to surprise her as much as it did him.
He just sat there, warm kitchen air on his face and a cool draft from the window on the back of his neck.
“Don’t go,” she said, meeting his eyes for the first time. “Stay and listen to the recordings. Help us figure something out. I’ll text every number I have that knew Adam, or knew people who knew Adam.”
“And ask them what?”
“If they can connect me with… someone. I don’t know. I’ll figure something out when I hear the recordings. We’ll figure something out.”
He felt a sad smile on his face as he stood. They moved toward each other like two objects on a collision course, gravity overtaking sense.
She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him tightly, burying her face in his shoulder. His arms around her were more gentle as he tried to memorize the silken feel of her hair, the long lines of her back.
“It’ll all be okay,” she said in a small voice, needing to believe.
“Yeah,” he agreed. A steady certainty rose up from the core of his being. With Keely in his arms, everything seemed simple. “Everything will be okay.”
A strange sort of peace settled over him.
He would protect his best friend, her brother, the only way he knew how.
He would turn himself in.
And everything would be okay because the people he cared about most would look out for each other. They would be okay. And that’s all that really mattered.
He would spend one last night with the people he cared about, taking in the sound of their voices and the warmth of their presence.
And then in the morning, before Nick appeared for questioning, Travis would walk into the police station and confess to the murder of Adam Walsh.