Page 6 of Keeping Secrets

Even though his rational mind told him that it was just John and Ed coming in for their usual coffee and BLTs, the fibers of his nerves screamed a visceral warning.

He had felt uneasy around cops ever since his first arrest. That anxiety had eased and abated over the years, especially around guys he knew like the handful of local cops in town, but it had never quite gone away completely.

And now it was worse than ever.

Every police officer's uniform, every squad car, made his blood turn to ice.

Adam‘s death had been all over the news. Coroners had found knife wounds on the body and called foul play. Local news had a field day with it, the first exciting thing to happen on their quiet coastline in ages.

Newspapers and cheap websites were one thing. Travis could avoid those easily enough. What he couldn’t avoid was the talk.

Every night since the incident, the bar had been filled with locals gossiping about the body found just outside of town at the bottom of a cliff. The body with wounds sliced across its arms and chest. "A clumsy attack," they had called it, quoting one of the newspapers.

At no point had Travis wielded the knife.

Adam had cut himself in his frenzied attempts to attack Travis. Some of them must have happened when Travis grabbed Adam‘s arm and pushed it back, forcing the knife away from his own throat. But he couldn’t remember any of it clearly.

The rapid-cycle news had already forgotten Adam, and the local gossip had turned to other things. But Travis knew that the case was still open. He knew that police officers – not John and Ed, but officers further afield where the death had taken place – were still looking for Adam’s supposed killer.

He’d gotten rid of the most damning evidence, including the recording from that night and the wire they’d snuck into Adam’s car, but he’d spent many sleepless nights wracking his brain for something he could’ve missed. And many more wondering what had happened to the young woman who had witnessed it all.

"Dammit!"

Travis‘s attention was wrenched back to the present by the sound of Scot’s voice and the bright noise of breaking glass.

This wasn’t the first glass that Scot had broken lately. Or the fifth, or the tenth.

Travis had begged his employer to go to a doctor and figure out why his hands and legs had stopped cooperating with his brain, but Scot refused.

"Are you okay?"

"Stop asking me that," Scot snapped. "And clean up this glass."

Travis watched Scot out of the side of his eye as he swept up the wreckage. Scot leaned heavily on the bar, struggling to catch his breath.

"I am going to make you an appointment with the doctor,” Travis said quietly as he dumped the broken glass into a trashcan.

"You’ll do no such thing," Scot said sternly, meeting his gaze.

"You need to…" But Travis trailed off as Scot stormed back to his office, stumbling slightly along the way and catching himself on the back of a chair. He retreated and slammed the door behind him.

Travis went back to his mindless tasks of getting the bar ready for another night, hours before he needed to. A text came in from Keely, and his heart jumped in his chest.

What time do you start work tonight? Want to do something before you head to the Bottlenose?

Travis picked his phone up and stared at the message for a long minute.

He wanted to reply. But he wouldn’t.

I bet you can’t finish a quadruple scoop at Kula, Keely challenged.

The message made him smile. Not an easy thing to accomplish lately.

His heart broke as he switched his phone to airplane mode and shoved it back into the pocket of his jeans. He felt like a jerk for ignoring her. But encouraging her would be worse.

He cared about Keely. He’d cared about her even when she was a gangly teenager with spots on her face, and he cared about her more than he should now that she was a gorgeous young woman.

But she was Nick's sister. And she’d been through too much already.

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