Page 20 of Stay Away from Him

Melissa brought Bradley to day care again the next day and then went straight home.

She didn’t feel safe in Lawrence’s basement anymore—but she didn’t feel safe anywhere else either.

She felt like she was being watched now, sensed unseen eyes on her as she drove around town, as she held Bradley’s hand to the door, as she gave him a hug in the entryway.

Back home, she locked all the doors, pulled the curtains.

Listened for sounds of movement. For someone trying to break in.

She was supposed to be looking for jobs. That’s what she needed—a bookkeeping job so she could pay her rent to Lawrence, fill the fridge with food, pay off the credit card she put the cost of moving on, the legal debt laid on top of her shoulders like a stone.

But she couldn’t concentrate.

She was thinking about the note. Still sitting on the dining room table, folded open. She couldn’t see the message from where she sat, but she didn’t have to. She’d memorized every word, every letter, every jagged swoop.

stay away from him unless you want to die

Melissa had so many questions about the note, starting with how and when . How did someone sneak it into her apartment at all? And when did they do it?

How was easy enough. There were three entrances to Melissa’s basement apartment.

One was through a side door from a garage stall Lawrence and Toby allowed her to use.

She usually parked her car inside, closed the garage door behind her, then took some wood steps down to an entry door that put her in a mudroom at the edge of the apartment.

Another entrance, obviously, from the top of the stairs.

She didn’t think anyone could have gotten in through either of those doors.

Too many locks and no signs of forced entry.

That left the third option: the back entrance.

A sliding glass door to the patio and a view to the lake.

Melissa had a tendency to forget about the lock on the sliding door, and often left it unlocked, even overnight.

This was a bad idea, she knew, and she was certainly going to lock it from now on.

Her intruder almost certainly got in that way.

The next question was when . Melissa didn’t remember seeing a note on the table when she and Thomas stumbled in from their short date.

Then again, they were a little distracted at the time, their hands all over each other as they stumbled to the bedroom.

Something could have been there, and neither of them noticed.

Another possibility—that someone snuck in and put the note on the table while Thomas and Melissa were having sex, while she was panting his name the next room over—brought a chill of horror. She couldn’t even think about it.

Or the intruder came in while Thomas and Melissa went back to his house to pick up Bradley. Came in through the sliding door, put the note on the table for her to find, and then left before she came back.

The next set of questions, who and why , were tangled up together in Melissa’s mind.

There was a lack of clarity in the note, in its intent: stay away from him unless you want to die.

Was it a warning? Or a threat? Someone who believed Thomas was a murderer, trying to tell Melissa he was more dangerous than she believed?

Or someone who was threatening to hurt her themselves?

Maybe it was even—she shuddered again to think of it—the person who really killed Rose.

Melissa recalled what Lawrence told her, the night she and Thomas first met.

Rose had a stalker. What was this, if not stalking?

The first person her mind went to was Amelia.

The trace of possessiveness in the way she talked about Thomas, the buzz of attraction Melissa sensed when she came upon them in the coffee shop.

They had history. They used to be together, before Rose.

And Amelia had opportunity. She lived next door to Thomas, which meant she could have been watching out the window when Melissa went over there to drop Bradley off.

Watching again when she came to get him again.

Seething inside her house, hating Melissa for stealing Thomas away from her.

Stealing him again , after already losing him, years before, to Rose.

Maybe she was Rose’s stalker. Maybe she was the one who killed her.

And maybe Melissa was next.

She shook her head, pushing the thought away.

Amelia may have been a little cold, a little aloof, and maybe she did still have feelings for Thomas—but none of that made her capable of murder.

Besides, if she wanted Thomas enough to kill, wouldn’t she have been with him by now, three years after Rose’s disappearance?

Just then, Melissa’s phone began buzzing. Two vibrations, in quick succession. She glanced at the screen and saw two Facebook notifications. She’d been tagged in a photo. And someone mentioned her in a comment.

Melissa rarely ever used Facebook anymore.

Since the divorce, she hadn’t wanted to leave too much evidence of herself online, not wanting Carter, her ex, to be able to follow her or see what she was doing.

Not even wanting gossip to get back to him, from old friends she left behind in the move.

As much as possible, she wanted to have a clean slate.

But Melissa still had a profile. She stood and moved toward the kitchen, where her laptop was on the counter.

She pulled out a stool and sat, opened the laptop, and went to Facebook.

Clicked on the notification, expecting a photo from the dinner party, maybe—Lawrence tagging a photo of her looking put together and sophisticated, hoping to connect her with even more of his friends in the area.

She should have braced herself for the worst. Because when the photo came up on the screen, she wasn’t ready. She practically fell off her stool.

The photo she saw was of her and Thomas kissing.

Passionately. She held him by the scruff of his button-down, the fabric straining as she pulled him toward her.

Their lips locked together and open, tasting each other.

She let out a humiliated groan, and her hands went to her eyes, covering them—but she couldn’t unsee the photo.

She thought she looked ridiculous, like a drunk club girl throwing herself at a random guy while her friends documented the evidence on their phones.

But how could anyone have gotten a picture of them kissing in the first place?

For an irrational second, Melissa imagined the intruder as the photographer, hiding somewhere in the apartment—behind the couch?

—as she and Thomas stumbled through the living room.

She immediately dismissed the thought. It was impossible; they could have missed a white envelope on the dining room table, but there was no way they’d have missed a whole person, not in this small apartment.

Melissa made herself look at the photo again, looking past Thomas and her to the details surrounding them, noticing for the first time the familiar wall decorations, the high-top table, the wineglasses.

Of course. The wine bar. She’d gone to the bathroom, then came back to see Thomas speaking to a woman. And after she left, Melissa had kissed him. Marked her territory, established him as hers. Then asked him back to the apartment. That must have been when someone snapped the photo, put it online.

After the shock of seeing the photo had worn off, Melissa was able to take in the rest of the details.

The photo was on the feed of a public Facebook group called Justice for Rose Danver , posted there by a user named Kelli Walker.

Melissa clicked on Kelli Walker’s profile and saw a face she recognized.

It was the woman from the wine bar—same blond hair, same tanned, round face.

Her profile picture had her posed, smiling, with two husky teenage boys in NASCAR T-shirts and a man with a mesh baseball cap, messy facial hair, and a scowl on his face.

Melissa had a feeling she’d dislike Kelli Walker, even aside from the fact that she’d snapped a picture of her and posted it to social media without her permission.

Kelli looked like the kind of woman who’d get in a fight with a neighbor over a property line, who’d oppose the construction of a subsidized housing unit in her neighborhood.

The kind of woman who was quick to call the cops, to threaten a lawsuit, to ask for a manager.

Back to the Facebook group, and the photo of Melissa and Thomas, where she read what Kelli wrote when she posted it:

Dr. Danger spotted at a wine bar in the north suburbs. Does anyone know this woman? Someone should warn her about who she’s locking lips with.

Dr. Danger?

Melissa clicked to expand the comments:

Don’t recognize her. Is that a name tag I see? Some kind of event?

Some sort of singles mixer. I looked, but they both had fake names.

Sneaky! What a lying bastard he is.

She’s in danger! Help her!

Unless she knows what he is and is into it. If so, this bitch deserves what’s coming to her.

Hope you’re wrong but there are women like that. Lots of sick people in this world.

We shouldn’t assume.

I think I might recognize this woman. Hard to tell, but this looks a little like a woman who moved into my neighbor’s basement. They’re friends of Thomas Danver, people who think he’s innocent, so it makes total sense that they’d set her up with this wife-killer.

God I hate these people. Just look at all the evidence! They’re setting up another woman to get abused and murdered by this evil man. They’re as guilty as he is. We really need to help her. Can you get her name?

I’ll ask around.

Ok I think I found her. Melissa Burke is this you?

Below this last comment, Kelli had posted a reply: