Page 28 of Stay Away from Him

What lingering doubts Melissa still had about her all-consuming relationship with Thomas Danver— Dr. Danger to his detractors—came calling one Monday morning in mid-autumn, after she dropped Bradley off at school.

The weather, which had held on with summery high temperatures well into October, had finally taken a turn for the cold with two weeks until Halloween.

The chill in the air bit at Melissa’s ankles as she got out of the car to walk Bradley to the school doors, and their breath was visible in puffs of steam that curled from their nostrils with each exhale, then dissipated on the air.

Bradley whined at the way the cold pricked at his earlobes—he regretted refusing the stocking cap Melissa had tried to press on him when they left home—and when they got to the doors, he dashed into the school without giving Melissa his usual goodbye hug, eager to get to the warmth.

On the drive back home, Melissa decided to treat herself with something warm: a vanilla latte, a dirty chai, or maybe—it being fall—something with a bit of pumpkin spice in it.

She pulled off the road into a strip mall parking lot with a drive-through Starbucks at the corner.

Everyone seemed to have had the same idea, and the line snaked all the way from the pickup window to the end of the lot by the grocery store and the franchise sandwich shop.

The line inched forward one car length at a time, and Melissa settled in for the wait.

Her mind wandered to the bookkeeping work waiting for her when she got home, which rarely took her more than three or four hours.

Mondays were for sending statements of care to insurance companies, Tuesdays were for mailing out bills, Wednesdays were for receivables, Thursdays were for expenses, and Fridays were for anything she’d missed—which was often nothing.

The rest of the time was taken up with Thomas .

A car horn honked, and Melissa looked up to see that the line had inched forward a few car lengths while she’d been getting lost in thought. More horns sounded behind her, and she fumbled to throw the car into gear, ears burning.

“Sorry, sorry,” she mumbled, though no one could hear her.

As she finally began to move forward, there was some movement to her left, and a minivan zoomed from the parking lot into the empty space in the line ahead of her.

“What the hell?”

Now the chorus of honks grew louder, seemingly everyone behind Melissa joining in with their displeasure at the line cutter.

Melissa gave her horn a tap to join the chorus, but she knew that, in part, everyone was still mad at her —it was her inattention that allowed the jerk in the minivan to jump the line in the first place.

For a second, she considered getting out of her car and walking up to talk to them.

But she didn’t, and neither did any of the other honkers.

The people of the state she’d moved to might have been as quick to anger as anyone else in the world—but they were also fundamentally conflict-averse.

Melissa continued inching slowly toward the front of the line until, finally, it was her turn to order. At the pickup window, the barista handed her a white cup, and then shook her head when Melissa tried to hand over her credit card.

“No,” she said. “The woman ahead of you paid for it.”

The line cutter? “She did?”

“Yup,” the worker said. “Threw in a snack too.” She handed Melissa a piece of warmed coffee cake in a brown paper sleeve, the smell of cinnamon and brown sugar filling the car.

Melissa glanced ahead, where the gray minivan that darted ahead of her in line had pulled forward but hadn’t yet left the parking lot, brake lights lit up red. The driver’s door opened, and out stepped—

Kelli Walker.

She stood by her open door and waved.

“Oh, this fucking bitch,” Melissa muttered, the words coming out of her involuntarily.

“Excuse me?” the coffee shop worker said.

Kelli stepped toward Melissa, leaving her minivan door open. A long shawl sweater hung almost to her knees, and she gathered the folds of it around her against the cold as she drew close to the window.

“Hey,” she said. “Can we talk?”

Melissa felt her jaw harden, the muscles in her cheeks and around her lips growing tight. “I’d rather not.”

“Please?” Kelli said. “Just give me two minutes.” She tilted her head toward the café, indicating that she wanted to sit down inside.

Melissa glanced at the young barista, her eyes grown large in her smooth face.

Two women facing off in the drive-through line wasn’t what she had expected when she clocked in to her morning shift, and she clearly didn’t know how to handle it.

Further back in the line, a chorus of impatient car horns rose up once again.

Melissa sighed. “Fine. Two minutes.”

***

Melissa set her phone on the table when she got inside, a timer on the screen set to two minutes.

“All right,” she said. “Go.”

Kelli glanced at the screen. “Seriously?”

“You said two minutes. That’s what I’m giving you. A minute fifty, now.”

“All right,” Kelli said. “Well, first of all, I owe you an apology.”

“You owe me way more than a measly apology.”

“You’re right. Which is why I’m offering to pay the medical bill,” she offered.

Melissa crossed her arms. “There’s no bill. Thomas patched him up for free. A minute and a half.”

Kelli’s eyes flicked down at the timer. Melissa could tell she was rattling her—and she was glad. “Thomas did that?”

“He did. The man you’re so bent on being a murderer.

The man whose life and reputation you’re trying to destroy.

He helped my son. Gave him first aid, for an injury you caused.

And then, he told me not to call the cops on you.

I wanted to press charges for assault, but he said there’d be no point.

How’s that for rich? Him defending you from the cops?

When you’re so desperate to get him arrested and put in jail. ”

Melissa gave Kelli her hardest glare. Everything she said was true.

Thomas did try to convince her not to get the police involved—after the experience he’d had with them around Rose’s disappearance, he didn’t trust them.

Melissa couldn’t blame him for that. She ended up ignoring him and calling the cops anyway, too furious to let it go.

But it was just like he said. They asked her if she thought Kelli had attacked Bradley maliciously, or if it had just been an accident.

Melissa had to admit that it was probably just an accident.

They said there was nothing they could do.

“I could talk to her,” the officer on the phone had offered, “ask her to keep her distance from you from now on. Would you like that?” Melissa had just hung up on him.

Kelli looked chastened now, ashamed, like she wanted to disappear under the force of Melissa’s fury. “I deserved that,” she said.

Melissa wouldn’t feel sorry for her. She refused. Kelli had done this to herself.

“You’ve got one minute,” Melissa said.

“Okay, look, I’ll just say what I have to say, and if you don’t want to talk anymore, you can leave.

And what I want to say is, I messed up. I know I messed up.

I’m a little nuts, all right? I know it about myself.

I get ahold of something, and I can’t let go.

That’s what happened with you and Thomas.

I saw you at the wine bar that day—I swear that was random.

But I saw you, and suddenly I couldn’t let it go.

I shouldn’t have taken the picture of you, and I shouldn’t have posted it.

I recognize that now. And then later, when I saw you at the playground—I shouldn’t have touched your son.

I shouldn’t have put my hands on him. That was unforgivable.

And what happened after, that was all my fault.

“But I swear, Melissa—everything I did, I did because I honestly, truly believe that you’re in danger.

I did it because I care about protecting fellow women.

Because I care about you . Rose was my best friend—my best. Friend .

Okay? And she told me things about Thomas.

Bad things, that made me suspect him when she disappeared.

And now I’ve got a contact in the sheriff’s department, someone who was involved with the case—he’s telling me the prosecutor should never have dropped the charges. ”

A contact in the sheriff’s department. That must have been where Kelli was getting her evidence from.

But who knew if it was accurate or not? Leaking information from an open investigation had to be an ethical violation of some sort.

Kelli’s contact must have been bitter about how the case against Thomas ended, must have had some kind of a vendetta clouding his judgment.

He could have been feeding Kelli overblown or one-sided information.

A voice in Melissa’s head interjected: But you’re getting one-sided information too.

“You’ve got no reason to listen to me,” Kelli continued. “No reason to trust me. I recognize that. I just want you to listen to yourself . Trust yourself . Is there some small part of you that wants to listen to me? Some small part of you that thinks you might not be safe with Thomas?”

A silence stretched out. Melissa glanced down at her phone screen. The timer counted down: 7…6…5…4…3…

She sighed. “Fucking hell.” She reached out and tapped the Pause button. The timer froze with two seconds to go. She picked up the phone and slipped it into her purse.

Kelli looked amazed, like even she didn’t believe Melissa would listen to what she was saying. And Melissa could hardly believe it herself. Not with what had happened between the two of them.

“I’m still not forgiving you,” Melissa said. “I’m pissed as hell at you.”

“I get it,” Kelli said. “You should be.”

“Maybe I could beat the shit out of one of your kids. Even the score.”

“Go for it,” Kelli said. “My boys are both assholes anyway.”

Melissa burst out laughing, and after a few seconds Kelli laughed too.

It felt like a pressure release, letting out something that had been building a long time, and Melissa went on laughing until she was crying, until people at other tables were glancing at her with concern in their eyes.

She waved apologetically— I’m okay, don’t mind me —then turned back to Kelli, wiping tears from her eyes.

God help her, she thought she might actually like Kelli Walker if she’d gotten the chance to know her under better circumstances.

“So you’ll leave him?”

Melissa shook her head. “I didn’t say that.”

Kelli squinted, confused. “But you believe me.”

“I believe you believe what you’re saying,” Melissa said. “I believe you think you’re right.”

“But?”

“But…well, you told me to trust myself, right? And you’re not wrong—there’s a part of me that desperately wants to know what happened to Rose. Part of me that’s afraid Thomas might have done it. And there’s another part of me too.”

“Part of you that wants to believe him when he says he’s innocent.”

“That’s right.”

Kelli shook her head. “But Melissa, you can’t. Don’t believe his lies. His whole nice guy, doctor, great dad, perfect abs bullshit—it’s an act. Can’t you see that?”

“Maybe,” Melissa said. “But when I look at the way he looks at me, the way he treats me, the way he is with his girls and with my son —I can’t ignore that. This might really be something, what he and I have. I can’t just throw it away. Not after everything I’ve been through.”

Kelli was quiet. Thinking. She didn’t ask Melissa to explain herself any further, didn’t press her on what everything I’ve been through meant.

She was a woman, like Melissa—she could probably guess.

Bad boyfriends, bad husbands: bad men. She’d had them in her life too, probably.

Women didn’t have to explain to each other. They just knew.

“All right,” she said. “So what, then? What do we do now?”

“We find out who killed Rose Danver. Who really killed her.”

Kelli heaved an exasperated sigh. “But I know already.”

“You think you know, maybe. But you’re not considering all the evidence. And that’s what we do, together. We look at everything. I’ll consider all the evidence against Thomas. And you’ll consider all the evidence in his favor. Take the stalker theory seriously, for instance.”

“And then what?”

“Then, at the end of it all, if the most compelling theory of the case is that Thomas killed his wife, I’ll leave him.

But if the bulk of the evidence points to someone else, then you’ll leave him alone.

Leave us alone. Stop harassing us. Stop trying to prove the man I’m falling in love with is a murderer. Deal?”

Kelli considered it for a moment, then extended her hand across the table. Melissa took it. “Deal.”

***

On the way to the cars in the parking lot, something occurred to Melissa. She stopped Kelli as she walked to her car, put her hand on Kelli’s elbow, and pulled her around.

“What?” she asked.

“There was something you didn’t talk about,” Melissa said. “When you were apologizing for all the bad things you did to me. You didn’t say anything about sneaking into my apartment,” Melissa said. “About leaving the note.”

Kelli reeled back, looking at Melissa with genuine shock—and Melissa realized that Kelli really didn’t know what she was talking about. She couldn’t be faking it. She wasn’t that good.

“Someone broke into your place?” she said.

“You did,” Melissa said, hoping that if she stuck with her accusation, Kelli would break.

But there was no change in her expression. She was genuinely confused.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then she got into her car and drove away. Left Melissa behind in the parking lot, reeling. The words coming back to her, burned into her brain.

stay away from him unless you want to die

If Kelli didn’t leave the note, who did?