Page 43 of Stay Away from Him

Melissa woke the next morning from an uneasy sleep, pursued by a threatening dream whose details skittered like cockroaches to the deep recesses of her mind as soon as her eyes opened.

She groaned and put a hand to her head, recalling not the dream—that was long gone—but the events of the prior day and night.

Carter, the fight, Thomas in jail, Rose’s body discovered, the charges of murder coming back.

Reality was nightmare enough.

She rose and checked on Bradley. He was still fast asleep, exhausted. In the kitchen, she busied herself making breakfast. After the coffee was poured, she stood for a moment at the back window.

“What am I going to do?” she asked the woods.

The bare trees didn’t answer.

Her phone buzzed with a number she didn’t recognize. She let it go to voicemail as she sat with her yogurt and coffee, then checked the transcription of the message.

Hello, Mrs. Danv—excuse me, Ms. Burke. I’m Jonathan Klein, Thomas Danver’s lawyer. I’m here at the Ramsey County Correctional Facility, coordinating with my client on a few details, and he’s requesting a meeting with you. Today if possible. I wonder if you could give me a call back at—

Melissa left the message and immediately called the number back.

“He’d like to speak to you as soon as possible,” Thomas’s lawyer said when she got him on the line. “There are some complicated developments here, and—well, I know you’re not his legal partner, but it’s my understanding that—”

“I’ll come,” Melissa said, cutting him off.

She didn’t want to talk about the proposal, didn’t want to ponder the question of who she was to Thomas with this man, a stranger.

She did want to see Thomas, though, even if she couldn’t say why.

Maybe she wanted to give him the chance to win her back one more time, convince her yet again that he wasn’t a murderer.

Or maybe she only wanted closure, before she never saw him again. A goodbye.

“Normally there’s a process for scheduling a visit,” the lawyer said. “But I’ll pull some strings and get you on the list. Can you be here around noon?”

She agreed, then ended the call and started planning.

She couldn’t take Bradley to the county jail with her.

She’d have to get Lawrence to watch him while she was gone.

It was still a long way to noon, which gave her plenty of time to get Bradley up, fed, and dressed, and to explain things to Lawrence.

The phone buzzed again, and this time she answered without even looking at the screen, thinking it must be Thomas’s lawyer again, calling with some important detail he forgot.

But it was a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Melissa, it’s Amelia.”

“Amelia? How did you get this number?”

“It was on Thomas’s phone. I have his passcode, for emergencies.”

She felt a surge of annoyance at Amelia and Thomas’s closeness—even Melissa didn’t yet know Thomas’s phone passcode. Until she remembered what was going on, the fact that she was supposed to be done with Thomas. After everything that had happened, Amelia could have him.

“I need your help.”

“What is it?”

“Rhiannon and Kendall. They’re missing.”

***

Melissa was at Thomas’s house thirty minutes later.

She had to wake up Bradley earlier than she wanted to, rush him through breakfast, and wrestle his sleepy limbs into a shirt and pants.

Then she packed him upstairs to Lawrence and Toby, who were still waking up themselves, fumbling through apologies to all three of them as she went out the door.

Now Amelia was opening the front door, a look of feverish panic on her face.

“You slept here last night?” Melissa asked, imagining her in Thomas’s bed—a bed she’d still not been in herself. Then she shook her head. She needed to stop this. There were more important things happening than her jealousy of Amelia and Thomas’s relationship.

“I was on the couch,” Amelia told her. “I know I’m only next door, but it didn’t feel right leaving them alone in the house.

I was up at seven, and they didn’t come down.

I figured that wasn’t a problem—they’re teenagers, they sleep in.

But then they still weren’t down by nine-thirty, then ten, and I went to check on them.

That’s when I saw that their beds were empty. ”

“Where could they have gone?”

“Anywhere,” Amelia said.

“That can’t be true.”

“It is. Thomas’s car is gone. Rhiannon’s seventeen; she has her driver’s license.”

Melissa walked inside the house and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was quarter to eleven. “Did you hear anything last night? Engine starting, garage door opening and closing? If we know when they left, then we could figure out how far they might have gotten.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Amelia says. “I slept like the dead last night.”

“And when did you go to bed?”

“I don’t know,” Amelia said, lifting her fingers to her temples in a jerky motion. “Ten-thirty, maybe?”

More than twelve hours ago. They could have been in a different state by now.

Amelia looked genuinely worried, jittery and stricken, her lips pulling away from her teeth as she breathed through her mouth, heavy and panicked.

Melissa felt a pang of sympathy as she realized how long Amelia had known Thomas’s girls—since they were babies.

She must have felt like a surrogate mother to them, as much a part of their lives as Rose, and far more than Melissa was right then.

Probably more than she’d ever be. On a sudden urge, Melissa grabbed for Amelia’s hand, gave it a squeeze, watched as the other woman’s eyes came to hers, wrinkled with anxiety.

“Hey,” Melissa said. “They’ll turn up. Okay? They’re going to be all right.”

Amelia breathed out. “You think so?”

Melissa nodded. “They probably just want to get away from all this for a while. Right? I mean, it’s pretty stressful. I don’t really want to be dealing with any of this right now. Do you?”

Amelia gave a hesitant laugh. “No,” she admitted. “No, I don’t.”

“They’re probably just… I don’t know, where do teenagers go when they want to be alone? The mall? A friend’s house? Have you thought about calling the police?”

Amelia gave her a grim look. “I did think about it. But…have you seen the news this morning?”

Melissa hadn’t—but she didn’t even need to ask. She knew what Amelia was going to say before she said it.

“They’ve discovered Rose’s body,” Amelia said. “Up north. And now the Ramsey County Attorney says he’s bringing back the charges against Thomas. With all that—I thought maybe it would be best not to get the police involved. If we can find them ourselves…”

“I get it.” Melissa glanced again at the clock. “Look, Thomas has asked me to come meet him at the jail.”

“At the jail? Why?”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to go. I need to be there in a couple hours. But maybe before I go, I could check at some parks, parking lots, maybe take a quick walk through Rosedale Mall.”

Amelia nodded. “Go. I’ll drive around and look for them too.”

“Shouldn’t someone stay here, in case they decide to come home?”

Amelia shook her head. “I can’t stand it here. I need to do something. Besides, I’m afraid the press is going to be here soon. Set up camp outside the house in case Thomas makes bail, harass the neighbors with questions about whether they think he’s guilty. I don’t want to be here when they come.”

Melissa nodded—it made sense. Now that Amelia mentioned it, she’d like to get out of there too.

She thought local reporters would love to get a shot of the woman Thomas Danver had been seen with around town.

The woman he’d been captured on video proposing to, then beating the pulp out of her ex-husband.

The woman who screamed, begging him not to kill anyone.

***

Amelia and Melissa left separately. Melissa did what she said she was going to do: She looped the neighborhood, driving past some local parks and other places where two teenagers might hang out, then took a quick walk through Rosedale, the closest shopping mall.

She didn’t see any sign of them—in fact the mall had only just recently opened its doors, stores still rolling up their metal cages and letting the day’s first customers in.

She needed to leave soon if she was going to make it to the jail in time for her meeting with Thomas.

She went back to her car and set her phone’s GPS for the Ramsey County Correctional Facility—not a trip she ever imagined taking.

The directions took her to a squat, forbidding stone-and-brick building at St. Paul’s eastern edge, plopped in the center of a broad, desolate field.

She followed the signs for visitors, then went inside and followed a female guard’s terse instructions for signing in and passing through security checkpoints.

She half expected to be taken to one of those rooms with webbed glass and a telephone, like in the movies, but the guard led her to a private room instead: square, with white cinder block walls.

There, Thomas and a man in a suit sat waiting.

“Ms. Burke,” the well-dressed man said, rising from his chair and offering his hand. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Jon, could you see if we can get a cup of coffee or at least some water to drink?” Thomas asked.

He was wearing the expected orange prison jumpsuit, which sat loose on his frame.

He looked diminished, smaller somehow than he did just a day before, something timid and childlike in the way he sat at the metal table, his hands folded in his lap.

Melissa could hardly recognize him—and, looking at him, she realized that she barely knew him at all.

The lawyer left without saying another word, and then they were alone. Melissa sat, and Thomas reached for her hands across the table. She snatched them away before he could touch her.

Thomas’s back slumped against his chair with a thud, a look of surprise and hurt on his face. “You’re mad at me, then?”

Melissa breathed hard through her nose, realizing in that moment just how angry she really was. Where to even begin?

“Why don’t you just tell me why you wanted to talk to me,” she suggested.

“I asked you a question last night,” Thomas said. “Before we were…interrupted.”

Melissa’s mouth fell open. “That’s what you want to talk about? Now? After everything that’s happened?”

“I need an answer,” Thomas said. His eyes glistened.

She felt herself taken back to that perfect, fragile moment on the pier—Thomas on his knee with a ring in his hands, the waves lapping gently around them, the ambering evening light glowing at her shoulders, the air crisp and clean.

There was no getting back to there from where they were, no turning back the clock to make it play out differently.

Now her answer to Thomas’s question had to come here , in a cinder block room in the county jail.

“I can’t give you an answer,” she said. “Not here. Not like this.”

“Why not?” Thomas pleaded, his voice breaking with emotion. “I need your support now more than ever, Melissa. Things are happening, bad things, and I need to know that you still…that you love me.”

Of course I love you. The words were on her lips, and she was so tempted to just blurt them out. But something stopped her. Did she still love him? She was certain that she did as recently as yesterday—but yesterday felt like a very long time ago.

“Melissa, you’re going to start hearing things,” Thomas said, dropping his gaze with shame. “It’s about more than this assault, now. The charges of murder—they’re coming back.”

“I know,” she said.

Thomas’s eyes snapped up to her. “You know?”

This wasn’t the time to admit that she’d been talking to Kelli Walker and Derek Gordon—Thomas’s enemies. “It’s already on the news,” she said instead.

“Then you know why this is so important,” Thomas said.

“Melissa, I’m on video proposing to you.

People know that we’re together. For you to leave me now, to turn down my proposal—it would make me look guilty.

But if there was a woman standing by me, sitting behind me in that courtroom, supporting me… ”

She gasped and rose to her feet, her chair clattering to the floor behind her. She turned and walked to the door, her hands rising to the sides of her face. She swept them through her hair in a rapid movement, then turned back to Thomas, suddenly furious.

“Is that what this is about? Optics for your goddamn murder trial?”

Thomas’s face twisted in agony. “Don’t make it like that. I want you standing by me because I’m about to face the challenge of my lifetime—staying out of prison, protecting my reputation, being there for my daughters. I need the woman I love beside me while I face it.”

“And what about what I’m facing?” Melissa said, so mad she could barely see, blotches of color flashing in front of her eyes.

“My ex-husband is going to try to get full custody of my son. My son , Thomas. He’s going to haul me into a courtroom and tell a judge that I’m a bad mother, that I’m putting my son in danger.

And because of you, he’s got a case. Because of what you did. ”

Because of what you did. The words dropped from her lips and fell on the table between them.

A silence descended in which Thomas looked like he was wondering what she meant by what you did —and maybe Melissa was wondering too.

Was she only referring to Thomas’s attacking Carter, sending him to the hospital?

Or did she also mean killing his wife? Had she gone from being one of Thomas’s defenders to believing he was guilty?

She wasn’t sure, and she also wasn’t sure if it mattered. Something had been broken between them, and it would take time to put it back together, if it could even be repaired. In the meantime, Thomas had a trial to face—and Melissa had her own problems to deal with.

“I need to focus on my son right now,” she said.

Thomas breathed out, seeming to deflate. “So that’s it. This is over.”

“Maybe. Maybe once the dust settles, we can get back together, see if there’s anything still here.”

Even as she said it, Melissa knew what she was saying would never happen. It sounded absurd in her own ears. A perfunctory reassurance, an empty promise of a possibility that could never be. She was sure Thomas could hear it too.

“Goodbye, Thomas,” she said. “Good luck to you.”

He didn’t answer, and she left the room under the shroud of his hurt, angry silence.

Her vision blurred on her way to the exit, the hard lines of the cinder block and the metal bars at the checkpoints warping and floating, like the swirl of one shade of paint mixing into another. Only when the cool air of the outside hit her cheeks did she realize she was crying.