Page 44 of Stay Away from Him

As Melissa drove out of the parking lot, she spotted something up the street.

Across a two-lane road with a narrow strip of gravel shoulder on either side, a residential neighborhood sat opposite the jail.

On an intersecting street a couple hundred feet down the road from her, a car was parked.

It looked like Thomas’s, but of course he couldn’t have been driving it.

It was the car that went missing from his garage that morning.

Melissa squinted and spotted some movement behind the windows.

Rhiannon and Kendall? They’d either followed her to the county jail, or they’d come by themselves, keeping watch—wanting to be close to their dad.

Melissa had intended to turn the other way down the road, but instead, she cranked the wheel in their direction and sped toward the car with a staccato squeal of tire rubber.

When she reached the street the car was parked on, she made a sharp turn and then screeched to a stop on a diagonal just ahead of the car’s front bumper, blocking escape.

Then she got out of the car and walked toward it.

When she reached the driver’s side door and craned down to look in, Melissa only saw Rhiannon, looking sheepish with her hands on the wheel. Kendall was nowhere to be found. Melissa signaled for Rhiannon to roll down the window.

“Where’s Kendall?”

Rhiannon shook her head. “I don’t know where she is. I was looking for her.”

“She’s not with you?”

“I woke up in the middle of the night, and she wasn’t in her room.

Her bike was gone.” A quaver in Rhiannon’s voice told Melissa just how worried she was about her younger sister.

Melissa couldn’t blame her. She was a fifteen-year-old girl wandering the city, apparently with nothing but her bicycle.

Reeling from her dad’s arrest. Confused, not thinking straight.

And maybe Rhiannon wasn’t thinking straight either.

She was older than Kendall, and she affected a worldly aloofness in the way that only seventeen-year-old girls could—but beneath that exterior, she was still a girl in most of the ways that mattered.

She was scared and confused too, and unlike Melissa, she didn’t have the luxury of walking away from Thomas.

It was her last living parent locked up across the road, facing down the prospect of life in prison.

Rhiannon was at serious risk of becoming an effective orphan, and the brokenness behind her eyes told Melissa that on some level she knew it.

“Are you okay?” Melissa asked.

Rhiannon folded her top lip over the bottom and looked forward. She closed her eyes, and the movement of her eyelids scraped tears onto her cheeks.

“This is your fault,” Rhiannon said. “Before you came, everything was fine. We were happy.”

Melissa felt an urge to argue, to defend herself. She didn’t choose any of this, after all. Thomas pursued her . But it felt more important in that moment to empathize with Rhiannon, to meet her where she was at, rather than argue with her.

“I know,” Melissa said. “I know it must feel like all these terrible things started happening when I came into your dad’s life. And I’m sorry. I am.”

“Why were you talking to those people?”

Melissa blinked, not sure what Rhiannon was talking about. She thought Rhiannon was angry at her for what had happened between her dad and Carter—she was right that he’d never have gone to jail for assault if it wasn’t for Melissa. But now it seemed like there was something else on her mind.

“What people?” Melissa asked.

“That woman who hates Dad so much. And that…that man .”

Melissa suddenly realized—she was talking about Kelli and Derek. But how could she have known that Melissa had been talking to them?

“Do you mean Kelli Walker?” Melissa asked. “And the detective who investigated your dad three years ago?”

“He investigated Dad?”

“He did. I know it must be confusing to know that I’ve been talking to them.

But…” Melissa trailed off, not sure how to explain it.

She couldn’t tell Rhiannon that she’d actually started to believe what they’d been telling her, that in the face of all the evidence piling up against Thomas, she no longer believed he was innocent.

She couldn’t tell this poor girl that she actually believed her father killed her mother.

So instead, she went with the truth as it stood just twenty-four hours ago.

“I’m working with them to figure out who really killed your mom. ”

“To prove Dad’s innocent?”

Melissa nodded. It was true at first, even if it wasn’t the case anymore.

Then Melissa realized something. Something Rhiannon asked only seconds ago, about Derek. He investigated Dad?

“Wait a second,” Melissa said. “The man I’ve been talking to. You didn’t know that he was in charge of the investigation into your mom’s disappearance?”

She shook her head. “Dad shielded us from most of that. Always had us go over to Aunt Amelia’s whenever the police came over.”

“But nobody questioned you? Took a statement?”

“They had someone else talk to us,” Rhiannon said. “Some woman. A social worker.”

This made sense, Melissa supposed. You don’t want to traumatize two girls who’ve lost their mother, don’t want to interrogate them the way you’d interrogate a witness or a suspect. So Derek got someone who worked with kids to take their statement. But then…

“So how do you know Derek?”

“That’s his name?” Rhiannon asked. “I only know what he looks like.”

Melissa breathed out with impatience. “Yes, but from where ?”

Rhiannon swallowed hard. “Mom…cheated on Dad. He didn’t tell you that?”

Melissa clamped a hand on the side mirror, suddenly dizzy. “Wait, you’re telling me…with Derek?”

Rhiannon nodded. “I saw them together. Not, you know, like that . But the way they were together. And Mom’s face when she saw that I saw. I knew. And then she admitted it. It turned into a huge fight at home, between Mom and Dad. But I was the only one who ever saw his face.”

Melissa’s mind raced. No wonder Thomas had never told her—an affair gave him a motive to have murdered Rose. Or…

“What happened after your mom admitted the affair?”

“She broke it off,” Rhiannon said. “But then he kept coming around.”

“Derek did?”

“Like I said, I didn’t know his name. But yeah.

I saw him parked in a car down the street from our house a couple times.

Spying on us or something. And once, when I was out with Mom at the store, he came up to her.

Grabbed her by the arm, said they needed to talk.

I thought probably they had started up again. But…”

“But what?”

“She was afraid of him. Mom was. Pulled away and told him to leave her alone. There were red marks on her arm afterward. From his fingers.”

Melissa backed away from the car door, literally reeling.

In that moment, her body needed to move, to keep up with her racing thoughts.

She looped away from Rhiannon’s window, then turned and saw the prison once more, looming across the road like an accusation.

She’d made a terrible mistake. Part of her wanted to rush back over there, take back everything she’d said to Thomas—of course she’d marry him, of course she knew— knew— he was innocent.

Derek. The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office may have fired him, but he must still have had friends there—friends who’d given him access to the evidence from the old case, the fibers collected from the back of Thomas’s car.

And he coordinated with the police department where Rose’s body was found, by his own admission.

He could have planted evidence. Could have framed Thomas.

She needed to tell someone. She fished her phone from her pocket and dialed the first number she could think of.

“Kelli,” Melissa said when she answered. “Where is Derek?”

“I haven’t seen him yet today,” Kelli said. “But he’s coming over to the house in a few minutes. He was going to give me an update on the case.”

Melissa’s heart sped up in her chest. “Are you in the house alone?”

“I am,” Kelli said. “My husband and the boys like to get out of town and go hunting most Saturdays in the fall. It’s deer season. They just left.”

Melissa glanced back at Rhiannon, who was watching her, listening to everything she said.

She heard Melissa say Kelli’s name when she answered the phone, knew who she was talking to.

The girl’s eyes sharpened, and she started the car, threw it into reverse.

Melissa ran toward her, but it was too late—she’d backed down the street.

Then she put the car in drive and turned around Melissa’s car, rocketed onto the two-lane road without even looking for oncoming traffic.

“What’s going on over there?” Kelli asked.

“It’s nothing,” Melissa said. “Look, you have to get out of the house.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s Derek. Kelli, you can’t trust him.”

“Derek? I’ve been working with him on this for years.”

“No,” Melissa said. “He’s been lying to you. This whole time. He’s been lying to everybody. From the beginning, he’s been trying to frame Thomas.”

Kelli sighed. “Melissa, I thought you were finally coming around on this. Thomas is guilty.”

“Kelli, you have to listen to me,” Melissa said. “Derek and Rose had an affair. They got caught. And when she broke it off, he didn’t like it. He kept following her.”

Kelli was silent on the other side of the line, slow to understand. “Rose hinted there might be someone. Once. But I don’t see—”

“It’s the stalker theory,” Melissa said. “Remember I said we should be taking it seriously? Derek didn’t get fired because he failed to find the stalker. He was the stalker.”