Page 46 of Stay Away from Him

“I’m going to confront him.”

“Kelli, are you nuts?”

Melissa was driving, speeding on the interstate to get to Kelli’s house as quickly as she could. The phone was on speaker.

“I can’t believe Derek lied to me all this time.” She sounded angry, offended—not as scared as Melissa thought she should be.

“Kelli, do not tell Derek that you know what I just told you. Who knows what he would do when he’s cornered?”

There was a pause. “He’s at the door. I’m going to say something, Melissa. I have to.”

The call ended, and Melissa loosed a scream into the close air of the car.

Kelli Walker could be such a fool. Overconfident that she could find Rose’s killer, she couldn’t let go of her moral crusader nature even when it put her in danger.

She needed to get out of her meeting with Derek, not let on that she knew anything.

Then, when she was safe, Melissa and Kelli could make a plan to tell what they knew to the police, to the county prosecutor—to convince them it was Derek and not Thomas who killed Rose.

It took Melissa fifteen more minutes to get into Kelli’s neighborhood. She slid off the freeway, then drove to the address Kelli gave her. She pulled up in the driveway. Before she even got out of the car, she could sense that something was wrong.

The front door to Kelli’s house was wide open. It drifted on its hinges, giving the impression that someone had just come bursting out, but then Melissa realized—it was only the wind. Whoever ran out the front door and left it open was gone now.

Melissa’s heart pounded so hard she could hear it, a thrumming static roar in her ears. She paused outside her car, afraid to go in, steadying herself on the side mirror. And then she forced herself to walk forward, to take the steps up to the front stoop.

“Kelli?” Melissa called at the door. In answer, there was only silence.

Melissa walked inside, past a front entryway, skirting along a small, white-carpeted living room, and moved into the kitchen with its gleaming granite countertops and a broad center island with stools pressed up against the overhang.

It was Kelli’s feet Melissa saw first, jutting out past the island.

One foot was wearing a leather house shoe, but the other had only a gray sock, the shoe missing somewhere.

Then Melissa noticed the blood, a bulging pool of it, shiny and so dark red it verged into black.

Melissa drew her hands toward her mouth, a guttural sound emerging from deep in her throat.

She inched further around the island to see all of Kelli, keeping close to the wall.

A sob ripped from Melissa into the air when the rest of her came into view.

Sprawled out on her stomach, her neck turned to the side so her cheek lay on the blood-streaked tile, her eyes glassy, dead.

One hand lay daintily at her waist, palm up.

The other arm bent at the elbow and reaching past the crown of her head, as though grabbing for something.

“Oh my God.”

The voice came from behind Melissa. She whirled around and saw him standing in the doorway. Derek.

“What the hell happened here?” He stepped into the kitchen. Dread swelled in Melissa’s chest, and her eyes darted to the counter, to a butcher block. She seized the biggest handle and drew out the knife, brandished it flashing in the air in front of her.

“Stay away.”

Derek’s hands came up, like Melissa was a skittish animal. “Melissa, what do you think you’re doing? Put that down.”

She backed away from him. Her heel slipped in the slick of Kelli’s blood, but she kept her balance. “Stay back!” she yelled. “Don’t come another step.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can tell you’re scared. But Melissa, you’re not thinking clearly right now.”

Anger rose up in Melissa’s throat like bile. She was so sick of people telling her what she thought and didn’t think, what she knew and didn’t know. “That’s not true,” she spat. “I’m thinking clearly for the first time. I know exactly what happened here. You killed her.”

Derek’s eyes bulged in a look of shock so genuine-seeming Melissa had to remind herself how good a liar, how good a pretender, this man was. “Melissa, I just got here.”

“I know that’s not true,” Melissa said. “I was on the phone with Kelli when you knocked on the door.”

“It had to have been someone else,” Derek said.

“Who?”

He shook his head, his eyes seeming to go out of focus. He was panicking, Melissa was pretty sure, realizing he was caught—realizing Melissa had him trapped.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s true, I was supposed to meet her fifteen minutes ago. She might have assumed it was me at the door. But I was running late.”

“You’re a liar,” Melissa said. “You’ve been lying from the beginning. I know. I know about you and Rose. I know you had sex with her. And that after you got caught and she tried to break it off, you stalked her.”

Derek started moving into the kitchen again, slowly closing the distance between them. His hand held out, trying to calm Melissa.

“We did have sex. Once. Only once. And I did follow her after that. But I wasn’t stalking her.

I was worried about her. I could tell there was something not right at her home.

I thought Thomas might be abusing her somehow.

That she was in danger. And Melissa, I was right .

Don’t you see? With all the evidence against him? ”

“Then why did your bosses fire you?” Melissa asked. “Why did they drop the charges and then treat you like something they had to hide?”

Derek kept inching closer. He’d come around the end of the island now. Melissa had backed away from him so far that her shoulders were pressed against the far wall. There was nowhere for her to run.

“Rose did report a stalker,” Derek said.

“She reported me . I panicked, got into the reports and altered them so my name wasn’t on them, went to Rose and told her not to do that again.

I threatened her, scared her. And I’m ashamed of that.

But I didn’t kill her. And when she went missing, and I caught the case—Thomas didn’t recognize me.

Didn’t know my name or my face. He didn’t know it was me who Rose had cheated on him with.

One of his daughters had seen me, but I always assigned someone else to talk to them. ”

“You hid the truth,” Melissa said. “On purpose.”

He shook his head. “I wanted to run a clean case. To find Rose—or find the person who killed her. And I did. We brought charges against Thomas, and they were solid. But then his lawyer went digging, found the stalker police report. When my bosses looked, they could tell it had been doctored, and they figured out that I’d done it.

They only fired me to avoid the embarrassment. ”

“They should have investigated you ,” Melissa said. “ You’re the one who should be in prison right now.”

“You don’t think they tried?” Derek says. “For a while after they dropped the charges against Thomas, I was their prime suspect. But they couldn’t find anything to prove I killed Rose. Because I didn’t do it, Melissa. Thomas did.”

“No,” Melissa said, trying to sound more certain than she was. “Because you destroyed evidence. Covered your tracks. Framed Thomas.”

Derek had been inching ever closer as he spoke. He made a loop around Kelli’s body—careful, Melissa noticed, to keep the soles of his shoes out of her blood—and now he was inching toward her, looming larger with each step.

“Stop there,” she demanded. “I’ll cut you if you get any closer, you hear? I’ll do it.”

Derek shook his head, gave a thin smile that chilled Melissa to her marrow. “I don’t think you will. I don’t think you have the guts.”

The knife still held out, Melissa reached in her pocket for her phone, took it out, and tried to open the emergency keypad one-handed—but she fumbled it, and it clattered to the tile.

Both Derek and Melissa dove for the phone at the same time. In the scramble, Melissa caught one of Derek’s elbows in her face, and her vision went white for a split second, a dizzy explosion of stars. Blinded, she slashed out with the knife and heard Derek yell out.

“Fuck! You fucking bitch!”

Melissa blinked, her vision coming back, and she saw Derek scrabbling away. Blood was oozing from his cheek, from one of his hands. Melissa grabbed for the phone and finished dialing— 911 .

“911 what is your—”

“I’m being attacked!” she shouted out. “A man killed my friend and now he’s trying to kill me. His name is Derek Gordon.” Melissa gave the address, staring hard at Derek while she spoke, watching his eyes grow panicked. There was no escaping now, no covering up what he’d done.

“Is your attacker in the room with you right now?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

Derek stood and walked a few steps away, then began running. He was gone. Melissa was safe.

“Just send someone,” Melissa said. “Send someone right away.”

“Units are on their way, ma’am. Just stay with me.”

She leaned back against the wall, rested her temple against it. Everything in her went loose, all the tension of the confrontation with Derek seeming to exit her body at once. The fear she felt and had been holding back. It washed over her all at once, then broke, like a wave against a rocky shore.

Her shoulders began to quake. She let sobs wrack her body as the sound of sirens filled the air.