Page 6 of Stay Away from Him

You idiot.

That was Melissa’s first thought when Lawrence told her that Thomas Danver, the man she had been flirting with all night, possibly murdered his wife.

Nice work, Melissa. You sure know how to pick ’em.

Her cheeks flamed, and she wanted to sink into the floorboards, let them swallow her whole. Until she realized that she really shouldn’t have been beating herself up about this. That she wasn’t the only one to blame here.

“Wait a second,” she said, shooting a glare at Lawrence.

“Are you telling me you invited an accused murderer to a dinner party at your house? And that you just sat by and waggled your eyebrows at me while I spent all night basically throwing myself at him?” Her anger gained momentum as she thought about everything that had happened that night, without Lawrence or anyone else saying so much as a word of warning.

Sitting next to Thomas at the end of the table, brushing elbows, letting him pour his honeyed words into her ear.

Then being alone downstairs with him, letting him meet—

Oh God . Bradley. Her son . The poor kid had only just escaped the orbit of his emotionally abusive dad. Now she’d introduced him to a literal murderer. She’d brought a killer into Bradley’s bedroom , let him see her boy in his race car bed frame.

“Lawrence,” she said, struggling to speak through the sudden panicked nausea that rose to the back of her throat, “he met Bradley . My son , Lawrence. Tell me you didn’t let a murderer come into the same building as my son. He’s all I’ve got left.”

Lawrence grabbed her by the forearm, and she shot him the hardest, sharpest glare she could muster. But he held fast to her and didn’t flinch away from her angry gaze.

“Honey, calm down. You know I’d never do that to you, right?”

Melissa pulled away, and Lawrence loosened his grip enough to let her break free. “I don’t know. I thought so.”

“Melissa,” Lawrence said. “I’m hurt. When you came to me and told me you had to get out of that marriage, I told you that you could stay here as long as you want. I told you this would be a safe place for you and Bradley, to heal and figure out what comes next. And I meant that. Okay?”

“So how do you explain this?”

“Thomas was only accused of killing Rose,” Lawrence said. “He didn’t do it.”

Melissa bit back a bitter laugh. “Oh, what a comfort. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? He didn’t do it. Perfect. All is forgiven.”

Now Lawrence was the one who looked angry, and Melissa felt a little stab of guilt.

Maybe she’d gone too far. She was the outsider here, the one who’d just moved to town.

Lawrence knew Thomas better than she did—he must have, or he and Toby wouldn’t have invited him into their home.

Maybe she should try to hear Lawrence out.

She took a breath, held it, then blew it through pursed lips.

“I’m serious, Melissa,” Lawrence said. “The whole thing was so unfair. Anyone who actually knows Thomas can tell you he’s not a murderer.

He’s one of the kindest men, the most respected men, in the neighborhood.

He’s a pediatrician, for God’s sake! He dedicates his whole career to helping kids.

And they had the audacity to accuse him of murder? Ridiculous.”

Respectable men can be evil too. The rejoinder was on the tip of Melissa’s tongue, but she bit it back.

She’d resolved to be quiet, to listen. That didn’t mean she couldn’t think it, though.

Respectable men can be evil. Some pastors and priests turned out to be serial sexual abusers; some cops were also killers.

Some accountants embezzled money; some investors committed financial fraud.

Ted Bundy’s neighbors all thought he was a nice, quiet man.

There was no limit to what a cloak of respectability could hide.

Who was to say an admired pediatrician couldn’t also be a wife-killer?

“He’s also a great dad, and a great husband,” Lawrence said. Then he hesitated, realizing what he’d just said. “Well, he was a great husband, I guess. Not that Rose exactly made it easy.”

“What does that mean?” Melissa asked. You were supposed to speak well of murder victims, of dead women—not to imply that they were complicated in any way. “How did she not make it easy on Thomas?”

“I loved Rose, I did,” Lawrence insisted. “She was beautiful, and wonderful in her own way. But she had problems. She was not a happy person.”

Not a happy person. Melissa ran the words through her head, trying to decode what they meant. Lawrence seemed to be backing away, speaking in euphemisms. Mental illness? Substance abuse? Suicidal thoughts, maybe even an attempt? She thought about prodding further, but Lawrence had already moved on.

“They had their ups and downs, but Thomas was a saint through the whole thing. He was the rock of that family. Everyone could see it—he was the one who was keeping them from falling apart. So when the police came after him, after all he’d done for Rose, while he and the girls were still grieving , and with so little evidence… ”

Lawrence trailed off, practically sputtering with anger as he remembered.

“They didn’t have much evidence against him?

” Melissa asked. She was starting to feel a little better—the more Lawrence told her, the more she began to think that maybe she wasn’t cursed, wasn’t a fool after all.

Perhaps she wasn’t so wrong in seeing something in Thomas that night, not so wrong to flirt with him a little.

The picture Lawrence was painting—not of a deceptive person whose outward respectability masked evil, but of a genuinely good man wrongly accused—was appealing to her. She wanted it to be true.

“Melissa, it was ridiculous,” Lawrence said. “They didn’t even have a body.”

Now Melissa actually gasped. She wasn’t exactly a legal expert, but she’d consumed enough true crime podcasts, streamed enough murder shows on Netflix, that she knew it was unusual, some might say even irresponsible , to pursue a murder prosecution without a corpse.

She was beginning to understand Lawrence’s anger, to feel it with him on Thomas’s behalf, an inner objection to the injustice of it all: accusing a man of murder, ruining his reputation and his life without even being able to prove that a murder had happened .

“What originally happened was, Rose just disappeared one day,” Lawrence said, snapping his fingers in the air.

“Nobody knows where she went, she’s not answering her calls, no signs of foul play, she just left.

Thomas spends maybe a day or so looking for her, talking to this person or that person, he drives up to this cabin they have up north, but she’s not there either, and so he finally breaks down and calls the cops, reports her missing. ”

“So it’s a missing persons case?”

“Yeah, to start. And it goes on the news and everything, her picture’s everywhere, they’re asking for anyone who’s got information that could lead to her discovery to come forward, there’s search parties walking through the woods and the fields nearby shouting her name, candlelight vigils.

The whole routine that happens when someone goes missing. ”

“Right.”

“But then, it starts to seem like the cops aren’t looking for her very hard. They’re spending more time looking at Thomas, actually. Searching his house, bringing him in for questioning multiple times. And then eventually they declare Rose dead— presumed dead—and charge Thomas with murder.”

“What did they have on him?”

Lawrence scoffed, letting out an angry puff of breath. “ Nothing , Melissa. Just a mess of circumstantial evidence, rumor, conjecture. It was lazy police work. A woman goes missing, you don’t have any leads—so just arrest the husband.”

“That can’t be. There must have been something . Otherwise, why would the case have gone to trial? Did anything come out there?”

Lawrence shook his head. “The prosecution never made their case against Thomas. They were in the middle of jury selection when the charges were dropped.”

Melissa’s mind ran ahead of Lawrence’s story. The prosecutor must have found some new evidence—something that exonerated Thomas.

“The cops messed up the investigation big-time,” Lawrence said.

“It turns out, someone had been stalking Rose, threatening her before her disappearance. Rose had even filed a complaint before she disappeared, but the cops didn’t do anything about it—and after she went missing, they didn’t follow up on the stalker either.

From the beginning, they were totally focused on Thomas as their only suspect. ”

“Who’s the stalker?”

“Nobody knows,” Lawrence said. “There was no name in the police report that was filed after Rose reported it. Rose might not have known who was following her. She was a beautiful woman—I always figured it was some lonely, unhinged guy who saw her and became obsessed, started following her around.”

Melissa shivered at the chilling plausibility of it. This was one of her own fears—one of the many that women lived with every single day: that a man, any man, could simply see her and decide that her life, her body , was his. His to take, his to destroy.

“Thomas’s lawyer announced all this to the press. He’d discovered the original police report and everything. It was a huge story, a huge scandal for the sheriff’s department and the county attorney. The next day, it was all over. The charges were gone.”

“It looked bad,” Melissa said, putting it together, looking between Lawrence and Toby. “The cops and the prosecutor—they just wanted it all to go away.”

“That’s right.”

“And then?”

Lawrence shrugged. “And then nothing.”

“Nothing? For three years?”

“Nothing. No arrests, no breaks in the case. No hints about who the stalker might have been. Thomas will ask the cops sometimes if there’s anything new, any leads. They only say it’s an active investigation, they can’t share anything. I think technically it’s classified as a cold case by now.”