Page 38 of Stay Away from Him

“Stop,” Melissa said. “It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

She turned and took a moment to study him. She wondered if she could imagine him doing it—killing Rose. Stabbing her in his kitchen. Then trying to clean up the blood. Putting her body in his trunk, driving north to bury her where no one could find her. At first Melissa thought shecouldimagine it,couldbelieve it was true, and something in her recoiled from him, drew back in horror. Then she blinked slow, a split second of black before Thomas appeared again before her eyes, and suddenly it was unimaginable again. Unthinkable that this man standing before her could be a killer.

She sighed and reached for her phone in her pocket. She thumbed it open, tapped her way to Facebook, then showed him the photo. Held the screen out toward him, forcing him to look at it.

“What the fuck?”

“Take it,” Melissa said, pushing the phone in his face.

He took it from her hands, holding it gingerly by the sides. “This is us,” he said. “But who—oh God. Kelli. That fucking bitch.”

Melissa hated that word—bitch—but she grinned to hear him use it against Kelli Walker. She’d never met Kelli, never spoken to her in person, but since she’d learned Kelli existed there might not have been a single person in the world she hated more.

“Melissa,” Thomas said. “I’m so sorry. This is—it’s a total violation of privacy. It’s outrageous.”

“It gets worse,” Melissa said. “I’m pretty sure she broke into my apartment.”

Thomas’s jaw bulged, and he seemed to struggle for a moment with a wave of anger that tightened his whole body. Then he calmed and suggested they sit down. They found a bench to keep talking. Melissa told him about the note, then about getting tagged in the photo, and what she read on the Facebook page.

“So you read all about—well, I was going to say ‘the evidenceagainst me,’” Thomas said. “But it would be generous to call itevidence. How about ‘what they think they have on me’?”

“You’re saying there’s nothing to it?” Melissa said, unable to disguise the hopeful note in her voice.

“Melissa, you have to believe me—Kelli Walker is completely nuts.”

“She says she was Rose’s friend.”

Thomas scoffed. “That would be a generous description too. Rose and Kelli met up sometimes. But the friendship, if there was one, was much more on Kelli’s side than Rose’s. Rose never liked her. Honestly, she thought Kelli was stupid. But Rose was lonely. She hung out with Kelli only to have something to do. She tolerated her. But Kelli wasobsessedwith Rose. I don’t know why she got it in her head to hate me so much, but I honestly think she just wanted Rose all to herself. After Rose went missing, I thoughtKellimight have killed her. Maybe Rose tried to break off the friendship or something, and Kelli snapped.”

“Could she have been the stalker?” Melissa asked.

Thomas’s eyes sharpened, grew guarded. “You know about that?”

“I’ve heard some things.”

“Rose thought she was being watched,” Thomas said. “I never knew what to make of it. She’d sense presences in the house, swear that things were getting moved around in the bedroom or the living room. A chair was warm, like someone had just sat in it. A dead bird on the deck—had it broken its neck on the sliding door, or did someone kill it and put it there? Stuff like that. She had a paranoid streak. Shedidreport a stalker to the police about a week before she went missing. That much is true. She never told me about it. I had no idea it had gotten bad enough for her to call it in. But then, later, my lawyer found the police report.”

“So you never knew who it might be?” Melissa asked.

“No,” Thomas said. “Rose might not have even known. The police report didn’t include a name. I did think Kelli might be the stalker—maybe they had a falling out I didn’t know about, and she started following Rose, her obsession turning unhealthy. I told the cops they should look into her. But nothing ever came of it. Obviously, the cops didn’t arrest Kelli. They couldn’t even prove that anybody was stalking Rose at all. Meanwhile, Kelli’s got this whole Facebook army of bored housewives with nothing else in their lives but to harass me. And you.”

He handed the phone back to Melissa, face down so she wouldn’t have to look at the photo again—but she didn’t have to see it. She felt as though the image was seared into the back of her eyeballs.

She cleared her throat. “About the evidence,” she began. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like talking about this. You told me that last night—having to constantly defend yourself, how furious it makes you. And I get it. But—”

“Melissa, you have to believe me, it’snothing,” Thomas said. “It’s total bullshit. What, I bought a shovel and a tarp? I drove up north and was off the grid for a while? We’ve got a cabin up near Bemidji—it’s nice, I’ll take you sometime. I had some brush to clear. A fence post to fix. That’s what the tarp and shovel were for. As for not being traceable, I guess my phone went dead for a while. Is that a crime?”

“And the blood in the kitchen? The housecleaning you ordered?”

“Rose cut herself,” Thomas said. “Dicing carrots. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. It was a bad cut too—I had to rush her to the ER, her whole hand wrapped in a dish towel sopping red with blood. A ton ended on the floor. It was a horror show. That was months before she went missing. But blood sticks around, you know.”

“And the cleaning?”

Thomas sighed and shook his head, exasperated. “I didn’torder a cleaning. We had a cleaning service come once a week. I still do. All I did was email them and suggest that they might come by while I happened to be gone, up at the cabin. Asked them to give the kitchen a deep clean with bleach. Seemed like a good time, since no one was going to be around to smell it.”

“That’s the other thing,” Melissa said. “No one was going to be around? Why? You were going to the cabin, but what about Rose and the girls?”

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