Page 93 of The Tenant
And now…
It will be hard to look at him lying on our shared bed, dead or unconscious, and knowing for sure that the future we dreamed of is gone forever.
Why did you cheat, Blake? Why couldn’t you have been a good guy like I thought you were? Why couldn’t you have meant it when you said you loved me and only me?
My heart is pounding as I walk into the house. I make a beeline for the sofa, bracing myself for what I might find there. But no. He’s not there. He must be upstairs, in bed.
I walk up the steps to the second floor, knowing that this is it. He will be lying in bed, very likely as dead as Elijah. I walk as slowly as I can, not wanting to see it. But then when I get to the bedroom…
He’s not here either.
Dammit. Where is he?
Maybe he really did go to the emergency room. I had been banking on the fact that he wouldn’t do that, but maybe I misjudged him. And if that’s the case, the jig is up. The doctors in the emergency room will surely know that he was poisoned, and it won’t be hard for them to put two and two together. Especially when they find that note I slipped into his pocket.
I take my phone out of my purse, trying to figure out my next move. Then I notice I have a missed call from him as well as a text message. I read the text, and then I listen to the message.
Okay.Interesting.
This might work out after all.
PARTIII
62
BLAKE
I throwup onto the sidewalk until my ribs hurt.
By the end, I’m dry heaving, but I don’t want to stop. Not until I’m sure that every trace of those cookies is out of me.
When I’m pretty sure my stomach is empty, I get to my feet unsteadily. I close my eyes, trying to remember exactly when I ate the cookies. It hasn’t even been an hour. How long does it take for something you eat to get into your bloodstream? I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve emptied my stomach, but it could be too late.
I feel awful, but mostly because I’ve been throwing up. Are my fingers tingling, or am I just imagining it? I can’t tell.
Mostly, I can’t keep my thoughts from racing. Krista—the woman I loved—is not who I thought she was. She is… Well, if the things her mother was saying are true, she’s a psychopath. She killed her boyfriend. She killed the girl her boyfriend was cheating with. She probably killed Mr. Zimmerly and Stacie.
Oh God, Stacie… It’s all my fault.
I take stock of my body. I feel…okay. I have a headache, and I’m mildly nauseous, but I can chalk that up to the fact that I’ve been throwing up for several minutes. I think I got all the poison out of my system before it started working, whatever it was.
Krista poisoned me. She tried tokillme.
I don’t quite understand what happened or who Whitney really is, but there is no doubt in my mind that Krista is the daughter of that woman I just met. Aside from the resemblance, everything sounded familiar. Telmont sounded familiar because Krista mentioned it before. And now that I think about it, she also mentioned once that she spent time in Braga, plus she loves that wine from Porto. That’s why it rang a bell for me. I’ve sure never been there.
Krista lied to me about her whole life. She claimed she was from Idaho and moved to the city with a friend after high school—a lie. I don’t know who that middle-aged woman we had dinner with was, the one who waxed nostalgic about Krista’s childhood. She clearly wasn’t her mother—another lie. She told the truth about her father having a heart attack, although she failed to tell me it was the stress of all the awful things she did that caused it.
Now what?
I think back to the suicide note Krista wrote on my behalf. The whole thing is horrifying, but there’s one sentence in particular that keeps tugging at me:
After all the lives I’ve taken, I can’t go on.
She clearly wants me to take the fall for the murders of Mr. Zimmerly and Stacie, but is that all? The note was so nonspecific. She’s not going to want the police to have any doubt about what I’ve done.
After all the lives I’ve taken…
She’s going to kill Whitney.
