Page 94 of The Tenant
A sudden certainty comes to me—that’s her plan. She is going to murder Whitney in my home so there will be no doubt about what I’ve done. But now I’ve taken a trip to New Jersey and put the kibosh on her plans.
Or have I?
If Krista assumes I’m going to eat the cookies either way—which is a pretty good bet considering my weakness for her snickerdoodles—she might decide to kill Whitney anyway. After all, the suicide note is in my pocket.
I’ve got to call the police.
I take my phone out of my pocket. I start to dial 911, but before I reach the third digit, I hear the story in my head and realize how ridiculous and convoluted it sounds. Nobody is going to take me seriously if I tell them the whole story. I’m even having trouble wrapping my head around it. They’ll have me committed before they believe it. Or worse—they’ll think I made it up to take suspicion off myself for Zimmerly’s murder.
I’ve got to talk to Krista. If she knows I’m alive and threw up the cookies, maybe she won’t do anything stupid.
Maybe.
I select Krista’s number—the first on my list of contacts, because I call her more than anyone else I know. The phone rings on the other line, again and again. She’s not picking up.
This is Krista… Leave a message!
I clear my throat. “Hey, uh, Krista? It’s Blake. Look, I’m… I’m in Telmont because… Well, you know why. And I’ve been… I talked to Whitney’s mother—I mean,yourmother—and I… I just… Can you please call me back? Please, Krista? I need to talk to you. I still… I just want to see you. I’m so sorry about everything, and… Look, I’m driving back to the city now and…just wait for me. Please.”
It’s a long, rambling message, and by the time I finish speaking, I wish I hadn’t left a message at all. Krista might be the woman I love, but I need to remember that she tried to kill me. She wants me dead.
I type a text message that’s a little more succinct:
Call me.
I check my watch. If I leave now, I’ll be back in the city by about seven, depending on traffic. I’ll be going in the reverse direction of traffic, so hopefully the highway won’t be a parking lot. Maybe I can stop anything bad from happening.
A voice in the back of my head tells me that I should call the police right now. Even if they think it’s a wild story, they might still send a patrol car over.
But Whitney is rarely home before ten or eleven, and I’ll be back in the city in two hours. I can make it back in time to stop anything bad from happening.
63
KRISTA
As promised,Amanda is home by seven.
She’s very prompt. She’s also clean and gives us rent on time, and she’s relatively quiet. She is, in many ways, the perfect tenant.
And I hate her with every fiber of my being.
Amanda is dressed in her usual blue jeans and T-shirt from the diner, and the vague scent of grilled beef still clings to her. Aside from that dark red lipstick I gave her, which she tried once and said wasn’t her style, she never wears any makeup. If she dolled herself up, she would be just as gorgeous as Stacie was, but she chooses not to do that.
Although to be fair, Stacie wasn’t very pretty at the end. I sliced up her face pretty good before ending it all. After about forty minutes, she was begging me to kill her. So really, it was an act of mercy.
Amanda is surprised to see me in the living room. “I didn’t realize you were already here.”
“Well, I’ve still got the key.”
“True.” She plops down on the sofa, letting her head fall back against the cushions. “I’m just glad it wasn’t Blake. He’s been so impossible lately. What an asshole.”
I feel a surge of irritation. Blake is not an asshole. He’s a decent guy—one of the few I’ve met. Okay, he did cheat on me, and I did try to kill him. I’m still going to kill him. But still. She doesn’t have the right to talk about him like that. She hardly knows him.
I sit down beside her on the sofa. “He’s not so bad.”
Amanda rolls her head to the side to look at me. “What are you talking about? You just broke up with him.”
“I know, but…” I’m not sure how to articulate what I want to say, and I’m not sure I want to say it to her. None of this is any of her business anyway. “So did you look at any apartments?”
