Page 65 of The Tenant
“I’m sorry, Mr.…”
It takes me a second to recall the fake name I came up with. “Sanders.”
“Mr. Sanders,” she corrects herself. “I don’t want to spread rumors. And it was a long time ago.”
“She has excellent references.” That’s actually true. I personally talked to Whitney’s boss at the diner as well as a friend who said she was a former roommate, and they both raved about her.I have never met a nicer or more responsible person, her boss told me.
“Oh, I’m sure,” the woman says. “Whitney was always very good at getting people to say what she wanted them to say.”
“How do you even remember her? It was so long ago.”
“I couldneverforget what Whitney did. Believe me.”
“So…um…” I squirm on the sofa. “What exactly did Whitney do? Her background check was clean.”
“Well, it would be,” the woman acknowledges. “Whitney was very good at keeping her nose clean. I can send you the transcript, and you’ll see that her grades are excellent. She was exceptionally smart.”
“But?”
“She was manipulative,” she says in a low voice. “She was one of those girls who were always surrounded by friends, but you could tell none of them weretruefriends. And if anyone did anything she didn’t like, she made it her business to wreck their lives.”
“Wreck their lives?”
“Well, this is all conjecture, Mr. Sanders.” She suddenly sounds reluctant to say any more. “I don’t want to start spreading rumors about her. Maybe she’s changed.”
On the contrary, this woman seems like shelovesspreading rumors. I just have to get her to keep talking.
“This is all confidential,” I reassure her. “But this is an important position, and I need to make sure she is the right candidate.”
“Oh! I see.”
“So if there’s any information I should know, I’d appreciate hearing it. You would be doing me a great service.”
“Yes, I understand.” She lowers her voice even further so that I have to strain to hear her. “Look, there were a lot of stories about things Whitney did when she was younger, but I never witnessed any of it myself. I never saw what she was capable of until there was a mess with her boyfriend during her senior year.”
“Her boyfriend?”
“His name was Jordan Gallo,” she says. “Nice enough kid. Football player. He was dating Whitney for about a year. And then, apparently, he cheated on her with another girl—you know how boys are. It was the usual high school drama you see a million times. They broke up, and Whitney made it her mission in life to destroy him.”
“Oh.” That doesn’t sound so bad. Like she said, it sounds like typical high school drama. I’m surprised this woman would even remember it fifteen years later.
“Mr. Sanders, Jordan Gallo jumped off the roof of the school.”
I freeze. “What?”
“Shetormentedhim,” she whispers into the phone. “I remember seeing him a couple of days before he killed himself, and he looked terrible. Like there was a ghost haunting him.”
“What did she do to torment him?”
“I only heard the rumors. I’m just the school secretary.” Her whisper is barely audible, and I need to press the phone close to my ear. “But right after the breakup, he got busted for cheating when an upcoming exam was found in his backpack, even though he swore he had no idea how it got there. He didn’t get expelled, but he was kicked off the football team. Football was everything to him, and he was banking on a scholarship. Which, of course, didn’t happen.” She pauses, as if caught in the memory. “And then there was the time Jordan opened his locker and found it crawling with insects.” I can almost hear her shudder through the phone.
The story of what happened to Jordan Gallo is different from mine yet eerily familiar.
“But that’s not all,” she adds. “Even though Jordan was acting strangely before his death, his parents insisted that he never would have killed himself.”
“What did they think happened?”
“Apparently, Jordan and Whitney used to go up to the roof together to be alone,” she says. “His parents insisted that she pushed him and made it look like a suicide.”
