"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

late, per Preston’s instruction. Get the clients looking around, get them interested,
get them antsy.
She’d thought it smart then. Only later did she realize that the manipulation
occurred long before she arrived on the scene.
Most of the people she met were young marrieds or professors about to take
their first assignment. She never thought it strange that none of them were locals.
She’d never worked as a rental agent before; she didn’t realize that in most rental
agencies, especially in a college town, ninety-five percent of the clients already lived
here and were simply looking to upgrade.
She was happy to show these wonderful people the small rental homes,
walking them through the empty rooms, describing how the place would look with a
couch over there and a bed over there and the perfect table just below that window.
People loved her and they trusted her. Most of them never came back to the
office, instead filling out an application right then and there, writing a check for the
security deposit to get the process started. Preston had been so very smart—his
rental houses were cheaper than the rest, easier to get into. He didn’t add first and
last month’s rent to the security deposit. He demanded just enough to seem
legitimate.
We have to trust them from the start, he’d said to Fala, and that was what she
said to the clients. We trust you. We’re going to be in this together for the long
haul.
She was better than Preston expected. She’d rented all two hundred units that
he had scattered throughout the city in less than two weeks. She was a natural-born
saleswoman with a true interest in people, and she worked as hard as she could to
place the right renters with the right house.
When she’d finished, she asked Preston what the next stage was, and he’d
smiled at her. That crooked, crooked smile.
Now we manage, he said.
That last week, she’d stayed in the office, filing all those filled-out applications
in the new drawer, first by client’s name, then by property address. All the other
filing drawers were locked, but because she was so new, she thought nothing of that,
either.
That last morning, she’d been the first one in the office, just as usual. She’d
put on the coffee, tuned the radio to NPR, and started answering the phones while
she waited for Reggie. The first call was strange: an hysterical woman wanting to
make sure she had the right address.
Fala had been warned not to give information over the phone—that was
Reggie’s job—so she promised to have Reggie call back.
But Reggie didn’t show, and neither did Preston, and by noon, every call had
an angry person on the other end, demanding addresses, demanding keys,
demanding money back. Finally, Fala turned off all the phones, let the service handle
the crisis, and headed to the nearest address.
It was also her favorite, a tiny one-bedroom on the edge of campus, with a
view of the nearby lake. A small U-Haul van was parked against the curb, the
passenger door open, and a woman sitting forlornly on the front steps. When Fala
got out of her car, the woman ran to her.
“You gave me the wrong address,” the woman said.
But Fala hadn’t given her the wrong address. Fala remembered her; this
woman had rented this house, and was supposed to move in on this day. But the
house had furniture inside now, and an upset man who claimed he owned the place.