The Craigslist Murders Read Free Page B

had a good guffaw over that one. She clicked on a posting from Queens for a couch.
    “Like new from the 17 th century.” The seller’s mother (recently “deseized”) had covered the couch in Saran Wrap. “So it never gets dirty.” Earlier, she’d stumbled on a couple of other bizarre listings, too. One for a “Beautiful Clear Body Bag” and the other for a door that belonged to “Van Go!”
    This is what had first attracted Charlotte to the List. Listening to all these voices, these stories that came from the hearts of the timid, the fearless, the rich, the poor, the misfits, the lying, the lonely. It was a kind of urban symphony. Like listening to the sounds of salsa, hip hop, jazz, and rock and roll that blared out from various cars lined up at red lights. At first, she’d stay up half the night, browsing and clicking, and e-mailing back and forth. It wasn’t just the compulsive hunt for “victims” that drove her. It was her relationship with the List itself. It seemed almost human, the way it called out to her.
    Then when the words became flesh; when she actually met the women who posted the listings, she grew even more addicted. Like those moments of intimacy shared bystrangers on a long distance train ride, they opened themselves up to her, confessing to everything from abortions to cheating on and stalking their husbands. She felt like a Peeping Tom—an emotional voyeur.
    She didn’t always kill. Far from it. Sometimes, Charlotte simply used the List to satisfy her curiosity. It was fascinating, the journey through other people’s homes. Especially when she was just a tourist; when it wasn’t for work. The young woman with the Shabby Chic couch, for instance. Her husband had left her and she’d sat, weeping, beneath a gilt-leafed mirror in a ten-room apartment on 68 th Street while Charlotte spring-tested the down pillows.
    As the girl abandoned herself to convulsive waves of sobbing, her shoulders shuddering, her nose all red and veiny, Charlotte had reached out, impulsively, to touch her hand.
There’s something almost voluptuous about her surrender
, she’d thought. Giving into grief was an extravagance—an extravagance that cost so little. And yet she knew so few who indulged in it. They took pills or got collagen shots, or shopped and jumped on a jet instead.
    This was the other thing she’d learned after entering the life of the List. Even if many of these women had been deserted by their spouses or lovers or fired from their jobs, Charlotte discovered that she envied them in their despair. Broke, desperate, and ditching their possessions, they were gripped by the terror of new beginnings.
    Years ago, every time she’d walked through the virgin stillness of a raw space, a space not yet born, she’d felt that same sweet terror, that exhilarating sense of expectation, of hope. For months, she’d carry the vision of its possibilitiesdeep down inside her, bringing it slowly to life, feeling it kick, as she did her sketches, saturating walls with bright splashes of vivid color and accumulating the objects that gave her interiors such intimacy and warmth. But those years were long gone.
    Charlotte’s phone vibrated.
Damn!
She’d lost all sense of time. She always did when she browsed through the List. It was 9:30. Maybe she’d come back after dinner. There hadn’t been a single posting from the Upper East Side, anyway. No one selling any of the high-end, logo’ed merchandise that made her eyes light up. Unloading expensive merchandise on Craigslist indicated a certain carelessness with money. The sort of carelessness that implied someone else had paid for it. Someone like a rich husband. Charlotte suddenly realized she was hungry.
    As she logged off and shut down the computer, the guy with the wooden plugs winked at her. After paying at the counter and replacing her credit card in her wallet, she thought, again, of those years long gone. Years when the future had beckoned her with all of