The Craigslist Murders by Brenda Cullerton

Author:Brenda Cullerton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781612190204
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-05-16T20:00:00+00:00

23

She was ten minutes late for her doctor’s appointment. The room was packed.

“I’m very sorry, Ms. Wolfe,” the nurse said when Charlotte checked in at reception. “But the doctor’s had an emergency.”

“How long is the wait?” Charlotte knew it was a dumb question.

The woman shrugged. “Why don’t you sit down, dear, and I’ll keep you posted,” she said, returning to the ringing phones.

Perched on the edge of a red upholstered chair, Charlotte drummed her fingers on the chrome armrests. As her eyes flickered over the row of vacant faces seated around the room, she realized that there was a bond she shared with these strangers. Like her, they had spent too many years waiting. Waiting for love, for dinner, for subways, for sleep. Waiting for bank loans and dentists, for sex, for success, even for dry cleaning.

Fidgeting restlessly in her chair, Charlotte sighed. Whoever had said that good things come to those who wait certainly didn’t live in New York, she thought. Age and death were the only two things that came to those who waited around in this town. She had been obsessed with death ever since those nights as a child when she’d tried to sing herself to sleep. That was why she’d chosen to block out the pain. To postpone the doctors. She didn’t want her fears confirmed. So why had she lied to Anna? Why wasn’t she here, making her laugh, quieting her fears? Casting her eyes down when she caught sight of the skeletal features of what had once been a staggeringly beautiful woman, Charlotte struggled against the urge to leave, to jump up and run for the door.

“Most of life is about loss and leaving,” Anna had said that night at the Temple Bar. It was the only time she had ever talked about her past; about the loss of her only child and her husband and about sharing her family’s country home in Padua with the Nazis during the Second World War.

“I was only eight years old,” she’d confided, spearing an olive with her toothpick. “And I sat in the back of a courtroom with my mother while a judge sentenced my father to five years in jail.”

“For what? Why?” Charlotte had whispered.

“For collaborating with the enemy,” Anna had fumed. “What collaborating? The Germans showed up and took over the house. My father was responsible for his own family and for every farmer on the estate.”

Tucking her green silk shirt tightly into her skirt, Anna’s words had become rushed. As if by hurrying them, she might distance herself from their meaning, their impact. “When my brother came back from the war, he lost a fortune at the casino in Venice,” she had said. “My father, the oldest brother, had to sign for him. For the honor of the family, you know? It was almost medieval then, the north, the Veneto. When my father died three years later in jail, I began to dream of going to America. And here I am,” she had added before ordering her third and last martini.

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