The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [4]
“Craigslist,” she said, giving her wrist a shake.
“You’re kidding,” he replied, utterly dumbfounded. “It’s eighteen karat,” he spluttered. “And it’s solid. I can hear the clunk.”
“Don’t look so shocked,” Charlotte replied, slipping her arm through his. “It comes with quite a story, too.”
As Philip guided her, oh-so adroitly, toward their table, she fumed. So typical! Dismissing yet another world he knows nothing about. Craigslist wasn’t just some secondhand, online shopping bazaar. It was a compulsion; a vital, visceral connection to the city, a connection that was changing people’s lives. But what did Philip know of change? Like most men, he probably hated change. (Unless, of course, the change involved a new wife.)
He was beaming as he pulled out her chair. “Close enough to the dais for you, Charlotte?” Unfolding her napkin, she prepared to endure another profoundly shallow, short, conversation with her host. There was grit in the arugula.
“You have no idea,” Philip said as she rootled through the salad in search of a sun-dried tomato or a pignolia nut, “but new money is ruining, just ruining, my Anguilla! I mean, we may have to go to Lyford after Christmas.”
Appearing suitably aghast, Charlotte buttered a roll. Poor Philip. Forced to book a $40,000 week at one of the most luxurious clubs in the Caribbean. But it amused her, how he used the possessive pronoun when referring to Anguilla. As if he owned the entire island. When he turned to his left to chat up some magnificent young Russian, she smirked. A titaness of downtown real estate, Charlotte had recently heard that the girl had bought the biggest piece of beachfront property left on “his” Anguilla.
She was admiring the pale pink fat and flesh of her tuna—it was so silky, so light, it seemed to evaporate in her mouth—when the man on her left burped into his napkin. Eyes nailed to his plate, he flushed with embarrassment.
“Not exactly Bumble Bee, is it?” she said, rescuing him with her most ravishing smile. He couldn’t be a day over 23, she thought.
“No, I guess not.” He shifted his gaze from his plate to somewhere near her neck. “I’ve never tasted anything like it.”
“Forgive me. I haven’t introduced myself,” she said, sticking out her hand. “I’m Charlotte Wolfe.” They shook.
“And I’m Peter Winthrop. Assistant curator in Islamic art.”
Passing him a generous spoonful of her own tuna, she asked herself how an assistant curator had landed so close to the dais. “It’s tuna belly,” she added as the boy forked up another mouthful. “I have a friend who buys it on online from the Philippines. Sixty bucks a can, if you can imagine.”
His eyes bulged. She didn’t mention that Vicky used to have her cook pack it up in sandwiches for her kid’s school lunches.
He grinned. “Nothing’s too good for our trustees.” Pausing for a moment, he picked up a corner of the tablecloth as Charlotte looked at him, curiously.
“I’m not sneaking a look at your legs,” he explained. “It’s your slippers. Everybody loves them.”
“Ah! Two different colored slippers. It’s one of my signatures,” she winked.
While Peter polished off his extra portion of fish and fingerling potatoes, Charlotte crossed her ankles beneath the table and wondered how Vicky was doing in Aspen. Friendships, like marriages, took years to fall apart. She knew that. But Charlotte liked being precise. She had to be precise. The business of interior design depended as much on precision as it did on the imagination. Measuring the exact dimensions of everything from furniture to oddly-shaped windows, selecting the perfect tint of alabaster white marble from hundreds of samples at the Cararra quarry in Italy, mixing and matching from thousands of different woods, tiles, and shades of paints and fabric. This is why she wished that she could pinpoint, precisely,