The way I found out about the neighborhood Buy Nothing group was I was taking a walk when I saw a woman struggling to wheel a rusted-out metal barrel on a handcart around the side of her house.
“Use a hand?” I asked, but trotted over without waiting for a response because it was pretty clear that she needed the help – the barrel was starting to roll off the cart.
I caught it just in time, holding it steady on the cart as she wheeled it. It was heavier than I expected, heavier than it looked.
“Thanks,” she said, stopping at the edge of the driveway.
“What’s in this thing – rocks?”
I was joking but it turned out I wasn’t far off.
“Concrete,” she said. “I busted up an old patio and have all these concrete chunks.”
“I don’t think the county will take this,” I said, eyeing the barrel. The county has pretty strict rules on curbside pickup. Weight limits and whatnot.
“Oh, no, it’s not for the county. Someone from the neighborhood’s picking it up.”
Then she explained.
I guess they’re a thing, these Buy Nothing groups. Maybe you’ve heard of them. I hadn’t. They’re these groups, usually organized via the Evil Social Network, where neighbors within some defined geographic boundary post free stuff for others to take. Sort of like Craigslist but highly localized and more personal, in that the people doing the posting and taking all live close together.
“Someone wants this?” I said. “A barrel of broken concrete?”
“You’d be surprised what people post and what gets claimed. I’ve seen people put up leftovers. There was someone who had an aquarium and all his fish died and he posted his dead fish. Someone claimed them. I think for fertilizer or something.”
We talked a bit. The woman’s name was Marjorie. I’d noticed her before. Sometimes I ran around the neighborhood and passed her running the other way. She was fit, pretty, about my age, late twenties, early thirties. Usually if I saw someone my age in my neighborhood I saw them with kids.
It was a family neighborhood: suburban, trees, sidewalks, well-tended yards. I don’t have a family but aspire to have one. I grew up lonely in a rundown excuse for a house in the middle of nowhere, and dreamed of living in a tidy home in a tidy neighborhood, surrounded by other families with kids, going to cookouts, little league games, that sort of thing. So that’s the kind of place I was looking for when I bought my house. Marjorie, it turned out, was divorced, and living with her two kids, who went to the elementary school up the street. I told her it was nice to meet her and that I’d see her around. I hoped I would, and there was a decent chance. Besides running a couple times a week, I walk through the neighborhood almost every day, weather permitting. I work from home and it helps punctuate the routine.
After work that evening, I dusted off my Evil Social Network profile and joined the Buy Nothing group. Marjorie was right, people posted all kinds of weird stuff. Outdated calendars, used cosmetics, obsolete electronics. Incomplete puzzles, scraps of wrapping paper, empty pickle jars. Even weirder was that people claimed these things. I began following the group and its postings.
I knew a good number of people in the neighborhood, but only in a wave hi kind of way. I’m pretty outgoing, and quick to chat someone up, if given a chance, but there weren’t too many chances. So this was how I came to know my neighbors – by the unusual stuff they claimed in the Buy Nothing group.
Like why did Dale Mayberry need so many bungee cords, and did the reason have anything to do with the bag of marbles he also claimed? Or why did Lisa Springfield want a whole box of zip ties?
I’m not using real names, here. Protecting the innocent and all that. The point is that I began to understand personalities according to the placement of value where you might not expect it. The names – the real ones – became familiar to me, to the point where I began making associations with them, and with the little thumbnail pictures that appeared beside them.
Which is why I noticed, maybe six, nine months after joining the group, when half a dozen new users started participating all at once. Never as posters, always as claimants. I’d never seen the names before, but suddenly they were snatching up everything – without rhyme or reason, it seemed to me.
Expired cans of fruit, storm windows, someone’s old putter that had a kink in the middle of it.
I had no way of knowing that this was the initial indication of something terrible about to happen. That the wheels had been set in motion. I wonder, though, if things might’ve taken a slightly different course if I hadn’t been following the group’s activity so intently.
The first time I saw the man, I didn’t think much of it. I was on my daily walk, and saw him pick up a standing lamp from the end of someone’s driveway and load it into the trunk of his car. I’d seen the lamp listed on the Buy Nothing group, and seen it claimed by one of the new people. Let’s say the name was Joe Blank. I figured this was him. He was squat, stocky, bearded, with a headful of bushy hair. Nothing so remarkable about him. He drove away before I got close enough to wave hello.
A few days later, I was walking when I saw him again, this time in a different car, wearing a flat cap and glasses, loading a box of old barbecue tools into it. This time, I caught the man’s eye and waved. Without acknowledgement, he scuttled into his car and drove off. What was weird was that I was pretty sure I’d seen this box of stuff claimed by someone other than Joe Blank, by one of the other new people – we’ll call him Fred Fredericks.
I verified this when I got home. And now that I was looking, I noticed that neither the thumbnails of Joe Blank nor Fred Fredericks looked anything like the guy I’d seen.
In retrospect, this is where I should’ve minded my own business.
Instead, I began observing this guy. For the next couple of weeks, every time one of the new people claimed something on the Buy Nothing group, I went and scoped out the pickup. That is, every time that I knew where the pickup would be – which was most times.
See, between my months of participation in the group and my daily walks, I’d made enough associations between stuff I’d seen posted and stuff I’d seen set out at the end of driveways to link certain names with certain driveways. Maybe that sounds stalkery but it wasn’t like I’d done this on purpose; it just kind of happened.
Anyway, I started timing and routing my daily walks to observe this guy on his pickups. Sometimes he had a beard, sometimes he didn’t, sometimes he had a mustache, sometimes he was bald, sometimes he wore a hat, sometimes glasses – but it was always unmistakably him. He drove one of half a dozen cars.
Broken garden shears, a mounted deer head, a box of forsaken baby dolls.
I was a little surprised that nobody else in the group seemed to realize that these newly added “neighbors” had been claiming everything in recent weeks. Then again, other people probably weren’t following the group so closely; they didn’t use it, as I did, to foster a sense of neighborly connection. Which was kind of ironic, given that this neighborhood aspect was supposedly what distinguished a Buy Nothing group from classifieds or whatever other methods people use to unload junk.
More new people joined the group and began claiming things, and I suspected these too were the man. In the spirit of experiment, I decided to post some stuff to see who’d claim it. I’d posted things before, since joining the group, though I’d never claimed anything.
I went through my house. In the basement I found an extension cord I’d been meaning to replace. It was the long outdoor cord I used for my Christmas lights and over time the sheathing where the cord meets the plug had worn away, so that I’d had to wrap that spot in electrical tape. I posted it, pointing out this defect, and one of the new accounts claimed it. I set it in a box at the end of the driveway and later watched through the front window as the man came and picked it up.
A couple days later, I posted some painting equipment that I figured I wouldn’t need anytime soon: a brush, a roller, a roller tray. The man came for these, too, in a different car.
Finally I decided to talk to him. I looked around for something else to post, but the problem is that I don’t have a lot of stuff, and really nothing in the way of junk.
Except no, that wasn’t exactly true. Like everyone, I had a little bit of junk. In a drawer in my kitchen. The junk drawer.
So that’s what I posted: “Contents of my junk drawer. Not sure exactly what’s in there but I’ve been meaning to clean it out and whatever’s in there you can have.” I included a snapshot.
It was true that I’d been meaning to clean it out. I tipped it over a box and watched what fell out. The typical stuff: takeout menus, spent disposable lighters, paperclips, rubber bands, unimportant odds and ends.
One of the man’s accounts claimed it.
When I set the box at the end of the driveway, I set it a few steps away from the curb, to buy myself time. And I watched carefully out the window so that I’d see him pull up. Sure enough, a couple hours later he arrived in one of his cars. As he approached the box I dashed out to intercept him.
“Hi there!” I said.
He picked up the box and turned away.
“Hey, sorry,” I continued, grasping for something to say that would stop him. “I think I might’ve accidentally put something in there that I need to-“
But he was already in the car, slamming the door, and a moment later was disappearing down the street.
This confrontation aggravated me. It just wasn’t neighborly.
It was one thing to make a bunch of dummy accounts to score free junk in some neighborhood group. None of it was valuable, after all. Only it was another thing to be rude about it. What if I’d really forgotten something of value in that box?
Which is why I did what I did next. I shouldn’t have, but I was angry.
I’d already been tracking the man’s actions to some extent, albeit on foot. There was nothing to stop me, however, from tracking them more extensively, I just had to make myself mobile.
The next time I went to observe one of his pickups – a set of mismatched silverware – I did so from my car, parked inconspicuously down the street from the end of the driveway where I knew he’d arrive. As he pulled away, so did I.
That day, he drove to the library down the street. He stayed long enough that eventually I had to leave, having been away from my work long enough that my absence would be noticed.
The next time, after he picked up a rake with several missing tines, I followed him as he drove around. I kept waiting for him to end up somewhere but he never did, at least not before I had to curtail my pursuit.
Finally, I decided to see things through. One of his accounts claimed a half bag of rock salt like the kind you spread on sidewalks when it snows. I called out sick the rest of the day and hopped in my car, which I’d filled up with gas and stocked with water and snacks.
He picked up the salt and drove around. Drove and drove, as before. He stopped at a park and set off down one of the paved trails. I got out of my car and followed him, in case he was going to swap one car for another. But he didn’t. He led us back to the first lot and when he got back in his car I got back in mine, continuing to follow him as he set off again. Evening fell as he continued driving. Finally he stopped – right back where we’d started.
My neighborhood.
He parked by a playground before setting off down the sidewalk on foot. I parked down the block and followed. It was a pretty big neighborhood – maybe he lived here after all? But this began to seem less likely as he veered from the sidewalk and began walking through backyards.
Well, not exactly through them, more like between them, along property lines and easements. Several times he stopped to watch one house or another. All the windows were bright against the night, everything inside clearly visible, people going about their evening business, making dinner, watching TV, kids doing homework, the usual domestic stuff.
Eventually he stopped to watch a house where, through a downstairs sliding door, a woman was doing yoga in a pair of tight shorts and a sports bra. It took me a second to realize it was Marjorie, the woman who’d first turned me onto the Buy Nothing group.
We’d crossed paths a couple of times since then, stopping to chat for a moment. Of course, I say that like it was coincidence. The truth was, she kept to a pretty regular running schedule and route, and I’d planned these “accidental” encounters, hoping to build our acquaintance to the point that I might ask her to coffee.
I watched her stretch and move. Then I realized what I was doing and turned away, back to the man.
He was staring right at me.
Staring intently and it was like his eyes had closed the distance between us, so that he was right there in front of me, and he had a crooked kind of smirk on his face, an expression of contempt – and it was the expression I was fixated on, rather than what he was holding in one hand, when – without taking his eyes off me – he casually tossed whatever it was in the direction of the house.
A loud WHACK as something hit the back of the house and I turned toward it. A backyard floodlight flicking on. The sliding door opening and Marjorie stepping onto the deck, calling out, “Hello? Who’s there?”
Fortunately, I was beyond the floodlight’s reach, concealed behind some ornamental grasses. I turned to look at the man and he was gone. Vanished.
Crouching, I ran back the way I came, and didn’t stop running until I was back in my car and driving toward home.
I wondered how long the man had known I was following him. Maybe the entire time.
In any case, the close call cured me of my fixation on the guy. And, for that matter, on the Buy Nothing group. I stopped checking it so frequently, and on the occasions I did it seemed as if the man’s dummy accounts had stopped posting. Things returned to normal.
###
About a month later, summer began to tip into that time of year where the days are still warm but the nights are cool. It’s the time of year I’m always compelled to go camping. One time when I was a kid a school friend had invited me on a weekend camping trip with his family, and it was one of my happiest memories from a childhood that didn’t have a lot of them. On that trip, the weather had been just like this.
I went down to the basement and pulled out the big box of camping gear. I hauled it outside and did what I always do, preparing for a camping trip: I assembled the tent, to air it out, tested the propane stove, and shook the dust from the sleeping bag.
Then I went back inside to gather the rest of my supplies: fishing rod and tackle, utility knife, flashlight, and air mattress. The only thing I couldn’t find was my compass. I know that with smartphones a compass isn’t really necessary but this one was a gift I got from being an usher in a friend’s wedding, brushed nickel casing, engraved with my name, and I liked having an excuse to use it.
I was wondering where I might’ve put it when I looked out the window and noticed my tent was gone.
My first thought was it must’ve blown away, even though it wasn’t a windy day. But I checked backyards in both directions – no tent. It was strange. My neighborhood has very little crime. It’s the kind of place where you might forget to lock your door before you leave the house and it isn’t a big deal.
The next day, I was planning to go to the sporting goods store after work, to buy a new tent, when, on a whim, I decided to check the Buy Nothing group. I’d seen camping stuff listed from time to time and figured maybe I’d get lucky. And I did.
A post from earlier that day: “Camping supplies. Extra fuel for camp stove, tarp, tent, etc. Useable condition.”
I claimed it and got a direct message from the poster with the pickup address.
I knew the house. It was one of those houses that’s rundown but not so rundown that it seems abandoned. I seemed to recall seeing an elderly woman sitting at the porch, once. The poster had a woman’s name but no profile pic.
She asked if I’d mind retrieving the camping equipment directly from the backyard shed, rather than the end of the driveway, so she wouldn’t have to carry it out there. The shed, she wrote, would be unlocked, and the box of camping gear clearly labeled. I could go around back and help myself.
That afternoon, that’s what I did. The house wasn’t far, so I walked. The day had clouded over, bleaching everything a soft, bone white. Walking around the back of the house, I looked up at the house, preparing to wave if the woman appeared in the window, but she didn’t. The shed, all the way at the back of the property, was large, about ten by twelve, with double doors in front. It was in much worse repair than the house, its shingled siding coming loose in several places. I hoped it was at least watertight, so that the tent wouldn’t be mildewed.
And that was about the worst of my worries when I opened the shed.
When the door swung open, I stood there a minute, looking in. Then I turned around and vomited into the grass.
I turned back to look and felt my gorge begin to rise again before I looked away. I bent over with my hands on my knees and took a few deep breaths. Finally I managed to pull my phone from my pocket and call 911.
The first police officer arrived to find me there, still doubled over. She asked what the trouble was and all I could do was point over my shoulder in its direction.
When she looked inside the shed she let out a sound like someone had punched her in the stomach. Then she was on her radio, her voice minutely quavering beneath a sheen of bravado as she let loose with a stream of cop talk I couldn’t bring myself to follow. Soon the yard was a swarm of police and EMTs.
The police had a lot of questions. I didn’t blame them. I did too, but only the police did the asking.
I answered as best I could. I found myself explaining the nature of the Buy Nothing group. I’m not sure any of it made sense. Then again, what I’d seen, the horror inside the shed, didn’t make sense either. Not in the world as I’d known it up to that moment.
It was a woman. Which was only evident from her body, because her head was covered by that of a taxidermied deer. She was impaled upon a standing lamp, positioned in a vertical spread eagle, her arms fixed in position by extension cords that ran between her wrists and ankles and the sides of the otherwise empty shed. The long tines of a rake were stuck under her finger nails. A golf club – a putter – jutted out from her chest, where it had been thrust clean through from the other side. Do I have to go on?
Maybe I had better, if only for the purposes of inventory. Stuck in each thigh was one blade from a set of garden shears, and her torso was pierced all over with silverware and pieces of jagged glass, which stuck out at all angles. There was a large open wound in her gut, and the entrails issuing from it were clasped in the barbecue tongs discarded on the floor. The cavity had been filled with rock salt. Between its coarse crystals and all the silver and glass, the body glittered in the day’s bony light.
Oh, and there was blood. Lots of blood. It had run down her legs and was collected in a paint roller tray. The roller itself had apparently been used to swipe at the sides of the shed, giving it a hasty coat of sticky crimson. All around her, dangling from strings, were baby dolls, hung by their necks.
Of course, it’s not like I thought to deliberately catalogue all these details in the moments before I turned to puke. If I recall correctly, those moments were spent staring into the eyes of the deer, as if it might tell me what had happened. Its glassy eyes stared back at me. Something silver glinted in its mouth.
But the details didn’t have to be deliberately catalogued to remain with me. It didn’t take more than a glimpse for them to imprint themselves, so that I could see them forever afterwards in nightmares, or in idle moments when I least expected them. One by sickening one or all at once.
###
What all I said in response to the cops’ questions, I can’t remember. All I know is I talked and talked. There at the scene, then at the station. I recall asking who she was, the woman in the shed, and the police telling me they didn’t know, asking me was I sure I didn’t recognize her, which struck me as so ridiculous – the deer head, remember – that I actually laughed, though it was a hollow, stricken laugh. They gave me terrible coffee and drove me home.
I had trouble sleeping that night, for obvious reasons. Not only did I see the inside of the shed every time I closed my eyes, but I knew that he was out there somewhere, the man who did this. The man I’d seen collect all those various means of death and torture. I’d told the police everything I knew about him, only omitting the night when I’d followed him into Marjorie’s yard.
He’d set me up to find the woman – that much was clear. The house the shed belonged to, it was vacant, the family of the elderly woman I’d seen there having recently moved her to assisted living. The man had known I was looking for a tent, had almost certainly plucked mine from my backyard the other day. All night I went over it and over it. He’d been watching. Every creak in the house, I was sure it was him, coming for me.
I climbed out of bed as dawn broke, giving up on sleep to sit on the sofa and watch bad TV. Eventually I must’ve dozed, because the next thing I knew the sun was bright through the living room window and someone was knocking loudly at the door.
I shuffled over. “Police!” I heard. “Open up!” I heard. Or something to that effect.
Opening the door, I expected to see a detective or two. Instead I was greeted by whatever you call a bunch of police – a platoon? A herd? I was still half sleeping and trying to make sense of it when someone grabbed me and slapped handcuffs on me and pushed me across my lawn into the back of a squad car to sit and wait and watch.
They had a search warrant, for some reason. People in matching police department windbreakers flooded into my house. After a time, they came out with bags: little bags, big bags. A man and woman in plainclothes seemed to be in charge. Windbreakers came up to talk to them in various combinations. On the other side of the squad car from all this activity, my neighbors had begun to gather and gawk. They ended up having a front row seat when one of the plainclothes came over and told me the news.
I was under arrest. For murder.
The bags that police had been carrying out of my house? Filled, apparently, with materials that could be directly connected to those in the shed: stuffing pulled out from the deer head, the remainder of the bag of rock salt, shards of the same glass (from old storm windows) found in the victim’s torso, barbecue tools from the same set as the tongs that had been used to fish out the victim’s entrails, and so on. All of this discovered in my basement.
Presumably the man had planted them there while I’d been vomiting and talking to police beside the shed. The neighborhood being so safe, I hadn’t thought to lock the door when I’d gone to pick up the camping gear.
But why had the police searched my house in the first place?
Well, because they hadn’t followed up on what I’d told them about the Buy Nothing group, about the man and how he’d collected all the items found in the shed. They’d assumed the story to be something I made up to deflect suspicion from myself. Suspicion based on their analysis of the crime scene.
Because that glint of silver I’d noticed in the deer head’s mouth? My brushed-nickel compass. The one engraved with my name.
I guess it had been in the junk drawer.
Police had inferred some significance from the fact that it was found in the deer’s mouth, given that, on top of everything else, the victim had botulism poisoning.
Cans of food, if dented, bred the toxin, causing the cans to bulge. And it just so happened that dented cans of expired fruit with the telltale bulge were also found in my basement, along with everything else.
None of this held up, ultimately. I got a lawyer and the cops got around to investigating the Buy Nothing group. They saw all the dummy accounts claiming the materials in question. For a while, they contended that I’d created the accounts – all activity associated with them could be traced via IP addresses to public computers at nearby county libraries – but this possibility too was dismissed after they finally identified the victim.
She’d been reported as missing from a nice suburban neighborhood a few states away. A neighborhood where a similar case of torture and murder had taken place. The victim in that case? A woman from a nice suburban neighborhood in yet another state, which neighborhood, too, had seen the same kind of crime. And on like this, a daisy-chain of horror that federal investigators had known about for some time.
Detectives remained interested in me, albeit for different reasons. I was the first person, it seems, to ever get a good look at the killer. The first person, also, to be implicated by him the way I had been when he’d planted everything in my basement. The prevailing theory is that these facts are related, that he’d implicated me precisely because he knew I’d noticed him and what he was doing.
I think that’s true. He knew I’d been observing him, and began observing me. Which is why he’d led me, that night, to the yard behind Marjorie’s house: He’d seen me “accidentally” running into her around the neighborhood, had seen us chatting, and knew that I liked her.
Which is why I can’t help but feel guilty. Like maybe if I’d minded my own business it wouldn’t have happened – though I suppose it still would’ve, albeit to someone else. Because in the short time the police were focused on me and what was in my basement, Marjorie went missing.