Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

“What’s up?” Tuesday spun her chair away from her computer and propped her bare feet on a pile of binders.

“Okay, so. This morning we finally processed the auction bids, at least on the items we were able to get to before, you know.” She laughed. “I still can’t believe it. I mean, a dude fucking died. He died.”

“Worst. Event. Ever,” Tuesday said.

“I can hear my performance review now: ‘So Trish, you’ve had a great year, except for how you ran literally the worst event in development history.’”

“You’re looking at this wrong,” Tuesday said. “What if the dead guy left us money in his will?”

“You’re terrible,” Trish said. “Anyway, so – you were standing next to that guy when he threw fifty K on the New Kids?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was Nathaniel Arches. I think I filled out the paperwork right. It was crazy right after, because he bid and then the guy – died – but I asked him. I remember, Archie—”

“Nickname basis already?”

“We had a moment. Or two or three.” Tuesday picked at her fingernail. “I asked him if he meant it, did he honestly want to bid fifty thousand dollars for the chance to chest-bump Donnie Wahlberg, and he said yes.” He’d actually said – absently, stunned as everyone else in the room – Sure, who wouldn’t. “I told him we’d bill him.”

“That’s interesting. Because we just called his office, and they wouldn’t pay.”

Tuesday stilled. “What?” she said.

“I spoke to his secretary and she said he wasn’t even there. At the event, I mean. I got the feeling he was there in the office and just didn’t want to talk to me.”

Tuesday leaned forward, squaring her feet on the carpet.

“You there?” asked Trish.

“Yeah, I’m here. What – what a flake.” Tuesday turned back toward her desk, lined with her carefully indexed and color-coded binders: new prospects, old prospects, research and database policies and procedures. Information – data, facts – you could trust. Once you found it, it stayed put. It didn’t charm you or mislead you or make you laugh despite yourself. She knew better than to trust people. She rubbed out the not what I expected note she’d written in her mental file on Arches, Nathaniel – good thing she’d used a mental pencil – and replaced it with basically exactly what I expected.

“What a dick,” Tuesday said.

“That’s what I was afraid of.” She heard a whoosh of air that could only be Trish sighing heavily. “Do you remember who the other bidders were? The two fighting over it?”

“Sorry. I was too far away to see.”

“Screw it. I’m going to take the tickets for myself. You want to come?” Trish laughed. “You know, I’m like the only woman my age who wasn’t a New Kids fan. The irony, right?”

“I wasn’t either,” said Tuesday. “They were too—”

“Adorable,” Trish said. “God, they were so cute I could puke. I skipped right past cute and went straight to Johnny Depp, do not pass Go. And the Diet Coke guy, that commercial where he takes off his shirt?”

“I’m learning a lot about you right now, Trish,” said Tuesday. “I think you mean Lucky Vanous.”

“You are a human Google. I love it.” Trish cleared her throat. “Thanks for nothing. I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything more from our rich dick. Unless …”

“Unless what?” Here it came. The no-business-asking-for ask.

“If you had a moment or two or three with him, do you think you’d get any further on the phone?”

“Trish. No.”

“Can’t hurt to ask!” said Trish. “Thought you might not mind a reason to reach out and touch him.”

“You’re better than that, Trish. Or at least you’re capable of making better jokes.”

“C’mon, it’s for a good cause.” She laughed. “I’m just kidding.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You’re right, I’m not. K, gotta go, let me know if you change your mi—” And she hung up midword, presumably because another crisis was cresting in her inbox like a horrible wave.

Tuesday set her phone back in its cradle.

She hated that she felt bruised, but she did. Bruised by a grotesquely wealthy stranger who owed her nothing, and to whom she owed even less. She’d just – recognized him. No, that wasn’t quite it. Yes, she’d recognized the rich man she’d researched, but there was something about him that her research hadn’t seen but her gut had.

There was more dirt to dig up.

She stood and stretched. It was the low part of the afternoon, post lunch, with nothing to look forward to but the end of the day. Her fellow researchers were either away from their cubes at meetings or buckled down with their headphones on. She flexed her feet. She could get away with not wearing shoes because the prospect research department was tucked back in a weird little makeshift office, all by itself, adjacent to the first-floor lobby of a corporate office building. The main development office was up on eight. Research had been up on eight too, once upon a time, but the office kept growing – it was still growing, though at a much slower pace since the market seized in oh-seven – and Mo, looking out for her team of professional introverts, practically sprained her shoulder raising her hand when operations asked which team would be willing to move to the first floor.

It felt more like a clubhouse than an office, surrounded on two sides with huge tinted windows looking out on the little park in front, the Verizon building next door, the entrance to the Bowdoin T station, and the parade of tourists and students and homeless and smokers and the occasional period-costumed Betsy Ross or Ben Franklin on their way to nearby Faneuil Hall. The office had a propensity to flood in the winter when the pipes froze. It definitely hadn’t been designed for its current purpose, but it was snug and functional enough, and best of all, nobody came to visit. Ever.

She kicked her slippers free from the jumble of shoes under her desk and stepped into them. They were plush, fuzzy, and leopard-print, her spoils from last year’s research team Yankee swap; wearing them felt like nestling her feet inside stuffed animals. She shuffled over to the kitchenette and filled the electric kettle.

She dumped a packet of cocoa mix in a paper cup.

It took only two minutes for the kettle to boil.

But by the time she padded back to her desk, she had five new Outlook emails, three more in her Gmail inbox, and her Facebook wall appeared to be one post, the same, shared about ten times. Her bag was buzzing like a pissed-off bee, her phone one long, continuous thrum.

Dex was calling, wanting her attention in the middle of the day.

A cool thump filled her throat where her pulse usually sat.

“Dex!” she said, her voice a cough. “What’s wrong? Why are you calling me?”

“Read your email,” he said. There was a long pause. “I was planning to say that and hang up,” he said.

“But you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t. Even for the sake of drama. Because did you see it? Did you see it yet? Like, how can it be real? Is it really a real thing? Do you think? It’s wild. It’s wild. It’s some Indiana Jones bullshit and I LOVE IT.”

“I have – no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh my God, READ YOUR EMAIL.”

She sat down and clicked open Dex’s contribution to her personal inbox.

“You’re still there, aren’t you,” she murmured.

“Read faster,” he said. Then he dropped his voice. “This call is coming from inside the internet,” he growled.

“Stop distracting me.” Dex’s email – subject line: WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK – consisted of about fifty exclamation points and a link to an article from the Boston Globe. Tuesday clicked.

“Oh – it’s his obituary. Pryce’s obituary.”

“READ. IT.” Dex coughed again. “You’re not reading fast en—”

Tuesday hung up on him.

She loved obituaries. Even before she’d taken a professional interest – she consulted obituaries for research all the time – she had loved them. They reminded her of Abby Hobbes. The two of them used to read the obits every weekend, until their fingers were black with newspaper ink. It was Abby’s habit originally, and she’d shared it with Tuesday as easily as passing her the Sunday comics. “New ghosts this week,” she’d say. They’d each pick a favorite, someone they’d try, later with Abby’s Ouija board, to contact. Tuesday made her selections based on the kindred-tingle she’d get reading some small detail – how much they loved the movies, a strange hobby they had, a meandering career path – that triggered a realization of regret: she’d just missed her chance to know them. And she had; no matter how many new ghosts she and Abby tried to talk to, none of them ever talked back.

Abby never got her own obituary. Plenty of other articles in the paper, but no obit.

Vincent Pryce’s was in a class all by itself.

It was preceded by a headline – VINCENT A. PRYCE, BILLIONAIRE ECCENTRIC, PENS OWN OBITUARY – and a brief explanatory lede:

Larger-than-life Bostonian Vincent A. Pryce died on Tuesday night at the Four Seasons Hotel, during a fundraising event for Boston General Hospital. His death is not being treated as suspicious. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe received a request to print the following death notice. Pryce was a frequent contributor to the Globe’s public opinion pages, always by mail and always manually typed. Around the Globe, he was known for his passion for the arts, his wild fancies, and his fastidious attention to AP Style.

Given the unprecedented nature of his death and the spirit of his life, the editorial board has decided to honor Mr. Pryce’s final request.

And honor Pryce’s executors, Tuesday thought, and the possibility that Pryce left the paper a little something in his estate. She knew Pryce had a history of underwriting Boston institutions with financial woes, and the Globe had been teetering for years. She scrolled down past a photo of Pryce. He was wearing a respectable black suit and tie, but something about the way he held his shoulders, the gleam in his eye, the cackle that was surely at the back of his throat, made Tuesday think he was always wearing an opera cape, even when he wasn’t.

It seemed an exhausting way to perform one’s life.

The obit was a scanned image of two typewritten columns.

I AM DEAD.

You may think me mad to say such a thing. And you are most likely right, or at least not intractably wrong. I was mad when I was alive, so why should I expect death to grant me sanity?

My name was Vincent A. Pryce. I was born. I lived. I traveled the world, seeking and collecting rare and fantastic objects, strange treasures with powers I daren’t describe for fear of being thought even madder. Now I have arrived at death’s doormat with a full heart and full pockets. I regret the latter. Work remains to be done. Death prevents me from doing it myself.

And so I turn to you.

Yes, you: you human, reading this obituary. You are cordially invited to attend my funeral masque, to be held on Boston Common at six o’clock in the evening on the third Friday of October. Costumes are required. Save the date; formal invitation to follow.

You are also cordially invited to play a game. I have devised a quest. An adventure of intellect, intuition and imagination that begins now and will culminate on the night of my funeral. You and everyone you know are invited to play.

Is it mad to bestow my legacy on a stranger? On someone I have never met, in this life or presumably the next – though having not yet gone to that other life, at the time of this writing, I cannot say for sure whether my heirs will possess the ability to travel betwixt both. If it be madness, then indeed I am mad, for to the worthy players who dare and who dream, I shall share a portion of my great fortune.

For my fortune is great. No one person can possibly possess it all, and to the degree that I have attempted to do so over my finite years, I regret the time wasted. Of this game there will be no prize won if many do not succeed.

I have already told you where to begin. Listen for the beating of the city’s hideous heart.

I am survived by dearest Lila and by all of you. Live as well and as long as you can.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

She called Dex.

“This is amazing,” she said.

“I can’t believe you hung up on me.”

“This is amazing.”

“I know,” said Dex. “It’s blowing my mind. It’s blowing the mind of everyone in my office. Of everyone in Boston. It’s blowing the whole freaking internet’s mind. It’s—”

“Did he say anything to you that night? Anything that might – make this make sense?”

“Yes.” Dex’s voice was short. “He said X marks the spot.”

“What about his wife?”

“I don’t know, Tuesday,” he squeaked. “She was maybe a little too upset watching her husband die to, like, tell me Marion Ravenwood has the headpiece to the staff of Ra or whatever.”

That brought a moment of silence.

“Sorry to drag down the mood,” Dex said.

“No, you’re right.” She took a sip of too-hot cocoa and scalded the tip of her tongue. “You’re right. This is serious. Sad. I wonder if he was sick. Physically ill, but he had time to creatively settle his affairs.”

“You’re the one with the access to medical records, hospital girl.”

“It’s so … Spielbergian. He died and left some kind of treasure hunt. I know he’s wealthy, but is he – this wealthy? What kind of fortune is he talking—” She tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder and began to Google furiously: Vincent Pryce treasure. Pryce treasure hunt. Pryce Boston. “Holy crap. He owns the Castellated Abbey. Of course he does.”

“What’s the – cast – what now?”

“It’s the most expensive house on Nantucket. It’s a freaking castle.” Her brain leaped: I bet he knows the family Arches. She typed “Pryce Nantucket Arches” and was rewarded with an entire page of cached articles from the Nantucket News.

They were – had been – next-door neighbors. Or as next-door as possible when you both own serious beachfront acreage, and as neighborly as possible when you hate each other. “Arches Files Injunction Against Neighbor’s Castle, Citing ‘Turret Height’ Code Violation.” “Pryce Submits Zoning Request for Cannon; Neighborhood Tensions Escalate.”

She could have clapped. This was the kind of dug-up research diamond that made turning all that earth worth it.

“I’ve gotta go research this guy and figure out if he’s for real. If this hunt is for – real.”

“Attagirl!” said Dex. “Like tossing a whole bucket of chum in the water.”

“Are you calling me a shark?”

“I’m calling you Jaws. Text me when you solve it.”

There was no response.

“Tues,” Dex said, “I can hear your heavy breathing. I’m going to hang up now. Happy hunting.”

There was still no response. Her brain was already five clicks deep into Wikipedia.

Tuesday had always been spooky. Even before Abby Hobbes moved next door when they were both twelve and Tuesday’s horror movie literacy shot through the roof, the youngest Mooney had a reputation. While her older brother, Oliver, did everything in his power to distance himself from their townie-weirdo parents – wearing a tie for fun, printing out business cards on their ink-jet that read OLIVER P. MOONEY, STUDENT, YOUNG ADULT – Tuesday wore fake plastic fangs to school every day. She loved to play witch: flying around the playground on an imaginary broom, casting spells on unsuspecting teachers, and keeping track of the names of dozens of black cat familiars. Some kids were into it, though she usually lost them at the burning-at-the-stake-while-hurling-defiant-invectives-at-your-accusers stage of the game. When she was in fourth grade, her teacher warned her parents that their daughter was dangerously morbid.

“They think you’re unhealthily fixated on death,” her father told her later. Her mother had made a beeline for the box of wine in the fridge. “I told them America is unhealthily fixated on death in absentia. America pretends we’re all gonna live forever. That everything is a sunny Coke commercial, that this grandiose experiment of a nation isn’t built on blood and bones and broken bodies. Moonie, you look the dark in the face and still you dance. You are healthily fixated on death.”

It was the most grown-up compliment her father had ever paid her.

She didn’t have friends, really. Before Abby, other kids hadn’t seemed worth the effort. She had her dog, a mutt named Giles Corey, who was too dumb to be a familiar but super-cute. She had her parents, and her parents had the shop – Mooney’s Miscellany, which sold games and souvenirs on Essex Street, snug in Salem’s touristy heart. She had her brother, who was wicked uptight but would at least play Monopoly with her. Most of all, she had books: she had Bunnicula and Bruce Coville and Susan Cooper and John Bellairs and William Sleator and Joan Aiken; later, she had all Stephen King, all the time. She had bedraggled collections of ghost stories she took out of the library again and again, and, yes, one collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. “The Cask of Amontillado” gave her a nightmare. She could think of no death more horrifying, more mortifying, degrading, or dreadful, than to be bricked up alive in a cellar while wearing a clown suit.

Tuesday hated – hated – clowns.

But she had always loved a sick thrill. Any thrill, really, but the sick ones – the ones that gave her vertigo, that raised her pulse and her gorge, that made her realize there was an awful lot of darkness beyond her own flickering flame – made her feel the most alive. It was why she found horror movies so comforting. Her adult life had turned out to be a series of patterns and routines. She knew what to expect of a given day, but that didn’t always mean life was particularly interesting, or that she was particularly fulfilled, or that she knew what the point was, other than moving from one space to the next. At least when a guy with a butcher knife is after you, when a werewolf is loose or a poltergeist is messing with your furniture and your head, you know what you’re fighting for.

So she got it. She got why this guy – this Vincent Pryce with a Y – would go nuts over occult junk. Over Poe. Would spend his life and his money collecting manuscripts and letters, rare bits and bobs from the author’s own sad, melodramatic, and substance-addled life, and a whole castle’s worth of funky crypto-junk. His “collection of haunted matter” was replete with mermaid remains, yeti print casts, spell books and charms, and, he claimed, “more than ten thousand haunted artifacts – objects housing the spirits of the departed,” including paintings, photographs, jewelry, pipes, slippers, watches, aviator goggles, typewriters, paperweights, one toaster, and a pince-nez that once belonged to Lizzie Borden, and presumably contained her forty-whacked stepmother and/or her forty-one-whacked father.

She clicked from article to article on the web. He’d been profiled in Town & Country, Mental Floss, Architectural Digest. He’d made his billions as the founder and sole owner of the Vincent Mint, which sold commemorative collectible coins and plates, movie reproductions, games, and other tchotchkes by direct mail: Neil Armstrong on a spoon. Lady Liberty struck in high relief on a solid-gold medallion. A Monopoly set with mother-of-pearl inlays on the board and fourteen-karat-gold pieces. If she’d been researching him for the hospital, she would have based her assessment of his net worth on real estate (the Castellated Abbey on Nantucket was worth thirty million alone) and his history of philanthropy; he had a personal foundation that distributed millions annually to performing and visual art and literature programs at public schools across the country.

But since she was researching him for herself, she focused on the haunted collection. That was what made him tick, and she was sure that’s what would be at the heart of this quest, and its prize. He certainly had the wealth and the inclination to give away a monetary prize, which could be even greater than his known assets would suggest – he vocally and vociferously distrusted banks and the stock market (“thieves and swindlers, all!”), so his cash was probably all in gold. Probably bricked up in a basement vault next to the amontillado. But still, that wasn’t what he valued.

Money alone – that wouldn’t be the prize. That wasn’t what his legacy would be.

“This isn’t that crazy,” she murmured to her computer. A lawyer could probably treat this – scavenger hunt? game? – as a contingent bequest of a portion of the larger estate. Pryce was leaving assets, defined however loosely, to someone, but specifying that someone by conditional deed and not by name. A lawyer could help him set everything up legally, and practically, too; if there were physical clues hidden around the city, she doubted Pryce had planted them all. She checked the open record they had for him in the development database, made by another researcher long before her time. No lawyer was listed under his contacts, just his wife.

Tuesday tapped the end of her pen against her teeth.

This could be real. It was bonkers, sure, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t also legally plausible.

She minimized the database window and Pryce reappeared before her on the open web tab, smiling out of the photo that accompanied his Mental Floss profile. He was wearing a bowler and peering through Lizzie Borden’s pince-nez at the photographer with a terrific grin. I would have liked you, she thought. I would have liked you a lot, and I only just missed you.

Pryce had been spooky, too. He had been plumbing the world for madness, perversity, and sensation. But also: possibility, strangeness. In searching the darkness, he was chasing the mysteries of life. Now he was passing the search along, handing it off like a baton.

She envied him a little. She’d chased plenty of things in her life – grades, her own phone line, diplomas, sex, the city, jobs, apartments, new jobs, better jobs, better sex, alcohol, different jobs, different apartments – but somewhere around thirty, she had looked around and realized she’d caught the one thing, all her life, she’d been searching for the hardest: a life on her own terms. For the past three years, she hadn’t moved. She was paying her rent and her bills, chipping away at her student loans. She hung out with Dex sometimes, she tutored her neighbor Dorry, she saw her parents and her brother and sister-in-law and her niece every few weeks for dinner. It wasn’t a bad life, not in the least. Tuesday was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising – though maybe it shouldn’t have been – that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable.

Tuesday was bored.

And now she—

She wanted to raise her hand.

She wanted that baton.

3

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

For Dorry Bones, Thursday nights were Tuesday nights.

Tuesday was her neighbor. Tuesday was the coolest f—ing person Dorry had ever met.

Two years ago, after Dorry’s mother died and her father had to sell the house and they moved into the apartment, Dorry had started seeing a tall, pale woman who wore only black. Black T-shirts. Black sweaters. Black pants and sneakers and jeans that were technically blue but so dark they looked black. Her hair was the color of black coffee. She appeared and disappeared and reappeared again: Turning her key in a mailbox. Holding the front door. Leaving the laundry room. Once, in her pajamas – also black, dotted with tiny skulls – on the front lawn after the building’s smoke alarm went off at two in the morning. The woman in black came and went and smiled a small smile at Dorry but never spoke.