TUESDAY MOONEY WORE BLACK
Kate Racculia

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Kate Racculia 2019

Cover design Micaela Alcaino @HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Kate Racculia asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008326951

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008326968

Version: 2019-09-04

Dedication

For all the people I’ve found

(and who have found me)

Epigraph

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn.

Billionaires, all of us.

—URSULA K. LE GUIN

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

2006

The Opened Tomb

2012

1. The Dead Man’s Scream

2. The Obituary

3. The Woman in Black

4. The City’s Hideous Heart

5. Bloody Marys

6. Hunch Drunk

7. Dead People

8. This Means Something

9. Library Voices

10. Takeout and Delivery

11. Much Worse

12. Caught Up

13. Death and the Neighbor

14. Games People Play

15. Dead Man’s Party

16. Interview with the Widow

17. This House is Falling Apart

18. More Than a Feeling

19. Heart on a String

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Kate Racculia

About the Publisher

Brookline

THE OPENED TOMB

The Tillerman house was dead. Over a century old, massive and stone, it lay slumped on its corner lot, exposed by the naked December trees and shrubs growing wildly over its corpse. It was ugly, neglected, and, despite its size, withered; a black hole of a house. If the real estate agent were the kind of person who ascribed personalities to properties – he was not – he would have said it was the loneliest house he had ever sold.

His instincts told him this would be a strange, quick sale, with a giant commission. When he’d told the owner that, out of the blue, they had a buyer for the Tillerman house, some guy named “R. Usher,” the owner said, after a long pause, “Don’t sell it for a penny less than listed.” But the agent was anxious to get this over with. He had been inside the Tillerman house once before, and he hadn’t forgotten how it felt.

A figure appeared on the sidewalk, rounding the corner up the street. The agent shielded his eyes against the white winter sun to get a better look. A man. Wearing a long black coat and a giant black hat, broad and furry, something a Cossack might wear against the Siberian winter. The real estate agent smiled to himself. Yes. This was exactly the buyer you wanted when you were trying to sell a haunted house.

“Hello, young man!” said the figure, waving, ten feet away now. “I assume you’re the young man I’m supposed to meet. You are standing, after all, in front of the house I’d like to purchase.” A bright red-and-purple-plaid scarf was looped around his neck, covering the lower half of his face. He pulled the scarf down with a red mitten to reveal a ridiculous curling white mustache. “Young man,” said the buyer, “allow me to introduce myself. Roderick Usher.” And he held out his hand.

The agent, while technically younger than the buyer, resented its being pointed out to him. He was years out of school, up and coming in Boston real estate, and, yes, selling this property for the listed price of $4.3 million would be a coup, but he wasn’t a young man. He was a man. He shook Mr. Usher’s hand and gestured to the property. “Shall we go inside?” he said, and pressed the quaver out of his voice.

Dead leaves crackled beneath their shoes as they walked under the portico and up the front steps. The lock to the Tillerman house was newly installed, but the key never wanted to work. The agent turned it to the left gently, then the right, then the left again. “What a beauty she is,” said Mr. Usher, his hands clasped behind his back, head tipped up to take in the carvings around the door, flowers reduced to geometric lines and patterns, a strange mishmash of Arts and Crafts, Nouveau and Deco, that didn’t jibe with what the agent knew about when it was built. It was almost as if the house had continued to build itself long after it was abandoned. “If she’s this lovely on the outside,” said Mr. Usher, “I can’t imagine what—”

The lock turned at last, and the agent pushed the door open.

The first thing that struck him was the smell. Of rot and garbage, of meat gone rancid, of animals that had been dying in the walls for decades. He pressed the back of his suit sleeve to his nose without thinking, then lowered it, eyes watering. The house had no electricity – when it was first built it did, but the wiring hadn’t been up to code since Woodrow Wilson was president – but it did have enormous ground-floor windows on one side of the great hall, which cast light throughout the first floor and down into the vestibule. It was enough to see by. It had been enough, on the agent’s previous showing with a buyer, for the buyer to take one look around and say, “Let’s get out of here now.”

Let’s get out of here now, said the agent’s brain.

“What a glorious – oh – oh my!” said Mr. Usher, and swept past him into the house. He took off his giant furry hat, clutched it in both hands at his chest, and spun back to the agent. Grinning. His front teeth were large and crooked. “My goodness, do you know what you have here? Can you feel it?”

He didn’t wait for the agent to answer, and charged up the steps, through the archway, and into the great hall.

The agent followed, slowly. His feet did not want to move. It was exactly what had happened to him the last time he entered the Tillerman house: his body did not want to be here. An uncontrollable part of his brain – his otherwise rational, adult brain – reacted to this place as though he were six years old. Six years old, and pissing himself on Halloween because his big brother, in a scuffed and stage-blood-spattered hockey mask, leapt out at him from the dark.

He cleared his throat. Took the steps one at a time. Until he was standing in the half-dusk of the great hall. Mr. Usher, who’d been dashing around the room, turned back to him.

“She died here,” he said. “Can you feel her?”

The agent managed something like a smile.

“Long, long ago, you came to Matilda Tillerman’s,” Mr. Usher continued, “she, the last surviving heir of all that Tillerman wealth – you came to her house to drink and to dance, to laugh and to talk, to be alive, together, in this glorious house. They all came here, were well met here, from every corner of this city, every nook and cranny. But something happened, nobody can say for sure what, and Matilda shut her doors. Shut out the entire world and made of her house a tomb.” He sighed and laid a hand gently on one of the columns supporting the upper gallery. “And a beautiful tomb it is.” Plaster flaked beneath his fingertips.

He tipped his head to the side. “Young man,” he said, “I’m going to buy this house. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, so you can stop looking so frightened. But I would ask a favor. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”

The agent, relieved to the point of tears that this showing was nearly over, would have permitted the buyer anything. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Marvelous.” Mr. Usher dropped his furry hat to the floor. It sent up a puff of ancient dust. “I have lived for a good long while. Enough to have borne the world,” he said. “And sometimes, the world is far too much for me. Too great. Too painful. Too lonely. I expect, if Ms. Tillerman will allow me to interpret her past actions, she may have felt the same. Is it selfish then, or self-preserving, to shut oneself away? At what point does one give up, so to speak, the ghost?”

The agent swallowed. He didn’t know what to say. No one had ever asked him a question like that before. It made him almost as uncomfortable as the house. It was too personal. It was too—

He had, once or twice, imagined it. How it would feel to say, to his bank account and his car and his condo and his girlfriend and his job, Go away. Leave me alone. So he could rest, and listen, and think, and maybe have a chance, one last chance, to remember what he’d been meaning to do before all this life he was living got started.

“I’m not sure,” he told Mr. Usher, “what to say.”

“An honest response,” Mr. Usher replied. “I appreciate that. I—”

A gust of frigid wind howled through the still-open door and lifted clouds of dust and spider webs from the walls and the floor. Delicate debris filled the air. The buyer coughed. Then the breeze caught the door and slammed it home with a crash.

The agent felt his entire body electrify. Mr. Usher jumped, and laughed.

Then: a second crash.

Smaller, closer, nearby in the house, off to the right. The agent’s body twitched violently and he doubled over, hands on kneecaps. He couldn’t stay here. This house was too much for him. He heard Mr. Usher walk across the great hall and pick something up off the floor and mutter to himself. Oh, you clever house, the agent thought he heard. What else are you hiding?

“Come on, dear boy,” said Mr. Usher, suddenly at his side, helping him upright and clapping him gently on the back. “It’s enough to frighten anyone, opening a tomb.” He smiled, the curls of his mustache lifting almost to his eyes. “Makes one feel a bit like Lord Carnarvon.”

The agent didn’t know who that was.

“Best hope there’s not a curse,” said Mr. Usher, walking back down the steps toward the door and the light, “for disturbing her.”

Boston

1
THE DEAD MAN’S SCREAM

The woman in black was alone.

It was five thirty-five on a warm Tuesday evening in October. She shuffled through the revolving door of the Four Seasons Hotel, her eyes sliding around the room, unable to stick to anything but cool marble, everything tasteful and gleaming under the recessed lighting. She caught the rich murmur of voices from mouths in other rooms. The hotel staff didn’t make eye contact. They knew she wasn’t checking in.

The event registration table was set up, as usual, on the far left of the lobby facing the elevator bank. It was already drawing men in suits like ants to a ham sandwich. WELCOME, proclaimed a foamcore poster on a small easel, TO THE 2012 BOSTON GENERAL HOSPITAL AUCTION FOR HOPE.

“Welcome to the Auction for Hope!” echoed a tiny blonde girl, wearing more makeup than the woman in black wore in a year, gesturing her closer. Her name was Britney. She was an administrative assistant in Boston General’s fundraising office and never remembered that the woman in black was her coworker. “You can check in here, and head up the stairs to your right for the hors d’oeuvres!” she chirped. “The program starts at seven in the ballroom.”

“Britney, hi,” said the woman, tapping her fingers against her chest. “Tuesday Mooney,” she said. “I work at BGH too. I’m volunteering tonight. I’m late.”

“Oh! Of course, I’m so sorry.” She waved Tuesday on, flapping her hands as though trying to clear the air of smoke. “The other volunteers got here a while ago. I didn’t realize anyone was – missing.” Britney’s teeth were very white. She still didn’t recognize Tuesday, and was, Tuesday could sense, vaguely concerned she was a random crazy off the street. Tuesday was five to ten years older than most of the other volunteers, who were generally single, young girls at their first or second jobs out of college, with energy and free time to burn. Tuesday was single but not as young. She was tall and broad, pale and dark-haired, and, yes, dressed all in black. Britney looked at her, not unkindly, as though she were something of a curiosity.

Tuesday couldn’t blame her. She was, to the office, an oddity. She didn’t leave her cube often, communicated almost entirely through email, didn’t socialize or mix with her coworkers. Or with anyone, really. Being alone made her better at her job. It’s easier to notice what’s important when you’re outside looking in.

She wasn’t upset that the other volunteers left without her either. She’d been distracted when they’d gone, talking with Mo – Maureen Coke, her boss, the only colleague with whom she nominally socialized. Mo was also a loner, bespectacled and quiet, unassuming in the deadliest of ways. People often forgot that Mo was in the room when they opened their mouths, which is how she came to know absolutely everything about everyone.

It was a silent skill Tuesday respected.

“Starting today, your mission as a prospect researcher,” Mo told Tuesday on her first day in the development office, three years ago, “is to pay attention to the details. To notice and gather facts. To interpret those facts so that you can make logical leaps. A prospect researcher is one part private detective, one part property assessor, one part gossip columnist, and one part witch.” Tuesday lifted her brows and Mo continued, “To the casual observer, what we do looks like magic.”

What Tuesday did was find things. Information. Connections. She researched and profiled people. Specifically rich people, grateful rich people, people whose lives had been saved or extended or peacefully concluded at the hospital (in that case, she researched their surviving relatives). The information she collected and analyzed helped the fundraisers in the office ask those rich, grateful people to donate tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars; she told them which buttons to push to make that ask compelling.

Whenever the events team threw charity galas or auctions, they asked for volunteers to help with registration, crowd control, VIP escorts, and the myriad other moving bits and pieces that went into making an event run smoothly. Tuesday always raised her hand. She spent forty hours a week digging through donors’ lives, trying to understand why and where and how they might be persuaded to give away their money. Thanks to the hospital’s databases and subscriptions, and all that gorgeous public information lying around on the internet, she knew where they lived, the addresses of their summer houses on the Cape, the theoretical value of their stocks, the other organizations their foundations supported, the names of their children, pets, yachts, doctors, and whether or not their doctor liked their jokes. But she had never met them. She knew them as well as anyone can be known from their digital fingerprints, but volunteering at events was her only opportunity to interact with them in person. To weigh her quantitative assessment of their facts and figures against a first impression in the flesh. Without that, she knew, it was too easy to jump to conclusions.

Plus, the food was usually pretty good.

Her stomach grumbled. Tuesday’s lateness meant she’d missed her comped volunteer meal, and the Four Seasons always had great volunteer meals. She’d worked at events where dinner was a handful of gummy bears and a snack-size pack of Goldfish crackers, but at the Seasons she’d missed gourmet cheesy pasta and bread and salad and tiny ice cream sandwiches, the kids’ table version of the spread hotel catering would put out later for the real guests.

“I guess you know the drill?” Britney gestured down the length of the registration table, at their mutual coworkers, who probably didn’t recognize her either. It was a good feeling, anonymity. “Just ask for their names and check them in on an iPad – there’s an extra one on the end, I think. Guests can write their own nametags.”

Tuesday took a seat behind registration at the farthest end, in front of the last abandoned iPad, and set her bag on the floor. Her feet pulsed with relief. She’d left her commuter shoes under her desk, and even walking the short distance from the cab to the hotel in heels – over Boston’s brick sidewalks – was a rookie mistake. She wasn’t even close to being a rookie, though. She was thirty-three, and she’d never been able to walk well in heels.

Her phone buzzed twice, then twice again. Then again. She felt a small bump of anxiety.

It would be Dex. Dex Howard, her coworker from another life – who could, incidentally, run in heels – and the only person who texted her.

Hey am I on the guest list?

I mean I should be on the list

Constantly.

I really really hope I’m on the list

Because I’m about to get dumped

Across town, at a dark, stupid bar he hated, Dex Howard waited to be proposed to.

Or dumped.

Dumped, definitely.

He sucked a huge gulp of whiskey and propped both elbows on the bar. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking like that: all or nothing, proposed to or dumped. He knew it was ridiculous and self-defeating. He wasn’t about to be anything, other than be met by his kind and affectionate boyfriend of four months – the longest he’d dated anyone consecutively, ever – who’d asked to meet him here right after work. Dex had no delusions. He only had coping mechanisms, and right now his coping mechanism wanted him to believe Patrick could potentially be proposing to him, when in his heart and his guts Dex knew – knew – he was getting dumped.

He checked his phone. No response from Tuesday (big surprise). No other texts. No emails. No calls (who called anyone anymore, but still). The bar was called The Bank, and it was in the heart of the financial district, which meant it was full of douchebags and assholes. Dex could, when the mood struck, be either or both. It was a land of finance bros: white guys with MBAs and short hair and, now that they were in their thirties, wedding rings and bellies that pulled their button-downs tight with a little pooch of fat over their waistbands. In the corner by the window there was a cluster of young ones, fresh out of school, still studying for their CPA exams, still able to drink like this every night and come in to work the next day, half alive. The boys were prettier than the girls. They were downing pints of something golden, maybe the first keg of Octoberfest.

His phone chimed. Tuesday.

I don’t see you on the list

He texted back, WHAT

Also you didn’t deny my previous text

which means on some level you must ALSO believe I am about to get dumped

She didn’t respond.

He’d known Tuesday for years. They’d met at work. She might be a do-gooder nonprofit stalker now, but Tuesday Mooney had started out, like him, as a temp in the marketing department at Cabot Assets, the oldest, most robust asset manager in Boston. At least that’s how it was described in the marketing materials, which Dex, like the innocent twentysomething he’d once been, took on faith for the first year of his employment. After one year – during which he became a full-time employee, with benefits, praise Jesus – he would have described it as the sloppiest, most disturbingly slapdash and hungover asset manager in Boston, though he had zero basis for comparison. He only knew that every Thursday night his coworkers went out to bars, and every Friday morning most of them came in late, looking like they wanted to die and occasionally wearing each other’s clothing.

But never Tuesday. She was the same on Friday morning as she was every other morning: acerbic and goth, never wearing anyone’s clothing but her own.

Like the last Cheerios in a bowl of milk, he would have naturally gravitated toward her, but the universe shoved them together. In an endless sea of tall cubes they were seated across from one another, at a dead end.

“Morning, Tuesday,” Dex would say, slinging his elbows over their partition. “Are we feeling robust today?”

“I’m really feeling the depth and breadth of this portfolio management team,” she’d deadpan, gesturing toward her computer monitor with her palms up. “The robustness is reflected in the ROI.”

“Oh, the ROI? I thought that was the EBITDA. Or was it the PYT?”

“Perhaps the PYT.” She’d squint. “Or the IOU, the NYC, the ABC BBD” – which Dex took as a cue to break into “Motownphilly.”

They’d both taken the job because they needed one, desperately, through a temp agency. Tuesday had something like a history BA, maybe an English minor. Dex had a degree in musical theater. He’d openly defied his parents to acquire it. In hindsight, it might have been his subconscious means of coming out to them without actually having to come out to them. His father flat-out laughed when Dex told him he’d be pursuing a theater degree. He’d thought it was a joke. His father was incapable of imagining any extension of his self – as a son surely was – spending time and money to be taught how to pretend, as though that would lead to any kind of career, which was surely the whole point of going to college. Dex, flush with his own inability to imagine a future for himself that didn’t include a literal spotlight, told him it was his life, his dream, his decision to make – not his father’s. To which his father said, “Fine. Go ahead and waste your own money,” and spat accusingly at Dex’s mother, I told you not to encourage him.

So Dex took himself to school, and took out his own loans, and studied and partied and graduated and promptly freaked the fuck out. He did not comprehend the weight of debt until it was pressing down on him. His theater school friends were either getting support from their parents or working weird jobs at all hours. Dex tried for a year to believe all you needed to be successful was fanatical self-belief, and failed. So he retreated to the safety of his minor in accounting. He had always liked numbers; music, after all, was math.

The job at Cabot was entry level and he figured it out; he was smart and worked hard and it was pretty shocking, to Dex, that that wasn’t the case for quite a few of the people he worked with. The whole place felt like high school all over again, and he was still the odd arty kid no one knew what to do with, only this time he was getting paid, which helped for a while.

And he had Tuesday. Who was just as out of place as he was.

So when Tuesday couldn’t stand it anymore, and jumped ship for a nonprofit, Dex jumped too. To Richmont, a smaller firm, a hedge fund with more assets under management than God, more go-getters, and better alcohol at parties. Dex hated his job at Cabot, sure, hated how buttoned down and conservative it was, how it smushed him into a cube with a computer and a tape dispenser he never used, how it had absolutely nothing to do with anything that he had once imagined for his future, or valued about himself. In finance, there was no professional advantage, for instance, to being an expressive belter. There were no head-pats for one’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular song lyrics, no kudos for one’s flawless application of stage makeup.

And Richmont likely wouldn’t be that different. But he was terrified of giving up the safety of his salary, which was now, he suspected, easily more than twice Tuesday’s. Because he had known her for so long, and in such a limited capacity – they were Drinks Friends, Karaoke Friends, Trivia Friends; he had never even seen the inside of her apartment – it wasn’t weird. But it could have been. Dex didn’t forget that.

He texted, see you can’t say it

you can’t even say ‘you won’t get dumped’ bc you know I’m going to get dumped and it will just be this horrible vortex of pain

Dex calm down, Tuesday replied.

Your level of concern is insufficient, he texted.

“Hello hello hello!” And Patrick was there, swinging the strap of his satchel over his head and taking his jacket off in the same fluid movement. Patrick did everything fluidly, gracefully, as though he never had to think about where and when and how to move his body; his feet were so firmly on the floor they may as well have been glued. He’d been trained as a dancer. Now he was a manager at a Starbucks. That was how they met, at the Starbucks in the lobby of the office building Dex sometimes cut through on his walk to work.

Patrick moved to peck him on the ridge of his cheekbone. “Wait, I forget,” he said. “Can we do this here? Oh fuck it,” and kissed him, because of course he was always going to. Patrick was younger than Dex, less fearful and careful of himself in the open. Dex was only slightly older, but they had grown up in different worlds.

“Hey you,” said Dex, pulling the chair beside him out from under the bar. “Welcome. Have a seat. How was work?”

Patrick rolled his neck on his shoulders. Dex watched. He had never seen such perfectly circular neck rolls. “Fine. You know, same old same old. Ground some beans, pulled some espresso, steamed some milk, almost fired Gary.”

“No.” Dex twisted in his seat, pushed his elbow on the bar, and propped his head on his hand. “Spill.”

Patrick ordered a whiskey and tonic from the bartender. He sat and shook out his shoulders like he was trying to rid himself of something unclean. Patrick had told Dex about Gary. Gary was older, in his mid-forties. Gary had lost his job a few years ago, not long after the crash – he’d done something in finance, which made the decision to work at a financial district Starbucks particularly masochistic – and was taking classes, trying to switch careers (thank God his wife still had her job, thank God the kids were years from college). Patrick liked Gary. He showed up on time and worked steadily and well, even if he wasn’t quite as fast as the twenty-year-olds who could squat sixteen times an hour to grab a gallon of milk from the low fridge.

“He stole,” said Patrick. His drink arrived and he downed it in a single gulp. “I caught him pocketing twenty dollars from the till today. I saw him. He looked around first, to make sure no one was watching, and he just didn’t see me. He popped open the till and took out a twenty, looked around again, slipped it into the front of his apron, and closed the register. I could not believe it. You know, when you see something happening in real life that you’ve only seen in movies? You think, for one second: Where am I? Is this real? Is this my real life?”

He motioned to the bartender for another drink.

“You didn’t fire him?” asked Dex.

“How could I?” said Patrick. “He’s stealing because he needs money. I confronted him, told him I saw what he did. He got all flushed and couldn’t look me in the eye and I honestly thought he was going to throw up all over the register, me, everything. I told him if he ever stole again, I would fire him. Today, this, was a mistake.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Mistakes have consequences, but they don’t have to break us. The next time it happens, I told him, I wouldn’t consider it a mistake.”

Dex thought, I would have fired that guy on the spot.

And then, I do not deserve the love of this entirely decent, generous grown-up.

Patrick slipped his glasses back on and leaned to the side, his arm over the back of the chair.

“You would’ve fired him on the spot,” he said, and grinned.

“What can I say,” said Dex. “I’m a mercenary.”

“You’re not a mercenary. I’m too soft.” Patrick tugged his ear. “I’m a sweet fluffy bunny in a land of wolves. I need to get meaner if I want to get anywhere.”

“Don’t ever,” Dex said. “It would break my heart if you got meaner.”

“Isn’t that what growing up is? Shedding the fat and the fluff until you’re this sleek, perfect beast, entirely the you you were meant to be?” Patrick was gesturing up and down in the space between them, and Dex realized, with a little jolt, that his boyfriend meant him. Patrick thought he, Poindexter Howard – who had dreamed, once, of painting his face, wearing someone else’s clothes, and belting show tunes on Broadway but instead became something called an Investment Marketing Manager, impeccably groomed in cool Gatsby shirts and Rolexes and shiny Gucci shoes, who belted nothing but his pants – was a sleek, perfect beast, entirely the him he was meant to be. Patrick actually thought Dex was himself. He was so young and so charming and so very wrong that Dex finally realized why he’d been so nervous when he first sat down.

“Patrick,” he said, “this isn’t working.”

Tuesday flicked her fingertip up and down, up and down, over the iPad, scrolling through the guest list. Which didn’t include Dex. Richmont, his firm, had bought six tickets for their employees, but he wasn’t one of them. Her stomach rumbled again. She was starving. They were allowed to grab hors d’oeuvres and drinks after the program ended, but that wouldn’t be for hours. At least she was sitting. At least she didn’t have to staff the cocktail party upstairs, wandering among the guests, answering questions, directing them to the VIP rooms or the bathrooms. All she had to do at registration was be pleasant to white guys in suits. It was a talent she’d honed daily all the years she worked in finance.

Dex once asked if her general standoffishness, her “aversion to team sports,” as he called it, came from having grown up in Salem, stewing in the cultural detritus of mass hysteria and (literal) witch-hunting. Salem’s natural vibe was part of it. What happened with Abby Hobbes was part of it too, though Dex didn’t know Abby Hobbes existed. Technically it was possible Dex knew the name Abigail Hobbes. He would have been a teenager in western Massachusetts when the coverage of Abby’s disappearance was at its height, bleeding beyond Salem, though her story never spread as far as it might have – if they’d found her body, if the missing girl had been upgraded to a dead girl. But Dex wouldn’t have had any reason to connect Abigail Hobbes directly to Tuesday. For Dex to know, at the time of her disappearance, that Abby had been her best friend, Tuesday would have had to tell him herself.

“You don’t trust people in groups,” Dex had said to her once, while they were out at McFly’s, one of his regular haunts for karaoke. Well, Dex was there for karaoke. Tuesday was there to drink, and pointedly not to participate. “Or people, really,” he continued. “But especially in groups.”

Tuesday had never thought of it in those terms, but yes, she didn’t trust people. People, in groups, alone – people disappointed you. That was what they did. They abandoned you. They didn’t believe you. They looked through you like you were made of smoke. You had your family, your work colleagues; you needed other humans around so you didn’t go completely feral, but the only person you could trust completely with yourself was yourself. That was, like … Basic Humanity 101.

“I mean … do you?” she said. “Does anyone? I thought that was the first rule: trust no one.”

“Should you be taking life advice from a poster in the basement of the FBI? On a television show?” Dex asked.

“That poster said I want to believe.”

Dex rolled his eyes. “I trust people more than you. But only a little.”

Tuesday hadn’t expected to stay in touch with Dex once they both quit Cabot. But Dex wouldn’t go away. He invited her to lunch. He invited her to the movies. They went to karaoke, even though Tuesday had a strict no-singing policy. They wiped the floor at pub trivia, the only two-person team that regularly took first place. She liked him; she had always appreciated his sense of humor and his intelligence. But he was needy. God, he could be outrageously needy. He texted. He chatted to her at work. In person, he required her approval of mundane choices he might have to make, her assurance that she had heard and understood him. Even the constant invitations, she suspected, had less to do with him wanting her company than not wanting to go into the world alone. Sometimes it felt like it didn’t matter who she was, so long as she was, an audience – any audience – granting him her attention.

She felt her phone buzzing in her bag, vibrating against her leg. Again. And again.

I did it, he texted.

IT’S DONE

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME he was so nice and sweet and young and flexible

She paused, her thumb over the screen. She’d liked Patrick. But this had been coming for a while. Tuesday could tell, from stories Dex told her, from watching the two of them together, that they had fundamentally different versions of reality, and fundamentally different ideas of each other. They were both playing parts.

He was too young, she texted back.

Pls don’t remind me, Dex texted, that I’m a decaying hag

You’re not a decaying hag, she replied.

Tuesday hated texting. Hated it, for its lack of nuance and tone. She always felt she was saying the wrong thing, or saying it the wrong way. But Dex was a natural, loquacious texter, and even by his standards, he’d been texting like mad lately. It meant he was anxious. And lonely. And now that he and Patrick were no longer together …

She felt a cold little stab, the looming threat of being needed.

Hey, he texted. Has anyone from Richmont not showed

She dutifully examined the list. Three of Richmont’s six tickets hadn’t been checked in.

Anders, Grouse, and Bannerman aren’t here yet, she texted.

UGH Grouse, said Dex.

I hate that guy

Why did GROUSE get an invite

He’s never going to show

I’m taking his place

Won’t your coworkers know you’re not him? said Tuesday.

He texted back, I’ll wear a clever disguise

Then: wait my whole life is a clever disguise

A flock of new suits appeared, swerved, headed toward the table. She tossed her phone back into her bag for good.

She’d worked event registrations often enough to intuit the kind of interaction she would have with an attendee the moment she made eye contact. Most people were nice. They smiled when you smiled, offered their names when asked. They were polite and looking forward to free Chardonnay and shrimp cocktail, comfortable with the implicit agreement one makes by RSVPing to a fundraiser: that at some point during the evening, you will be asked for money, and you will say yes.

Then there were people like this one. He came alone. He waited calmly, patiently, at the end of the line forming in front of the girl next to Tuesday, adjusting the cuffs on his suit, smoothing a dark tie between two fingers. The girl next to her was a Kelly – Kelly W.; there were at least three Kellys in the office. She was shy and not, like the other Kellys, blonde; her hair was dull brown, her nose small, her eyes large. Tuesday liked her. When she spoke, it was usually to make a joke so dry it made you cough. But she looked like a mouse, and Tuesday suspected that was why this particular guest was waiting in her line.

Tuesday had spotted him as soon as he crossed the lobby, moving with the confidence of someone who owns every cell of his body, every atom of the air around it, and every right in the world to be exactly who and where he is.

He was the kind of person who expects to be recognized, and likes to make a big deal when he isn’t.

Tuesday was in the middle of checking in a gaggle of attorneys when he reached the table in front of Kelly W.

“Welcome to the auction,” she said. “May I have your name?”

He had a face made for striking on coins: hair brushed back, broad, dark-eyed, and long-nosed. It was familiar to Tuesday. Because she read society and business columns. Because she was fond of a high forehead. And because she’d researched him.

“Bruce Wayne,” he said.

Kelly W., without missing a beat, said, “Might it be under Batman?”

He laughed. It made Tuesday like him a little, which was unexpected, given everything she already knew. His name was Nathaniel Allan Arches. He was the oldest child of Edgar Arches. The Edgar Arches, who had turned a lot of old Boston money into a hell of a lot of new Boston money by founding Arches Consolidated Enterprises (yes, its acronym – and general business reputation – was ACE), one of the largest private holding companies on the East Coast, if not the world. ACE had started small, with a chain of grocery stores on the Cape, then exploded in the early eighties, thanks to smart initial investments in tech companies spearheaded by MIT graduates. The company had had a hand in every major personal electronic device developed over the past thirty years, from Palm Pilots to smartphones. ACE had moved through the tech world like an amoeba, wrapping itself around industries and companies and swallowing them whole, the man at its helm a seemingly unstoppable, unbeatable force of nature.

And then Edgar Arches, the force of nature himself, went missing.

Five or six years ago, now. Tuesday had still been at Cabot when it happened. He disappeared over Labor Day weekend under odd and tragic circumstances. After a scene of public drunkenness during a charity wine tasting in Nantucket Harbor, Edgar Arches and his son retreated to the family yacht, Constancy. Nathaniel brought the yacht back the next morning – alone. His father and the yacht’s dinghy had vanished in the night. The dinghy eventually washed up on Madaket Beach, but there was no evidence of foul play – no blood, no fingerprints. There was no hint of corporate malfeasance or a scandal that would suggest a possible suicide. The family’s public statement was crafted for maximum plausible deniability: Nathaniel, the dutiful son, left his father safely sleeping it off on one of the yacht’s banquettes, and went to bed in his own stateroom. When he woke up the next morning, father and dinghy were simply AWOL. Nathaniel was questioned by the police, but not, as far as Tuesday knew, ever considered a suspect, because there wasn’t an obvious crime. There was no body, so there’d been no murder; Edgar Arches was a missing person. The news took that paucity of information and whipped it into a froth of supposition and gossip. What had happened on that boat, that night? What had happened to the richest of rich men, Edgar Arches – the man who had it all?

But what had he really had?

He’d had a wife, Constance, who’d assumed control of ACE in his absence, and presumably still ran it. He’d had a daughter, Emerson, made internet famous by a meme of her clotheslining Paris Hilton at a Halloween party (Paris was a devil; Emerson was a unicorn). Before his disappearance, Edgar Arches was a staple on the Forbes list of billionaires. Constance, as the surviving scion, currently held that honor, though there were rumors – even at the time of the disappearance – that Nathaniel was champing at the bit to manage the family fortune.

Most people with that kind of life did not have a sense of humor, and if they did, it was not about themselves.

“Look under Man,” Nathaniel Arches said. His voice was slow and deep. “Man comma Bat.”

“Look under Arches,” Tuesday said to Kelly W., soft enough not to embarrass her, loud enough for him to hear. “First name – there. Nathaniel.”

He smiled like a flashbulb.

“Would you like to make a nametag?” Kelly W. handed him a permanent marker and a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker.

“Sure,” he said, uncapping the marker and inhaling. “I do love a fresh Sharpie.”

Tuesday’s mental file on Arches, Nathaniel fluttered in this breeze of personality. Nathaniel, since his father’s disappearance and his mother’s takeover of ACE, had funneled his share of the family fortune into N. A. Arches, a venture capital firm that invested in biotech, the next generation of MIT-spawned companies ACE was built on. There were rumors he had dated Gisele before Tom Brady. There were rumors he had dated Tom Brady before Gisele. In every interview Tuesday had read about him, he’d sounded like an out-of-the-box corporate venture dude, a walking jargon machine. He talked about synergy, about leveraging his assets. He made not one joke, possessed not a hint of wit or irony or self-consciousness of any kind.

He’d come to her attention last month, when one of the fundraisers she worked with – Watley, who raised money for primary care – asked for research. Nathaniel had no apparent connection to the hospital; he’d given no money, expressed no interest. He was just a name Watley discovered, probably after Googling “rich people in Boston.” She tried to tell Watley that good fundraising required a slightly more strategic approach, that it wasn’t worth her time to research and write up a full profile on a prospect with no Boston General connections and no history of, well, anything other than being a wealthy douche.

But Watley was new to the office and eager, Nathaniel Arches was rich as hell and his family was bonkers, and it was the dull deep end of August when everyone was down the Cape, so Tuesday dove into the cool information-soaked sea of the internet. His Facebook account was locked down, but he tweeted pictures of sunsets, the beers he was drinking, and the kind of vague motivational quotes that were usually accompanied by photographs of soaring eagles and windsurfers (REACH! IT’S CLOSER THAN YOU THINK). He did have a record in the patient database, but he had seen specialists (plastic surgeons, years ago), and technically that wasn’t public information; it was a violation of the hospital’s privacy policies to use that information to initiate contact.

So she focused on everything else. Nathaniel had been profiled on Boston.com and the Improper Bostonian. He barely opened his eyes in photographs. He was listed as a director of a private family foundation that gave, relative to its potential, offensively nominal donations to every nonprofit organization in Boston – the equivalent of giving a kid a nickel and telling her not to spend it all in one place. He owned no property under his own name, though he lived in the family’s luxury condo at the top of the Mandarin Hotel – when he wasn’t at the family compound on Nantucket – and he’d shown up on five separate lists of Boston’s sexiest: Sexiest Thirtysomethings, Sexiest Residents of the Back Bay, Sexiest Scenesters, Sexiest New Capitalists (he was number one with a bullet), and just plain Sexiest.

Tuesday had compiled all the hard and soft data she could find on Nathaniel Arches, and found his self-satisfied, megamonied, essentially ungenerous, ladykiller affect the exact opposite of sexy.

In person, though, was a totally different story.

This was why she volunteered for events.

He peeled the paper from the back of his nametag and slapped it gently on his chest. “How’s that?” he asked. “Is it on straight?”

Under HELLO MY NAME IS, he’d written ARCHIE.

“One edge is a little – higher—” Kelly W. pointed.

Tuesday stood and leaned over the registration table. “I can fix it,” she said.

Archie leaned toward her without hesitation. They were close to the same height, and he turned his head slightly to the side. “I’ve always wondered if two heads colliding really make that coconut sound,” he said, “but I don’t need to find out tonight.”

Tuesday gave him a long smile. “The night is young,” she said, and slowly pulled his nametag from his suit. Holding the sticky corners level, she repositioned it, pressed, smoothed it flat with her fingertips.

He stepped back and held out his hand.

“Archie.”

“Tuesday.” She squeezed his hand.

He gave a little finger-gun wave and glided away.

Tuesday plunked back in her chair.

“Holy crap,” said Kelly W. “What just happened?”

“Research,” said Tuesday. “In the field.”

At the Four Seasons Hotel, in a ballroom full of smiling men in suits, Dex Howard waited to be hit on.

That was it, right there: that was why he’d decided to come. As pathetic as it might be, he wanted a pity pickup. A distraction from having broken up with Patrick, even though everyone – seriously, everyone, including his own subconscious – had seen it coming. They had chemistry, they had fun, but they didn’t have much else. Patrick was a wet-behind-the-ears erstwhile ballet dancer turned barista. Dex was a Vice President. Richmont, which had no more than fifty employees, had fifteen Vice Presidents. All employees who had, at other firms, started as Coordinators, transformed into Analysts, then Senior Analysts, and then, having no further room in the chrysalis, burst into fully mature Vice Presidents. He was a Vice President who Managed Marketing, whatever the hell that meant, and his hairline was receding at the same rate as his childhood dreams.

He hated to think it – it was mean, it was shallow – but Dex was pretty sure Patrick had seen him as a meal ticket, a sugar daddy, a sponsor. Dex bought dinner. Dex bought tickets. Dex bought gifts. Patrick gave: support, compliments, sex. (Not for money, Dex told himself; not like that.) He liked buying things for Patrick, and Patrick liked receiving them. That Patrick liked his money didn’t mean he didn’t also like Dex as a person. Dex took a slug of open-bar whiskey – God, he hated this thing that his brain did, the way it looked at a man who professed to want him and asked, But why? Then answered, without waiting for a response, Because I can buy you things.

At least in a crowd of senior vice presidents and higher, Dex’s ability to buy things was relative, and puny. Though it wasn’t all that different from the crowd in The Bank. It had a higher tax bracket, was older and less visibly douchey, but there was still that slightly desperate undertow of desire threading through like a hot wire. Desire to make some sort of impression, to outperform, to draw attention, or at least to numb yourself to the day you’d just had with free booze – not to mention the next day, and the next.

Tuesday, as was her wont, was suddenly, silently there.

“Are you going to spend the night drinking morosely in the corner?” she asked.

Dex tried to hide the start she’d given him.

“But I excel,” he said, “at morose corner drinking.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About Patrick.”

Dex shrugged.

“You should try the shrimp,” Tuesday said. “Did you see them? They’re grotesque. They’re the biggest shrimp I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s an oxymoron.” Dex drained his glass.

“Though I overheard people complaining that they didn’t have much flavor.” Tuesday walked with him out of the ballroom and back toward the bar and the food. “They’re too big.”

“Metaphor alert.” Dex nabbed a small plate from the end of the buffet. “Those are the biggest shrimps I’ve ever seen. They’re obscene.”

“The chicken satay thingies are always good,” she said. “And the dessert course here is usually phenomenal. Save room for the cake pops.”

“Cake Pops and Bourbon.”

“Title of your autobiography?”

“My darkly confessional, poorly received sophomore album.”

That got a twitch of a grin. Dex loved it. He knew that people looked at Tuesday and saw, in order, her height, her shoulders, her pale darkness. They heard her clumping around corners, occasionally tripping over her own feet; they saw her all-black wardrobe, her shelf of bangs, and her un-made-up face, and in their heads they thought, Grown-ass Wednesday Addams, one day of the week earlier. Dex actually knew this; their former coworkers, before Dex fully defected to Team Tuesday, once asked him what the deal was with that bizarro know-it-all tall girl. The guys thought she was hiding a great body – I mean, no wonder she was so clumsy; she was topheavy – under black sackcloth. The girls thought her face only needed a little, like, lipstick, or eyeliner, or something. If they even bothered, they imagined that she spent all her free time watching horror movies (true), listening to The Cure (occasionally true), and writing goth fan fiction (not true, but not outside the realm of possibility).

The truth was this: Dex genuinely believed Tuesday didn’t give a shit what people thought when they looked at her. But the truth was also: he spent a fair amount of his free time with her – when he wasn’t with a future ex-boyfriend – and he didn’t really know what the deal was with her either. He knew how she was. He knew she cared about him, though he also knew he cared more about her. She kept him outside. After all these years, after all this time, he knew her without really knowing her at all.

He didn’t know, for example, where she came from other than geographically. He had never met her parents, or learned anything about them other than factual details: they owned a souvenir shop in Salem. She had a brother, he thought. He knew what she loved, aesthetically – the weird and macabre – but he didn’t know what she feared. Or wanted. Or worried about. He didn’t know where she was most tender, or why, and anytime he poked in the general direction of where her underbelly might be, she solidified, invulnerable as granite. There was something Tennessee Williams tragic about her intimacy issues that, if he was being honest with his most melodramatic self, increased her appeal. Since she wouldn’t take him into her confidence, he could only romanticize her. He could only imagine how she’d managed to get her great heart squashed.

Not that anyone would ever be able to tell. A squashed heart still beat, and Tuesday categorically Had Her Shit Together. She was quick. She was bright. But Dex knew a thing or two about armor – this suit and tie he was wearing right now was a shell over his own tenderest parts – and he knew every suit of armor has a weak spot that can only be found by systematic poking. Every time Dex succeeded in making Tuesday smile, it was like seeing a rainbow over a haunted house.

He took his heaped plate of satay and shrimp back into the ballroom, and only then noticed Tuesday was plateless. He nodded toward the food. She picked up a skewer. Then another skewer. She had nothing if not an appetite. They chewed, Tuesday surreptitiously, and loitered by the rear wall. Tuesday’s next responsibility was helping with the auction as a runner. If anyone sitting in her quadrant of the room won an item, she had to dash out and collect their pertinents: name, address, credit card number. The auction itself, she explained, would be pretty exciting – the auctioneer was a professional, brought in for the night; the cause was good; the crowd was well heeled, well sponsored, and well lubricated.

“We have VIP meet-and-greet tickets for the New Kids on the Block reunion concert,” she said. “My money’s on that for bidding war of the night.”

“Really?” said Dex. He took in the room, ivory-draped tables and rows of maroon seats filling. “Big NKOTB fans here in the land of ancient corporate white dudes?”

“You’d be surprised. Hometown pride. Plus, there are a lot of parents bidding for their kids.” She pulled the last bite of satay off her skewer with her teeth. “You should take a seat. I have to grab my clipboard.”

“Want me to drive up the bid on the New Kids?”

“You can bid on anything you want.” She raised her brows. “So long as you pay for it.”

After Tuesday was gone, Dex, alone again, and embracing the reality that no one was going to hit on him tonight – this crowd was too old, too straight, too married, too professional – scanned for someone fun to sit beside, someone who might feel as out of place as he did.

“Is this seat taken?” he asked, placing one hand lightly on the back of a chair at the front of the room.

The woman sitting beside it looked up and smiled. No one else was sitting at the table but her. Dex would have guessed she was in her late thirties or early forties. Her skin was dark, her black hair fringed and pulled back; she was gloriously round, and rocking the holy hell out of a one-sleeved teal dress. On her ring finger was a yellow diamond big enough to put out a man’s eye.

“Not at all,” she said. “Have a seat! My husband bought this table as a sponsorship, but then we didn’t invite anyone, so it’s sort of a table for lost souls.”

“Absolutely perfect,” Dex said, and sat down. “Dex Howard.” He offered his hand. “Professional lost soul.”

“Lila Korrapati Pryce,” she said, shaking it. “English teacher – former English teacher. Professional wife.”

“You looked very lonely over here,” Dex said. “A lonely little island.”

“Crap,” she said. “Lonely? Really? I was aiming for glamorously aloof, keeping my distance from the hoi polloi. International star, maybe. Bollywood queen.”

“Ambassador’s wife.”

“Ambassador,” she said.

“Heir to a diamond mine.” He pointed at her ring. “Owner of a cursed jewel.”

Lila laughed. She had a magnificent laugh. It was warm and hearty, like a drunk but high-functioning sailor’s. “Professional mysterious woman,” she said, “and the only brown person in this corner of the ballroom.”

“Well, I did notice that,” said Dex. “Kind of hard not to.”

“You’d be surprised what people don’t notice,” said Lila. “I don’t mind, honestly. I mean, I mind it in the larger socioeconomic sense, but in the personal sense, I like being a little on the outside. Keeps me sharp.” She cracked her neck. “You have to laugh.”

“Or drink,” said Dex. “You could drink.”

“Oh, I do that too,” said Lila. “And I forget that I’m not supposed to talk about uncomfortable things, especially with strangers. You’d think I hadn’t lived in Cambridge my whole life.”

“I am very glad to be sitting next to you,” said Dex. “What are you drinking?”

“Vince – that’s my husband, you’ll meet him in just a moment – went to get—” She looked up and back and laughed again. “You’ll meet him right now!”

A much older man approached the table, a glass in each hand – one with brown liquid and rocks, the other clear and sparkling with a bright wedge of lime – and Dex nearly choked. He was wearing a cape. A goddamned cape. A black cape like the kind British guys wore to the opera in old movies: secured, somehow, around his high tuxedo-collared neck, popped like a polo collar, fluttering halfway down his back. His skin was chalky and spotted, his hair was pure silver, his ears stuck out like wings, and under a nose you could only refer to as a schnoz was a peppery push broom of a mustache. His eyes were steady and warm. He looked like the kind of man who tied damsels to train tracks but only because that was his role in the melodrama, and he would never get away with it; he was there to give someone else a chance to be a hero.

“I leave for one second,” he said, setting the sparkling drink before his wife, “and look who shows up. Suitors. Are we going to have to duel?” he asked Dex.

Dex stuck out his hand and introduced himself again. “Hello,” he said. “And I hope you don’t think it’s inexcusably rude of me to ask if your name is really Vincent Price.”

“Oh, it’s hardly rude, certainly not inexcusable,” he replied with half a smile. “And also true. Yes, my name is Vincent Pryce. Pryce with a Y, so you see, it’s completely different. I was named years before the other Vincent Price became a celebrity. Though my people weren’t moviegoing people, so they had no appreciation for the gift they’d given me.” He sat and jauntily brushed his cape back from one shoulder. “And it is a gift. I’ve always loved his movies. House of Wax. The Fly. The Tingler! The sound of his voice, that rumbly, educated purr. And his characters: men of science, men of wealth, men of passion – undone! By ambition, by madness! Who went headlong, laughing, to their dooms.”

“And rapped for Michael Jackson,” said Dex.

“Plus, he introduced me to E. A. Poe,” said Vince with reverence. “And for that, truly, truly I am grateful.”

“Vince has one of the world’s largest amateur Edgar Allan Poe collections,” Lila said, as Pryce rolled his eyes at the word “amateur.” “First editions, letters, ephemera, assorted memorabilia. Movie stuff, posters, film prints of the Poe movies the other Vincent Price made with Hammer—”

“Corman, my dear.” Pryce placed a hand, surprisingly large and steady, over his heart. “He made House of Usher in ’sixty, The Pit and the Pendulum in ’sixty-one, The Raven in ’sixty-three, The Masque of the Red Death in ’sixty-four” – Lila shot Dex a beautifully arched brow – “and all the others with Roger Corman, my dear. King of American independent cinema.” After he had composed himself, Pryce winked at Dex. “Master of cheap thrills.”

“You should meet my friend Tuesday,” Dex said. “She lives for creepy stuff. And she’s right—” Dex waved across the ballroom. Tuesday, auction clipboard in hand, might have nodded in response. “She’s right there. If you bid and win, she’ll come over.”

“I intend to,” said Vince. “What’s the point of bidding if you don’t intend to win?” He took a drink. “Dex. Dex Howard. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”

Dex, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, started. “Oh, me? You mean – of course.” He laughed. “Fire at will.”

Vince cleared his throat.

“Do you believe, Dex Howard,” Vince asked, “that you are real?”

A beat of silence fell between them.

Dex looked at Lila. Her expression was flat, with no hint as to how seriously he was supposed to take her husband.

“Uh … yes?” Dex said.

“Your hesitation speaks volumes.” Vince leaned into him. “How do you know you are real?”

Dex cleared his throat. Swallowed. Decided on:

“Because—?”

He didn’t get a chance to say more before Vince charged ahead.

“Precisely. Because. Simply because,” Vince said. “Because you have accepted the central, implicit thesis of existence – you exist as real because you know, as of yet, no other way of being. But that’s the rub, aye. There are so many ways of being, of being real, of living, right now. And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self. The selves, whether they be wrought or revealed, recognized at long last.” Vince’s voice quieted. “Tell me, Dex Howard. Who are you? How were you made, and how much of your making was by your own hand?”

Dex grinned at him. He could not help it. “I am a human,” Dex said. “I was made by Harry and Phyllis Howard in western Mass. in 1978, probably during a snowstorm. I made myself—” Dex swallowed. “Do you want a real answer?”

Vince and Lila both nodded.

Dex considered. There were many answers. All of them were more or less real. Had his making and unmaking taken place on his high school’s stage, when he was in the habit, yearly, of becoming fictional people? Or had his making been one great decisive action, when his father told him he could waste his own money on school and he agreed? Or—

He remembered his armor.

“On the day I went for an interview at a temp agency, I wore a suit, because a suit fit the part I was auditioning for,” he said. “And they looked at me like I had three well-groomed heads and immediately sent me to temp in finance. So I guess that’s when I made me, when I made this me that you see here before you.”

“A fine distinction, this you.” Vince nodded gravely. “We are many. All of us.”

“Yes,” said Lila under her breath. “I am aware I married a fortune cookie.”

“In a cape,” said Dex. “Well done.”

No one in Tuesday’s section of the ballroom was bidding. She’d expected as much – she was staked out way in the back, surrounded by corporate-sponsored tables filled with midlevel executives who had already made their own, more modest contributions to the night’s total. She pressed her clipboard to her stomach. She was still hungry. The illicit satay she’d snuck from Dex had only made her hungrier. She wasn’t allowed to hit the buffet until after the auction, technically, but if she didn’t get more to eat soon, she was at risk of passing out. Tuesday was a fainter. “Your blood has a long way to go,” her doctor had said after Tuesday passed out in tenth-grade band and hit her head on the xylophone, “to get from your heart all the way down to your feet and back up to that big brain of yours. Your blood cells have to be marathoners. Marathoners have to take care of themselves.”

“So you’re saying I’m a giant with a big head.”

“You know you’re a giant with a big head,” said her doctor. “Eat more salt.”

The cream and gilt walls of the ballroom were broken up by enormous gold-draped windows. Tuesday nestled herself against one of the drapes, slipped out of her shoes, and closed her eyes. She always saw more with her eyes closed. Like the suit sitting at the table four feet to her right; he was angry about something. She could hear the fabric of his suit jacket sliding, pulling as he hunched his arms. He set his glass down hard. His voice – he was talking about nothing, really; work stuff – Dopplered in and out, which meant he was moving his head as he spoke, side to side, trying to catch an ear. He couldn’t sit still. The other people at the table weren’t listening to him. He was angry because to them, he was invisible. I see you, thought Tuesday, and opened her eyes.

Nathaniel Arches was standing in front of her.

He looked down at her bare feet, gripping the crimson carpet.

“That the secret to surviving this thing?” he asked. “Making fists with your toes?”

“Better than a shower and a hot cup of coffee,” she replied, and balled up her feet.

A wave of noise crashed from the other side of the ballroom. Two bidders were going head-to-head for the New Kids tickets. The auctioneer pattered, Do I hear seventy-five hundred, seventy-five hundred – do I hear EIGHT, eight thousand, eight thousand for the meet-and-greet of a lifetime, the New Kids in their home city, in the great city of Boston – do I hear – I hear EIGHT—

“You should try it,” she said.

“Take off my shoes? But then I won’t be able to make a quick getaway.”

“You’re telling me the Batmobile doesn’t have an extra pair of shoes in the trunk?”

“It doesn’t have a trunk,” he said. “Or cup holders.” He looked down at the tumbler in his hand, half full, brown and neat. “I’ve been meaning to do something about the cup holder situation.”

“But not the trunk.”

“It’s not like I take it to Costco.”

Tuesday laughed. She’d been trying not to, and it came out like a snort.

—do I hear eighty-five – EIGHTY-FIVE, do I hear nine? Nine thousand? To hang tough with the Kids?—

“You’re fun,” he said.

“And you’re very pretty,” she said back, and that made him laugh.

“Fun and a fundraiser.” He leaned against the wall beside her. “How’s that working out for you?”

“I’m not a fundraiser,” she said. “I’m a researcher.”

“What do you research?”

“Prospects. I’m a prospect researcher.”

“Ah, so you research people like me.” He tapped his HELLO MY NAME IS sticker.

“I’ve researched you,” she said. “Actually, you.”

He brightened. “And what can you tell me?” he said. “About myself, I mean.”

—TEN! I have ten from this gentleman here in the red tie. Yes – oh I can tell, I can tell you’re a fan! But I have to ask, it’s my job: do I hear ten thousand five hundred?—

“That you don’t already know?” Tuesday said.

“Impress me.”

She opened her mental file on Nathaniel Arches. Looked over his tweets. His investments. His vague pronouncements. The rumors. This was her favorite part of the job, a holdover from being the kid whose hand always shot up first with the answer. She loved to prove how much she knew.

She was about to say You don’t know you’re rich – because he clearly didn’t; if her research had a common theme, it was incurious hunger, a dumb desire for more, as though he had no idea he’d already been born with more than most humans will see in six lifetimes—

But Nathaniel Arches turned and opened his eyes at her, wide. She had never seen his eyes before. In all those press photos, his eyes were slitted, protected, too cool. Now they were open, dark, steady. He was looking at her like he was capable of curiosity. Like he was searching for something.

Or someone.

She slid this information, full value yet to be determined, up her sleeve like an ace.

“You don’t know you’re rich,” she said.

“You think I’m rich?”

“You’re a few notches above rich,” she said, turning to stare straight ahead.

“What’s a higher notch than rich?”

“Stupid rich,” she said. “Then filthy rich. It gets fuzzy once you’re over a billion.”

—do I hear eleven! ELEVEN! – Hey – hey, man, you’ve got some competition for biggest New Kid fan over here. You’ve got some competition!—

“What does a billion even mean?” Nathaniel said.

He grinned at her with all his teeth and raised his hand high.

“Fifty thousand!” he shouted.

Every face swung around and pushed them against the wall.

The auctioneer was a cheerfully sweaty guy named Tim. He had gray hair and a red nose and Tuesday had seen him call auctions before, but she had never seen him look like he did now: surprised.

The room held its breath.

“Well!” Tim shouted into his microphone, and the room let go – it exhaled, it hooted, it whistled and shouted. “Sir! Sir! Out of the back corner and into our hearts! You don’t mess around! Do I hear fifty thousand five hundred?” Tim laughed. He turned back to the first competing bidders. “Guys? What do you think?”

Tuesday smiled – cheerfully, professionally – at the room. She saw Dex up front, kneeling on his chair and cackling, open-mouthed.

“You’re nuts,” she said to Nathaniel around her teeth.

“Takes one to know.” Nathaniel smiled back.

“Fifty thousand going once!” said Tim.

“Do you even like the New Kids?” she asked.

“Not really. Do you?”

“Fifty thousand going twice!”

“Not – particularly—”

It happened then: the beginning of everything that would come after.

A dark figure on the edge of Tuesday’s vision stood up at the front of the room not far from where Dex was sitting – in fact, exactly where Dex was sitting, at Dex’s table.

“Sir!” Tim the auctioneer cried. He turned away from Archie and flung his arm toward the figure like he was hurling a Frisbee. The room roared. “I hear fifty thousand five hundred!”

The figure was a tall man with silver hair, wearing a cape – a cape? – a cape! Tuesday peered across the ballroom. The man turned.

“Do I hear fifty-one thousand?”

The man wobbled.

Crowds feel things before they know things. This crowd of investors and developers and venture capitalists, of vice presidents and senior vice presidents, of fundraisers and gift processors and admins and researchers, mostly white, mostly men, mostly straight, rich and not rich and not much in between, but humans, all of them humans, felt it. Felt something. It stilled on nothing more than premonition. It waited for the man in the cape to turn around and face it. It held its tongue.

The man in the cape wobbled again. He blinked. He didn’t act as though he knew where he was. His arms were raised, tense and defensive. A woman in a striking teal gown began to rise beside him, to pull him back to her, to help him. But it was too late.

He screamed. He threw his head back like hell was raining down from the ceiling and covered his head with his arms and screamed and screamed in the otherwise silent ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel.

His final scream died in an echo. The old man in the cape straightened. He held his hands out, fingers splayed like a magician.

“Gotcha,” he said.

Still nobody moved. Nobody knew what was happening.

The old man’s eyes opened as large as his lids would allow and glittered in shock, as if he’d recognized a friend long lost across the chasm of time.

Then he took two steps and fell down dead.

2
THE OBITUARY

Two days later, Tuesday’s desk phone rang.

The only reason anyone called instead of emailing was because they wanted something they knew they had no business asking for.

She looked at the gray caller-ID square. KURTZ, TRICIA blinked back at her in blocky blue digit-letters. Trish worked on the events team. If Tuesday was remembering correctly, the Auction for Hope – or the Auction to Abandon All Hope, as Dex was calling it – was her baby. She was the organizer, the decider. She was the person who’d had to explain to June, head VP of the development office, that yes, a donor to the hospital, a billionaire and all-around beloved kooky Bostonian, had died, gone tits-up smack in the middle of a BGH fundraising event. And no, there was nothing anyone could have done.

People tried. Dex had tried, and was genuinely upset about the whole thing, which is why Tuesday let him get away with making morbid jokes at the event’s expense. Pryce’s wife – the woman in teal – had tried. They both whaled on his chest. She puffed air into his lungs. Nothing worked. Vincent A. Pryce was toast, and the next morning the Herald upheld its long tradition as the city’s classiest rag with the headline PRYCE BIDS FAREWELL.

Tuesday picked up the phone.

“Hey Trish,” she said. “Are you drunk-dialing me at two in the afternoon? Because I wouldn’t blame you if you were.”

“Ha ha ha,” said Trish. Tuesday hadn’t worked with her often, but enough to know Trish was sarcastic as hell. Everyone on the events team was. It seemed a necessary disposition for a job that was five percent emailing, five percent decision-making, ten percent constant overtime, and eighty percent shitstorm crisis management. Tuesday had nothing but respect for the events team. “I wish I were. You have no idea how badly I wish I were,” said Trish.

“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.

Their apartment building was the kind of place that would be incomplete without a ghost or two. It was old and brick, four floors high, and wrapped like a horseshoe around a small green courtyard with pink and purple impatiens and a black lamppost in the center like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some nights Dorry would lie awake thinking about all the other people eating and talking and having sex right next to her, right below her, right beside her and above her, right now, and all the other people who had eaten and talked and had sex in this one giant building for decades. It gave her the same fluttery feeling she got when she stood on the edge of the ocean, like that time (the last time) Mom took her to the wharf in Salem: like she was the tiniest part of something vast and old, something that had been around a long time before her and would keep rolling in and out long after she was gone. It made Dorry feel, for a second, like she was okay, and that the things in her life she couldn’t control – which was basically all of it – weren’t her fault. Because no one ever could control the sea.

They were supposed to have a city apartment for only a little while, to have what Dad called “options” and “flexibility.” That’s why he rented in Somerville instead of someplace out on the commuter rail; he could justify the expense if it was only temporary. Her dad worked in a lab at MIT, and it was super-easy for him to take the bus to work, which Dorry suspected was the real reason they rented in the city – he had never learned to drive, and never would, now, because of the accident. But she’d heard him say on the phone to Gram that it wasn’t any cheaper than the house, thanks to the Gentrifying Hipsters. Her dad had a problem with the Gentrifying Hipsters. They brought a “plague of cocktail and artisanal-olive bars,” restaurants with mac and cheese made from cheeses that sounded like characters from The Hunger Games, stores that sold actual records, and lots of friendly people with small dogs and fun hair. Dorry could see her dad’s point – artisanal donuts were kind of pushing it – but she still liked it. And she especially liked the city’s buses and trains and the subway, because she didn’t want to learn to drive either, or move again, ever.

She wanted to stick around and haunt this place like the woman in black.

She knew the woman wasn’t really a ghost. Ghosts, real ghosts, were a different thing. Dorry was old enough to know she wasn’t supposed to believe in ghosts – and she didn’t believe in them that way, in white sheets and clanking chains, like a kid. Dorry wasn’t a kid. She was in ninth grade. She’d turned fourteen in August. She’d gotten her period a year and a half ago, she’d kissed someone (Wade Spiegel, who maybe would be her boyfriend if he hadn’t moved to Ohio), she’d been wearing a bra since she was eleven, and for God’s sake, the quickest route out of childhood was a dead parent, and she had that locked down. Now she believed in ghosts like a grown-up. Like a scientist. She believed in cold spots and strange lights and electromagnetic anomalies that defied explanation. She couldn’t help it. Ever since the accident, it was the only way to believe she might see her mom again. Without, like, dying herself.

She officially met Tuesday on a lame gray Thursday during her first Somerville March. School had been whatever. She didn’t hate it, but she didn’t love it either. Leaving her old school felt like escaping. Ever since it had happened, they’d all been watching her, like she was a pathetic puppy, maybe with one eye and a limp. It was a relief to be the new kid, the half-Asian girl (her mom was Chinese; her dad was Jewish) who kept to herself and wasn’t even on Facebook. By spring, her new-kid cool had faded to general disinterest. And the disinterest was totally mutual. She’d rather hunt around for every last bite of information she could find about ghosts. Sightings. Famous hauntings. Modern methods of detection. Contact.

But that Thursday she’d been looking forward to delivery from Café Kiraz (they actually delivered frozen yogurt; reason number eight thousand why living in the city was better than stupid old Haverhill) with Dad, and watching his Seinfeld DVDs. If they were watching something, then they didn’t have to talk. About anything, but especially the accident and Mom and the fact that her dad was spending more and more time not at home. At least watching Seinfeld was a way for them to still be together, in the same room, without her father constantly clearing his throat like he was about to announce something. Sometimes Dorry worried that she was the reason her father was staying long hours at work, not that he’d lost track of time or whatever he was working on was so important, his usual excuses. Dorry was always in the apartment when she wasn’t at school; his office at work was the only place her father could be alone. And he wanted to be alone. And the fact that Dorry didn’t want to be alone apparently wasn’t that important to him.

That Thursday, he called from the lab and said he’d be late. Really late.

“There’s a pot pie and some Amy’s enchiladas in the freezer. And maybe a pizza?” He sounded exhausted. She wondered if he’d eaten lunch. He was probably going to drink a lot of coffee and call it dinner. “Does that sound okay, Dor?”

Not really. But all she could say was, “Yeah, no problem. Go make science. And don’t stay out too late.” As soon as they ended the call, she pulled up the number for Kiraz. She’d had her dad’s credit card memorized for months.

As she waited for her sandwich (turkey with green apples), her cup of minestrone, and her vanilla frozen yogurt with double Heath bar mix-ins, she began to sink. Sinking had become something of a problem lately. That was the only way to describe the feeling: one minute she’d be sitting on the couch or her bed, rereading her mother’s old Sandman comics or highlighting entire paragraphs in her American history textbook because it all seemed important, and the next she would feel heavy, like she was made of stone. Solid and cold and dense, so dense she couldn’t move her legs or lift her arms or even look up.

She started sinking after Mom died, a few days after the funeral. Everyone had gone home. Life was supposed to be normal, or whatever kind of normal was possible now. Dad was at the grocery store, and Dorry, alone, sat on the couch and felt herself pressing into the cushions. It was like gravity had tripled. She sat there sinking until her dad came home and asked for help unloading the groceries. And the weight lifted. Just like that. She thought she’d dreamed it at first.

But it came back. It usually happened when she was alone, but not always. Even if she was surrounded by people, the weight made her too flat, too slow, to tell anyone about it. So she didn’t. The weight made her too heavy to care. It happened in fifth-period English. It happened while she was waiting to cross the street, at the dinner table, and that day, that Thursday when she met Tuesday, it happened while she was sitting in the recliner, waiting for the delivery guy. She felt cold and hard and heavy, and she sank without a sound.

Sound. She heard a sound. Someone was thumping down the hallway toward the apartment. Food, she thought, and the sink let go a little, enough for her to get out of the recliner and walk across the living room, enough for her to open the door.

It was the woman in black.

“Oh hi!” said Dorry. She was a little too excited, but it was hard not to be whenever the sink let you go. And it had; it was gone. The woman had vanquished it.

“Hi there,” the woman said, and if Dorry had freaked her out, she was totally cool about it. She pushed her sunglasses up in her hair. She was holding keys, and Dorry realized – right then, for the first time – that the woman in black didn’t just live in her building. The woman in black was her next-door neighbor. There were two apartments at the end of Dorry’s hallway, their front doors adjacent to each other. She had heard muffled music through the wall they shared, had heard the door open and close, but had never met her neighbor until now.

“Are you okay?” asked the woman. “Do you want a tissue?”

Dorry’s hand jumped to her cheek. Her fingers came back smudgy, damp with mascara. She’d waited until she was thirteen to start wearing makeup (Mom’s rule, even if she hadn’t been around to enforce it), and she still forgot when it was on her face. She’d been crying. Sometimes that happened when she was sinking.

“Oh—” she said. “Um. Yes. Thank you.”

The woman dug into her bag for a plastic packet of tissues. “I’m Tuesday,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Dorry,” said Dorry, and wiped at her eyes. Her cheeks felt very hot. She didn’t know why she was mortified, but she was. “I’m waiting for delivery. I thought that’s who you were.”

“Ah, I see,” said Tuesday. “I get pretty sad waiting for delivery too.”

What Dorry did next happened because she’d been sinking, and because she wasn’t sinking anymore. And because this whole time the ghost had been living right next door.

She threw herself at the woman in black. She wrapped her skinny arms all the way around her and hugged like she hadn’t hugged anyone in months, which she hadn’t.

And the woman in black – Tuesday – hugged her back.

That was the beginning. By now, Tuesday Thursdays had settled into a simple pattern: They ordered Indian. They talked about Dorry’s classes and homework, per her dad’s wishes. She wasn’t flunking or anything, but Dorry knew she could be doing better. She’d always been a straight-A to A-plus kind of kid until the accident, which had sort of redefined what did and did not feel important. Homework was definitely the latter. And she had been doing better in school since Tuesday Thursdays started.

But it wasn’t because Tuesday was knowledgeable about the War of 1812 or vectors or Animal Farm or quadratic equations (though she was); it was because Tuesday was her friend. And a grown-up, but the sort of grown-up who made growing up look pretty great. Tuesday came and went when she pleased. Tuesday bought her own groceries and washed her own dishes. She took care of herself. She had a job in the city at the big hospital, and from what Dorry understood, she was great at it – and she cared about Dorry. Having someone care about you makes you want to give a shit, especially if you’re having trouble caring about yourself.

And she had great taste in music and movies and TV. That was the real tutoring Tuesday did: every Thursday, Dorry got a new lesson in the culture she’d missed out on because she hadn’t been born yet. Tuesday had introduced her to every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even the bad ones. To Twin Peaks, which Dorry didn’t really understand, though that seemed like the point. They started The X-Files over the summer. Dorry loved it so much she dreamed about it. It made Dorry want to grow up, because the world was big and strange and exciting, and as long as you had your true partner – and you loved each other so much you couldn’t even, like, discuss it – you would live to fight another monster. You might meet a miracle.

But tonight the pattern was off.

Dorry pressed her hand to Tuesday’s door. It vibrated. Usually when her neighbor was playing music this loud, Dorry knew better than to knock. It meant Tuesday was working. It meant Tuesday was working so hard she wouldn’t notice if a bomb went off.

But it was Thursday.

She knocked three times. Nothing. She held her ear to the door and heard half a lyric – luctantly crouched at the starting line – that sounded like … Cake? Was that the name of the band? Dorry was a little obsessed with the nineties. Tuesday had been treating her to what she called the BMG Music Service experience, which, so far, included a lot of Cranberries, Tori Amos, and Cake. Dorry knew that Tuesday played Cake when she really wanted to concentrate, when she needed the rest of the world to fade away.

She felt a little hurt. But then curiosity swallowed her hurt and she balled up her fist and pounded on the door until it rattled, until the Cake – HE’s going the dist – cut out. She heard foot thumps and then the three friendly clacks of Tuesday throwing her door’s bolts and chains back.

“Hey,” Tuesday said. “Sorry, I got distracted with this crazy – did you see this thing?” She stepped aside for Dorry to enter. “This obituary treasure hunt thing?”

Dorry dropped her purple bag on the floor next to Tuesday’s pile of shoes. The buttons on the straps clattered and clinked. “Nope,” she said. “You forget I don’t have any friends. Or any Facebook friends.” She could make a joke about it because she did have a friend – Tuesday – even if she didn’t have any friends at school. But she really didn’t have Facebook, or Twitter, or anything. Dorry had a phone “for emergencies,” from her grandmother. But she’d never signed up for Facebook because her mother was still out there, smiling like nothing ever happened. Once she’d asked her friend Mish from her old school, who did have an account, to show her her mother’s page. It was still up months after the funeral, and full of comments like RIP, thinking of you all, what a beautiful person, gone too soon, from people Dorry had never heard of. It was weird. She didn’t know how to feel about it. And she didn’t know what was worse: that pictures of her mom, pictures of her and her mom, were haunting the internet forever for anyone to click and comment on, or that one day her father could check a box and make it all go away.

“I forget,” said Tuesday, “you’re the last Luddite teen in America.”

“It does not make me a Luddite,” Dorry said, “to not want to give it up to Mark Zuckerberg.”

“Dear Dorothea.” Tuesday put a warm hand on her shoulder. “The first time you share your private information with an internet monolith is a very special, magical—”

“I’m saving myself for Tumblr,” Dorry said.

Tuesday closed her door and pulled her phone out of her back pocket. “Usual?” she asked, and Dorry nodded, though nothing about this Tuesday Thursday felt usual. There were short stacks of paper all over the living room floor, lined up across the coffee table and the couch cushions.

“What’s the big deal?” Dorry asked.

“A very rich man died,” Tuesday said. She put her hands on her hips and faced the neat piles she’d made. “In his obituary – he wrote it himself – he promised to leave part of his estate to whoever follows his clues. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“Can he do that?”

“He did it,” said Tuesday. She squatted down and narrowed her eyes. “His obit says to ‘listen for the beating of the city’s hideous heart,’ which is a reference to Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart.’ You know that story?”

Dorry nodded. She’d just read it in English. It was basically a New England English class requirement, to read Poe in October. “Guy goes crazy because the old man he’s taking care of has a big creepy eye,” she said. “So crazy guy kills the old man and hides the body under the floorboards. But then he confesses like as soon as the police even breathe on him, because he thinks he can hear the old man’s dead heart still beating under the floor.”

“Poe’s narrators are always drama queens. ‘I admit the deed!’” Tuesday muttered. “‘Tear up the planks! here, here! – It is the beating of his hideous heart.’”

A black and white blur galloped out of the bedroom and straight through the papers.

Tuesday gently smacked her own forehead. “I am a terrible cat mom. I haven’t fed him yet.”

“On it,” said Dorry. The tuxedo blur – Gunnar – was sprawled on his back on the kitchen linoleum, looking very weak and hungry, or as weak and hungry as a slightly overweight cat can look. “Talk about drama queens,” Dorry said, and rubbed the thick white fur of his belly. His eyes slid closed.

“So anyway,” said Tuesday, her voice echoing toward the kitchen, “I thought ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ might be the decoder ring, the key to deciphering – whatever the clue is. If it were a straightforward substitution cipher, you know, a jumble of seemingly meaningless letters that he gave us and said here, crack the code, someone would have cracked it in five minutes. But the clue itself is hidden. Under the floor. Like the old man. All we can hear is the beating of its hideous heart.”

“Which is only in our minds,” called Dorry over the plinking of cat kibble into Gunnar’s dish.

“He said he already told us where to begin, so I printed off every letter to the editor he ever wrote, of which there are many. I’ve spread them out by month and year.” She looked up. “How do you feel about reading a bajillion letters tonight?”

Dorry walked back to the living room. “What am I looking for?” she asked.

Anything. Anything that didn’t seem quite right, that called attention to itself. Or, as Tuesday said with a shrug, any jumble of seemingly meaningless letters. Dorry threw her legs over the arm of the couch and Tuesday took her cat-scratched leather chair, and for the next thirty minutes, they read.

Dorry was surprised that it sort of bummed her out. This guy – Vincent Pryce – seemed pretty cool. He made a lot of dumb jokes, but he also really, really cared about things. He cared about teaching theater and music in elementary schools. He cared about scholarships for kids to attend summer programs and prep schools and colleges. When a handful of parents tried to get The Diary of Anne Frank taken off their kids’ summer reading lists, he went ballistic.

Pryce also had strong opinions about, of all things, Valentine’s Day. On February 13, 2006, he wrote, “Please – this holiday makes a mockery of one of our greatest capacities as humans, perhaps THE greatest function of the heart: to love and to be loved.” On February 10, 2007: “Ask yourself: why do many of us feel compelled to spend this day proving we love each other, something we could be doing any other day of the year without the absurd theater of chocolate roses or edible underwear?” February 14, 2008: “Roman godlings, bare-bottomed. Flowers that smell of sugar and rot. Hearts. Candy hearts. Chocolate hearts. Stuffed hearts with cheap lace edging. Hideous hearts, all.”

Hideous hearts.

Dorry grabbed a pen and began to circle.

Tuesday’s buzzer rang.

“Thank the Maker,” Tuesday said, and pressed the button under her intercom to let the delivery guy up. She was in the kitchen, clanking silverware against plates, when Raj – their normal Palace of India Thursday-night delivery guy – knocked on the door. Dorry, distracted, opened it.

It was not Raj.

It was a white guy. Tall. Lanky. Dark hair that was somehow annoying – kind of fake-looking and wrong, like a wavy helmet of snapped-on Lego hair. His whole face was long, prickly with five-o’clock shadow, except for his smile, which was soft and wide. He was wearing jeans and sneakers that looked like the kind the rich kids at her old school collected – because that was a Thing, collecting sneakers – and a bright white T-shirt, bright blue V-neck beneath a beat black motorcycle jacket with a rip in the sleeve. He smiled at her, then thought better of it.

“You’re not Raj,” she said.

“No, but he said to say hi. And to give you this.” He had a rumbly voice. He handed her the usual brown paper bag of food, order slip and receipt stapled to the folded flap.

“Tuesday,” Dorry called. “Could you—”

She could feel Tuesday standing behind her.

“You’re not Raj,” said Tuesday, and then, sharp, “Did you pay for our food?”

The man nodded.

“So you could pay for our food but you couldn’t pay your auction bid?” She paused. “Actually, that isn’t much of an argument.”

“No, it isn’t,” said the stranger. “It is far, far easier for me to pay thirty bucks plus tip for Indian than fifty thou for New Kids tickets.”

“Do you know this guy?” asked Dorry. “Or should I call nine-one-one?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Tuesday.

“Well. You should decide,” said Dorry. “Because the food is getting cold and I’m hungry.”

“This will only be a second,” Tuesday said. “Take the food.” She looked at the stranger. “You,” she said, “aren’t coming in. But I want to talk to you.”

Dorry cradled the food bag and walked in her sock feet to the kitchen, listening the whole way.

“How did you find out where I live?” Tuesday’s voice was quiet but firm.

“You of all people should know how easy it is to find someone’s address,” he answered.

“Okay, let me rephrase: where the hell do you get off coming to my apartment?”

Dorry set the bag on the counter. Gunnar, having followed her into the kitchen, gazed up at her expectantly. Dorry lifted him into her arms, which wasn’t at all what he’d been hoping for.

“—apologize.”

“Bullshit.”

“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “Which is why I brought this—”

Dorry didn’t need to hear more.

She bolted into the living room, Gunnar bouncing in her arms. “Don’t you TOUCH her,” she shouted, “or I will throw this cat at you.”

The stranger was holding a piece of paper between his first two fingers. Tuesday was reaching for it.

Gunnar sort of sighed.

“He has claws,” Dorry said. “And he knows how to use them.”

“It’s okay,” Tuesday said. “This is a classic example of money having its own rules.”

Dorry shifted Gunnar’s weight. It was like holding two bags of warm flour wrapped in a sweater.

“Money has its own sense of what is and is not appropriate human behavior,” said Tuesday. “For example, money” – she indicated not-Raj, who gave a stupid little wave – “thinks it’s okay to show up at a stranger’s apartment so long as he’s hand-delivering a check for fifty thousand dollars.”

“Does that mean I can come in?” he asked.

“No,” said Tuesday.

“I meant to pay. I swear. My secretary gets requests for money all the time, so she turns them down out of hand. I forgot to tell her this one was legitimate.” He shrugged. “It was a crazy night. And I am truly sorry for the trouble I’ve caused.” He looked down at the floor. “Still making fists with your toes, I see.”

“Stop staring at my feet,” said Tuesday.

The stranger flushed. It made Tuesday smile one of her small smiles, the kind that meant she was playing around. That was enough for Dorry to relax a little. She set Gunnar down on the sofa, next to Pryce’s letters about Valentine’s Day.

“To be honest—” said the stranger.

“Please do,” said Tuesday.

“I have a proposal for you. I assume by now you’ve heard about Pryce’s quest.”

Tuesday nodded.

“I know a lot about him. He’s – he was, I guess – a family … acquaintance. I’ve seen his collection. And, assuming some ‘portion of his great fortune’ includes the collection, I can personally vouch that it’s worth whatever we can do to make it ours.”

“Pretty liberal use of the plural possessive there, Arch,” said Tuesday. She crossed her arms and propped herself against the doorframe.

“I know things,” he said. “You know things, and what you don’t know I bet you know how to find. The check I just gave you – I can write another one, just as big, if you agree to help me with Pryce’s game.”

“No,” said Tuesday.

He opened his mouth in a perfect O. Dorry leaned into the silence growing between them. Because she knew Tuesday, she knew it was a deep-thinking silence. But the stranger – Arch or whatever – didn’t know that. He panicked.

“I’ll double it,” he said. “One hundred thousand for your help.”

“I’m charmed that you take my silence for hardball,” said Tuesday. “Trust me, you’ll know when I’m playing hardball, and that wasn’t it.” She stared at him. “Why me?”

“Because you’re smart,” he said.

“Unlike,” said Tuesday, “the horde of lawyers, accountants, private investigators, and public relations handlers your family has on retainer.”

“They’re smart but you’re smarter.”

“I doubt that.” Tuesday narrowed her eyes.

The guy frowned. Then he muttered, “I met you, I liked you, I feel bad that I flaked on the fifty thousand. And, well: nobody in my … complex family knows who you are, which means you can operate with a degree of anonymity.”

“Fine, that’s why me. Why you? What does the collection have that you can’t get somewhere else? You’re almost passing for aspirational middle class in this J. Crew catalog drag right now—”

“Hey,” the guy said, and smoothed his blue sweater over his stomach. “This is not J. Crew.”

“—but I bet you’ve got four figures in loose change in your pockets. From a financial standpoint, to you, Pryce’s ‘great fortune’ has negligible value. Forgive me for questioning your motives, but contracting me for this is like – if I were to contract Dorry here to help me hunt down a pack of gum.”

“I would do that,” said Dorry.

“I know you would, kid,” said Tuesday. “No, not even a pack of gum. It would be like me hiring a PI to find a wad of gum under a desk. So why do you, dirty, filthy, stinking-rich Nathaniel Allan Arches” – with every adjective Tuesday lobbed at him, he nodded – “want a wad of used chewing gum?”

He tugged on his right earlobe, and Dorry blinked. A tell. He had a tell. The next thing out of his mouth would be a lie, or, if not a direct lie, something that wasn’t entirely the truth. Her mother had had a tell: whenever she was about to drop a Wild Draw Four on Dorry in Uno, she tapped her fingers on the cards.

He inhaled. His chest rose. So many tells, thought Dorry, and looked at Tuesday, who had no tells, or at least none that Dorry had ever noticed.

“Why does everything have to be about money?” he said. “Honestly, and I would expect someone who roots around in the digital drawers of rich people for a living to know this already, if you have enough money, it stops meaning anything. You can’t touch it or taste it or feel it. Then the things that matter become what you can touch, or taste, or – feel.”

“Objects, you mean. Something in Pryce’s collection,” Tuesday said.

“Let’s just say” – his already deep voice lowered, which made the bottoms of Dorry’s feet tingle – “that the value is sentimental.”

Tuesday didn’t respond.

“One hundred fifty thousand,” he said. “Final offer.”

“One hundred fifty is my retainer, plus expenses,” said Tuesday. “I want a working partnership. We split the detecting, the legwork, fifty-fifty. If we win, we split the reward fifty-fifty. I’ll take half, you take half. Or you can buy me out, for however much Pryce’s estate is currently valuing whatever the prize turns out to be.” She smiled. “But for no less than five million.”

Dorry’s throat dried up. She made a little coughing sound halfway between a gasp and a laugh.

“Oh, now you’re playing hardball,” said Archie.

“Still not,” said Tuesday, grinning. “But closer.” She stuck out her hand.

Archie paused.

“Why does everything have to be about money?” Tuesday said. “C’mon, I know you’re good for it. I’ve done the research.”

He slid his hand into hers.

“We start tonight,” said Tuesday. “Because you know anyone else who’s serious has already started too.”

So Archie came in. He introduced himself to Dorry with a handshake, and Dorry felt herself start to giggle, because seriously, a handshake? Then her hand went sort of rigid in his warm grip, and after he let go, her first thought was I did that wrong. Or did she? How was she supposed to shake a guy’s hand, a guy who wasn’t her dad’s coworker, wasn’t her mom’s old college friend, wasn’t saying, while they held her cold hand, I’m so sorry for your loss?

They all sat at Tuesday’s rickety Ikea table and ate and strategized.

“Tell me about Pryce,” said Tuesday.

“He was a weirdo. A true-blue, first-class, dyed-in-the-wool weirdo.” Archie dipped a piece of naan into the malai kofta sauce. “New money, vulgar money. Barely tolerated. And I really don’t think he gave a fuck. Oh—” His eyes darted to Dorry.

Dorry snorted. “Dude,” she said, “you kiss your mutha with that fucken thing?”

“This is your influence?” he said to Tuesday. “Look what you’re doing to the youth.”

“I believe the children are our future,” said Tuesday.

Dorry cleared her throat.

“Oh children,” said Tuesday, “do you have something to say?”

Dorry felt herself blush. She did. She had a lot to say. She coughed. “Um, I think I might – know where to start looking.”

Tuesday’s head jerked like a bird’s. “Wha— that’s great. Where?”

Dorry looked at Archie, blushed again, and looked back at Tuesday. “Do you really trust this guy?” she asked. She didn’t, but she trusted Tuesday completely.

“I trust his money,” said Tuesday.

“I want a cut,” Dorry said.

Tuesday cackled. “And that,” she said to Archie, “is hardball. You got it, kid. I can’t spend five million all by myself.”

“Actually, you can,” said Archie.

“Well, I have no plans to go to college again. Dorry needs it more than I do.”

Dorry knew she was still blushing – she could feel her face almost pulsing, and a cool tight spot in the middle of her forehead – and when she stood up, she shook a little. Even if Tuesday only shared one million dollars, it meant Dad could afford the apartment for as long as they wanted. It meant they would never have to move back to the suburbs, or buy a car or have to drive one. And if neither she nor her father ever learned to drive, they could never hit a patch of black ice and smash through the guardrail of a bridge and sail into the river below. They could never be missing for two days in a blizzard, sealed under ice and snow.

They could never drown in freezing water with their seatbelt still on.

She grabbed the letters she’d been reading before Archie knocked on the door. Gunnar was sleeping on them (of course), and was less than pleased to be displaced. “Pryce had a real problem with Valentine’s Day,” she said, handing the printouts to Tuesday. “Every year, he wrote about what a sham it is. He calls candy hearts hideous hearts.”

She heard Tuesday suck in a breath.

“I started circling the first words, then the first letters, of each Valentine’s clipping. In order. So far I have P A R. It could be spelling a word, right? And didn’t the obit say something about hearing the city’s hideous heart?” She was talking too fast. “We’d have to find them all to be sure, but I bet – I bet the first letter of every Valentine’s letter spells Park. As in Park Street.”

“Park Street station. The oldest subway in America. Of course,” said Tuesday. “Where else but under the ground would the old city’s heart be beating?”

“Where else?” said Dorry. Her own heart was leaping like it would never stop.

4
THE CITY’S HIDEOUS HEART

Tuesday, on the sidewalk outside her apartment, snapped her bike helmet’s chin buckle.

She couldn’t believe she was doing this.

But of course she was doing this. It was the most fun she’d had in an age.

“Archie,” she said.

Nathaniel Arches turned around. “What?”

“I never told you my last name,” said Tuesday.

“I never told you mine either.”

Fair point.

“Are you so surprised by my resourcefulness?” he asked.

“Your resourcefulness,” she said, “is borderline creepy.”

“Isn’t your whole job borderline creepy?”

“I don’t cross the border. I have a code of ethics. I don’t, for example, show up at the apartment of someone I have researched.”

“You just write up dossiers about us that we don’t even know exist.”

“Dossiers that help the people I work with strategically persuade you to become just slightly less rich, so the hospital can build a nice new oncology suite. Besides,” she said, “you knew. You know. You gave those interviews.” He pulled his own helmet over his head as she continued. “You tweeted those memes. You put an idea of yourself out there for me, for anyone, to find.”

“Did you ever consider,” he said, “that I was using my resourcefulness to impress you?” His voice was muffled by the helmet, but his eyes were visible, the same eyes she’d recognized in the ballroom of the Four Seasons. “And that with our powers combined—”

He threw his leg over the motorcycle, parked illegally in front of her building’s driveway. Tuesday didn’t know much about bikes, but she knew his was a Ducati, and that it was very cool.

“Your game needs work,” she said.

The first glow of sunset was disappearing over the top of her apartment building when she climbed on the bike and locked her arms around him.

“Seems like it’s working okay,” he muttered, and ripped the bike to life. She was charmed, begrudgingly; it was the cheater’s way of getting the last word.

They rode through the blue night air, up and over the Somerville streets, on the crumbling elevated highway, past the Museum of Science, crossing the Charles River into the white lights of the city. They swung low through the winding snake of Storrow Drive, pulled off at Beacon, looped around the Public Garden, and slalomed down into the parking garage beneath Boston Common. There was so much beneath the ground in Boston: cars and tunnels and tracks and subway trains. Literal garbage, under the Back Bay – an entire neighborhood built on landfill. No wonder Pryce started his hunt here, at the center of the city, on the corner of the Common, in one of the oldest subway stations on earth. Everything began beneath the ground.

Archie cut the engine. “That tickles,” he said, and Tuesday realized her phone, tucked in her inside jacket pocket, was vibrating. Dorry, probably. She’d been pissed to be left behind, but she’d backed off once Tuesday pointed out that (a) her father would have a fit if he found out his daughter’s tutor had taken her on a wild treasure hunt, (b) they needed someone at mission control, someone who could call the police if they stopped making contact, and (c) only two people would fit on the bike. “I’ll give you the first two,” Dorry’d said. “But the third reason is crap. It’s a T station. I don’t need to ride with you guys to get there.”

But it wasn’t Dorry. It was Dex.

Did you solve it yet you’re killing me

She felt a little guilty. For forgetting about him. And for not, with a fleeting adolescent protectiveness, wanting to share.

Yes! Park Street. Heading there rn, stay tuned

It was officially blue-dark in the Common when they came up out of the garage, only a little past seven, though, so the paved paths were still full of people. The closer they got to the station itself, the brighter and noisier it was. Under a streetlamp, two guys in bandanas banged syncopated beats on upturned plastic tubs while a third did the worm on the sidewalk, the last of the day’s buskers, playing, now, for the locals. Drumming in the city made her walk differently. It loosened her hips. Brought her back into her body, ready to bend and to move.

Her phone buzzed again.

WHAT you mental minx

I knew you’d figure it out

She texted back, Next Dorry did, not me, and felt a pop of pride for her neighbor. Dorry was a good kid. The best kid she knew. The kind of kid who made having kids seem particularly great, if you wanted to have kids, which Tuesday didn’t.

“So what are we looking for?” asked Archie.

“I have no idea.”

“Then let’s go see what we can find,” he said. “Maybe it’ll scream at us.”

Park Street had two entrances, gray iron-and-stone structures like twin mausoleums dropped at the edge of the Common, heralded by the symbol of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority: a capital T in a black circle, branded on white like the M on an M&M. Tuesday and Archie took the right entrance, flowing with the human tide down yellow-edged steps to the first of two levels of trains. The upper Green Line platform held the remnants of rush hour, exhausted-looking commuters, eyes glazed, ears sprouting white buds and wires, lazily poking at their phones or burying their noses in books. A girl with pink and purple hair – Berklee student, for sure – was slow-jamming the theme from The Simpsons on tenor saxophone, smooth and sweet, and a youngish man with dark hair silvering at his temples smiled at her. He dropped a crisp bill into the instrument case open for change at her feet. It floated down like a leaf.

Tuesday stalked along the right side of the platform, dodging T riders, following the yellow rubber edge all the way to the end. Nothing. “I don’t know what I expected,” she muttered. “Kilroy saying ‘Vincent was here’? ‘Follow to clue’?”

“Um,” said Archie, pointing over her shoulder. “That seems pretty close.”

On the other side of the tracks, spray-painted and dripping on the dirty white and gray plaster of the wall, was a black bird. Head up and stiff. Wings folded back. The very silhouette of a raven, if it were sitting, say, on a bust of Pallas above one’s chamber door. A shaky scrawl in white chalk floated above the raven’s head. She had to step closer to read it: The prince of darkness is a gentleman!

“I mean,” said Tuesday. Her pulse picked up speed. She imagined the platonic ideal of a lawyer, three-piece suit, leather attaché, leaping over the tracks with a stick of chalk and a raven stencil, shaking a can of spray paint like a maraca: Pryce’s helper. Leaving clues around the city. “We shouldn’t be worried that it seems too easy, right? Pryce wants us to follow him. He wants people to solve it. He’s not trying to hide.”

The painted raven’s beak and one spindly foot, raised, were pointing toward the dark of the tunnel, beyond the platform, where the tracks disappeared on their way to Tremont Street station.

She took a picture on her phone and sent it to Dorry.

Dorry responded in four separate texts:

O

M

F

G

“I have no idea,” said Archie, drawing Tuesday by the elbow to conspire, “what sort of security cameras are set up here, but I’m willing to make a run for it down the tracks to see what we can find.”

“I’m less worried about security cameras than I am about – well.” Tuesday rolled her head to indicate the other people milling on the platform. “We’re about to become the definition of see-something-say-something.”

“They’re not going to see or say anything,” said Archie. “Look at them. They’re zombified. We wait until another train pulls into the station and they’ll all turn to look at it like—” He whipped his head to the side. “Squirrel.”

She swallowed. She felt a little dizzy. A little too warm. A little shaky.

On the internet, when she was researching, she was fearless. She would chase the tiniest clue down any number of research rabbit holes. This was just a forty-foot walk down a dark tunnel. Where she wasn’t supposed to go, technically – but, unlike the internet, once she was gone, there would never be any trace of her. No IP data, no browser history, no nothing. Online, she left tracks. Only in the world could she actually be invisible.

This was real, and her body was reacting accordingly.

She cleared her throat. “We have options,” she said. “We should discuss them. One: we wait for a break between train cars, and we sneak down the side of the tracks. Two: one of us sneaks, and one of us distracts. And I suppose there’s a third option, where we locate the station manager and tell him what we’ve found and wait for the police to come and supervise the whole thing.”

Archie’s lips slid slowly into a grin. “I don’t want to do that,” he said.

“You are bad news,” said Tuesday. “But I don’t want to do that either.” Her heart bumped. There was a whole world underground, of access doors and unused passages, old stations and tunnels. How deep was Pryce going to ask them to go?

Five million dollars could bail her out of jail more than a few times.

She looked across the tracks at the DANGER DO NOT CROSS signs posted every ten feet. She looked at Archie. He was rocking back and forth on his limited-edition Pradas, tenting his fingers like Mr. Burns, looking more mad scientist than sexiest new capitalist. It made him hotter. Stupid hot. One step removed from filthy hot. Tuesday’s taste had always run to the Doc Browns of the world, the wild-eyed renegades and rule breakers. But Emmett Brown broke rules because he wanted to find new roads. Archie broke rules because he thought, as did so many born under a dollar sign, that the rules applied to other people. This was less attractive, philosophically.

But it wasn’t unattractive.

The metal-on-metal shriek of a train approaching on the opposite track made her decision for her.

She grabbed Archie’s hand and ran into the dark beyond the platform.

Her feet kicked up stones. She crossed over a tie with each stride. She didn’t stop until they were well inside the tunnel, far enough not to be seen from the station but not so far that the station’s ambient light couldn’t reach them. Tuesday instinctively hopped over the rail and threw herself flat against the wall, and then realized the wall must be disgusting – all the walls were black with grime, the whole place had needed a power wash for half a century – and flinched forward, her foot connecting with an empty plastic cup. It bounced up and over the rails, clear dome winking in the low light, and rolled to a rest against some kind of train machinery. A signal box, maybe, or a breaker, levers sticking up out of the ground.

She looked behind her. No klaxons. No shouting. No reflector-stripe-uniformed T personnel blinding her with a flashlight.

She let go of the air in her lungs.

“Told you,” said Archie. This time, he took her hand. “Come on,” he said. “Watch your – watch your feet. You don’t want to step on a rat.”

“New York has rats,” Tuesday said. “We have cute little mice.”

“I doubt you’d want to step on one of them either.”

She heard shuffling and then there was light, tiny but piercing, from Archie’s iPhone. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and fired up her own app.

“So we’re here,” she said. “Huh.”

“Not as magical as you’d hoped?”

Yes and no. They were a few yards away from the junction that brought the station’s twin tracks together, en route to Tremont, and the parallel rails coursed through the darkness, crossing, shining, melting together, iron arteries flowing from a metal heart. It was also full of garbage. Dunkin’ Donuts cups and Coke bottles and wrappers and plastic bags and assorted other, unnamable detritus. She felt it before she knew it was happening – a shift beneath her feet, like an earthquake’s ghost – and the train that had been pulling into the station when they made a run for it coasted down the opposite track, through the junction to points beyond, clacking through the darkness like a great green mechanical caterpillar.

She threw her phone’s light up on the wall. Dirt. More dirt. Here, a door, with an MBTA PERSONNEL ONLY sign, half open – a storage closet. Inside, buckets and tools and wires and plastic yellow CAUTION/CUIDADO signboards with graphics of flailing stick figures. Next to the door, more dirt and graffiti, all in caps: YANKEES SUCK.

“Hey!” Archie’s voice carried from ahead. “I found – I don’t know. Over here.”

Tuesday followed his voice around a corner into an alcove, clear from the path of the train, partially made of brick. Bright, clean brick. So clean it couldn’t possibly have been down in the tunnel for very long. And over the brick, someone had spray-painted more graffiti, though the sentiment was somewhat more refined than YANKEES SUCK:

IN PACE REQUIESCAT

“Rest in peace,” said Archie.

Tuesday put her hand on the bricks. The mortar felt loose, powdery.

Shit.

“This is it. This is what we’re supposed to find. There’s – I hope to God there’s only a clue bricked up inside and not some poor schmuck. Buried alive.” Her stomach was doing something she wasn’t sure it had ever done before. It felt very dense, like it had its own specific gravity, distinct from the rest of her body. “In a jester’s costume,” she croaked.

“Ah,” said Archie. “The cask of amontillado marks the spot.” He nudged her with his elbow. She tried to nudge back.

But she felt sick and weak, and all she could think of was the last time she read “The Cask of Amontillado.” In high school, under duress in English Ten. Ms. Heck’s class.

With Abby Hobbes.

Abby used to sit at the desk behind her. Abby kept up a running commentary throughout class, even though they both loved it, and loved Ms. Heck. Not being able to shut up was how you knew Abby Hobbes loved something. And Abby loved that “The Cask of Amontillado,” with its pathetic, drunk clown buried alive, was Tuesday’s Achilles’ heel. Are you seriously freaked by this? This is so tame. This is lame. It’s masonry. It’s a drunk asshole and a psycho and unnecessary home improvement. “For the love of God, Montresor!”

Tuesday could still hear her cackle. Focus on the task, she told herself. Focus. There’s nothing here that can actually hurt you. It’s theater. It’s a game. It’s one hundred fifty thousand dollars plus expenses in your pocket. It’s the possibility of five million more.

“We need a tool, a hammer or something.”

“How about an elbow?” said Archie. “Or a shoulder?” And he threw himself sideways at the wall.

It did not work.

Tuesday laughed a weak laugh and felt, for the moment, better. When she realized Archie was smiling at her, and that he hadn’t really expected to break through, she thought seriously about pushing him up against it and sticking her tongue down his throat.

Focus, she told herself.

They found a hammer and a rubber mallet in the supply closet. Tuesday took a picture of the graffiti, one without and one with Archie (“Should I make finger guns?”), and sent them to Dorry, who responded immediately: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Then they stood in front of the bricked-up wall, weapons raised like bats. Tuesday paused.

“This is not how I expected my night to turn out,” she said.

“Me neither,” said Archie.

They swung.

Tuesday had never tried to break down a wall before, but she could tell right away this wall had been built to fall. Whatever the mortar was, it was still soft; the bricks started to give on the second swing. By the fifth swing, they’d knocked whole chunks clear. They pulled the wall down with their hands, brick by brick.

Her feet felt the earthquake-ghost again, stronger this time, closer – vibrating down their track, not the opposite one. “Careful,” she told Archie. “I think a train is com—”

Archie chose that exact moment to shine his phone on the black hole they’d been making.

And on the corpse of Abby Hobbes hanging inside.

Strung up by her wrists. A multicolored ruff around her neck. Her face a bloated gray moon. Lips black. Soft rotten holes instead of eyes. Found. After all these years vanished, found. Found dead and bricked up in a tunnel underground.

Tuesday didn’t scream. Later, she would be proud of herself for at least that.

What she did was turn and bolt out of the alcove like an electrified rabbit, toward the oncoming path of a Green Line car that would have splattered her across the tracks if Archie hadn’t lunged after her, flung his arm around her waist, and yanked her back from the edge and into the pile of dust and bricks.

The train ding-dinged.

“We’ve been made,” Archie gasped.

The train car’s brakes squealed, then shrieked.

Tuesday couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t close her eyes. She couldn’t—

It couldn’t be.

It could not be Abby.

“Are you okay?” Archie asked.

She scrambled off him and onto her knees, wrapped her fingers over the edge of the broken brick wall, and peered inside.

A red emergency light flashed.

And no, of course.

Of course it wasn’t Abby. Abby wasn’t here. Abby wasn’t anywhere.

This was a dummy. A blank mannequin, obvious now in the low red glow, hanging by its handless wrists from some kind of metal frame. It was dressed in full motley, garish red and purple and green and yellow harlequin, with a twisted jester’s cap, bells on every twist. Hanging around the dummy’s neck, alligator-clipped from each side like a dental patient’s bib, was a furl of parchment.

Archie leaned above her, into the hole, and retrieved it.

Tuesday heard shouting down the tunnel. Far but drawing closer.

“They’re coming,” she said. Her voice was too loud. She pressed her lips together.

“Take this.” Archie shoved the parchment into Tuesday’s hands. “For, uh, various reasons – I’ve got to go. I hate to, but I do.”

“What are,” said Tuesday. “What are you talking—”

She looked beyond the alcove. The train that had almost punched her card was stopped fifty feet up the tracks, purring mechanically in a pool of red and white light. In the other direction, she saw three uniformed T personnel booking it through the station, almost to the tunnel’s entrance.

Her body took over. It pushed her to her feet, it pumped her legs. She ran. She was aware of her fingers curling around the parchment. Of the sound of Archie’s feet crunching through gravel, of the whirring beast of the train car on her right as she passed beside it.

She was not, however, aware of the crosstie until it caught the tip of her sneaker.

Tuesday felt the world shift. She thrust out her arms, but it was too late. She whipped straight down on her face.

Archie’s footsteps at least had the decency to stop.

“Are you okay?” he hissed.

“I’m not dead,” she said. The palm of her right hand and both forearms were studded with bright points of pain, rocks and gravel and please dear God (Montresor) nothing worse. Her ankle hurt. She’d wrenched it. She pressed herself up on her elbows.

“They can’t know—” Archie’s voice rose. “Not yet.”

“What—” Tuesday frowned. Of course. Of fucking course. “You have got to be kidding me,” she growled.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll find you.” And then she heard his footsteps again, faster, farther, until Archie had melted into the black.

She lay on her back. She unrolled the now-bedraggled parchment and had time, just, before the cops were upon her, to snap a picture of it, a series of obscure symbols written in neat black pen:

“A freaking secret code,” Tuesday murmured.

Aww, said Abby Hobbes, sharp, in Tuesday’s rattled head. You got a love note from the Zodiac.

The first thing Tuesday did – after the police handcuffed her and led her up the stairs, out of the station, and into the back seat of a cop car; after she successfully convinced them she was not a terrorist, that her goal in the tunnel was treasure hunting, and that the parchment they’d taken as evidence was in fact the first clue in that rich dead guy’s game; after they decided not to charge her, because she was white and well spoken and a woman and obviously no threat to anyone; after she realized the only person – the only person – she could call to pick her up without either jeopardizing her employment or terrorizing her parents was Dex, and Dex said, gleefully, “I always knew one day you’d call me from jail”; after Dex came for her, around eleven, wearing his white Miami Vice jacket and Ray-Bans, his costume screaming I am living for this ridiculousness, a message that filled her with both gratitude and shame, that she’d been so worried that this slightly overbearing but essentially decent human would need her; after Dex escorted her out of the precinct and through a small but aggressive throng of news media who’d gotten wind of her, because intrepid Bostonians had tweeted pictures of the scene, of Tuesday in handcuffs, even of the parchment, meaning the whole freaking internet knew what Tuesday had risked her stupid neck to find; after Dex, loving every goddamn second of this, told them his client had no comment and hustled her into the cab he’d paid to wait; after they were finally alone, and Dex said, “Jesus God, girl, what. The fuck. This town loses its shit over a couple of Lite-Brites under bridges and you decide to tear down the T?” and all Tuesday could do was shrug and shake her head because she was so exhausted she felt like vomiting, and she didn’t know so many unbelievable things could happen in the same night – the clue and its solution, a brush with death, and that jackass abandoning her – not to mention the thing that was the least believable of all, seeing Abby Hobbes, hearing her, Abby’s voice so clear in Tuesday’s head, a place it hadn’t been for more than fifteen years; after Dex walked her up to her apartment and got her a glass of water before leaving (but not before examining every room, nodding, saying, “This is exactly like I imagined, exactly”) and Tuesday finally saw Dorry’s texts – you are so badass, went to bed (big chem test tomorrow), DYING TO HEAR WHAT HAPPENED!!!!!!! – and realized, with a twinge, that she was perhaps the worst role model in the world – after all of that, the first thing Tuesday did was get out her Ouija board.

Technically, it was Abby’s Ouija board.

Tuesday had stolen it from Abby’s room during the wake. No. It wasn’t a wake. What do you call it when everyone goes back to a house after a funeral to eat cold cuts and prepared salads and make strained conversation? A memorial? But could it even be a real memorial if there hadn’t been a real funeral?

It wasn’t a real funeral. There had been no official death. There was no obituary. There was no body. Abby was still considered a missing person. Even so, one morning they’d lowered an empty casket into the ground – empty except for a pair of purple Doc Martens, a few photographs, and the High Priestess card from Abby’s Rider-Waite deck, which Tuesday had slipped in when Abby’s dad, Fred, wasn’t looking. (She couldn’t bury the whole deck; dropping the whole deck in would have meant that she’d given up hope, and she hadn’t, not then.) By noon, Tuesday was at her presumed-dead best friend’s house, dragging a chip through French onion dip. Tuesday was sixteen. Abby was sixteen too. She would have turned seventeen in November if she hadn’t disappeared in July.

Tuesday’s parents and her big brother Ollie were eating chips too, and Ms. Heck, their English teacher, and a bunch of people from school and the neighborhood and of course Fred, who was vibrating with grief. Tuesday could almost still feel the pain of watching Fred hovering, fluttering, asking if he could get people anything to drink, trying to take care of everyone else so he wouldn’t have to stop, not even for a second.

All funerals are for the living, but this funeral, this premature burial, was explicitly for Fred. He was already a widower. Tuesday didn’t know if there was a word for the surviving parent of a (presumed) dead child, but now he was that too. He had tried to hope for the rest of July and most of August, and that was enough; he couldn’t live with the uncertainty. She’d heard her parents talking about it, late, on the back porch, a little drunk. “He said he’d rather proceed as though she were dead than live with false hope,” her dad squeaked. “Can you – can you imagine? Is that pessimism? Is that – what is that?” And her mother said, “It’s a ritual. A rite. A motion to go through simply to move.”

Tuesday, at the memorial, fled to Abby’s room, which looked exactly the same as it had every day of Abby’s life, or at least all the days of her life during which she and Tuesday had been friends. Matted purple shag carpet, a black bedspread with purple pillows. Taped to her sloped ceiling, a blue and black and white movie poster: a woman, buried to her waist in the ground, trying to pull herself free but held down by a disembodied arm, a rotting hand wrapped around her throat. I’m going to be one of the evil dead, Tues. None of this nice dead business for me. Sneaks and platform clogs lined up at the end of the bed. A pile of clean socks and T-shirts stacked on her dresser.

You would never guess that two months ago she had vanished off the face of the earth.

Or off the edge of Derby Wharf at least. Into the water, probably – into the cold Atlantic, all while Tuesday was fast asleep in her bed. Tuesday was supposed to be staying over at Abby’s, but they’d had a fight. Sort of. It was a dumb fight. Abby had wanted to go out to the light station at the end of Derby Wharf that night, and Tuesday didn’t. For years, they’d walked out during the day – it was their usual meander around town, down by the old counting house and out the long concrete stretch of the wharf to the tiny white light-house at the end. They’d lean against the light station and scuff their feet over the crumbling stone and most of the time they talked, but sometimes all they did was sit and watch the sea and the sky. Tuesday would only be able to articulate later – years later, with the language of time and adulthood – that that was the first time she understood it was possible to be with another person and not feel at all alone.

That June, right after school ended, they started going out to the light station in the middle of the night. It had been Abby’s idea – of course – but Tuesday needed little convincing to get on board. They each filled their backpacks. Abby with candles and matches and a spell book she’d found and, naturally, the Ouija board. Tuesday with sweet and salty snacks, Oreos and chips and two bottles of chilled Sprite and, once, two teeny bottles of cherry-flavored vodka she’d found at the back of her parents’ liquor cabinet. They snuck out of their houses, two girls in the dark world, packing spells and candles.

She knew her parents would have freaked out, but she didn’t care. They weren’t trespassing – the wharf was a national historic site, and it was open twenty-four hours; she’d checked at the visitor center. And they weren’t actually summoning, like, demons. They were trying to talk to people who had died – recently, in town, or historically, at sea, always with limited success (This Ouija is broken, said Abby, we need a better board) – yes, but mostly they were talking to each other. Making each other laugh. It was a ritual, all right: they were tasting their own freedom. And they were getting away with it.

The reason Tuesday hadn’t wanted to go that night was because it was raining. And because, earlier that day, Abby had asked Tuesday what she thought about trying to contact the ghost of Abby’s dead mother. Tuesday had said sure, but her gut went tight and cold and dug in its heels. She didn’t want to have to tell Abby the truth: that she didn’t really believe believe in this stuff. And that she felt a strange breed of shame – shame for the plain dumb luck that her mother was still alive when Abby’s wasn’t.

“Wimp,” said Abby. “It’s just rain.”

“Rain is cold,” said Tuesday. “And it’s not supposed to rain tomorrow.”

It seemed like an airtight argument.

“Well then, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Abby said. They were in the Hobbeses’ downstairs den, watching The Evil Dead on video for the zillionth time, and though Tuesday wasn’t done with her bowl of vanilla ice cream and jimmies and radioactive-red maraschino cherries, she knew Abby had told her to leave. So she left. Hours later, tucked warm into her bed and tired of fretting, she figured, when she saw Abby tomorrow, that they’d do what they always did: pick up where they left off.

But the next day all the Salem police found was Abby’s backpack, heavy with the previous night’s rain, leaning against the white concrete of the light station. And Abby’s fringed scarf – Tuesday could still picture her haggling with a cart seller on Essex Street – caught around the station’s high metal railing, a black banner flying twenty feet in the air.

If Tuesday hadn’t left Abby’s house – if Tuesday had gone to the wharf, or even just asked what was so special about that night, and why Abby wanted to go – she would have seen. She would have known what had happened to her best friend.

She might have stopped it from happening.

But she didn’t.

Seven-odd weeks later, she finally did something. The day of the memorial, in Abby’s closet, on the tall shelf next to her sweaters, was a short stack of board games, shelved in order of how often they were played: Life, Clue, and on top, Ouija.

It was the same Ouija box that Tuesday, wrists and pride still smarting from the police’s handcuffs, balanced on her lap a lifetime later. The box was old, foxed and squashed, dark blue with a lighter blue sketch of a hooded figure, one hand raised. Good old William Fuld’s mysterious oracle, a quality product made by Parker Brothers, right at home in Salem, Mass. She hadn’t taken the board out in years, hadn’t wanted the reminder (as though she needed a reminder), but maybe she should have. It was like seeing an old friend. Abby had personalized the edges of the board with pictures cut from magazines, a Sgt. Pepper collection of heads and shoulders: Lydia Deetz. A winged Claire Danes. Three different Keanus, a John Lennon, a Morrissey, an Edward Scissorhands, a Wednesday Addams. Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. The 27 Club: Hendrix, Cass, Joplin, Cobain. Mulder was glued upside down, next to the sun in the upper left corner, a word-bubble connecting his mouth with the word YES; Scully was opposite, glued beside the moon, saying NO. Abby had sealed everything flat and smooth with a coating of clear nail polish. It still smelled, chemical and teenage.

She rubbed her eyes. God, she was tired. And confused.

She set the Ouija board on her knees and placed the plastic planchette, yellowed with age, a short nail spiked through the clear viewing hole, on the board. Gunnar, purring like a fiend, rubbed up against her leg.

She coughed.

“Abby,” she said, and she was worn so thin that just saying Abby’s name out loud made her throat tighten and her eyes sting and she cried a little. She coughed again. “Abigail Hobbes. Calling Abby. Abby Cadaver. It’s me. It’s Tuesday Mooney.” She twitched her lips. “Your living best friend.”

Gunnar bonked his forehead into her shin.

She rested the tips of her index fingers on the planchette and closed her eyes.

“Abby,” she said, “I thought I saw you.”

She breathed in and out.

“And then I – heard you.”

She lifted one lid to peek. Nothing. Gunnar was lying on his back now, furry limbs splayed like a little murder victim. He blinked at her.

“Abby, are you there?” she asked.

Silence.

“That’s settled, then,” said Tuesday. She laughed, but it wasn’t from amusement. She was relieved. And disappointed. And worried. She had no idea if she was losing her mind.

Again.

5
BLOODY MARYS

Friday.

Tuesday’s alarm went off at the usual time. Her arm shot out from a mound of duvet and smacked Snooze with a great deal of violence.

Before any discernible time had passed, it went off again.

And this time she remembered the night before.

Her brain sprang to life, dinging like a pinball machine. She had chased Pryce’s clue into the bowels of Park Street – ding! – and found a secret code – ding! – with a wealthy, obscenely attractive stranger – ding-ding! – who also – ran away and left her to the cops?

Had that really – had that—

She pulled her duvet up and over her face. Her lips cracked into a demented grin. Tuesday, alone in her apartment, cocooned in her bed, began to laugh. It came out first like a strangled hiss, air pushing between her clenched teeth, but the more she thought about it, the more absurd – she was exhausted, but it was – she was – her head was full of helium. The laugh pushed itself up and out into a full-throated cackle.

Tuesday Mooney was awake.

And now that she was awake, she had some decisions to make. Like: Should she call in sick? Or was calling in sick delaying the unavoidable; was it better to suck it up and get the worst of the “yes, that was me you saw on the internet in handcuffs” conversations out of the way before next week?

She stopped laughing and sat up straight.

Her parents.

It was too early to call her parents. Any call from her before eight a.m. would scare the daylights out of them, but she should probably try to talk to them before they saw it somewhere. Complicating matters was the fact that her parents had recently discovered Facebook. At her brother’s insistence, they’d created a page for Mooney’s Miscellany, which was really a way for Ollie to post pictures of the rare action figures he traded and sold out of the store on weekends. Her father thought Facebook was hilarious – “Six people liked what I had for breakfast. What a world!” – and her mother mostly used it to take personality quizzes. “Guess what?” she’d say, as though passing along hot intel. “If I were a Muppet, I’d be Gonzo.”

Did they look at Facebook at home before opening the store at ten? She didn’t know. She turned off her alarm and glared at her phone. She could check her own Facebook app and see how bad it was. She loved the internet, but she loathed feeling so fucking available. So exposed. And so goddamn distracted.

Gunnar howled from the kitchen.

She didn’t want to call them.

She didn’t want to have to explain any of this. She already knew what they’d think, even if they didn’t say it. Especially if they didn’t say it. It would ooze into all the cracks and crevices between their words.

And they would be right, this time, to be worried.

Her phone rang. The screen filled with a picture of her parents’ dog, Giles Corey III, pressed to sleep under a mound of couch cushions.

She slid her fingertip across the phone.

“Is this my daughter the terrorist?” her mother said. Sally Mooney had a voice like dark maple syrup, sweet and deep. And she was Gonzo; she invented strange, mostly useless things (an automated toast butterer, a case for golf pencils) and held firm beliefs about the healing powers of various Stevie Nicks songs. Tuesday didn’t need an online quiz to tell her that her mother was a weirdo.

“I was really hoping I could break it to you guys,” she said.

“There’s this thing, dear terrorist daughter, called the internet. It’s faster than the speed of a daughter’s admission of guilt.”

Tuesday tucked herself farther under the covers. “I don’t feel that guilty. Lucky, yes. And ashamed, maybe? That I got caught.”

“It’s true, we raised you to be slipperier than that. Are you okay? Ted – Ted, pick up the phone. It’s your daughter the terrorist.”

The line crackled and her father’s higher voice – nerdier, brighter, the voice of an overly enthusiastic cartoon squirrel – broke in. “You say terrorist, I say anarchist. Moonie! What the hell happened?”

“I—” And here it was: the wall. When asked for an explanation, Tuesday found herself unable to provide the truth, whole and unvarnished.

For a variety of reasons. Despite being on social media, they weren’t tech savvy; they wouldn’t know how to tweet Archie’s involvement to the world (not that she felt any great desire to protect him at this point). But every time she so much as glancingly mentioned a man, in any context – Pete, her mail carrier; Alvin, her bus driver; Fancy Hobbit, the short, curly-haired, bowtie-wearing stranger she saw most days on her commute – both of her parents turned into giggly preteens. For as resolutely nontraditional as they both claimed to be, for all the talk of dream-divining and heart-following, and the gently radical dogma that had permeated her childhood (the fourth little pig lived off the grid, which is why the wolf never bothered him in the first place), when it came to the question of relationships, a conservative streak ran deep. They only wanted her to “fall in love,” to “be happy” – as if the only way she could possibly be happy was by securing an explicitly sexual romantic partnership – but she wasn’t looking for excuses to get their hopes up, particularly when their hopes were theirs and not her own. So she said:

“Dorry and I figured out the clue. How could I not go for it?”

Elision was the best kind of lying. You didn’t even have to lie, just selectively tell. She selectively told them about the editorials, the hideous hearts, the raven in Park Street. She told them about the clown mannequin.

She did not tell them that it had, for a moment, worn the decaying face of Abby Hobbes.

“Oh Moonie,” said her dad, who had never forgiven himself for hiring a clown for her third birthday. “I am so sorry.”

Her phone buzzed against her ear.

It was Dex: guess who’s on the front page of the metro.

She felt her entire body try to sink into her mattress, desperate to become one with her bed.

Gunnar galloped the length of the apartment and sprang onto her feet. Then he sat, deliberately thumping his tail, flattening the duvet, and stared at her.

“The world is telling me I have to get up and get this over with,” she said. “I promise not to make too much more trouble.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” said her mother. “But be careful. You know you’re our favorite daughter.”

“I’m your only daughter,” she said. They’d been reciting the same joke, like a benediction, ever since Tuesday was old enough to understand why it was supposed to be funny.

“Moonie,” said her father, the brightness of his voice dimming. Tuesday pulled the duvet back over her head. There was never any question of telling them that she’d seen and heard Abby – never, ever would she do that – but she didn’t have to. Abby was always just below the surface.

“Be careful,” he said, “only daughter.”

An hour and change later, though only nominally more awake, Tuesday swung into her cubicle. She set the first of what would necessarily be many, many cups of coffee on her desk, and noticed someone had taped the front page of that morning’s Metro to her computer monitor. Under the headline TREASURE HUNTER IN THE HUB was a full-color photo of her

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