Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  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 punch
ed 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.