“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 – holy shit, she really was in the Metro – being escorted out of Park Street station by two of Boston PD’s finest. She looked … good. The night was mostly a blur; it wouldn’t have been surprising to see herself with a slack jaw, a gaping mouth, a Quasimodo hunch. But she was straight and tall – her head back, her hair blowing around her face like a lion’s mane. She was taller than both officers, dwarfing the policeman on the right by about half a foot.
And she was smiling, like she had a terrific secret, which, as far as she knew, she still did. Twitter was cluttered with pictures of the raven and the prince of darkness graffiti that led down the tunnel, but no phone in the universe other than hers had a picture of Pryce’s secret code.
The same someone who had taped it up had written RESEARCHERS – THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! in black Sharpie over the headline. They get so wrapped up finding stuff that the cops have to haul them away!
Tuesday meandered over to Mo’s open office door.
“You know I recognize your handwriting,” she said.
Mo adjusted her glasses. “A life of crime agrees with you,” she said, and grinned.
The rest of the day was a variation on that theme. Ollie, who wrote the Mooney sibling book on rule-following, emailed to ask (only half ironically) why she’d brought shame to the family, and whether she was still coming for Olive’s fifth birthday party in three weeks, and if so, could she bring her refrigerator pickles, by Olive’s special request? Facebook’s little red notifications climbed from ten to twenty, then to fifty, as she was tagged and messaged and liked and commented on. She signed out.
At one o’clock, after the office had ostensibly moved on, she’d been able to accomplish the bare minimum of work, and she realized, a little late, that she was starving for lunch. Her desk phone rang. It was an outside line.
She picked up the receiver.
“Hello.” It was a woman with a Boston accent thick as fudge. “Is this Tuesday Mooney?”
“Who is this?” asked Tuesday.
“Brianna McGuff, Boston Globe. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the—”
“No comment,” said Tuesday, and hung up.
She stared at the phone. They’d found her. Of course they’d found her. The Metro had printed her name; she wasn’t hiding. And she, of all people, knew how very easy it was to find someone. She suddenly had the sensation of standing on the edge of a tall building in a strong breeze, in a great voluminous dress that flapped and ballooned and threatened to launch her over the ledge, a lone woman on the wind.
Only she wasn’t alone. She only looked, to the world, like she was alone.
She opened Nathaniel Allan Arches’s record in the development database – and remembered (crap) that she still had his check for fifty thousand dollars. She’d take it over to Trish later. There, populated in all the usual demographic fields, was his address at the Mandarin Hotel, his address on Nantucket; there was his age (thirty-nine) and his birth date (November 3 – his fortieth was approaching). There were her own research notes, all about him – his career with N. A. Arches, all the interviews and gossip and blind items and Boston’s sexiests. Researching a prospect always made her feel that she was getting to know them. She’d gleaned a sense of what he was like, what might make him tick – and it didn’t jibe with anything she’d learned from spending time with him in person. Well, except for his tendency to flake like a complete dick. That seemed about right.
Her gut pinged. The barrage of information he spread across the internet was a smokescreen. Camouflage. A careful construction of a self, probably more truth than fiction but an incomplete picture, PR designed to distract from the salient facts she already knew. First, Vincent Pryce and the Arches family had an ongoing feud. When asked what was so compelling about Pryce’s game, why Archie wanted to win it so badly – when asked about Pryce, point-blank – what had he selectively told her? The prize held great sentimental value. Pryce was a wacko.
Elision, as she knew, was the best kind of lying.
The second fact was just as undeniable, but it snuck up on her. It was hiding in plain sight. It was what she had recognized that night at the Four Seasons, and then again outside her apartment.
Archie’s father had disappeared.
Archie knew how it felt for someone in his life to up and vanish.
It didn’t make her trust him any more, but it explained what she saw in him.
Dex smoothed Tuesday’s Metro front page over his desk blotter. He thought, I know her, and not for the first time that morning, danced a little in his seat. He knew someone famous. Or infamous, at least, for the fifteen seconds every commuter spends scanning the picture above the Metro’s fold.
Dex had never been on the front page of anything.
He stopped dancing.
Dex had a meeting he didn’t want to go to and a pair of Jimmy Choos and a bottle of whiskey in his bottom drawer. He’d been trying very hard not to get drunk or cross-dress at work (as much), but this week had been difficult. First, he watched a guy die. No, first, he broke up with Patrick. His sweet, flexible ballerina, who, although visibly upset by the request, had taken Dex at his word and didn’t contact him thereafter. Dex liked breaks to be clean. Dex didn’t like complications. Dex would have absolutely continued to have all kinds of sex with Patrick after they broke up – and, given the events of the past few days, it would have been great, inspired-by-proximity-to-death sex. He didn’t want to do that anymore, the same way he didn’t want to open Grindr and feel, with every swipe, exponentially disposable, duplicable, and depressed. But he would have, if Patrick had made it easy by making the first move. Because Dex, God forbid, could not make anything easy for himself.
So he missed his boyfriend, though he knew he didn’t really want him (other than Like That). And then Vincent Pryce died. The man with the cape and his fantastic wife, Lila, who had become extra-fantastic in her shock and her grief. As soon as her husband went down, after five seconds of stunned silence, she’d shouted, “Is there a doctor here? Anywhere?” She wasn’t crying. Dex didn’t see her shed one tear. “Oh, come ON,” she said. “You cannot tell me there is not ONE doctor in the house. I don’t care what kind of doctor you are, you all took the freaking oath.” And she dropped to her knees on the carpet, flopped like she was wearing gym togs instead of a one-sleeved gown, flipped her husband over, made a tight ball with her hands, and pounded his chest like she was driving a fence post into the ground.
Dex remembered everything about those minutes with precise, pinching clarity. Kneeling across the body from Lila, telling her he wasn’t a doctor but he wanted to help, taking turns thumping Pryce’s chest. The mentholated old-man smell rising off the body. Lila muttering, Come on come on come on you old idiot come on don’t do this don’t DO this. The doctors came forward – it was a hospital fundraiser after all – but the EMTs whisked him off, as if it weren’t too late, not yet, though of course it was. One of the EMTs was desperately cute, had a dimple that winked even when he looked dour, and they put the body on a stretcher and wheeled it away, Lila trailing behind.
Dex sighed. He folded the Metro so he couldn’t see Tuesday, then unfolded it, then folded it again. If he was being perfectly honest, he was more than a little jealous she had gone adventuring with someone else. He was frustrated and sour that he hadn’t been next to her in the Metro, in full color above the fold. Sure, he was thrilled that she’d called him from jail, and that, at long last, he had stepped inside her apartment. But. Tuesday told him about Rich Boy last night – about the pact they’d made, the five million dollars or at least the potential promise there
of – and it was all he could do to stop himself from saying, Was I not the person who told you about this treasure hunt in the first place?! Which was ridiculous; even if Dex hadn’t told her, Tuesday would have found out; just because he told her about it didn’t mean he had exclusive rights to what she did with that information; and it was actually pretty exciting to be close to that kind of wealth, to have a leg up on the competition an Arches could surely provide. Jealousy was a too-sensitive teenager’s reaction. If it had been any other week, it would have passed through him like a cool breeze. Instead, it was lodged in his chest like a little chip of ice.
He just – wanted to play. Dex, all his life, had wanted to feel that he was part of a team, a member of the cast – an integral member of an ensemble that appreciated his comedic timing, his showboating, his talents, before they withered to dust. Though he supposed the vast majority of humans felt like unpaid extras. Milling about, uselessly waiting to be discovered, recognized for their innate yet invisible value, but doomed never to be anything but human scenery. Maybe that was his team, and he was already on it. Had been on it, in fact, forever.
He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock. The meeting, scheduled for ten, would actually start in fifteen minutes.
Dex turned toward his computer and checked his email.
At the top of his inbox was a message from Lila Pryce.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Brunch?
Hi Dex,
I’ve started this email several times. Every time it gets weirder. At first it was like, “Dear Sir, I would like to cordially invite you to my home in Beacon Hill for brunch.” Then it turned into “Dear Person I Barely Know, You tried to resuscitate my husband, and even though that didn’t work out, I’d still like to get you drunk by eleven a.m.”
I am having trouble calibrating my gallows humor.
So here is my final attempt:
Do you like brunch?
I hope you’re not doing anything tomorrow (Saturday) and can join me for brunch. As a thank-you, because I saw how hard you tried to save Vince, but also because, in another timeline, a timeline where the most exciting thing that happened that night was a chance meeting of lost souls, I’d still be inviting you over for brunch. Though in that other timeline, we would have exchanged cards at the end of the night. I wouldn’t have had to Google-Fu your email address from the Richmont website.
(By the way, if this is not the Poindexter Howard whom I met at the Four Seasons on Tuesday night, my apologies.)
I can’t guarantee I won’t be a disgusting mess, but I promise carbohydrates and the finest bloody mary bar you’ve ever seen as an offset. Brunch is at 10:30. My address is 13½ Louisburg Square.
And you can bring your friend Tuesday, who found the first clue. I would have loved to meet her at the fundraiser, but since we live in this timeline I would love to meet her at brunch.
Lyle KP
Dex accepted the invitation immediately.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Brunch?
Is “do you like brunch” code for “are you gay”? Because yes. But really, what sane human, gay, straight, or otherwise, does not like brunch? Whoever they may be, I do not wish to know or associate with them.
But I would be honored to associate with you.
I will be so bold as to accept the invitation on both my own and Tuesday’s behalf, with assurances that she would love the chance to know you better as well. No matter the timeline.
Dex
“I forget what we decided,” said Tuesday. “Are we pretending this brunch is or isn’t part of Vincent Pryce’s game?”
Dex stepped over a hole in the brick sidewalk that looked thirsty for his ankle. They had just turned off Beacon and were ascending Walnut, heading straight up into the heart of Beacon Hill. “God, this neighborhood is one giant booby trap.”
It was Saturday morning. They were both hung over, which was unusual. In fact, if Dex was calculating correctly, the night before had been the first time he had ever met Tuesday Mooney for drinks and she’d become visibly intoxicated. Even when they were self-medicating finance newbs, Tuesday had never given the impression of being remotely overserved. It had seemed like a superpower.
But she was very obviously, now, a human.
The day before, she’d texted him. He came back from his boring meeting and was bursting to text her about Lila’s brunch invitation, but lo and behold, Tuesday had beaten him to the punch. Dex just about tipped out of his ergonomic Staples chair in shock. She never texted first.
Hey Dex. I owe you drinks, multiple. McFly’s?
McFly’s was a beater of a bar dangling off the ass end of Charles Street, an equidistant cab ride from their respective apartments in Somerville and the South End. It was dark and sticky and the stools wobbled and it served undergraduates from Suffolk and Emerson – there were always several faces in the crowd that could’ve been peeled off a bottle of children’s sunscreen: glowing, innocent, slightly dazed – but critically, for Dex’s purposes, it was the last Friday-night karaoke venue in greater Boston that had not blacklisted him. He had a tendency not only to hog the mic, but to hog the mic by playing karaoke roulette. It was a game of his own invention: he sang songs of his choice in the style of an artist chosen by the whims of the Shuffle feature on his iPhone. That was the whole game, and that was how he came to know the genius of, say, belting Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of” in the style of Barbra Streisand. It was a very dumb and very entertaining game that Dex could play all by himself but chose not to. It was objectively obnoxious.
Not, Dex thought, unlike himself, which was why karaoke roulette was so essential. Singing like a giant, showboating, asshole chameleon – an undeniably talented one, but still – was one of the only ways he could remind himself of, well, who he was, and what he loved. He sang like an attention-seeking missile and remembered everything that weeks and months and years of pretending to care about money and how to sell it to other people had conspired to make him forget. Whenever he wrapped his fingers around the mic and opened his mouth, he, Poindexter Howard, was back.
Tuesday Mooney, however, when he sat down across from her that night at McFly’s, was … different.
She buzzed, and not because she’d already started drinking. She flickered, almost, like her attention couldn’t settle. And she blushed – her face went full tomato when she thanked him, again, for coming to fetch her from the police.
“Of course,” Dex said.
She cleared her throat.
“I guess I’m not used to—” She shrugged. “I mean, I could’ve called my own cab, but I – anyway. I appreciate it.”
Dex poked her in the arm.
“Don’t get mushy on me, girl.”
They ordered another round. After a thorough debrief of everything that had happened that week – the end of Patrick, the Auction to Abandon All Hope, and Tuesday’s night with Rich Boy/Poe Boy (a pun Dex made without even trying, and about which they giggled for a solid sixty seconds) – Dex felt a little better. Jealousy was like indigestion: it cleared with crackers and conversation. The invite from Lila helped. He had a card to play now too. And he wasn’t such a monster that he could begrudge Tuesday a thrilling Thursday with a slab of man meat who truly was, in the common tongue, Hot as Hell. She’d shown him the pictures on her phone to prove it.
That girl needed to get laid yesterday.
“He said he’d ‘find me’ today,” Tuesday said, slurping up the last of her third G&T.
“How romantic,” said Dex.
“He didn’t.” Her words were clipped and quiet. She looked down at her glass. Dex paused, waiting for more. But Tuesday pressed her lips together.
“What a dick,” he said casually. She exhaled, clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to press for details. At least not those deta
ils. Instead, he flicked to the next picture on her phone. “So this is the secret code,” he said.
“Sure is,” said Tuesday.
“Fat little ankh, funky arrow, coffin, eyeball, butthole. Maybe you chant this stuff naked around a bonfire on the solstice.” He snickered. “Sixty-nine, dudes.”
“That’s not the number sixty-nine. That’s the astrological symbol for Cancer.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “Filthy little crustaceans.”
“I spent most of the afternoon trying to crack it.” Tuesday rubbed her whole face with both hands, pulling her cheeks down like something Edvard Munch would paint. “And it doesn’t make much sense. The ankh is an ankh – life. The coffin seems like it’s just a coffin. You’ve got the astrological symbol for Jupiter in there, infinity, a heart, a cartoon cat, a dollar sign – there’s no consistency. It’s a bunch of random symbols. It’s wingdings.”
“Have you tried reading them like they’re emojis?” Dex hunched over the glow of her phone. “Life arrow coffin. That has a certain trajectory.” He took a sip of his own gin and tonic. “What does Cookie Monster’s eyeball stand for, really?”
“Gold,” said Tuesday. “It’s the alchemical symbol for gold. Hey.” She hunched lower beside him. “You’re not wrong about that trajectory – life to coffin. Birth to death. Unless we find, like, a decoder ring somewhere, this might be our best—” She jerk-bobbed upright on her stool and wove closer to him. “Poindexter Howard,” she said, drilling her eyes into his, “we need a plan.”
“A plan?”
“We shouldn’t go to brunch tomorrow without a plan.”
Dex swung his giant forehead around and pointed it at hers.
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Because.” She was a little slurry now. “We’re going into the dead man’s den. There may be clues.”
Dex frowned. “I’m pretty sure,” he said, “the living widow invited us because she’s, like, sad. And wants company.”
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 10
