The door bounced off something on the other side and swung back into the frame. The knob had broken through the plywood; it was recessed, smushed in like a thumbprint cookie.
“Or we could have used that,” Tuesday said, shining her light on an eyehook screwed into the doorframe, and the key dangling from it.
“Where’s the romance in that?” Archie pushed the door open again with one arm. “Adventurers first,” he said, and Dex took another breath and stepped through.
They were no longer in a hallway but a storage room, maybe, an antechamber on the outskirts of a much larger space. A balcony. A balcony, with several tiers like cake layers, for now-absent seats. Dex stepped down one, then another. There were columns and a curling metal railing in front of him, and more cardboard boxes, though not stacked so high as in the hallway. Tuesday called out that she’d found stairs, and Dex and Archie followed her down the curving darkness.
“Oh Dex,” said Tuesday. “Look.”
Her phone flashlight was puny, but it was enough. There was a mural on the back wall of the theater: an audience of figures in Grecian robes listening to a standing figure on the shores of a lake that was still bright blue after all this time. Dex’s dusty heart stirred, caught in his chest. His eyes prickled. What a terrible thing to bury such beauty alive. The rest of the paint was chipped and dulled by water and time, but the mural was spectacular, ageless and so big Dex had to back up to take it all in, which he did without realizing he was backing up to the lip of another short flight of stairs, flanked by more columns – Tuesday caught him just in time, or else he would have tipped ass over heels, down the stairs into the mass of filing cabinets and chairs and piano benches and music stands and dead pianos, rotted skeletons of keys and wires, and – oh God, was that a toilet? Dex wiped his brow with the back of his hand and looked out into the auditorium, which was small and oval. The air was cool, but the walls seemed to glow orange, and he felt safe and close, as though he were a yolk floating in an egg.
“The acoustics in here must be insane,” said Tuesday. She walked down the last steps to join Dex on the auditorium floor, shining her light on the junk all around her, the railings, the walls. Archie followed. Once she was standing in the center of the floor – seatless as the balcony, who knew when the seats had been removed – she lit the walls in a slow circle. Massive columns, deep niches. Walls feathery with flaking paint. Each niche was marked with the name of a composer in delicate letters, surrounded by decorative hand-painted borders: BACH. MOZART. BEETHOVEN.
This was a recital hall. For music, not for theater. Dex didn’t see a stage, just a flat floor with space at the front for a piano, a quartet, a soloist, and though a stage could have existed and been removed at the same time as the missing seats, dramatic productions were not what this space was built for. It was underground, sure, and Pryce (and Poe) had a fondness for the subterranean, but the clue was a snippet of Shakespeare. Lear. Dex pondered. This didn’t seem quite right.
Maybe his hunch had been drunk.
Dex turned back to see Tuesday flash her phone’s light straight into Archie’s eyes. “We need to talk,” she said.
Archie raised a bent arm, shielding his face like a capeless vampire. “Ouch, jeez,” he said. “You don’t have to torture me.”
“Were you going to call me?” Tuesday asked Archie, gesturing to the garbage heaped around them. “You’ve obviously known about this theater for at least a day. Long enough to know when the guard makes his daily coffee run.”
“All I did” – Archie backed up into a filing cabinet – “was figure out that Poe’s parents met doing Lear, and that Poe was born here.”
“And that brought you here, specifically?” Tuesday said, lowering her light.
“Yes. When I say Poe was born here, I mean right here. That alley next door? It’s called Carver Street. Edgar Allan Poe was born on Carver Street.”
“How do you—”
“I’m resourceful,” he said. “Remember?” He pushed a hand through his hair and stopped halfway, grabbed it, gave it a tug. It stood. It was practically a mane. “And yes, I put that together and didn’t tell you about it, but it’s not like I wasn’t going to.” He swallowed. “I Googled the addresses adjacent to Carver Street, and all this stuff about the underground theater comes up, which seemed like the kind of thing Pryce would’ve loved. But it was all – supposition. So I came on a recon mission.”
“I like supposition. I’m great with supposition.” Tuesday set her phone on a chair, light shining up, and crossed her arms. “You said you’d find me yesterday. I did not hide. Yet somehow you did not find me.”
Archie made a deep noise midway between a grumble and a growl.
Dex took a slow, centering breath. He mulled. Carver Street. What a fantastic name for a street. What a perfect place for Edgar Allan Poe to be born. What a hopeful sign that his hunch hadn’t been so drunk after all. He pressed down hard on a piano bench and, satisfied with its sturdiness, sat. He crossed his legs. Rubbed the first knuckle of his right hand with his right thumb. From where he was sitting, he had a full view of the giant mural, of the figures standing by the water.
Or were they on a heath?
Tuesday’s voice cut into his thoughts: “—thought we were partners, and the terms of partnership were—”
Archie: “—don’t remember signing anything—”
Dex tuned them out. Not all the way out, because they were amusing, and Archie’s voice was a gorgeously soothing bass. Tuesday went for the destabilizing non sequitur – What’s wrong with your ear? (what indeed?) – and Archie, after a beat, responded with a classic – What’s wrong with your ear? Tuesday shot – It’s a reasonable expectation of a partner to NOT abandon me to the freaking Boston PD – and Archie shot back: I didn’t abandon you, I was trying to protect you—
Dex perked. Oh you sweet, stupid man, he thought. He had broken not one but two of the Tuesday commandments: Thou shalt not gaslight. And thou shalt not condescend.
He looked up. Tuesday’s lips were pressed flat and her eyes held something that wasn’t quite murder but close – manslaughter, maybe, or negligent homicide. But she looked amazing. In this cold, wet piano mausoleum, she burned like a coal. And Dex, distracted by Pryce’s puzzle, caught up to what had been happening right in front of him. Tuesday was fighting. Implacable, unflappable Tuesday – his favorite emotional iceberg was on fucking fire.
And Archie – more of his hair was standing up now, and higher too, brushing Barry Gibb-ian heights. His lips were tilted in a kind of smile, because he was the kind of man who laughed when he argued, and his shoulders were up high, around his ears, his hands out in front of him, fingers splayed so he could hold his own words and present them to her like a hot dish. It seemed that being intensely frustrated was the most fun Archie’d had in months.
They’d been arguing about something Dex had been only half paying attention to – oh, it was about trust, being on the same page, about not “unnecessarily going it alone,” which was a hilariously ironic argument considering Tuesday had come up with it – with a fierceness and a flush that could mean just one thing: they were desperate to bone but hadn’t quite admitted it to themselves yet.
Dex laughed.
They both turned to him.
“Stop overthinking it,” he told them.
A bell rang in the back of his brain.
He saw it.
Dex squawked.
He raised his arm and pointed at something behind and above Tuesday and Archie, and Tuesday whipped her head around to follow. All she saw was the wall. No, it wasn’t just a wall. It was a niche pressed into the wall, a slightly rounded space offset by columns. She saw the name BACH lettered in what had once been white at the top of the niche, surrounded by an intricate hand-painted frame, also in dusty once-white paint, of flowers and vines and—
Tuesday’s jaw dropped. It actually dropped, flopped loose with her open, astonished mouth. It didn’t matter that, ten second
s ago, she’d wanted to rip Archie’s head from his shoulders (or his clothes from his body; it was getting progressively more difficult to tell where one desire ended and the other began). All that mattered was that they were exactly where Vincent Pryce wanted them to be.
She turned back to Dex.
“We don’t need a decoder ring,” she said.
“What,” said Archie. “I don’t—”
Dex stood from his piano bench and walked straight back, sliding between Archie and Tuesday, sheer glee radiating off his body. He stood with his back to the niche and pointed straight up at the painted border.
“Sixty-nine, dudes,” he said.
“You’re going to have to explain a lot better than that,” said Archie.
“Look,” said Tuesday. “Look at the design, the border around Bach’s name.”
Archie stepped closer. Dex grinned fanatically and hopped a little, still pointing up.
“Do you know the difference between a code and a cipher?” Tuesday asked.
“Here we go!” Dex clapped.
“What people think of as codes are, most of the time, really ciphers,” said Tuesday. “Ciphers replace each letter in a hidden message with a sign or a symbol. A code replaces each word in a message with a sign or symbol. Vincent Pryce gave us a secret code. And this, all of this—” She gestured to the air. “This concert hall is the secret code decoder room.”
Dangling on the edge of the faded painted border around Bach’s name, someone very recently had painted the astrological sign for Cancer in bright white paint. Beneath that, also in bright white paint, the same someone had painted the word “clock.”
“The symbol for Cancer is code for the word ‘clock,’” said Dex. “And we need more light.”
They hunted. Archie traced a string of yellow-caged work lights back to a small generator and flicked the switch. Tuesday warned him they might be sitting in a pool of seeping groundwater. “Don’t electrocute yourself,” she hissed, and he smug-smiled at her like he’d caught her accidentally caring about his safety and wasn’t it adorable, and she rolled her eyes and immediately, in the new low light, saw another symbol: the ankh. Painted on the side of a rusting green filing cabinet listing in the corner of the room. She circled the cabinet. There was a symbol on each flat side – the ankh, the bent arrow, the coffin – and beneath each symbol, a freshly painted word.
“The ankh … means life. The arrow is after. The coffin is death,” she said to herself, and then, louder, to Dex and Archie and the whole haunted room, “Life after death.”
Dex found, to his eternal delight, the asterisk (“butthole!”) in the border painted around Mozart – game. Archie found both half-moons, facing left and right – before, the. And scattered throughout the mural like hidden pictures, they found infinity (well), the cat (alone), the tombstone (ages), the circle (seek), the star (play). Tuesday tapped each of their discoveries into her phone notes, then sat quietly on the steps and began to decode. They were missing a few: the dollar sign, the equal sign, the heart. Though maybe those symbols didn’t need decoding, because they meant what they meant.
She looked up and caught Dex’s eye as he crossed the room, still searching. He grinned extravagantly at her, all teeth and joy, and for a split second she saw him as a child, six, seven, on Christmas morning. Or – she knew this to be a part of his personal history – watching Newsies for the first time. She laughed. Child Dex would have played witch with her, she realized; child Dex would have loved it.
She had missed his childhood, but she had known him, and been known by him, through what felt like two or three ages of her adult life. It was suddenly astonishing to her, her friendship with Dex. Outrageously lucky that she was friends, still friends, with the sole legitimately witty coworker at her first adult job, who just happened to be assigned the cube opposite hers. Without meaning to, or trying, she and Dex had been friends to varying degrees for more than—
Ten years.
Ten years, and they hadn’t gotten bored of each other. Ten years, and she’d seen almost every side of Dex, every boyfriend, every gripe about his job, every voice he could borrow and bend, and there were still sides to him. Ten years, and she honestly couldn’t think of anyone else she would rather be with here – here, in this basement theater, together. Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years.
She smiled at him, bewildered and grateful.
“Tuesday,” said Dex, wary, “why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because,” she said, tucking what was precious safely away, “we found the theater. We cracked the code.” She stood on the steps, the mural to her back. “We’re missing a few symbols, but I think we can fill in what they mean based on context. The equal, for example, probably means ‘equals,’ the dollar sign probably means ‘dollars,’ and the ampersand probably means ‘and.’” Archie propped one elbow on the rusty green filing cabinet and grinned at her like he was going to bust. Dex pressed his palms together and hopped up on his toes. “The cat,” she continued, “means ‘alone’ and the starburst means ‘team,’ so I’m interpreting that to mean we can play by ourselves or in teams. The only one we’re missing that doesn’t seem completely obvious is the heart.”
“Play?” asked Archie. “Play what?”
“Only you,” said Dex, “would look for another explanation for what a heart means.”
Tuesday grinned at him and cleared her throat. “You ready? All together now:
“Life After Death
“A Game for All Ages
“Alone or in Teams
“Objective: Seek well before the clock (equals) twelve.
“Receive thirteen thousand (dollars) and (heart)
“How to Play: Use your imagination.”
Dex opened his mouth. He held out his hands, fingers flexed expectantly.
“Fantastic!” he said. “What the fuck does it mean?”
Tuesday shrugged. She felt like giggling. She was sober, or at least the most relatively sober she’d been in hours, but even so, her head was light and loopy.
“It’s a game,” she said. “For all ages. We use our imaginations to play it.”
“Where’s the money coming from? Is someone going to give us thirteen thousand dollars?” Archie asked. “Where – how do we get it?” And then, off Tuesday’s face, he said, “I’m not focused on the money, I’m focused on how the game works.”
“Maybe it’s here somewhere?” She gestured at the room. “We haven’t looked everywhere yet. There are plenty of places to hide – I mean, look at all the boxes.”
What had Dex said, right before he saw the symbol on the wall?
Stop overthinking it.
She hopped down the stairs and crossed the cluttered floor to where Archie stood, leaning against the filing cabinet with the name of the game, ankh-arrow-coffin, Life After Death, painted all around it. She pulled open the top drawer; it was empty. The middle drawer was empty too. But the bottom drawer, which she could open only so far, since it was surrounded by cardboard and old paper and assorted other garbage, was heavy with manila envelopes. Several dozen neatly filed, front to back. She pulled the first one out.
The envelope itself felt like any other manila envelope, but the flap was sealed with a glob of black wax and pressed with an elaborate symbol:
“That’s him,” said Archie, close over her shoulder. He was giddy almost, buzzing like a neon tube, lit by something deeper than the excitement of finding a clue. His voice rose so high, so quickly, it cracked. “That’s his – see the V, the A, and the P? That’s—” He coughed into his fist. “That’s Vince,” he said again, his eyes bright.
Dex pulled the file from Tuesday’s hand to peer at the wax seal. He wasn’t paying any attention to Archie.
But Tuesday was.
Her mental file on Arches, Nathaniel floated open.
Didn’t just know the dead man, she wrote.
Ar
chie coughed again. Knuckled what might have been a tear from the corner of his eye, with a hand that had the slightest tremor.
Might have loved him.
7
DEAD PEOPLE
Dorry flicked her highlighter back and forth between her fingers until it blurred. She didn’t really get highlighting. Everything seemed important, every tiny detail – that’s why those sentences were there, to be noticed! – so she painted every sentence in smooth stripes of yellow, blue, and pink. When whole pages in her biology textbook turned fluorescent orange, she kind of wondered if she’d missed the point.
But weren’t all the points the point?
She squared the report on her desk. One more read and she would take it to Tuesday. She wanted to highlight the whole thing, but she resisted. She’d worked on it every free second since Thursday night – when she wasn’t in school (and sometimes when she was, like in study hall), or while eating or sleeping or Having That Talk with Dad (he super freaked about the picture of Tuesday in the Metro, which Dorry had to take off the fridge and stick in her desk drawer). The report was thirty pages long. It was the longest thing she’d ever written. She’d had to go to the Staples in Harvard Square to buy another printer cartridge because there were so many photos in the appendix. The title page read, in a drippy Buffy the Vampire Slayer font she’d found online, THE HAUNTED LIBRARY OF VINCENT PRYCE: THE COLLECTOR AND HIS COLLECTION.
Tuesday hadn’t asked for it, but just because no one had assigned it didn’t mean it wasn’t the best work Dorry had ever done. She hadn’t known she could feel this proud of something she wrote. And it wasn’t just the writing that she thought was good; it was the information. Mr. Pryce’s collection was amazing. No wonder Archie wanted it so bad. No wonder he’d said it had sentimental value. It was starting to mean the world to Dorry and she’d never seen it, hadn’t even known it existed before three days ago.
Everything she’d found was online, in newspapers and online articles and on Wikipedia. Maybe she could turn this in instead of her final research project for English class. But no: she didn’t want to share this information. It was sensitive. It was for Tuesday’s eyes only (and Archie’s, she guessed, since they were partners). And it wasn’t for a grade. It was for millions of dollars.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 14
