“Six years,” she repeated. “Six—” She opened the binder, licked her fingertip, and flipped through the fat stack of three-hole-punched pages.
“You’ve been gone since your father disappeared,” she said.
He returned her steady stare.
“What else can you tell me about Nat?” he asked.
“You really don’t want to talk about him, do you?”
“Nat?”
“No,” said Tuesday. “Your father.”
“First tell me one thing that happened to Nat in the last six years,” said Archie.
“Plastic surgery,” she said. “A lot.”
“No!” Archie said, laughing despite the weeds of fear trailing through his bloodstream. It helped. “And he was always the pretty one.”
“He’s pretty something,” said Tuesday. “I mean, it’s good plastic surgery – you’d never know. He just looks—” She shrugged. “Younger than he should. He looks like you, I guess. Even more than you look like him.”
“The Arches line is strong.”
“Come closer,” she said, crooking a finger. She lifted herself to kneel on her chair. She leaned toward him.
Archie did the same. He kneeled and moved forward, walking his palms across the table. When he lifted them, they left sweaty shadows.
Tuesday brushed his hair back from his forehead. Tucked it behind his ears. Pressed his ears flat to the sides of his head. It felt so good to be touched. Blood warmed his face.
“Pinned his ears,” she said. She let Archie’s ears spring back. Then she cupped them, one in each hand, rounding them, pulling them toward her. She ran the tip of her finger down his nose – his long, lumpy bloodhound nose, the nose that Nat broke after Archie broke his – and said, “Nose job.” She frowned in concentration. “Clench your teeth?” she asked, and he clenched, and she brushed her fingertips along the lines of his jaw. “Possible fake dimples.” Then she pressed the pad of her thumb against his fat bottom lip.
“He’s pretty boring,” she said.
Over the years, in his darkest moments – waking up still drunk, still wrapped around a girl whose name he had made a point of never knowing, or, later, after a long late shift, alone on a bus or a porch, knowing there was no one, possibly anywhere on earth, who cared if he lived through another night – Archie would be forced to admit something to himself. Just because he could, occasionally, pretend not to care, the truth never went away; the truth never stopped being true. He might have run away from the money, from the business, from his family, but he couldn’t run away from his own stomach. To never be satisfied was an Arches trait at the genetic level; to want, regardless of how much he already had, was his legacy. What made Archie different was the flavor of his hunger. It was less tangible than money, more common than power. He had tried, almost all his life, to exist without it.
He didn’t need other people to know him. He didn’t need someone to touch him. He didn’t need to be connected to anyone or to anything.
But he could no longer pretend he wasn’t hungry.
Because he was starving.
“I have some questions,” Tuesday said. “But first” – she nodded at the brown bag – “let’s eat.”
While ferreting out Vincent Pryce’s second Beacon Hill address on Pinckney Street (which she knew existed because of something Bert Hatmaker had mentioned at brunch) from Boston’s online property records, Tuesday had decided to bring sandwiches. When Archie had come to her place unannounced, he’d been bearing food. It seemed only appropriate to return the favor.
Plus, she wanted to confront him on a full stomach. No, confront wasn’t quite the word. She wanted to show him what she knew, what she’d discovered on her own, and then discover everything she didn’t. She’d been close, before, to solving one Arches, but now she was close to solving two. It was delicious. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything.
And he was interesting. He was the first interesting man she’d met in – she swallowed a bite of turkey and cheddar – in so long, she’d almost forgotten how it felt to be interested. She’d lived for years now, and happily, freed by the realization that she didn’t need to believe the books, the television shows, the commercials that told her, if she was single, there was something wrong with her. That if she liked it, she was lying to herself. If she chose it actively and indefinitely, if she didn’t think of her single life as a holding pattern, a prelude to the next (coupled) life, then she was – what even was she? A nun, repressed and suspect? A witch, dangerously free? A spinster with a cat, pathetic and irrelevant?
In other words, confused.
But she wasn’t confused. She knew who she was, and who she was was herself. She took care of herself. She came home to herself. She was enough, herself.
So to meet a person who was truly interesting, who presented both a mystery and a challenge, whose life was extraordinary to her yet familiar – she had not seen that coming. Archie was novel. She had never known anyone quite like him, in person, at least – she’d known any number of people in his tax bracket, his level of society, from facts and strange details collected and analyzed. But she had never felt anyone like Archie look at her, and (try to) lie to her, and, with very little persuasion, reveal to her a kind of malnourished need – to not be such a goddamn stranger – he was desperate to feed. His need didn’t feel overwhelming to her, though; it was far more overwhelming to him, and if he was asking anything of her at all, it was to not be overwhelmed alone. And – he was a mystery. A mystery she knew she could solve. It might not have been the healthiest attraction. She didn’t care.
She didn’t know what would happen. She didn’t know what, precisely, she wanted from Archie. Only that she wanted more.
“It’s your turn,” she said.
He stared at the sandwich on the table in front of him.
“What?” she said. “Do you not like ham and Swiss and honey Dijon?”
He shook his head.
“I love it,” he said.
She raised a single eyebrow. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I only use my powers of intuition for good.”
He stared at her.
“It’s your turn,” she repeated.
He picked up his sandwich. Opened his mouth.
Tuesday sighed.
“You don’t want to talk about your father for one of two reasons,” she said. “Either because you miss him very much, or you’re very glad he’s probably dead.”
He chewed.
“Junior,” she said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Junior?”
“Call me Archie,” he said. “Eddie – Edgar – that was his name.” He lowered the sandwich. “My father was not a good man. Nathaniel … whom you’ve described to a T, by the way.” He looked down at the bread in his hands. “Nathaniel was always more his son.”
Archie’s eyes traveled to the backs of his hands. Tuesday saw a scar on his first right knuckle, a lump of tissue, a jagged white line like a check mark. He rubbed it with his thumb.
“He’s been gone for six years, and I still – see him,” Archie said.
Tuesday’s insides jangled.
Archie’s voice was very low. “Sometimes I hear him.”
I know, she thought, helplessly, though Archie didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. She knew just how that felt, and it didn’t feel sane.
“It’s a little disturbing,” Archie finally said, “to hear my – vanished asshole of a father calling me—” He dropped his voice and drained it, dried it up into a husk. “Junior,” he growled. “Whenever I’m about to do something I know he would just … hate.”
“Like what?”
“Like this,” Archie said. He widened his eyes at Tuesday.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Spilling the family guts,” he said, “to a money grubber.”
“I told you,” Tuesday said, “I’m not a fundraiser.”
“You’re really more of a stal
ker.”
“I’m really more like a private eye,” she said. “And I’m not here for the money.”
“We have a verbal agreement that says otherwise.”
“You’re the money I’m here for,” she said. “You’re filthy rich with secrets. That’s what I’m here for, now.”
Tell me, she thought at him. Trust me.
Archie’s chest rose with a long inhalation. “Six years ago, over Labor Day, my father got drunk and shoved my mother into the bar cart,” he said. “This was not unusual for Labor Day. Or any weekend of the year, really. What was different about that year was the summer that came before it. That summer—”
“What?” said Tuesday. “Why did you stop?”
“You’re not writing this down,” he said.
“I’m not writing it down anywhere you can see,” she said.
He cleared his throat and continued. “That was the first summer my father began seriously grooming Nathaniel to take his place at Arches Consolidated. Nat had been there for years, but without much power. Summer intern. Junior analyst. Cutting his teeth. That summer, Dad let Nat hold the reins. And Nat was great at it, of course. He had learned how to be an excellent asshole from the most excellent asshole in the business. He went straight to work on a company they were prepping to sell, streamlining, trimming the fat. Eliminating positions. Demoralizing people so that they worked harder and longer, even though there were fewer of them, so that the company’s financials looked fantastic. But they weren’t, like. Real.”
“The corporate crash diet.”
Archie nodded. “Nat’s job performance wasn’t the problem, as far as I could tell. Well. Not in the traditional sense.” He took a bite of his sandwich.
“He was too good,” Tuesday said. “Too powerful. Too young.”
Archie nodded, still chewing.
“Your father felt threatened by his own son.”
Archie swallowed. “You’re a little spooky.”
“It’s not that difficult to put the pieces together,” she said. “I’m sure your father liked to think he was unique, but he really wasn’t.”
“He was in an extra rage that Labor Day. Against his own decline. His death. I think he actually believed that, because of who he was and what he had, he wouldn’t die. Not because he took great care of himself, because he didn’t, but because he couldn’t imagine being anything less or other than what he was.” He rubbed the scar on his finger again. “So he shoved my mother into the bar cart, and while I was helping her up he pushed me down and I sliced myself open.” He held up his finger. “Emerson stitched me up. Like she always did. Nat, I don’t know – he took a swing at Nat too. He took a swing at all of us. And—”
He looked up at her. “I think you know the rest,” he said.
Tuesday propped her elbows on the table. She did know the rest.
“That was the day,” she said, “he and Nathaniel went to a private wine tasting at the Blue Whale, a restaurant by the wharf. On Nantucket. He was already drunk. He got drunker. Made a scene.” Archie nodded. “Your brother – wait a minute.” Tuesday flipped through her binder, to her freshly researched and recreated timeline of Edgar Arches’s disappearance. “Your brother called him a ‘drunk clown.’” She looked up at Archie. “I thought that was a fun detail.”
Archie didn’t respond.
“He went ballistic,” said Tuesday. “And then Nathaniel hauled your drunk clown of a father away to the family yacht to sober up.”
Archie clamped his lips together and nodded.
“There’s more,” she said.
“There is.” Archie looked down at the table and tugged his earlobe. It was almost charming, how bad a liar he was. “Sometime during the night, my father and the dinghy both disappeared. Dinghy washed up. Father didn’t. The company board granted my mother, as the CEO’s next of kin, emergency powers. Control in his absence. Whenever he returned, alive or dead, the original succession plan would kick in.” Archie inhaled again. He looked away. “I left. I couldn’t – I didn’t want to be a part of my family anymore, or get caught in the press and all that – shit. Needed a fresh start. For six years I slept in random beds and worked whatever jobs I could, in warehouses, hotels, boats. I’m a decent short-order cook now. It wasn’t easy, but it was better than being an Arches. Junior.”
She thought she knew what he was going to say, but she wanted him to say it.
“So why are you back now?”
“Because in the next year my father can be declared legally dead,” he said. “Which will negate the emergency powers and activate the original succession plan.”
“Nat gets control.”
Archie nodded.
“Of a multibillion-dollar company.”
He nodded again, half closing his eyes.
“And that,” said Tuesday, “really chaps your ass.”
Archie flinched.
Tuesday smiled. Of course he thought he was the whitest of white knights. Of course he thought this was his destiny, his mission, the justice he alone could seek. He was a prince who’d paupered his way around and returned in secret, shut out his sister and his mother (who, everything in Tuesday’s research suggested, had done a more than decent job running the company financially and ethically, and might be a terrific ally, if only he gave her the option). He flew under dramatic cover of his brother. All so he could pull off the greatest gotcha in the book: The forgotten prodigal returns! And he’s way less of an asshole than his brother! After all, the world he’d been raised in had never disabused him of the notion that he couldn’t, if the spirit moved him, be Batman.
“Um,” Archie said, vaguely flustered, “I’m not sure what you—”
Tuesday went in for the kill.
“What does all of this have to do,” she said, “with Vincent Pryce?”
Everything.
Everything that happened that summer had everything to do with Vince.
What Archie had told Tuesday was the truth. It was true that his father was in an extra rage that Labor Day, on the heels of Nat’s success, at the first hint of his own obsolescence. It was true that his father had pushed his mother into the bar cart, and it was true that Archie had almost lost a finger, and it was true that his sister, his Swiss Army knife of a sister, had literally stitched him back together. Teenage Emerson had taken a slew of survivalist courses, which turned out to be far more applicable to both their lives than Archie’s piano lessons. She had sterilized the needle with their father’s World War II Zippo.
It was all true. It was enough, Archie thought, for Tuesday to know.
Even though it was only part of the story.
The rest of the story was Vince.
Archie first met Vincent Pryce on a chilly morning in mid-May when Vince brought a plate of cookies to the front door of the Archeses’ house on Nantucket. “Hello, neighbor,” Vince said, brandishing the plate. “I’m building the castle next door.”
Archie, uncharacteristically, had answered the door. He was mostly sleeping and drinking at the time, nominally keeping his mother company but more committed to wallowing in his quarter-life crisis, which was manifesting as a perpetual hangover. He knew about the gaudy pile next door. He knew it made his father insane. Which predisposed him to like this stranger a great deal. He was primed to like anything, or anyone, who might make his father angry, or at the very least make things more interesting. Life on the island, life in the house, was luxuriously dull (except when his father was home, which wasn’t often). Nat was in the city, working. Emerson was out in Los Angeles for the summer, doing – something, Archie didn’t know. They had a cook, Maria, and a landscaper, Georgio, and Maria’s cousins Cristela and Jan cleaned the house once a week, though Archie and his mother lived in only five of the twenty-five rooms: their individual en suite bedrooms, the kitchen, the TV den, and the library, because it had the bar cart and the books, Archie’s and his mother’s addictions of choice.
Archie had a series of private tutors wh
en he was a child, but most of what he learned about the world outside his family came from reading his mother’s paperbacks: Stephen King and Michael Crichton and John Grisham and Danielle Steele, and for a while he had been obsessed with Mary Higgins Clark, for the suspense as much as the glimpse her books provided of the terrors of being a girl. The blind dates who murdered you with your own shoe. The women framed as unfit mothers and never allowed to shed that false accusation. The men who, once you became financially dependent on them, and once they impregnated you, turned out to be violent psychopaths. (He suspected this was uncomfortably close to his own mother’s life story.) He was fascinated and horrified. They were thrillers about powerlessness, which, at the age of twelve, he understood too well, though he knew he could never get pregnant (thank God). He’d wanted to ask Emerson if she was afraid of these things too – blind dates, motherhood, having no money of her own – but he was afraid to ask, afraid she would tell him to mind his own beeswax. She had taken a lot of judo in addition to her survivalist training, but unlike half of the rest of their family, she’d never once hit him, and not because she wasn’t capable. Besides, that was the Arches way: never to speak, in actual words, of anything more personal than how they felt about dinner. As much as Archie would have liked to know his sister better, he did not possess the words.
Now, at twenty-six, he drank gin and tonics with his mother and watched The Price Is Right every morning at eleven, and the days passed, and he didn’t do anything with them, and part of him didn’t care, and the part that did care, the hungry part, the starving part, existed in a suspended state of numb paralysis. This was the only life he had ever known. It was easy and predigested. He was rotting from the inside out, though he would only be able to name that sensation later.
Much later.
But it all started with that first plate of cookies Vince brought over, which were the best cookies Archie had ever eaten. They were chewy and buttery with big soft lumps of chocolate. “What are you eating?” his mother asked. “One dollar,” said a contestant from Des Moines, and Archie passed his mother the plate. “Neighbor stopped by,” Archie said through a full mouth. “He’s weird.”
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 21
