The chart revealed no obvious answer. There was no clear path. No one, as far as Dorry and Ned could tell, had figured it out yet. Not even them. They’d decided to split the thirteen thousand between them and save most of it for college. Neither Dorry nor Ned felt right doing anything else, though it seemed like too boring a solution to be what Pryce was looking for. But Dorry had a hunch that what they did with the money was only part of the solution; Vincent Pryce valued stuff – things, but also ideas and actions – other than money. They still had to play their hand with the widow, which meant collecting all the cards. “The pattern is going to be in the data,” Ned said. Between the Globe and the Black Cats and their own private knowledge, they’d only tracked down twenty-six teams; a lot of the chart was empty, and they didn’t know for sure how much they were missing. “What we need,” Ned said, “is more data.”
Tuesday had more data.
Tuesday was more data.
“What’s your card?” Dorry asked her.
Tuesday tilted her head again, like she was listening, and swiveled back to Dorry.
“Don’t tell your dad,” she said.
She handed Dorry a queen of diamonds.
The music was fading out at the end of a song, the singer was howling that he lost himself, he lost himseeeeelf, and Dorry wanted to smack Tuesday’s giant old stereo, rip the plug out of the wall, make it fade faster. She looked at the card, at the front and the back. It was the same deck, same design, as hers and Ned’s. She didn’t understand it any more than she understood their own.
“Diamonds,” Dorry said, handing it back. “I’d buy thirteen thousand dollars in diamonds.”
Tuesday wrinkled her nose. “Really?” she said.
Dorry didn’t do anything but return her gaze.
“I guess.” Tuesday joggled her head from side to side. “I guess ‘seeking well’ could mean – seek the good life. Live high. Drape yourself in diamonds.”
Vincent Pryce would not have thought that. Dorry knew this because she’d done the research – she saw her report’s shiny plastic cover peeking out from a pile of paper on Tuesday’s desk – and she couldn’t believe Tuesday didn’t know it too.
It was almost like Tuesday hadn’t read her report.
Tuesday sighed. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s a better idea than mine. Which was keeping it for myself.”
Wrong. Dorry almost laughed. That was the wrong solution. Vincent Pryce thought living well was using what you had, your money, your life, instead of stashing it away. Being curious and adventurous and hunting for weird things. Looking for them, trying to find what was impossible. Like Dorry searching for her mother’s ghost.
Which, she realized like a slap in the face, had to be a correct solution.
Dorry almost felt sick, she was so excited, so abruptly. She’d been right all along. All along. She had figured it out herself, without any help. And Tuesday had tried to—
Tuesday slumped down on her desk chair. Her shoulders caved forward. Her legs were wide, her feet turned in. She looked like a puddle of unspooled thread.
The next song wasn’t really a song but a list of things recited by a robot, and it was horrible, there were horrible, sad, skittering sounds underneath and on top, it chilled Dorry, and Tuesday acted like she didn’t hear it at all. Or like she’d heard it so many times before, she could no longer hear how horrible it was.
Dorry squeezed the flat jar of hair paste in her hand. She’d gotten what she came for.
“I should go,” she said.
“Wait,” said Tuesday. “You read – you read the profiles? Of the other players?”
Dorry nodded. “It’s been all over Facebook,” she said. It was the most casually calculated half-truth she’d told yet. Sure, it was probably on Facebook; but Dorry wasn’t, and hadn’t read about it there. And Tuesday knew it.
But she didn’t notice.
“What did you think?” Tuesday asked. “Gut reaction.”
Dorry looked at Tuesday and Tuesday looked back. The full truth seemed like it couldn’t possibly change anything, so Dorry told it.
“It’s like they’re all playing a different game,” she said.
14
GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Go for a walk, said Abby.
Tuesday didn’t want to. Once Dorry left – spacey and vague, whatever she’d been hiding all week, she was still hiding – all Tuesday wanted to do was dig up those profiles in the Globe, see for herself what Dorry’s excellently sensitive gut had intuited. And speaking of her excellent gut … where was that report she’d written about Pryce?
Tuesday, said Abby, leave your apartment.
“You leave my apartment,” muttered Tuesday.
Great idea! Whither thou goest, I ghost. Abby paused. Then cackled maniacally.
Tuesday pulled her eyes away from her computer. This was going to go on for some time if she didn’t do what Abby said. And Abby had a point. The farthest she’d walked today was the thirty-five feet from her bed to her kitchen and back again, and she was jittery, over-caffeinated, anxious. Walking would burn that off. It wasn’t too cold out; it was a perfect late-October early evening. She would go for a walk to Porter Square. She would walk and she would think.
And try not to think about the fact that neither Dex nor Archie had texted her.
Still.
It was scarf weather. She bundled herself up, and it was comforting. The sun was low and bright, and Abby had been right; a walk was what she needed. Told ya, said Abby, and Tuesday slipped her earbuds into her ears. If anyone passed her on the sidewalk, she wouldn’t look like the insane woman talking to no one that she was.
“Don’t get cocky,” she said.
I’m never cocky, said Abby. You must be thinking of someone else. She paused, like she had after her stupid ghost pun, then said, sotto voce, Cocky, and burst out laughing again.
“It’s good to know my mental illness has managed to retain her adolescent sense of humor.”
Cocky, said Abby again, still laughing.
Tuesday walked down Summer Street, past the community hospital, past Somerville’s ribbons of triple-deckers and tiny front lawns, scattered with dead leaves and lawn statues, benches, birdbaths, the Virgin Mary half-shelled in bright blue plaster alcoves. She thought about how everyone playing Pryce’s game could be playing a different game, all at the same time. The game was open-ended. Pryce wanted there to be variety. He had funded fifty-one potential start-ups, to see what they would do.
He’d built an experiment with fifty-one variables.
Who could all be playing a different game, legitimately. There was, in this one game, the possibility of many. She paused at the corner of Summer and Linden – at a house with not only a polished metal gazing ball and a small windmill but a very large lawn shrine to the Virgin Mary, snug in her surrounding plaster shell – and thought, Nested. In one game were many, nested. That’s why the instructions were so vague. Pryce wanted every player to do what they wanted to do. And depending on what they wanted to do – she supposed, the wording of the funeral invitation was as vague as the game instructions – was there to be another round? Was “the audience” the card players could have with the widow an interview, a test before moving on to the next level? And between the card player(s) who’d spent their thirteen K on, say, a Swarovski-encrusted Green Bay Packers cheesehead and the card players(s) who’d transformed their assets into socks and long underwear for a homeless shelter, whom would the widow choose?
Blinged-out cheesehead, said Abby. Definitely.
Was the widow enacting her own or the dead man’s wishes? Which could be, based on past evidence – built a castle on Nantucket, collected several million dollars’ worth of occult doodads – a little more flamboyant?
That was the key, then, and all she had to do was figure out which game she, Tuesday, was playing.
Depends on who you’re playing it with, said Abby.
“Archie. Or Dex.” Tuesday had reach
ed the parking lot of the Star Market. She crossed the plaza. “Or myself.
“Archie’s game,” she said, and dropped her voice; there were more people here, milling around the grocery store, the dry cleaner, the bookstore, after work. “Is tied to Pryce, at a deep family level that I still don’t understand, because Archie is keeping his cards ridiculously close.” She turned right at the Dunkin’ Donuts onto Mass. Ave. “Dex’s game is – well, he’s already playing it with Rabbit, and it’s a fantastic kind of … romance. It’s a romantic game.”
That leaves you, said Abby. And your game.
“I know,” said Tuesday. She sounded terse, even to herself.
You forgot someone, said Abby, and Tuesday was about to ask her who when she saw the banker.
Through the window of the Newtowne Grille.
Rabbit Hatmaker was sitting in the first booth visible from the sidewalk, next to the door to the takeout lobby, and Tuesday’s first instinct upon recognizing his face – haloed in yellow and red from the neon hamburger buzzing in the window – was to drop to the pavement like a stone made of shame.
She pressed her back against the exterior of the restaurant and crouched on the sidewalk. Someone had graffitied a small red heart on the concrete a few feet away from her sneaker. Her own heart was pressed up against her larynx.
Super smooth, said Abby.
Tuesday didn’t think Rabbit had seen her. Rabbit was, after all, the sort of person – kind, caring, entirely adult – who would come outside to make sure she was okay, if he had witnessed her diving to the sidewalk outside Porter Square’s oldest established watering hole.
She’d been inside the Newtowne once or twice. It was your standard townie bar: shouting TVs, glowing blue Keno screens, a dining room on one side and a dark, cozy bar on the other. On a Wednesday night, without any big sporting events, it would be slow and empty, the handful of requisite townies bellied up but none of the students and hipster yuppies who would clog it on trivia nights, the sports fans who preferred the atmosphere – low stakes, low expectations, a relic of another time, like someone’s uncle’s basement – to other Celtics and Sox and Bruins viewing venues.
So why was Rabbit Hatmaker here?
And did that mean – did that mean Dex was here too?
She wanted to melt into the concrete.
Still crouched, doing her best to ignore the stares of those commuters hustling home along the street who did notice her, Tuesday slid beneath the window and peered in at the other side of the booth.
It wasn’t Dex.
It was the widow.
Lyle Korrapati Pryce looked much as she had the last time Tuesday saw her, at her townhouse in Louisburg Square, swaddled in sweats at brunch. She was wearing a light gray hooded sweatshirt, well worn, frayed with love. The bare minimum of makeup, her hair held back in a bird’s nest of a bun, skin glowing, eyes shining in her bright face. She was listening to Rabbit with some intensity. On the table beside them was a large cheese pizza, floating on a pizza stand, and a pitcher of beer from which only Rabbit had poured himself a glass.
Pregnant, said Abby.
“I know,” said Tuesday.
The sunset was deepening. Tuesday hoped it was bright enough to effectively blind both Lyle and Rabbit. She inched up a little higher, high enough to see what else was on the table.
It looked like a house of cards.
What the – said Abby.
Tuesday inched higher. Yes, it was a house of cards. Built precariously on the table between them, between their individual plates of pizza, three stories tall and growing. Rabbit sipped his beer. Lyle lifted a card from a neat pile by her silverware, looked at it, then turned it for Rabbit to see. She laughed. Tuesday couldn’t hear her, but her lips were easy to read.
Found it!
It was the ace of diamonds. When she flipped the card back over, Tuesday recognized the pattern on the back. It was the same pattern, borders nested around a twelve-spoked circle, as on Pryce’s bespoke playing cards.
What game are they playing? asked Abby.
Tuesday didn’t know what it meant, only that it had to mean something. It had to mean Dex’s boyfriend knew even more than they thought he knew. She had to talk to Dex. Or maybe Dex – already knew? Tuesday’s lower back kinked. She straightened without meaning to.
Lyle saw her. She made direct eye contact over the house of cards.
After a beat of confused surprise, Lyle smiled.
And Tuesday bolted.
She flew down Mass. Ave., dodging commuters and cars through the shopping plaza parking lot. She ran up Elm Street across the city line between Cambridge and Somerville. She ran, her chest burning, past the school. The pet store. She turned left at Linden and slowed to a brisk walk up the hill, then right on Summer, and again she was running, heaving for breath, up the street. Up the front steps of her building. Keys jangling, lobby door open – up the three winding flights to her floor, steps creaking, Tuesday sweating, her lungs tight, her heart fit to explode—
And Archie was waiting for her.
He was sitting on the carpet, his back against her door, wearing his ripped motorcycle jacket. His legs stretched the width of the hallway.
His face was ruined. Swollen and purple, nose crusted with blackened blood.
Tuesday stopped.
Breathing.
“Lost my phone,” he said.
Archie coughed. It hurt.
Tuesday stood completely still at the end of the hall. She didn’t come closer. Her face was bright red, shiny, like she’d been running. Away from someone, maybe.
And here he was, waiting for her in her dim, dark hall. The wood trim was coal brown. The walls were close, the blue paint dingy. There was an ambient stuffiness, old smells of food. The carpet was muddled blue, blackened from decades of dirt, probably, and he was rubbing his ass on it.
In all that gloom, backlit by weak fluorescent light, Tuesday burned.
“Feels pretty good,” he said. “To not have a phone. But without it, I didn’t know – how else to.”
She wasn’t moving.
He pressed his tongue against the tooth Nat had loosened, and tasted warm salt.
“I didn’t know how else to warn you,” he said.
Tuesday wobbled. As Archie watched, her face drained from red to white.
And she fell to the floor like a pile of loose bones.
Archie had seen people faint before. One Christmas, when he was eight and Emerson twelve, and furious she hadn’t gotten the compound bow and arrows she’d been asking for – but Nat had – she’d tried to pierce her own ears. At the time, Archie thought putting two tiny holes in her body was a strange way to show their parents how angry she was. But in hindsight maybe it was Emerson’s way of channeling a furious desire to hurt someone by turning it inward, into something fashionable, even. He watched, worried, as she numbed herself with an ice cube. She wedged a cork from one of her mother’s bottles of Merlot behind her earlobe, and she didn’t flinch when she stabbed her own ear with the sewing needle. But when she saw the smears of blood on her fingertips, her eyes and her head tipped back and she rolled gently off the couch. Later she would tell him, with some pride, that she’d managed to train herself never to faint at the sight of blood again, her own or anyone else’s; Archie did not ask how. In the moment, though, her faint was quiet and quick.
So he had never seen a body faint like Tuesday’s. She went down, bam, like she’d been shot. It stunned him for a second. And then he pulled himself up – he was one bone-deep ache all over, but he could walk – and staggered to her.
“Tuesday.” He patted her cheeks, which were dead white. Two days ago, when he’d been bloodier and arguably less conscious, his sister had slapped him with much less tenderness. But then, he was her brother. “Tuesday, wake up.” He knelt beside her body, straightened her tumbled legs flat down the hallway. “Tuesday,” he said louder. Was she even breathing? Was he going to have to call an ambulance? His phone was lo
ng gone. Crushed. Probably still under a sofa at the Mandarin. “Tuesday.” He was shouting now.
Where did Tuesday’s neighbor girl live?
How many doors would he have to knock on before he found someone who would help? Would anyone help?
Tuesday made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
“Hey!” Archie, for the first time, understood he was sweating. He was shaking. Every cell in his stupid body was screaming and he was only now bothering to listen. “What are you – saying?”
“Arn,” said Tuesday. Her eyelids twitched. “Hee?”
“Okay,” said Archie. “Okay, let’s – can you stand?”
“No.” Emphatic. “I. Here.” Her chest rose. “Usta. Min.”
Archie sat back on his heels. Leaned against the wall. The edge of his vision flickered. He—
“Move over,” he said, and lay down flat on his stomach beside her in the hall. He listened to her breathe and tried to match her breath for breath. In and out. In and out.
His sister was going to be furious.
His sister probably was furious, at this precise moment. Archie had no idea what time it was, but it was late, the sun had set, Emerson would be home at the Mandarin by now, wondering where the hell he’d gone. Why he’d vanished as violently as he’d appeared. Back in her life after six years gone, for two nights only, leaving behind nothing but a bloodied pillowcase. He couldn’t remember the end of the beating (Nat never let a loss of consciousness stop him), but he remembered his sister slapping him, trying to wake him, dragging him from the living room to the condo’s bathroom, half conscious, spit-spraying the blood still pouring out of his nose, Pollocking the pure white porcelain tile. Nat, blessedly, was gone by then. Emerson cleaned and drugged him up – he had no idea what she gave him, but it wasn’t OTC – poured a glug of bourbon down his throat, reset his broken nose. He remembered her reciting a litany of things she was going to do to their brother: slow-poison his whiskey, razorblades in his Italian leather shoes.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 28
