Scattered throughout the hall were squat square pedestals. On each pedestal was an object. She saw a wooden baseball bat propped in a metal stand. A yellowed globe. An old-fashioned microphone, silver and striped, the kind you imagined Elvis singing into.
Strapped to a cloth mannequin head, faceless and soft: silver-framed goggles with big, bug-green lenses.
Dorry took the goggles off the dummy without thinking. The goggles were here. They were right here, not at the end of the game. Or was this the end? Had she won already? Her hands shook. She slipped the goggles over her head and pushed them back up into her hair like a headband without looking through them. It was silly, maybe, but she—
For weeks she’d been thinking of everything she might see through them, but now that her real life had caught up to her dreams, she was painfully awake. Her heart hurt. It was almost too much to be awake inside her own dream. What if it turned into a nightmare?
She reached up and wrapped her hands around the silver of the eyepieces. She held them.
Then she pulled the goggles over her face and opened her eyes.
“Do you hear that?” said Tuesday. “Listen—”
She tipped her ear to the side. She’d been tilting her head like a dog reacting to a whistle for days, only this time Archie heard it too. It echoed through the basement, this dank, fusty basement where their pine boxes had been dumped on the uneven dirt and slate.
“Sounds like.” He swallowed.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
“A bomb?” he said.
“It’s not a bomb,” Tuesday muttered. “Vince doesn’t want us dead.” And then, off Archie’s face: “Not literally.”
Tuesday pushed herself up and out of her pine box, then turned back to lend Archie a hand. His calves cramped for a second when he stood on them. The basement was a warren of cardboard boxes and old furniture, dust transforming, by volume, into dirt, and curtains of cobwebs. The only light came from a single weak bulb somewhere to their left. It smelled like wet wood and paper, mold and earth.
“I can see why your brother would sell this off,” Tuesday said. “If the upstairs is anything like this, it’s not an easy flip.” Her voice echoed around a corner. “Oh Arch,” she said quietly. “Look at her.”
Archie came around a tower of boxes and saw an eye: a black eye, deep as a well. Surrounding the eye was a face. It was a portrait, head, neck, and shoulders, of a young woman, sketched in black charcoal. She had dark hair swept off her forehead with a perfectly round pin like a little moon; those deep, heavy-lidded eyes; and a long, boxy nose that made Archie think of bloodhounds. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she were about to speak. Archie couldn’t tell how old the drawing was – there was no date, no signature – or why the woman felt so familiar.
Only—
“This is Vince’s,” he said. “I remember her. I don’t remember who she is, but I know her face. It’s part of his collection.”
Tuesday picked up the frame and held it at arm’s length. “If it’s part of the collection, and it’s here, then that means it’s part of the end game.” She audibly hmmed. “Let’s take it,” she said, tucking it under her arm. “And let’s find your bomb.”
Archie’s arms and hands were twitching, like his nerves were shorting out. The long ride in the pine box had calmed him after the interview with Lyle Pryce, though he was still raw. Had Vince been toying with him, using him, this entire time? Vince had given him the PO box key that summer. You never know, he’d said, pressing the key into Archie’s palm, when you might need to get in touch with a friend, which had struck Archie as odd but, for Vince, typical. Now, it struck Archie as though Vince had placed him like a piece on a board, long before Archie had any idea he was playing a game. What a dupe he was. What a stupid pawn. Archie had actually thought his decision to play Vince’s game had been a choice, his choice, a tribute to an old friend. Fate, that he should come home just in time to play it – or tragic destiny, that his return should bring about Vince’s death, and create the occasion for it. Either way, it had given him, in his first terrifying days home, a direction. Vince’s game had seemed so much easier to focus on, in his guilt and shock, than the cosmically, hilariously insurmountable task of confronting Nat.
Nat, who hadn’t needed any plan whatsoever to confront Archie senseless.
And the auction, falling for a fake Vince – Archie had let the guilt of shocking Vince to death pickle him for weeks. What else had he seen and believed? What else was a lie? He burned. And Tuesday had been so obnoxiously composed about it all. Her coolness made him feel even more moronic. He was a complete idiot for not seeing it before she did. He’d actually known the dead man, after all. Didn’t that mean—
“Ah!” she said. “There. There it is.”
Tuesday pointed toward the far corner of the basement’s ragged brick wall. Dangling from a nail on a long gold chain was an open pocket watch.
“Is that part of Vince’s collection too?” she asked.
It wasn’t.
Archie’s mouth filled with something hot and sour, and he realized, a second later, that he was about to throw up.
He swallowed.
Yes, he’d known the dead man.
He had known both dead men.
The last time he saw that watch – gaudy as hell, too big to be practical – it was on the floor of his father’s yacht. It was ticking away face-up on the carpet of the Constancy’s main cabin. His father’s flailing hand had torn it out of his suit jacket.
“Kind of impractical for a pocket watch,” said Tuesday. She propped the drawing of the young girl against a post and drew closer to look at the watch from the right side, the left, above, and below. “It’s a showpiece. Lots of gold. Diamond chips? Style is old but it feels new. Reproduction, maybe. It has an inscription on the inside cover – Tardius lex.”
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
“‘Slow law’?” she said softly.
Archie couldn’t move.
Something was odd about the brick wall behind the watch. The bricks, floor to ceiling, were lighter than the age-blackened bricks on either side. And the wall itself was a diagonal, as if it were covering up a corner of the basement.
“This wall is false,” said Tuesday, louder now. She rubbed at a line of mortar and it turned to dust at her touch. She looked back at him.
“You want to—” His throat yanked the words back from his mouth, down into his gut. “Knock it down?”
She lifted the watch off the nailhead.
“Have a better plan?” she said.
Archie’s plan, six years ago, had been to run away. That was it: his entire plan. It was the plan of a spoiled twenty-six-year-old brat. On the day that his father shoved his mother into the bar cart, and Archie sliced open his finger and his sister stitched it up, and then his brother and his father, the latter already drunk, went to that wine tasting at the Blue Whale in Nantucket Harbor – as soon as Nat and his father were gone that day, Archie had packed a bag. He threw in socks and underwear. A toothbrush. His electric razor. A ruffled paperback of All Around the Town. He hadn’t read it yet, and he assumed he was going to have a lot of free time in the near future. All his assumptions about running away were improbable and romantic, as if there might be boxcars on Nantucket he could hop to points west. The only facts that seemed germane were these: He hated his family. He hated his life. Escape was change. This was going to be his adventure.
He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t think of his mother or his sister. He thought, for a second, of Vincent Pryce, and congratulated himself for a plan he thought Vince would heartily approve of. He grabbed a bag of potato chips out of the pantry and one of his father’s best unopened bottles of scotch, and he took his sister’s Vespa. He didn’t think to leave a note about that either. The theft spoke for itself.
Archie loved the sea. Whenever they went out on the Constancy, even when he was a little kid, he spent more time with their various hired skippers than wi
th his family, who preferred not to interact with their staff when there were so many other things – drinks, resentments – to nurse. He knew enough to be able to get the boat out into open water and back to the mainland, where he would ditch it, or sink it, maybe, as a final fuck you, and vanish into the wider world. Which had to be better than the one into which he’d been born.
He quietly boarded his family’s yacht and proceeded to get very drunk on his father’s scotch. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but it hadn’t not been part of the plan either. The next thing Archie remembered about that day – drunk, he’d rolled himself up into a cocoon of blankets on the floor in the master bedroom and fallen asleep – was the sound of his father’s pocket watch hitting the floor. He didn’t know it was the watch until later; all he heard was a heavy thunk. All he knew, when he jerked awake, was that he was not alone on the boat. And from the gentle bob of the floor beneath him, he could tell he was out to sea. He pulled deeper into the blankets and listened. He couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing. A frenzied whistling of fabric against fabric. Low grunts, muffled like a muzzled animal. It was quiet, achingly quiet, or maybe Archie was so drunk he was delusional, but it was so still he thought he could hear ticking: tick tick tick tick tick tick. That was when he thought of the pocket watch. His mother had given it to his father for his most recent birthday, only a few weeks ago in July. It was a reproduction pocket watch of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s, inscribed with his father’s credo, Tardius lex. The full quote, attributed to Vanderbilt – You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I will ruin you – was his father’s favorite. It was etched into a brass plaque on his desk, and now he could carry it with him always. “What are you trying to say?” his father asked, holding the watch high. “Time’s up?” He wasn’t joking, but Archie remembered his mother laughing anyway.
He hadn’t noticed, then, how loud the ticking was. But that night, huddled in the stateroom, it was the loudest watch Archie had ever heard.
The air on the boat altered.
That was how it felt: the air, the very air itself, changed. He felt too sober and slightly sick. He didn’t want to breathe.
“You can come out now,” said his brother from the other room.
And Archie, shocked biddable, came out. Nathaniel was pinning a body down on the left-hand banquette in the main cabin, knee to chest. He held a large white pillow with a blue anchor, printed off-center, tight over the body’s face, even though the body was limp. The body’s hand, fingers curled, brushed the floor a foot or so away from the pocket watch, which might have stunned Nathaniel if the hand had been able to swing it with enough force. Nathaniel’s own hands were spread, his fingers rigid. They were the only part of his body that didn’t look at ease. His face was open and refreshed, his shoulders and legs and arms loose and confident, having performed the work for which he was born and bred, and having performed it well.
“Don’t act so surprised,” said Nat. “The old man would have done it to me first if I’d given him the chance.”
They hid the body in a place Archie had never seen before but Nathaniel, apparently, used often: a smuggler’s hole in a false floor beneath the opposite banquette. Their father’s body fit the space as neatly as a foot in a shoe. Archie both did and did not remember the hours that followed. Some details were sharp: the white pillow with the jaunty blue anchor that Nat tossed back on the banquette and karate-chop fluffed. The furious redness of his father’s face, full of as much wrath in death as in life. “That’ll do for the time being,” said his brother. Then he remembered Nat telling him, Couldn’t have done it without you. And Archie remembered thinking, Did I do something?
What did I do?
In time, he remembered exactly what he’d done: nothing. He hadn’t stopped his brother. Not that night, when he might have investigated what was happening instead of eavesdropping from the bedroom. Or any of the days and nights thereafter, when he could have reported his brother to the police. Whenever he listened to that terrified cry in his brain that said You have to tell, you can’t not tell, the weight of never telling the truth will poison you, another voice would say: You are a fucking idiot. Do you have any hard evidence, other than what you saw? Why wouldn’t Nat produce a credible story of his own to cast doubt on you, his vagrant fuckup of a little brother? Who disappeared the very night Edgar Arches (Senior) went missing, and only now starts making wild claims about successful, famous, incredibly powerful Nathaniel Arches? I mean, how did that look?
The voice’s tone would change when it came in for the kill: And wasn’t the old man a monster anyway? Didn’t he deserve to die?
Aren’t you glad he’s dead?
(Yes.)
Nat brought the Constancy within rowing distance of Cape Cod. Topside, the wind tearing the words out of his mouth, he told Archie to take the dinghy and never come back. “If you come back,” said Nat, “if you show your face to me again, ever, I will kill you.”
Archie believed his brother. He never stopped believing his brother. But he came back anyway, because the life he was living, a life without consequence or connections, wasn’t worth protecting anymore. And if he was going to do something, now was the time.
Lyle Pryce told him to remember who he was. That who he was, was the reason why he was in this house, by Vince’s design. Archie’d always thought Vince believed he was capable of a bigger, braver, altogether different life than the one he’d been born to. But maybe the only life Vince ever wanted for Edgar Allan Arches Junior was his own.
So Vince invited him to play a game. A game that led to this house. This house that Vince bought from Nathaniel.
Nathaniel, who hid their father’s dead body in a hole.
“Come on,” said Tuesday, smiling at him. “This is kind of our thing. Knocking down walls to find the dead bodies of drunk … clowns—” She tilted her head, listening. Listening. To someone only she could hear.
She whipped her head back at Archie.
“The missing,” she said, “ace.” Her eyes glistened, enormous. She put her hand over her mouth.
Archie almost loved her then. He didn’t know it was possible to feel understood so easily, the darkest parts of his darkest heart known without having to say a word. Though that was still the coward’s way out. If he really wanted to be known, he was going to have to tell something like the truth.
“That watch,” he said, “belonged to—”
He was interrupted by a tremendous bang. The entire house shuddered, like a bomb had detonated upstairs. Dust rained from the ceiling in grainy streams. The bricks in the false wall shifted like a pile of teetering blocks, and Tuesday thrust her hands forward, shoving the bricks back into the darkness beyond, into the space behind the false wall. Archie tried to walk to the wall to tear it down with her, but his legs were a thousand pounds apiece. He lifted one. He lifted the other. He turned and the drawing of the young girl with the deep eyes watched him, and with a cold jolt he remembered where he’d seen her. Not in Vince’s collection. He had seen her in his own face. In his sister’s, and his brother’s.
In his mother’s.
She was the ghost of the girl his mother had been before she became an Arches. Which was just the sort of sentimental thing Vincent Pryce would do: leave his mother as a sentinel and a witness, even if she was only made of paper.
The bricks fell. The dust rose.
Tuesday started laughing.
She had pushed the top half of the wall down, enough so that she could lean in and look into the hidden corner of the basement. She gestured to him, her body jerking with laughter that was almost lunatic, and Archie went to the broken wall and looked over and down into a round, deep hole in the floor.
Tuesday wrapped her arm around his side and pulled their bodies together.
“Seek,” she hissed. She was shaking. Her whole self was chattering. “Seek well.”
Dex woke up alone.
“Nice, Pryce,” he told t
he empty music room. “I’m aware that I’m sans partner. That I’m playing your little game solo. Didn’t have to rub my face in it.” He pushed himself up and out of his coffin and straightened his cone breasts and his microphone. Dusted pine shavings out of his wig and off his shoulders. He flipped the lid of his coffin shut with the tip of his shoe.
He was running low on hope. He didn’t know why he was here, even, other than by the grace and pity of Lyle Pryce, who, when he admitted what he’d done with the money – what had he said, exactly? Yes, relieve the specific horror of your vanity, Poindexter Howard: pitching extravagant woo. He told Lyle he had pitched extravagant woo to a party known to both of them – Lyle nodded – and while his woo was, if not rebuffed, put on hold, he couldn’t be mad at Rabbit. Just as he couldn’t be mad at Rabbit for not sufficiently convincing Dex that he was cool with Dex’s emotional extravagance. It wasn’t Rabbit’s fault that Dex needed more than anyone could give him.
“Vince would have loved a bespoke suit. Of armor,” Lyle told him, and it didn’t sound like a conciliatory compliment. Dex could see that it was true; he’d known the dead man for all of an hour, but he’d spent the better part of the past few weeks playing his game. The dead man was nothing if not extravagant himself.
Maybe he belonged here after all. Maybe he was far, far too hard on himself. He looked around. The music room was dark and still, the ceiling high and windows heavily curtained. It smelled like old furniture, dust, and mothballs. He assumed it was the music room because there was a piano, a poor neglected thing, and because the wallpaper was patterned with lutes. Or lyres. Some kind of stringed instrument left over from an ancient civilization.
Beside the closed door, there was an umbrella stand.
Dex crossed to it. It held a single black umbrella, furled tight. The handle was solid wood, curved, worn smooth by decades of hands. The tip was silver and sharp. He hesitated for a moment, but only a moment, because the only bad-luck omens he believed in had to do with the theater, and he only believed in those because they were part of the script. He unclasped the umbrella’s tie.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 33
