It opened with a sturdy, satisfying fwoomp.
“Are you special?” he asked the umbrella. “Haunted by the spirit of Gene Kel—”
He wasn’t alone.
Dex’s lips clamped shut, and he pressed his ear hard against the darkness. A sliver of moonlight sliced the curtains. His eyes had adjusted well enough to the gloom by then that he could see – what the ever-loving—
The wall opposite, the uninterrupted wall, flat and flush between the lutes, cracked open.
Dex dropped to a quiet crouch and sheltered behind the open blackness of the umbrella. A secret door. A secret fucking door. He pressed his fist over his mouth to stopper a hoot. Who was this surprise guest? What did they want? Were they supposed to team up – was Dex not, after all, all alone?
There was a light in the passage behind the secret door. Dex risked a glimpse around the umbrella’s edge, quick enough to see that the profile looked masculine. Tall and broad. High forehead, a long, wolfhound nose—
Archie. Tuesday’s Archie.
But it couldn’t be Archie, because he wasn’t wearing that ratty smoking jacket. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, glowing gray in the darkness, and he wasn’t – Dex blinked; the light was better, and the man turned – his face was perfect. Not a bruise. Not a scrape.
Dex’s hand, wrapped tight around the umbrella’s handle, began to sweat. He was fairly certain Lyle Pryce would not have cast Nathaniel Arches for a role in her husband’s final act. He was fairly certain Nathaniel Arches was here for his own reasons, and he was fairly certain none of those reasons were altruistic.
He was fairly certain he, Dex Howard, in the music room with the umbrella, was the only person in the house who knew it held more than ghosts.
Nathaniel Arches slid the secret door shut behind him with a gentle click.
At that moment something exploded.
“What did you just do?” Verena Parkman – the old woman whose picture Dorry had noticed in the Globe, who looked even more like a witch in person – pressed a gnarled and spotted hand to the cameo at her throat. “Cassandra. Retrace your steps.”
Cass was stunned, which was the only reason, Dorry thought, that she didn’t remind Verena, respectfully but firmly, that her name was Cass. Verena called them all by their full names. Dorothea. Cassandra. Edmund. (Dorry hadn’t known that was Ned’s first name.) Lisa got off easy. So did Marcus and Colin Shaughnessy, the final two in the great hall, brothers with thick Boston accents and huge, stubby-fingered red hands, who restored old houses for a living. Marcus, short, was dressed in red overalls. Colin, tall, wore green. They both had thick black mustaches glued on their faces.
But this – whatever Cass had done, whatever had just happened – stilled the room. Dorry was maybe slightly less bewildered, but only because she was still wearing the goggles. She’d avoided most of the dust and debris that flew out of the wall when it shook and cracked, but it was all over her hair and her costume. She could taste it in her mouth.
“I don’t – know,” said Cass. She rubbed plaster dust off her nose with the back of her hand. “I was standing here.” She stood with her back to the center of the room. “Looking up at the balcony. I stepped. Here.” The cluster of people in the great hall gathered around Cass’s foot. It was resting innocently on one of the mangy old carpets blanketing the floor.
Cass rubbed the floor again with her toe.
“Perhaps some kind of lever or trigger,” said Verena, “beneath the carpet.”
Cass nodded. “I think,” she said, “we need to see what’s underneath.”
Verena and Cass had taken charge. As soon as everyone was up and out of their coffins, they led the introductions. Verena had a sharp way of speaking but Dorry liked it; she knew what she wanted to say, and she didn’t want to waste time talking around it. Marcus and Colin seemed nice too, though only Marcus spoke. Lisa Pinto asked if they were twins, and they replied the Irish kind, which Dorry didn’t entirely understand. But they were all adults who took Ned and Cass and Lisa Pinto seriously. They wanted to work together, to do – whatever it was they were supposed to do. Cass said she doubted that they were supposed to just sleep the night away in uncomfortable coffins on the floor of a haunted house. And we discover our purpose here, said Verena Parkman, by determining who haunts this house.
Or something like that. Dorry hadn’t really been paying attention. She was too lost in what she could see, now that she was looking through the goggles.
Which was nothing.
The lenses were a little cloudy, but with age, not spectral evidence. Everything and everyone was greenish but hardly ghostly. Because this was real life, and ghosts weren’t real. The whole thing was so stupid, and so was she – to have imagined, even for a second, that she might see a ghost because she had special glasses. Like ghosts were an observable phenomenon if only you had the right tools. How stupid was she to hope she would ever be able to see her mother again. She wouldn’t. It was scientifically impossible. She would never, ever see or hear or smell or talk to – her mother was gone from the world, and she had left Dorry behind, and Dorry had known this, she had always known this, and that she’d ever, for a second, been able to pretend otherwise – she was such an idiot. She wanted to rip the goggles off and throw them away, because they made her feel like the giant baby that she was. But she couldn’t take them off her face. She didn’t want anyone, least of all Ned, to see how red her eyes were. To see how hard she was trying not to cry, and how miserably she was failing.
She knew she was being a child. A silly, childish little girl. She knew she should have been listening to what Verena Parkman was saying. It was about the house, and it seemed interesting and important, but a very big part of Dorry couldn’t bring herself to care. The game, for her, had been about those stupid goggles. And she’d gotten them. She had held them in her hands. She had won. But what she had won, after all of that, was absolutely nothing. No ghosts. No mysteries. No – Mom. The disappointment was so heavy she was breathless.
Verena was standing in front of a big painting on the wall to the left of the grand staircase, beneath the balcony but lit from the open windows opposite. It was a portrait of a woman with silver hair brushed up and away from her face, pale skin, and a black dress whose neckline went up her throat and sort of faded into the background, so she looked like a floating head. With two floating hands. Matilda Something-or-other, Verena was calling her. Only daughter of one of the wealthiest Brahmin families, died mad and alone, died without heirs. Gilded Age fortune never found.
“This was her house?” Ned’s voice cut through the humming in Dorry’s brain. She blinked and felt a tear pool against the bottom of the right goggle lens.
“I’m saying it certainly appears to be.” Verena shrugged. “She lived in Brookline. Adjacent to the Emerald Necklace – that’s what Mr. Pryce meant by Olmstead’s emeralds. The parks designed by Frederick Law Olmstead are called the Emerald Necklace.” She sniffed. “Mr. Pryce was a well-known collector, especially to all of us who deal in antiques locally. I heard through my contacts that several years ago he’d purchased the Tillerman family home, falling apart though it was. Because he believed it was haunted. A genuine haunted house.” She looked at Dorry, straight through the green glass of the goggles, and Dorry shrunk a little. “She died here. In her bed. Mad, they said, in her final years. A total recluse at the end, possessed by strange humors, taken up by passions. She was the only human, the only body, discovered in the entire house – a bit decayed, as you might imagine, by the time she was found. She once held tremendous salons right here in this hall, full of the high and the low, artists and men of business, scientists and mesmerists, poor and rich. Until she cast everyone out, shut the doors forever, and retreated from the society of the world.” Verena Parkman smoothed the wool of her skirt with both hands. “They said that she didn’t trust the banks, that she converted the family wealth from stocks and bonds into gold and silver, and t
hat it was absconded with entirely. She said—” She cleared her throat. “In a diary – a colleague claims it is legitimate, but who knows its provenance, truly – but she said she would ‘take her fortune with her up to the ceiling of heaven.’”
Vincent Pryce would have thought that was a terrible waste.
Dorry twinged. Vincent Pryce. Matilda Tillerman. She knew that name. She knew those names together.
Because she’d done the research.
“I have a theory,” Cass said.
“Do tell, Cassandra,” said Verena.
“It’s Cass,” she said gently. “The fact that you know all that, about the house and Matilda Tillerman? That’s why you’re here. We were chosen to be here for a specific reason, like – Ms. Parkman, you’re here because you know the house’s history. I’m here because I’m good at organizing people, getting them to work toward a goal. Lisa’s here because she’s a horse’s ass.”
“You know it,” said Lisa Pinto.
“You two, Marcus and Colin.” Cass furrowed her brow. “You know how old houses work. You take them apart and put them back together. That has to be why you’re here, and that has to mean – we have to.” She looked around at the vast open hall. “Find something. Or do something. To the house itself.”
Dorry, still only half listening, walked over to the painting. It was huge. Taller than Dorry. Life-size. It looked like Matilda Tillerman could walk right out of it.
“Why’m I here?” asked Ned. “Feeling a little left out, is all.”
“I don’t know,” said Cass. She wrinkled her nose at him. “Yet.”
There were two letters, neatly painted, in the lower right corner of the portrait: MT.
“The artist Matilda Tillerman,” Dorry whispered to herself.
“We are missing people too,” said Verena. “There are only seven of us, and thirteen chosen. That means there are six more persons somewhere in this house.”
“Then let’s find them,” said Cass. “Ned, Dorry, check upstairs. Ms. Parkman, stay here in case anyone shows up. Colin and Marcus, why don’t you see if there’s a basement. Lisa, let’s start down here.”
Cass did nothing after that but cross the floor of the great hall. Away from the portrait of Matilda Tillerman, through the jumble of empty coffins and artifacts on pedestals, toward the wall opposite the grand staircase.
And the wall before her, between two closed doors, boomed and shuddered and spat out dust and plaster and sent a crack spiraling to the ceiling like an upside-down bolt of lightning.
Cass sneezed from the dust. “Gesundheit,” said Verena Parkman. The brothers Shaughnessy inspected the cracked wall. The air smelled electric, hot, like a firework. “You think the house is set with charges?” Marcus asked his brother, and Colin shrugged. Marcus continued, “What’s the point of blowing up a house when it has people in it?”
“Murder,” Lisa Pinto said drily.
“Could have been on a timer, like the locks on the coffin lids. Someone could be watching us. Or. Could’ve set something off,” Marcus said to Cass.
“We must pull up the carpet,” said Verena. “To see what is beneath.”
Dorry hovered on the edge of the group. They didn’t need her help. They didn’t need her. She was an extra, and despite the fact that she’d won, she’d lost. She felt the painting of Matilda Tillerman watching her from across the room. She could understand why someone would close up their house and push the whole world away. Sometimes the whole world hurt.
Colin and Marcus and Lisa Pinto and Ned knelt along the long edge of the giant carpet and began to roll it up.
And Dorry saw it.
Cass paced back and forth, inspecting the old wooden floor.
“Nothing,” Cass said. “Maybe I didn’t trigger anything. Which makes me think it was on a timer. Or it was just a coincidence.”
Dorry said, “You mean you don’t see it?”
Cass looked up at her. “See what?”
“See the—” Dorry went very still. She closed her eyes. And when she opened them, it was still there.
An ankh.
On the floor – large, two feet long, placed so it shot a straight line from the grand staircase to the opposite wall, the wall with the lightning-bolt crack.
She wrapped her hand around her mother’s ankh and thought, Maybe. Maybe this was how the goggles worked. What if her mother was silver, heavy and cool on a cord against her chest – and a part of the floor, and part of the air, in the world, always, in the details, in everything Dorry was and saw and did? And what if she’d been here all along, all this time, waiting for Dorry to learn how to see her with something other than her eyes?
“There’s an ankh on the floor.” Dorry pointed, then walked over, knelt, and pressed her hand against it.
“How do you—” Verena peered at her. “Those glasses. It must be those marvelous glasses that you’re looking through.”
Dorry pulled them off. Her hands were shaking. Though the ankh disappeared once she was looking through her own eyes, she didn’t need the goggles. She didn’t need them to see or to feel her mother anymore, and she didn’t need them to cover her face. She had nothing of herself to hide. Verena looked through the goggles and gave a cry. “So there is!” she said. “Right there! An optical effect, a symbol painted with a special stain.” She handed the goggles to Cass, who yelped.
“That’s your job, then, Dorothea,” Verena said. “You must go and look for what is invisible.”
Ned took the goggles from his sister and whistled. He lowered them. “That’s amazing and all, but what is it? Like, X marks the spot? Are we supposed to dig here?”
“What if.” Dorry’s brain was ricocheting around the room. “What if stepping on the ankh didn’t crack the wall,” she said. “What if it’s the other way around.” She licked her lips. “What if the wall cracked – on a timer – so we’d look for and find the ankh. And now we have to look for more—”
The closed door to the left of the crack in the wall creaked open. A man stuck his head out. A tall white man with dark hair and a high forehead and a long nose. After a flash of recognition (Archie!), Dorry’s gut pinged.
It was Archie, but it wasn’t.
“Is it safe to come out?” he asked.
What Tuesday saw, around the edge of the kitchen door, looked like a party. A Halloween party, or the streets of Salem on October weekends, everyone in costume, everyone a little strange to each other but friendly and warm. Recognized. Thrown together by chance and all playing the same game. Mario and Luigi were moving from pillar to pillar in the great hall, inspecting them (for what?). She saw a college-age girl, missing the front half of her horse costume, prowling the perimeter, examining the walls. She saw a short young woman in a banana-yellow tracksuit splattered with red, talking with a man who was even shorter than her, wearing a bright green Hulk costume and purple pants. Actually – no. He wasn’t wearing a costume; he was wearing green body paint all over a very muscular torso. Another college girl, with a handmade Nefertiti headdress held up around her afro, stood in the middle of the hall, keeping watch. Sitting beside her on two stacked pine boxes was an old woman who wasn’t, as far as Tuesday could tell, wearing a costume at all.
I bet Lyle gave her grief about it too, said Abby.
“I bet she gave Lyle grief right back,” said Tuesday.
“What?” said Archie.
Tuesday didn’t respond.
They’d come up from the basement to call the police. To call the police and tell them that, based on a series of facts and strange coincidences, and the nudging of a dead man, Tuesday Mooney had a hunch that the body of missing billionaire Edgar Arches (Senior) was buried in a well in the basement. The final resting place of the dead-drunk clown. The missing ace, found. It was the biggest intuitive leap of her life. She did not know how he died. She didn’t know how he got there, though she suspected Nathaniel Arches, owner of the property at the time of Ed Senior’s disappearance, did. The facts swirl
ed. Nathaniel Arches had sold the property to Vincent Pryce – after all, who better to unload his father’s secret tomb to than the crackpot chump with whom he was publicly feuding? It made a kind of sick sense.
It fit.
She didn’t know how she felt. About any of it. After the initial wave of triumphant euphoria came a cool, queasy dread, to be standing so close to death. Murder, most likely. The odds of a natural death leading to interment in a secret well seemed low. Besides, murder was easy. It was human. It was entirely ordinary. She had always suspected as much. When she stopped shaking, when her teeth had stopped clacking together so she could speak, she told Archie what they had to do. “We have to call the police,” she said. “I think this is a crime scene.”
“I know,” said Archie.
“I know you know,” said Tuesday. “A lot more than that.”
Her phone didn’t have service in the basement. They climbed the basement stairs, came out through a servant’s hallway into the kitchen, and now they were spying on the rest of the players of Pryce’s game – Pryce’s other game, the one played in the light of day, the game that got bigger and more generous as you played it. Tuesday, for a beat, resented that she’d gotten stuck playing the nasty game within the game, collecting the sick cereal-box prize in its belly. True, she could bring closure, a solution to a mystery. She knew that wasn’t without value. But upstairs, in the dusk of the kitchen, watching those other people search and call and laugh with each other, Tuesday found she didn’t want to call the police. Not yet.
She wanted the other players to have a chance to finish their game. Maybe there was still another prize to be found. Death was real, but so was life.
Don’t get greedy, said Abby.
“What are they doing?” whispered Archie.
“Looking for something,” she said. “Maybe more symbols. Like in the underground theater. Like the ones that—”
Dex found.
Thinking of the theater made her think of Dex. And miss him, and wish he were there, with a fierceness that would have surprised her a month ago. But not now. Not after everything that had happened, everything they had done. All the words she had said, and couldn’t take back.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 34
