Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  TUESDAY MOONEY WORE BLACK

  Kate Racculia

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London, SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

  Copyright © Kate Racculia 2019

  Cover design Micaela Alcaino @HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

  Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

  Kate Racculia asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008326951

  Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008326968

  Version: 2019-09-04

  Dedication

  For all the people I’ve found

  (and who have found me)

  Epigraph

  How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn.

  Billionaires, all of us.

  —URSULA K. LE GUIN

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  2006

  The Opened Tomb

  2012

  1. The Dead Man’s Scream

  2. The Obituary

  3. The Woman in Black

  4. The City’s Hideous Heart

  5. Bloody Marys

  6. Hunch Drunk

  7. Dead People

  8. This Means Something

  9. Library Voices

  10. Takeout and Delivery

  11. Much Worse

  12. Caught Up

  13. Death and the Neighbor

  14. Games People Play

  15. Dead Man’s Party

  16. Interview with the Widow

  17. This House is Falling Apart

  18. More Than a Feeling

  19. Heart on a String

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kate Racculia

  About the Publisher

  Brookline

  2006

  THE OPENED TOMB

  The Tillerman house was dead. Over a century old, massive and stone, it lay slumped on its corner lot, exposed by the naked December trees and shrubs growing wildly over its corpse. It was ugly, neglected, and, despite its size, withered; a black hole of a house. If the real estate agent were the kind of person who ascribed personalities to properties – he was not – he would have said it was the loneliest house he had ever sold.

  His instincts told him this would be a strange, quick sale, with a giant commission. When he’d told the owner that, out of the blue, they had a buyer for the Tillerman house, some guy named “R. Usher,” the owner said, after a long pause, “Don’t sell it for a penny less than listed.” But the agent was anxious to get this over with. He had been inside the Tillerman house once before, and he hadn’t forgotten how it felt.

  A figure appeared on the sidewalk, rounding the corner up the street. The agent shielded his eyes against the white winter sun to get a better look. A man. Wearing a long black coat and a giant black hat, broad and furry, something a Cossack might wear against the Siberian winter. The real estate agent smiled to himself. Yes. This was exactly the buyer you wanted when you were trying to sell a haunted house.

  “Hello, young man!” said the figure, waving, ten feet away now. “I assume you’re the young man I’m supposed to meet. You are standing, after all, in front of the house I’d like to purchase.” A bright red-and-purple-plaid scarf was looped around his neck, covering the lower half of his face. He pulled the scarf down with a red mitten to reveal a ridiculous curling white mustache. “Young man,” said the buyer, “allow me to introduce myself. Roderick Usher.” And he held out his hand.

  The agent, while technically younger than the buyer, resented its being pointed out to him. He was years out of school, up and coming in Boston real estate, and, yes, selling this property for the listed price of $4.3 million would be a coup, but he wasn’t a young man. He was a man. He shook Mr. Usher’s hand and gestured to the property. “Shall we go inside?” he said, and pressed the quaver out of his voice.

  Dead leaves crackled beneath their shoes as they walked under the portico and up the front steps. The lock to the Tillerman house was newly installed, but the key never wanted to work. The agent turned it to the left gently, then the right, then the left again. “What a beauty she is,” said Mr. Usher, his hands clasped behind his back, head tipped up to take in the carvings around the door, flowers reduced to geometric lines and patterns, a strange mishmash of Arts and Crafts, Nouveau and Deco, that didn’t jibe with what the agent knew about when it was built. It was almost as if the house had continued to build itself long after it was abandoned. “If she’s this lovely on the outside,” said Mr. Usher, “I can’t imagine what—”

  The lock turned at last, and the agent pushed the door open.

  The first thing that struck him was the smell. Of rot and garbage, of meat gone rancid, of animals that had been dying in the walls for decades. He pressed the back of his suit sleeve to his nose without thinking, then lowered it, eyes watering. The house had no electricity – when it was first built it did, but the wiring hadn’t been up to code since Woodrow Wilson was president – but it did have enormous ground-floor windows on one side of the great hall, which cast light throughout the first floor and down into the vestibule. It was enough to see by. It had been enough, on the agent’s previous showing with a buyer, for the buyer to take one look around and say, “Let’s get out of here now.”

  Let’s get out of here now, said the agent’s brain.

  “What a glorious – oh – oh my!” said Mr. Usher, and swept past him into the house. He took off his giant furry hat, clutched it in both hands at his chest, and spun back to the agent. Grinning. His front teeth were large and crooked. “My goodness, do you know what you have here? Can you feel it?”

  He didn’t wait for the agent to answer, and charged up the steps, through the archway, and into the great hall.

  The agent followed, slowly. His feet did not want to move. It was exactly what had happened to him the last time he entered the Tillerman house: his body did not want to be here. An uncontrollable part of his brain – his otherwise rational, adult brain – reacted to this place as though he were six years old. Six years old, and pissing himself on Halloween because his big brother, in a scuffed and stage-blood-spattered hockey mask, leapt out at him from the dark.

  He cleared his throat. Took the steps one at a time. Until he was standing in the half-dusk of the great hall. Mr. Usher, who’d been dashing around the room, turned back to him.

  “She died here,” he said. “Can you feel her?”

  The agent managed something like a smile.

  “Long, long ago, you came to Matilda Tillerman’s,” Mr. Usher continued, “she, the l
ast surviving heir of all that Tillerman wealth – you came to her house to drink and to dance, to laugh and to talk, to be alive, together, in this glorious house. They all came here, were well met here, from every corner of this city, every nook and cranny. But something happened, nobody can say for sure what, and Matilda shut her doors. Shut out the entire world and made of her house a tomb.” He sighed and laid a hand gently on one of the columns supporting the upper gallery. “And a beautiful tomb it is.” Plaster flaked beneath his fingertips.

  He tipped his head to the side. “Young man,” he said, “I’m going to buy this house. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, so you can stop looking so frightened. But I would ask a favor. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”

  The agent, relieved to the point of tears that this showing was nearly over, would have permitted the buyer anything. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Marvelous.” Mr. Usher dropped his furry hat to the floor. It sent up a puff of ancient dust. “I have lived for a good long while. Enough to have borne the world,” he said. “And sometimes, the world is far too much for me. Too great. Too painful. Too lonely. I expect, if Ms. Tillerman will allow me to interpret her past actions, she may have felt the same. Is it selfish then, or self-preserving, to shut oneself away? At what point does one give up, so to speak, the ghost?”

  The agent swallowed. He didn’t know what to say. No one had ever asked him a question like that before. It made him almost as uncomfortable as the house. It was too personal. It was too—

  He had, once or twice, imagined it. How it would feel to say, to his bank account and his car and his condo and his girlfriend and his job, Go away. Leave me alone. So he could rest, and listen, and think, and maybe have a chance, one last chance, to remember what he’d been meaning to do before all this life he was living got started.

  “I’m not sure,” he told Mr. Usher, “what to say.”

  “An honest response,” Mr. Usher replied. “I appreciate that. I—”

  A gust of frigid wind howled through the still-open door and lifted clouds of dust and spider webs from the walls and the floor. Delicate debris filled the air. The buyer coughed. Then the breeze caught the door and slammed it home with a crash.

  The agent felt his entire body electrify. Mr. Usher jumped, and laughed.

  Then: a second crash.

  Smaller, closer, nearby in the house, off to the right. The agent’s body twitched violently and he doubled over, hands on kneecaps. He couldn’t stay here. This house was too much for him. He heard Mr. Usher walk across the great hall and pick something up off the floor and mutter to himself. Oh, you clever house, the agent thought he heard. What else are you hiding?

  “Come on, dear boy,” said Mr. Usher, suddenly at his side, helping him upright and clapping him gently on the back. “It’s enough to frighten anyone, opening a tomb.” He smiled, the curls of his mustache lifting almost to his eyes. “Makes one feel a bit like Lord Carnarvon.”

  The agent didn’t know who that was.

  “Best hope there’s not a curse,” said Mr. Usher, walking back down the steps toward the door and the light, “for disturbing her.”

  Boston

  2012

  1

  THE DEAD MAN’S SCREAM

  The woman in black was alone.

  It was five thirty-five on a warm Tuesday evening in October. She shuffled through the revolving door of the Four Seasons Hotel, her eyes sliding around the room, unable to stick to anything but cool marble, everything tasteful and gleaming under the recessed lighting. She caught the rich murmur of voices from mouths in other rooms. The hotel staff didn’t make eye contact. They knew she wasn’t checking in.

  The event registration table was set up, as usual, on the far left of the lobby facing the elevator bank. It was already drawing men in suits like ants to a ham sandwich. WELCOME, proclaimed a foamcore poster on a small easel, TO THE 2012 BOSTON GENERAL HOSPITAL AUCTION FOR HOPE.

  “Welcome to the Auction for Hope!” echoed a tiny blonde girl, wearing more makeup than the woman in black wore in a year, gesturing her closer. Her name was Britney. She was an administrative assistant in Boston General’s fundraising office and never remembered that the woman in black was her coworker. “You can check in here, and head up the stairs to your right for the hors d’oeuvres!” she chirped. “The program starts at seven in the ballroom.”

  “Britney, hi,” said the woman, tapping her fingers against her chest. “Tuesday Mooney,” she said. “I work at BGH too. I’m volunteering tonight. I’m late.”

  “Oh! Of course, I’m so sorry.” She waved Tuesday on, flapping her hands as though trying to clear the air of smoke. “The other volunteers got here a while ago. I didn’t realize anyone was – missing.” Britney’s teeth were very white. She still didn’t recognize Tuesday, and was, Tuesday could sense, vaguely concerned she was a random crazy off the street. Tuesday was five to ten years older than most of the other volunteers, who were generally single, young girls at their first or second jobs out of college, with energy and free time to burn. Tuesday was single but not as young. She was tall and broad, pale and dark-haired, and, yes, dressed all in black. Britney looked at her, not unkindly, as though she were something of a curiosity.

  Tuesday couldn’t blame her. She was, to the office, an oddity. She didn’t leave her cube often, communicated almost entirely through email, didn’t socialize or mix with her coworkers. Or with anyone, really. Being alone made her better at her job. It’s easier to notice what’s important when you’re outside looking in.

  She wasn’t upset that the other volunteers left without her either. She’d been distracted when they’d gone, talking with Mo – Maureen Coke, her boss, the only colleague with whom she nominally socialized. Mo was also a loner, bespectacled and quiet, unassuming in the deadliest of ways. People often forgot that Mo was in the room when they opened their mouths, which is how she came to know absolutely everything about everyone.

  It was a silent skill Tuesday respected.

  “Starting today, your mission as a prospect researcher,” Mo told Tuesday on her first day in the development office, three years ago, “is to pay attention to the details. To notice and gather facts. To interpret those facts so that you can make logical leaps. A prospect researcher is one part private detective, one part property assessor, one part gossip columnist, and one part witch.” Tuesday lifted her brows and Mo continued, “To the casual observer, what we do looks like magic.”

  What Tuesday did was find things. Information. Connections. She researched and profiled people. Specifically rich people, grateful rich people, people whose lives had been saved or extended or peacefully concluded at the hospital (in that case, she researched their surviving relatives). The information she collected and analyzed helped the fundraisers in the office ask those rich, grateful people to donate tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars; she told them which buttons to push to make that ask compelling.

  Whenever the events team threw charity galas or auctions, they asked for volunteers to help with registration, crowd control, VIP escorts, and the myriad other moving bits and pieces that went into making an event run smoothly. Tuesday always raised her hand. She spent forty hours a week digging through donors’ lives, trying to understand why and where and how they might be persuaded to give away their money. Thanks to the hospital’s databases and subscriptions, and all that gorgeous public information lying around on the internet, she knew where they lived, the addresses of their summer houses on the Cape, the theoretical value of their stocks, the other organizations their foundations supported, the names of their children, pets, yachts, doctors, and whether or not their doctor liked their jokes. But she had never met them. She knew them as well as anyone can be known from their digital fingerprints, but volunteering at events was her only opportunity to interact with them in person. To weigh her quantitative assessment of their facts and figures against
a first impression in the flesh. Without that, she knew, it was too easy to jump to conclusions.

  Plus, the food was usually pretty good.

  Her stomach grumbled. Tuesday’s lateness meant she’d missed her comped volunteer meal, and the Four Seasons always had great volunteer meals. She’d worked at events where dinner was a handful of gummy bears and a snack-size pack of Goldfish crackers, but at the Seasons she’d missed gourmet cheesy pasta and bread and salad and tiny ice cream sandwiches, the kids’ table version of the spread hotel catering would put out later for the real guests.

  “I guess you know the drill?” Britney gestured down the length of the registration table, at their mutual coworkers, who probably didn’t recognize her either. It was a good feeling, anonymity. “Just ask for their names and check them in on an iPad – there’s an extra one on the end, I think. Guests can write their own nametags.”

  Tuesday took a seat behind registration at the farthest end, in front of the last abandoned iPad, and set her bag on the floor. Her feet pulsed with relief. She’d left her commuter shoes under her desk, and even walking the short distance from the cab to the hotel in heels – over Boston’s brick sidewalks – was a rookie mistake. She wasn’t even close to being a rookie, though. She was thirty-three, and she’d never been able to walk well in heels.

  Her phone buzzed twice, then twice again. Then again. She felt a small bump of anxiety.

  It would be Dex. Dex Howard, her coworker from another life – who could, incidentally, run in heels – and the only person who texted her.

  Hey am I on the guest list?

  I mean I should be on the list

  Constantly.

  I really really hope I’m on the list

  Because I’m about to get dumped

  Across town, at a dark, stupid bar he hated, Dex Howard waited to be proposed to.

  Or dumped.

  Dumped, definitely.