Whenever she allowed herself to imagine she might actually get part of millions of dollars, her stomach did this funny hover-drop. It was so weird. What did millions of dollars even feel like? She’d tried to get her dad excited about that, to explain that that was why Tuesday had been arrested, not for doing anything (really) bad. He’d looked at her like she’d grown a unicorn horn or giant bunny ears, like he didn’t quite believe or understand what he was seeing when he looked at her. He said that Tuesday was making some questionable choices and he wasn’t sure how appropriate she was as a tutor. Which made Dorry so mad, her hands curled into fists.
“It’s not like she’s teaching me to be a terrorist,” Dorry said.
“She’s teaching you to get your hopes up,” he said, “too high,” and somehow that made Dorry even madder. How high Dorry’s hopes were was on Dorry, not Tuesday. They were her hopes. So she said that just because Mom had always been the hopeful one, the one who got excited about stuff, didn’t mean that no one else in their family could get their hopes up about the possibility of crazy awesome things. She was the kind of angry that made her want to be mean, so for a second it felt great. But her father’s eyes skittered around like he didn’t know where to look anymore, and just as quickly she felt terrible. She apologized for it later, but she and Dad were kind of avoiding each other still. Maybe because they both knew she had a good point.
It wasn’t fair that Dorry couldn’t get her hopes up.
Because it wasn’t fair to pretend that the possibility of crazy awesome things, like the collection, didn’t exist.
She flipped open the report cover. She’d started with a biography of Vincent Pryce. Just a short one, a prologue before you got to the good part, mostly taken from his bio on the Forbes list of billionaires. It listed his age (seventy-four), the source of his wealth (self-made, owner of the Vincent Mint), and his infamous extracurriculars; he spent his early retirement, already “wealthier than any individual human has any right to be” (his words), collecting rare and occult artifacts and books from around the globe.
She put in a little about his house on Nantucket and a picture of him, standing in front of a bookcase so full it looked like it was about to topple. He had a toothy grin and a big nose, and ears that stuck out almost as much as his hair. He looked like she’d imagined while she was reading his editorials: like a cranky crackpot who lives in a basement apartment with thirteen cats and a bunch of hamsters. The kind of guy some kids think is a child-eating troll but other kids suspect, correctly, is a secret wizard. She’d written:
Mr. Pryce’s life before his retirement was pretty normal. He did not have any children and did not get married until he was very old. He made all his money as the owner of the Vincent Mint, which sold special coins and plates honoring celebrities and dead presidents through the mail. Because of the Vincent Mint, he became a billionaire. He once said, “Money has meaning when you put it to work.”
He retired when he was forty-one and started traveling the world, looking for artifacts. He became famous for his haunted collection, and many rumors about his “secret double life” were passed around. People said he was a grave robber, a thief, and “a modern pirate in the style of Captain Kidd” (www.nantucketdirt.com). One thing is clear: regardless of how he collects his objects, he has a lot of them, and they are strange.
She scribbled out “collects” and “has” and wrote “collected” and “had.”
Her mom had been a collector of little things. Literally little things: miniatures. Tiny hats and shoes and clocks and books and plates and furniture, fit for a dollhouse, perfect for a mouse. A walking stick no bigger than her thumb with a duck carved on the handle. A suitcase with real leather straps, a real clasp, small clothes inside. Some her mother made herself, teensy cakes and dim sum and candy and fruits from polymer clay and nail polish. Her mother had displayed her collection in glass-fronted shadow boxes, one in every room in their house. Dad didn’t unpack any of them after they moved to Somerville. The entire collection, hundreds of itty-bitty things, fit in one box, which Dorry kept taped shut, in her closet.
Mr. Pryce’s collection was a lot bigger.
Mr. Pryce built his mansion on Nantucket to be large enough to hold his collection, which is “a spectacular library of curious stuff” (Mental Floss). It contains over twenty thousand objects, such as many rare books and letters written by Edgar Allan Poe, but also mummified mermaids, Sasquatch hair, and an unhatched sea serpent egg. Many of the objects are haunted. They provide a way of seeing or contacting or talking with ghosts, or they hold a departed spirit itself. For example, the portrait of Eugenia Meisner not only watches people as they cross a room, it speaks when they turn their backs. The Earhart goggles are aviator goggles that Amelia Earhart left behind before her final flight (from which she never returned). If you look through the goggles when a ghost is present, you will see the ghost. The Peggy Luna Shure is an old-fashioned microphone that electrocuted a singer named Peggy Luna, who was supposed to become a star. If you talk or sing into the microphone, her ghost will talk or sing back.
In this report, I have organized the objects in Mr. Pryce’s library as Weird (mermaid mummy), Haunted (the portrait of Eugenia Meisner), and Tools, which are subcategorized as either Seeing (the Earhart goggles) or Interacting (the Peggy Luna Shure).
Thirty pages later, Dorry had barely begun to express everything important about Mr. Pryce’s greatest hits in each category. And these were only the objects that were mentioned in articles: Lizzie Borden’s pince-nez (seeing). A pot of blue ink that put a writer into a trance so they could talk with spirits (interacting). A glove with a finger bone sewn into the pinkie (weird). His collection even included a whole haunted house. It was somewhere in Brookline, the home of a family of real estate speculators named Tillerman. According to ghostsofnewengland.com, Matilda was the last living Tillerman, a “wealthy spinster who sealed herself up inside her mansion to die, taking the whereabouts of her vast fortune to her grave.” But Mr. Pryce called her an artist. The exact quote, in an article from the Brookline Historical Society’s newsletter, was “I have obtained the last masterpiece of the artist Matilda Tillerman.” Which Dorry remembered because it was so sad and cool to call a haunted house a work of art.
But the Earhart goggles were her favorite. They were so neat-looking, shiny silver frames, lenses big and bug green. She’d feel tough wearing them, brave as an ace pilot. She doubted they had anything to do with Amelia Earhart. She wasn’t a dork; she knew a bedtime story when she heard it. And she knew that, scientifically speaking, ghost-seeing goggles weren’t part of the standard ghost-hunting tech; they couldn’t detect electromagnetic fields or changes in temperature. But they clearly had some value. Mr. Pryce had paid a lot of money for them, and he featured them in his collection. What if they couldn’t be explained but could be, like … experienced? Wasn’t it good science to at least try them? For herself?
What if they were possible?
She flipped the report closed.
Her dad was zipping up his jacket in the living room. It was the only room that wasn’t either of their bedrooms, the kitchen, or the bathroom. The smallness of her space, compared to their old house in Haverhill – which had had a den and a living room, plus a dining room and a basement, and an office where her mother kept all her art supplies – still surprised her sometimes. “Hey,” he said, “Dor. I have to go to work for a bit.” He rubbed the side of his nose with his knuckle – his tell. He probably didn’t have any actual work to do. He just didn’t want to be in the apartment with her.
“On Sunday?” she asked.
He nodded. “You know how it goes. Science cares not for weekends.”
“Okay,” she said, and thought, Liar. “Go make science.”
He opened the door. Muted music, familiar, filled the air from next door. Dorry turned her ear toward it, thudding beats, a man’s low voice (—should have hidden it, shouldn’t you—). What song was that? She should know. Tue
sday must have told her.
Her dad turned back.
“Dor,” he said, “I don’t want you to get involved. I mean it.”
Her cheeks burned. She looked at the floor. Her fingers got all sweaty on the report cover again, sweaty and slippery.
“Or get your hopes up.”
She bit the inside of her cheek.
“I don’t want you to go over there,” he said, “for any reason other than homework.”
There it was. The worst, stupidest, dumbest, meanest part of their fight. Dorry looked up – still all fiery and hurt – and her dad laughed at her. A little dry laugh that wasn’t happy, sure, but he laughed.
“And we both know you’re going over there as soon as I leave,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I know.”
He shut the door.
Dorry made a fist with the hand that wasn’t sweating on the report. Dammit. Dammit. Now she felt worse. Of course she was planning to go over. Of course she could see Tuesday whenever she wanted to – they were neighbors – but now she felt … like a little kid. A little kid, so predictable, sneaking something she’d been forbidden, like Tuesday was a cookie. A stupid kid who thought she was pretty smart but really wasn’t. And now, if she wanted to prove her dad wrong, she’d have to stay. She’d have to spite herself to spite him. When had her dad gotten so good at messing with her head?
“Terrorist,” she called after him, not loud but not quiet either, hoping, kind of, that he’d heard.
Tuesday heard the Boneses’ door shut. Footsteps plodded down the hall. Heavy steps. That would be Dr. Bones, not Dorry. She looked over at her stereo. She was playing Depeche Mode loud enough to try any neighbor’s patience, and she was already on Dr. Bones’s shit list.
Not that she blamed him.
She stretched her long legs out straight across her couch. It was a love seat, really, plush but unfussy, upholstered in dark red velvet. She spread her toes. Plucked at the fabric.
Gunnar was dozing in a pool of sun on the back of the sofa, a black and white loaf of cat, his head turned toward the window’s light.
His fur was warm when Tuesday rubbed it. “What the hell, Gun,” she said. “What the hell was this week. A week ago this time, I was—” A week ago she’d spent Sunday – she didn’t even remember. She did not remember what she was doing one week ago today. Laundry, probably. She might have read a book or watched television. Gunnar splayed his front knees and dropped his little furry chin flat to the sofa, moving from loaf pose to camel. A week ago she’d been bored, and now she was not.
Tuesday heard a knock on her door.
She’d been expecting it. Even so, she closed her eyes and pretended, just for a second, that she hadn’t heard. Pretended that her favorite kid, her Next Dorry, wasn’t about to press the point that the good Dr. Toby Bones had driven home.
He’d stopped by yesterday in the late afternoon. She’d only been back from the day’s adventures for fifteen, twenty minutes. He must have been listening for the slam of her door. It was light out still. She, Dex, and Archie hadn’t stayed long once they found the envelopes – about as long as it took to have a discussion about how many they could, in good conscience, take.
“The rules of the game state we can play alone or in teams,” said Archie. He was kneeling in front of the filing cabinet, thumbing through the long stack. “Look, there are tons in here. We can take three. It’s not unethical.”
“Actually, it is unethical to take three. It’s not irrational to take three.” Tuesday snapped the wax seal off an envelope and reached inside. “You and I have an agreement; we’re a team. If we took three we’d be rationally obeying the rules to the letter but not honoring the spirit of the game.”
“Literally,” Dex said, and high-fived her for the pun. “What would Vincent Pryce want?”
Archie sniffed. “As many players as possible,” he said. “As many as—” He began counting under his breath.
“Fifty,” he said. Then he looked up at the envelope in Tuesday’s hands. “Fifty-one.”
“Fifty-one.” Her brain chewed on the number. “Fifty-one envelopes. Fifty-one teams or individual players. What does fifty-one mean?”
“Area Fifty-one,” said Archie. “Secret government base.”
“Seventeen times three.” Dex crossed his arms. “The square root of two thousand six hundred and one. Six fewer than Heinz’s varieties.” He paused. “You know, I’m quite struck by how much faith Vincent Pryce had in people. Like, all these envelopes are here on the honor system.” He looked at Tuesday. “He’s sort of the anti-you.”
“Vince,” Archie started, and stopped, like he’d forgotten what he was going to say.
“We should take at least two, though,” said Tuesday gingerly, because she knew Dex would be sensitive about exclusion. “So we can compare what’s inside each envelope. Starting with—” She pulled out a banded stack of crisp twenty-dollar bills.
“There’s your thirteen thou, Arch,” she said. She dug back in, though the envelope felt empty. But it wasn’t.
She held up a single playing card. A queen of diamonds.
The card didn’t look tampered with. There were no obvious changes or hidden messages on either the face or the reverse. It was an ordinary, impassive, flower-gripping queen of diamonds.
“Since it’s strategic for us to play on two teams,” Dex said, eye-balling her knowingly, “pass me one of those.” He held a hand down toward Archie.
Dex’s envelope held an identical banded stack of bills. And a seven of hearts.
“Magnificent,” said Dex.
They left the theater. Climbed back up to the lobby. The guard was gone again. Tuesday paid little attention to all of it. Her brain was focused on the card. On the money. On fifty-one players. What it might mean. What Pryce might be asking them to do.
She did not have a clue.
“We should have a plan. Let’s divide and conquer,” Dex said, once they were out on the sidewalk. “What are we looking for again?”
Tuesday looked down at her notes. “Seek well,” she said, “before the clock equals twelve.”
“I’ll look for wells,” said Dex.
Tuesday frowned at him. “I think Pryce was speaking metaphorically.”
“Then I’ll look for metaphorical wells,” said Dex. “You look for clocks. Archie?” Archie turned toward him and raised both eyebrows. “Wells and clocks are spoken for,” said Dex. “Look for something else.”
“Fifty-one,” said Tuesday. “What about the significance of fifty-one?”
Archie nodded. He was clearly working something out in his mind. What he was really going to look for, maybe, without telling her or Dex.
“I’ll keep the money,” she said, waving the envelope in front of his face, “until we figure out what to do with it.”
Archie nodded again.
“And we should keep in touch,” Dex said, “so no one can accuse anyone of going rogue.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and asked for Archie’s number.
“What do you need my number for?” asked Archie.
“Um,” said Dex, “so we can keep in touch. Paranoid much, Rich Boy?”
Archie gave Dex a number. Tuesday didn’t have the contact information from Nathaniel Arches’s record in the database at work memorized, but she knew exactly what she’d be cross-checking first thing Monday morning.
Dex dropped his phone back into his pocket. “Let’s touch each other’s bases,” he said. Then he nodded crisply at them both and about-faced to walk home down Tremont.
Leaving her alone with Archie. Standing outside the Steinert building. Facing each other. For the first time since he ran away into the bowels of the MBTA.
“I’m heading to Somerville,” she finally said, pointing across the Common. “Taking the Red Line from Park Street.”
“I think it’s best we steer clear of Park Street station,” Archie said. He had a wide mouth. It took a long time to curl at the corners. “At least to
gether.”
Tuesday’s bag buzzed. Archie jumped and reached for his butt. It was Dex, still walking – hell, she’d be able to see him if she turned around – texting to the group: TESTING TESTING TESTING. Then, in a separate text, just to Tuesday:
Girl you’re welcome
How many times have you been out with this big bag of sex
And *I* had to get his digits for you?
Tuesday dropped her phone back in her bag, and they headed toward Park Street. They walked together, but they didn’t talk. Which was odd, because even though she’d unloaded every barrel of words she had at him in the theater beneath the street, Tuesday had more to say. To ask. About Vincent Pryce. About Pryce’s monogram, and what had happened to Archie’s eyes, and his hands, and presumably his heart, when he saw it. Usually she didn’t have a problem saying what was on her mind. But she sensed a magnetic field pushing at her from Archie, a sort of attraction-repulsion polar deadlock. She was sure there was more he wanted to say too; he just didn’t know where to start, or whether to let her go first because he could feel her field. And so they made it all the way to the T station without having said anything at all, until:
“So,” said Archie. He looked at his feet. “You met my sister? And my mother?”
Yes. God. A year ago this morning. Tuesday nodded. And briefly explained that she and Dex had been at Lyle Pryce’s for brunch.
“You didn’t tell them anything – about.” He gestured – toward her, the station entrance, all of Boston, the air. His hands were large and his fingers long and graceful.
“Probably more than I should have, but nothing about you.” Nothing explicitly about you, at least. “There’s a chance your sister saw a picture.”
“You were showing—” A line appeared between his eyebrows. “Why do you have pictures of me?”
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 15