“What should I do, Abby?” she asked the Ouija board, her fingertips on the planchette. It had been swooping in a figure eight, not landing on anything in particular, fluttering for the fun of it. It was late November now, almost Thanksgiving. Tuesday used the board every night before she went to sleep. Abby talked to her all day long, board or no, but the movement of the planchette was a comfort, the glide of its felt feet over the board’s papered surface familiar and soothing. “If you don’t have any suggestions about how to start finding your killer, do you have any other advice?”
The planchette dove into another eight.
Don’t you know it’s dangerous to use the board alone? said Abby.
“I don’t think Witchboard is an accurate representation of proper Ouija usage,” Tuesday said. She snickered, then felt a pang, because even though Abby was around, it wasn’t the same as actually having her here. Watching awful eighties horror movies starring Tawny Kitaen with a voice inside your own head wasn’t the same as watching them with your best friend – your best friend who muttered Bitch stole my look every time Tawny’s increasingly wild mountain of red hair appeared onscreen. Abby was a flame redhead. “You know,” she’d said when she still had a living body, “once upon a time this hair alone would’ve gotten me burned at the stake.”
Tuesday addressed the board. “Are you saying you’re going to possess me?” she asked.
The planchette slid up and sat over NO.
“What are you saying, then? Anything?” She paused. “What should I do, Abby?”
The planchette wove loops through the letters and spelled out F-I-N-C-H.
“Scout?” asked Tuesday. “Atticus?”
Detective, said Abby. Detective Finch, moron.
Tuesday hadn’t known that a detective looked into Abby’s disappearance. She certainly hadn’t known that detective’s name. She lifted her fingertips from the planchette. The hairs prickled on the backs of her hands, her wrists, then the prickle ran up her arms and across her shoulders and straight up the back of her neck. “Abby,” she said. “Holy—” And Abby said, Mary Mother of God.
A week later, she was explaining to her parents it was on a tip from Abby Hobbes (no, really – that Abby Hobbes) that she had broken into the Salem police station – which had gone about as well as one might expect, and certainly worse than Tuesday had hoped. But that was only the beginning of the bad. The Much Worse was still to come.
All because Tuesday wanted to talk to a dead person.
And now, so did Dorry Bones.
Dorry was a girl after her own heart: a smart, strange, searching girl. If Tuesday could protect her from a Much Worse of her own, she would, even if it meant breaking the heart that they shared. A broken heart hurt like hell, but it kept beating.
A lost mind was something else entirely.
8
THIS MEANS SOMETHING
It wasn’t until the following Tuesday – Tuesday the day, not Tuesday the person – that the underground theater got that much closer to being officially, publicly discovered. Tuesday the person was, that Tuesday morning, sitting in her cube at work, procrastinating. She had a queue of research requests, but none of them pressing or particularly interesting; if you’ve researched one midcareer lawyer in Cambridge, you’ve researched them all. Far more urgent was the desire to apply her imagination, as instructed, to Pryce’s game. To seek well before the clock – turns? strikes? Was there some nuance she was missing? – equals twelve. She’d been trawling the internet for clocks in and around the city of Boston. Clock towers at universities. Public clocks in town squares. Expensive antique clocks up for auction at Skinner’s. Historically important clocks on display at the Museum of Fine Arts. “Clock” was the only noun in the code preceded by a definite article, so, logically, Pryce had a specific clock in mind: the clock. So far she’d learned that Boston was full of clocks, of all sizes and functions, but none of them had any obvious link to Pryce or to Poe.
She blew a puff of air into her bangs. She thought it would be simpler to track down a clock rather than address the larger, vaguer, more all-encompassing part of the objective. What did it mean to “seek well”? To play the game strategically, with clarity of purpose? Or was Pryce pointing his players toward a broader understanding of what it meant to do anything well, or to be well, or to—
She looked over at her cooling second cup of coffee. Too early. It was too early, and she was too undercaffeinated, for philosophy.
A chat window popped up in the lower right corner of her computer screen. Someone else procrastinating at work, half a mile and fourteen floors away.
DexHoward: what does it even mean, really
“Seek well”
I think I’m coming around to your metaphorical wells
Tuesday exhaled again. Dex, ever since the decoder room, had been reading her mind. Or she’d been reading his.
Or they were both getting obsessed.
TuesdayMooney: The search for wells
Not going so well?
DexHoward: ha ha ha
TuesdayMooney: My gut really says he’s using “well” as an adverb and not a noun
And it’s up to us
(The players/seekers)
To figure out what it means to seek well
DexHoward: Figures
It would have been so nice if we were looking for a literal hole in the ground
But of course we’re looking for “enlightenment”
And I have to work for my enlightenment
Why can’t it like
Come in the mail
Tuesday sat back in her chair, tucked one foot under the opposite knee, and the warm growl of Archie’s voice bubbled up from somewhere in the back of her brain. He wasn’t saying anything in particular. He didn’t have to. He was always there lately, like a daydream she couldn’t (and didn’t want to) stop having, or a riddle she couldn’t (but wanted to) solve. The number he’d given Dex didn’t match any of his known contacts in the fundraising database. She looked over at her cube wall. She’d pushpinned a copy of Pryce’s obituary into the fabric, between an old Christmas photo of Ollie, her sister-in-law Vivian, and little Olive, and a single-serve pouch of Spam that had magically appeared in her desk drawer one day, because Mo was both a great manager and an obscure prankster.
Her desk phone rang.
She looked at the display: an outside line. She’d been screening her calls, at work and on her cell – the only people who called her now, it seemed, were her parents and reporters who’d managed to track down her number. She hadn’t given any interviews, hadn’t made any statements. There was nothing to say. The game was news, not her. And even then it wasn’t really news news. It wasn’t Afghanistan or the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. Ms. Heck, her tenth-grade English and journalism teacher, would have called it meat for the monkeys, a gawker piece. The interesting but inessential human interest story of how one rich lunatic lived, died, and spent his money.
She’d been avoiding Facebook too. She’d received dozens of new friend (ha) requests and unsolicited messages, many of them genuinely bizarre, some of them threatening. She’d deleted her Twitter account, which had gotten terrifying, terrifyingly fast. It was liberating, frankly, to disappear from social media so deliberately. She had no interest in fanning flames or being famous, at least not for this. She just wanted to figure it out.
And, sure, get bought out by Archie. Five million dollars wasn’t nothing. Five million dollars meant – it meant she could change her life, if she wanted. And Dorry could change hers. It meant she wouldn’t have to be or do anything she didn’t want. It meant she could wipe out her student debt, for starters. Beyond that, it meant – she didn’t even know yet. It meant she would have time to figure out what she’d like to do for the rest of her life. Or for the next few years, at least, before she got bored again. And she would never have to swing into her cube, or log on to her computer, or open her email, or research another midcareer lawyer in Cambridge ever ag
ain.
God, it was an appealing thought.
Her phone kept ringing.
“You going to answer that?” Her cube neighbor’s voice floated across the aisle.
“My fan club is kind of annoying,” Tuesday said, and her coworker chuckled, and Tuesday decided what the hell and picked up the handset.
Before she could say anything, a terse woman’s voice took control. “Hello,” the voice said. “I’m calling for Tuesday Mooney. Is this Miss Mooney?”
“It is,” Tuesday said, though “Miss” always made her itch.
“Nathaniel Arches would like to meet you for lunch. He’s free at twelve noon. Are you available?”
“Uh.” Tuesday’s brain blipped. “Yes?”
Why hadn’t he texted?
“Excellent. We’ll have the car to your location by eleven forty-five. That’s One Bowdoin Square, correct?”
“Yes?” she said again.
“Do you have any food allergies?”
Tuesday’s mouth opened but the words weren’t there. She looked at the photo of her brother and Viv and Olive, at the obituary, at the Spam.
“No?” she finally said.
“Excellent,” the woman repeated. “Have a pleasant day.” And she hung up.
Tuesday lowered the handset. Pressed it against her shoulder. What.
The chat window at the bottom of her monitor flashed.
DexHoward: WHOA
WHOA WHOA WHOA
Someone else found a raven
WE’RE NOT ALONE
I REPEAT
WE
ARE
NOT
ALONE
Tuesday felt a whoosh of dizziness as she clicked on the link Dex sent next, which meant she was close to passing out. It also meant she was a lot more personally invested in this competition than she had previously admitted to herself. Dammit, she wanted this. She wanted this for herself, and she wanted it with Dex and Dorry and Archie. And nothing made her want a thing more than the threat of it being taken away.
It was a public Facebook group page. Under a photograph of a hissing black cat was a header in capitals: WE R THE BLACK CATS. We’re playing Vincent Pryce’s game, the group’s description read, and you should too. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, POST SOMETHING.
The group had sixty-six members. They all considered themselves Black Cats, but within that there were subgroups, clusters of treasure-hunting gangs like pub trivia teams, representing their corners of greater Boston. The Smoots had MIT; the Gay Mafia covered Eastie; the Highlanders, Somerville; the Green Monsters and Challahback Girls, Fenway and Brookline. Adama Is a Cylon – the name of a trivia team she and Dex had gone up against more than once, which couldn’t be a coincidence – had parts of Cambridge. The more she dug, the more motivating and heartening they seemed, the gangs of Boston, all working together. She could hear Dex: See, Tuesday? Not all humans in groups are a bad thing.
She supposed groups of collaborative nerds were an exception.
The earliest posts (the group hadn’t even existed a week) were of—
Tuesday.
Pictures of her, and of the raven and the quote from Lear, snapped and circulated from Twitter. Her, coming out of Park Street station with a cop on each side. Her first instinct was not to read the comments – the first rule of retaining whatever faith you had left in humanity was Never, ever read the comments – but she couldn’t help it.
She read the comments.
Tim Burton’s Lady Indiana Jones and the T Station of Doom
#hero #fuckshitup
Who is this woman???
And then – these were her people, all right: resourceful, internet-literate geeks – a link to her professional profile on LinkedIn. She inhaled. And, not for the first time, was intensely grateful no one who didn’t already work for the hospital knew the location of her little satellite office.
Subsequent posts included links to articles about Pryce, some conspiracy boondoggles and a few smartass memes, and then, after a few days, someone posting as Lisa Pinto said: HEY GUYS what about the Shakespeare? Like that has to be part of the solution right? And then the most recent post, the one Dex had sent her.
It came from a Highlander named Ned Kennedy, who had ventured beyond his home turf of Somerville into downtown Boston. It was a picture of a brick wall with another spray-painted raven, tilted so that its beak and leg pointed down at the ground, as if it were saying Peck here. Above it, instead of a line from Lear in chalk—
“The code,” Tuesday breathed.
The symbols that had been on the scroll, the instructions to Life After Death that had given her her head start, were sketched in white chalk, one symbol per brick. And shared on Facebook for all the Black Cats and their friends to see. The photo was captioned:
Heeeeey look what I found. GUESS WHERE I AM!!!!! Ok ok I’ll tell you: alley off Boylston, between burrito place and piano store. Poe born here. I have no idea what the hell any of this means but it seems important. K now Imma get a burrito.
Dex chatted her again.
DexHoward: Whelp
There goes our lead
Also how did we not see those??
Tuesday sat forward in her chair.
TuesdayMooney: It rained
DexHoward: what does that have to do with anything
TuesdayMooney: It rained on Sunday
And on Friday too
Meaning it keeps washing away the code
Meaning it comes and goes
Until someone living re-chalks it
DexHoward: well
… hell
TuesdayMooney: but now that it’s on the internet it’s not going anywhere
She chewed her thumbnail.
TuesdayMooney: Archie just had his assistant make a lunch date with me
DexHoward: His assistant?
TuesdayMooney: He is important, Dex
DexHoward: Tell me something I DON’T know
Tuesday tried to smile. It helped ease the uncertainty rippling through her stomach.
TuesdayMooney: I just wanted someone to know
It feels … off
DexHoward: Mooney-sense tingling?
I’ll release the hounds if I don’t hear from you
TuesdayMooney: Thanks Dex
And yes, I’m tingling like crazy
… not like that
DexHoward: Sure
Right
Uh huh
The sky was perfect October blue when she left the office, but Tuesday didn’t look up. She looked down at her phone instead, at the text she’d tapped to Archie but hadn’t sent.
Um you had your ASSISTANT call me?
It seemed stupid to text him when she was going to see him any minute.
And yet.
She put her phone away in her bag, message unsent.
She didn’t understand him or what he was doing, but she wanted to. She wanted to fit all his pieces together, mesh the data she’d found online with the information she’d collected in person. She was maddeningly close to creating a complete picture of a person, on the brink of understanding who the hell Nathaniel Allan Arches really was. And once she knew who the hell Nathaniel Allan Arches was, she suspected she’d be that much closer to knowing who the hell Vincent Pryce was – and knowing Pryce, she thought, would be the key to his own game. Who Pryce was, what and whom he loved, and why he did what he did with everything he had would tell Tuesday how to win. And with the code exposed, it was only a matter of time before more players found the underground theater. And decoded the rules for Life After Death. And picked up their money and their cards. She could feel the clock, which she couldn’t find anywhere, ticking faster.
Yes. She nodded to herself. That was it. That was where this jittery anticipation was coming from. She was loitering outside her office building, swinging her bag nervously at her side, teetering on the edge of discovery. While the whole city breathed down her neck.
A town car floated up to the curb like a gleaming bla
ck cloud.
She didn’t move toward it.
The driver’s door opened and a trim man in a white shirt and thin black tie climbed out. He opened the rear door and gestured for her to approach.
Oh, so this is how you die, said Abby Hobbes.
Tuesday flashed cold.
Abby.
Back in her head for the second time in less than a week.
This is not how I die, she thought back at her. This is how I live.
Abby didn’t respond. Tuesday walked toward the car, slid inside, and sat down, and when she looked up, Archie was watching her from the other end of the seat.
He was wearing a dark, chalk-stripe suit, a white shirt so crisp it seemed capable of slicing his neck, and no tie. The suit likely cost more than a year of her take-home pay. His hair had been slicked back with fistfuls of product. It made his face longer, sharper, his eyes smaller. He was drenched in a cologne that made her eyes water. So this was what he looked like, and smelled like, when he was himself.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said.
The car pulled into traffic. Tuesday’s body rocked back against the seat.
She didn’t know what to say to that.
Archie looked at her like he had never seen her before, and wasn’t quite sure how to process her as a piece of visual information, how to connect her head and face and neck and chest and trunk and lap and legs and toes. When he looked into her eyes, he did something unfamiliar: he clenched his jaw. Two dimples appeared on either side of his face. How had she not noticed those before? Then he brushed a hand through the side of his hair. It wasn’t slicked back, it was short; it was shorter than it was supposed to be because—
“Holy shit,” said Tuesday. “You’re not Archie.”
He laughed an irritated sort of laugh and looked away from her, out the window at the passing city. His voice was deep but colorless. “That’s what he’s calling himself?”
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 17