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“Welcome to the auction,” she said. “May I have your name?”
He had a face made for striking on coins: hair brushed back, broad, dark-eyed, and long-nosed. It was familiar to Tuesday. Because she read society and business columns. Because she was fond of a high forehead. And because she’d researched him.
“Bruce Wayne,” he said.
Kelly W., without missing a beat, said, “Might it be under Batman?”
He laughed. It made Tuesday like him a little, which was unexpected, given everything she already knew. His name was Nathaniel Allan Arches. He was the oldest child of Edgar Arches. The Edgar Arches, who had turned a lot of old Boston money into a hell of a lot of new Boston money by founding Arches Consolidated Enterprises (yes, its acronym – and general business reputation – was ACE), one of the largest private holding companies on the East Coast, if not the world. ACE had started small, with a chain of grocery stores on the Cape, then exploded in the early eighties, thanks to smart initial investments in tech companies spearheaded by MIT graduates. The company had had a hand in every major personal electronic device developed over the past thirty years, from Palm Pilots to smartphones. ACE had moved through the tech world like an amoeba, wrapping itself around industries and companies and swallowing them whole, the man at its helm a seemingly unstoppable, unbeatable force of nature.
And then Edgar Arches, the force of nature himself, went missing.
Five or six years ago, now. Tuesday had still been at Cabot when it happened. He disappeared over Labor Day weekend under odd and tragic circumstances. After a scene of public drunkenness during a charity wine tasting in Nantucket Harbor, Edgar Arches and his son retreated to the family yacht, Constancy. Nathaniel brought the yacht back the next morning – alone. His father and the yacht’s dinghy had vanished in the night. The dinghy eventually washed up on Madaket Beach, but there was no evidence of foul play – no blood, no fingerprints. There was no hint of corporate malfeasance or a scandal that would suggest a possible suicide. The family’s public statement was crafted for maximum plausible deniability: Nathaniel, the dutiful son, left his father safely sleeping it off on one of the yacht’s banquettes, and went to bed in his own stateroom. When he woke up the next morning, father and dinghy were simply AWOL. Nathaniel was questioned by the police, but not, as far as Tuesday knew, ever considered a suspect, because there wasn’t an obvious crime. There was no body, so there’d been no murder; Edgar Arches was a missing person. The news took that paucity of information and whipped it into a froth of supposition and gossip. What had happened on that boat, that night? What had happened to the richest of rich men, Edgar Arches – the man who had it all?
But what had he really had?
He’d had a wife, Constance, who’d assumed control of ACE in his absence, and presumably still ran it. He’d had a daughter, Emerson, made internet famous by a meme of her clotheslining Paris Hilton at a Halloween party (Paris was a devil; Emerson was a unicorn). Before his disappearance, Edgar Arches was a staple on the Forbes list of billionaires. Constance, as the surviving scion, currently held that honor, though there were rumors – even at the time of the disappearance – that Nathaniel was champing at the bit to manage the family fortune.
Most people with that kind of life did not have a sense of humor, and if they did, it was not about themselves.
“Look under Man,” Nathaniel Arches said. His voice was slow and deep. “Man comma Bat.”
“Look under Arches,” Tuesday said to Kelly W., soft enough not to embarrass her, loud enough for him to hear. “First name – there. Nathaniel.”
He smiled like a flashbulb.
“Would you like to make a nametag?” Kelly W. handed him a permanent marker and a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker.
“Sure,” he said, uncapping the marker and inhaling. “I do love a fresh Sharpie.”
Tuesday’s mental file on Arches, Nathaniel fluttered in this breeze of personality. Nathaniel, since his father’s disappearance and his mother’s takeover of ACE, had funneled his share of the family fortune into N. A. Arches, a venture capital firm that invested in biotech, the next generation of MIT-spawned companies ACE was built on. There were rumors he had dated Gisele before Tom Brady. There were rumors he had dated Tom Brady before Gisele. In every interview Tuesday had read about him, he’d sounded like an out-of-the-box corporate venture dude, a walking jargon machine. He talked about synergy, about leveraging his assets. He made not one joke, possessed not a hint of wit or irony or self-consciousness of any kind.
He’d come to her attention last month, when one of the fundraisers she worked with – Watley, who raised money for primary care – asked for research. Nathaniel had no apparent connection to the hospital; he’d given no money, expressed no interest. He was just a name Watley discovered, probably after Googling “rich people in Boston.” She tried to tell Watley that good fundraising required a slightly more strategic approach, that it wasn’t worth her time to research and write up a full profile on a prospect with no Boston General connections and no history of, well, anything other than being a wealthy douche.
But Watley was new to the office and eager, Nathaniel Arches was rich as hell and his family was bonkers, and it was the dull deep end of August when everyone was down the Cape, so Tuesday dove into the cool information-soaked sea of the internet. His Facebook account was locked down, but he tweeted pictures of sunsets, the beers he was drinking, and the kind of vague motivational quotes that were usually accompanied by photographs of soaring eagles and windsurfers (REACH! IT’S CLOSER THAN YOU THINK). He did have a record in the patient database, but he had seen specialists (plastic surgeons, years ago), and technically that wasn’t public information; it was a violation of the hospital’s privacy policies to use that information to initiate contact.
So she focused on everything else. Nathaniel had been profiled on Boston.com and the Improper Bostonian. He barely opened his eyes in photographs. He was listed as a director of a private family foundation that gave, relative to its potential, offensively nominal donations to every nonprofit organization in Boston – the equivalent of giving a kid a nickel and telling her not to spend it all in one place. He owned no property under his own name, though he lived in the family’s luxury condo at the top of the Mandarin Hotel – when he wasn’t at the family compound on Nantucket – and he’d shown up on five separate lists of Boston’s sexiest: Sexiest Thirtysomethings, Sexiest Residents of the Back Bay, Sexiest Scenesters, Sexiest New Capitalists (he was number one with a bullet), and just plain Sexiest.
Tuesday had compiled all the hard and soft data she could find on Nathaniel Arches, and found his self-satisfied, megamonied, essentially ungenerous, ladykiller affect the exact opposite of sexy.
In person, though, was a totally different story.
This was why she volunteered for events.
He peeled the paper from the back of his nametag and slapped it gently on his chest. “How’s that?” he asked. “Is it on straight?”
Under HELLO MY NAME IS, he’d written ARCHIE.
“One edge is a little – higher—” Kelly W. pointed.
Tuesday stood and leaned over the registration table. “I can fix it,” she said.
Archie leaned toward her without hesitation. They were close to the same height, and he turned his head slightly to the side. “I’ve always wondered if two heads colliding really make that coconut sound,” he said, “but I don’t need to find out tonight.”
Tuesday gave him a long smile. “The night is young,” she said, and slowly pulled his nametag from his suit. Holding the sticky corners level, she repositioned it, pressed, smoothed it flat with her fingertips.
He stepped back and held out his hand.
“Archie.”
“Tuesday.” She squeezed his hand.
He gave a little finger-gun wave and glided away.
Tuesday plunked back in her chair.
“Holy crap,” said Kelly W. “What just happened?”
“Research,” said Tuesday. “In the field.”
At the Four Seasons Hotel, in a ballroom full of smiling men in suits, Dex Howard waited to be hit on.
That was it, right there: that was why he’d decided to come. As pathetic as it might be, he wanted a pity pickup. A distraction from having broken up with Patrick, even though everyone – seriously, everyone, including his own subconscious – had seen it coming. They had chemistry, they had fun, but they didn’t have much else. Patrick was a wet-behind-the-ears erstwhile ballet dancer turned barista. Dex was a Vice President. Richmont, which had no more than fifty employees, had fifteen Vice Presidents. All employees who had, at other firms, started as Coordinators, transformed into Analysts, then Senior Analysts, and then, having no further room in the chrysalis, burst into fully mature Vice Presidents. He was a Vice President who Managed Marketing, whatever the hell that meant, and his hairline was receding at the same rate as his childhood dreams.
He hated to think it – it was mean, it was shallow – but Dex was pretty sure Patrick had seen him as a meal ticket, a sugar daddy, a sponsor. Dex bought dinner. Dex bought tickets. Dex bought gifts. Patrick gave: support, compliments, sex. (Not for money, Dex told himself; not like that.) He liked buying things for Patrick, and Patrick liked receiving them. That Patrick liked his money didn’t mean he didn’t also like Dex as a person. Dex took a slug of open-bar whiskey – God, he hated this thing that his brain did, the way it looked at a man who professed to want him and asked, But why? Then answered, without waiting for a response, Because I can buy you things.
At least in a crowd of senior vice presidents and higher, Dex’s ability to buy things was relative, and puny. Though it wasn’t all that different from the crowd in The Bank. It had a higher tax bracket, was older and less visibly douchey, but there was still that slightly desperate undertow of desire threading through like a hot wire. Desire to make some sort of impression, to outperform, to draw attention, or at least to numb yourself to the day you’d just had with free booze – not to mention the next day, and the next.
Tuesday, as was her wont, was suddenly, silently there.
“Are you going to spend the night drinking morosely in the corner?” she asked.
Dex tried to hide the start she’d given him.
“But I excel,” he said, “at morose corner drinking.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About Patrick.”
Dex shrugged.
“You should try the shrimp,” Tuesday said. “Did you see them? They’re grotesque. They’re the biggest shrimp I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s an oxymoron.” Dex drained his glass.
“Though I overheard people complaining that they didn’t have much flavor.” Tuesday walked with him out of the ballroom and back toward the bar and the food. “They’re too big.”
“Metaphor alert.” Dex nabbed a small plate from the end of the buffet. “Those are the biggest shrimps I’ve ever seen. They’re obscene.”
“The chicken satay thingies are always good,” she said. “And the dessert course here is usually phenomenal. Save room for the cake pops.”
“Cake Pops and Bourbon.”
“Title of your autobiography?”
“My darkly confessional, poorly received sophomore album.”
That got a twitch of a grin. Dex loved it. He knew that people looked at Tuesday and saw, in order, her height, her shoulders, her pale darkness. They heard her clumping around corners, occasionally tripping over her own feet; they saw her all-black wardrobe, her shelf of bangs, and her un-made-up face, and in their heads they thought, Grown-ass Wednesday Addams, one day of the week earlier. Dex actually knew this; their former coworkers, before Dex fully defected to Team Tuesday, once asked him what the deal was with that bizarro know-it-all tall girl. The guys thought she was hiding a great body – I mean, no wonder she was so clumsy; she was topheavy – under black sackcloth. The girls thought her face only needed a little, like, lipstick, or eyeliner, or something. If they even bothered, they imagined that she spent all her free time watching horror movies (true), listening to The Cure (occasionally true), and writing goth fan fiction (not true, but not outside the realm of possibility).
The truth was this: Dex genuinely believed Tuesday didn’t give a shit what people thought when they looked at her. But the truth was also: he spent a fair amount of his free time with her – when he wasn’t with a future ex-boyfriend – and he didn’t really know what the deal was with her either. He knew how she was. He knew she cared about him, though he also knew he cared more about her. She kept him outside. After all these years, after all this time, he knew her without really knowing her at all.
He didn’t know, for example, where she came from other than geographically. He had never met her parents, or learned anything about them other than factual details: they owned a souvenir shop in Salem. She had a brother, he thought. He knew what she loved, aesthetically – the weird and macabre – but he didn’t know what she feared. Or wanted. Or worried about. He didn’t know where she was most tender, or why, and anytime he poked in the general direction of where her underbelly might be, she solidified, invulnerable as granite. There was something Tennessee Williams tragic about her intimacy issues that, if he was being honest with his most melodramatic self, increased her appeal. Since she wouldn’t take him into her confidence, he could only romanticize her. He could only imagine how she’d managed to get her great heart squashed.
Not that anyone would ever be able to tell. A squashed heart still beat, and Tuesday categorically Had Her Shit Together. She was quick. She was bright. But Dex knew a thing or two about armor – this suit and tie he was wearing right now was a shell over his own tenderest parts – and he knew every suit of armor has a weak spot that can only be found by systematic poking. Every time Dex succeeded in making Tuesday smile, it was like seeing a rainbow over a haunted house.
He took his heaped plate of satay and shrimp back into the ballroom, and only then noticed Tuesday was plateless. He nodded toward the food. She picked up a skewer. Then another skewer. She had nothing if not an appetite. They chewed, Tuesday surreptitiously, and loitered by the rear wall. Tuesday’s next responsibility was helping with the auction as a runner. If anyone sitting in her quadrant of the room won an item, she had to dash out and collect their pertinents: name, address, credit card number. The auction itself, she explained, would be pretty exciting – the auctioneer was a professional, brought in for the night; the cause was good; the crowd was well heeled, well sponsored, and well lubricated.
“We have VIP meet-and-greet tickets for the New Kids on the Block reunion concert,” she said. “My money’s on that for bidding war of the night.”
“Really?” said Dex. He took in the room, ivory-draped tables and rows of maroon seats filling. “Big NKOTB fans here in the land of ancient corporate white dudes?”
“You’d be surprised. Hometown pride. Plus, there are a lot of parents bidding for their kids.” She pulled the last bite of satay off her skewer with her teeth. “You should take a seat. I have to grab my clipboard.”
“Want me to drive up the bid on the New Kids?”
“You can bid on anything you want.” She raised her brows. “So long as you pay for it.”
After Tuesday was gone, Dex, alone again, and embracing the reality that no one was going to hit on him tonight – this crowd was too old, too straight, too married, too professional – scanned for someone fun to sit beside, someone who might feel as out of place as he did.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked, placing one hand lightly on the back of a chair at the front of the room.
The woman sitting beside it looked up and smiled. No one else was sitting at the table but her. Dex would have guessed she was in her late thirties or early forties. Her skin was dark, her black hair fringed and pulled back; she was gloriously round, and rocking the holy hell out of a one-sleeved teal dress. On her ring finger was a yellow diamond big enough to put out a man’s eye.
“Not at all,” she said. “Have a seat! My husband bought this table as a sponsorship, but then we didn’t invite anyone, so it’s sort of a table for lost souls.”
“Absolutely perfect,” Dex said, and sat down. “Dex Howard.” He offered his hand. “Professional lost soul.”
“Lila Korrapati Pryce,” she said, shaking it. “English teacher – former English teacher. Professional wife.”
“You looked very lonely over here,” Dex said. “A lonely little island.”
“Crap,” she said. “Lonely? Really? I was aiming for glamorously aloof, keeping my distance from the hoi polloi. International star, maybe. Bollywood queen.”
“Ambassador’s wife.”
“Ambassador,” she said.
“Heir to a diamond mine.” He pointed at her ring. “Owner of a cursed jewel.”
Lila laughed. She had a magnificent laugh. It was warm and hearty, like a drunk but high-functioning sailor’s. “Professional mysterious woman,” she said, “and the only brown person in this corner of the ballroom.”
“Well, I did notice that,” said Dex. “Kind of hard not to.”
“You’d be surprised what people don’t notice,” said Lila. “I don’t mind, honestly. I mean, I mind it in the larger socioeconomic sense, but in the personal sense, I like being a little on the outside. Keeps me sharp.” She cracked her neck. “You have to laugh.”
“Or drink,” said Dex. “You could drink.”
“Oh, I do that too,” said Lila. “And I forget that I’m not supposed to talk about uncomfortable things, especially with strangers. You’d think I hadn’t lived in Cambridge my whole life.”
“I am very glad to be sitting next to you,” said Dex. “What are you drinking?”
“Vince – that’s my husband, you’ll meet him in just a moment – went to get—” She looked up and back and laughed again. “You’ll meet him right now!”
A much older man approached the table, a glass in each hand – one with brown liquid and rocks, the other clear and sparkling with a bright wedge of lime – and Dex nearly choked. He was wearing a cape. A goddamned cape. A black cape like the kind British guys wore to the opera in old movies: secured, somehow, around his high tuxedo-collared neck, popped like a polo collar, fluttering halfway down his back. His skin was chalky and spotted, his hair was pure silver, his ears stuck out like wings, and under a nose you could only refer to as a schnoz was a peppery push broom of a mustache. His eyes were steady and warm. He looked like the kind of man who tied damsels to train tracks but only because that was his role in the melodrama, and he would never get away with it; he was there to give someone else a chance to be a hero.
“I leave for one second,” he said, setting the sparkling drink before his wife, “and look who shows up. Suitors. Are we going to have to duel?” he asked Dex.
Dex stuck out his hand and introduced himself again. “Hello,” he said. “And I hope you don’t think it’s inexcusably rude of me to ask if your name is really Vincent Price.”
“Oh, it’s hardly rude, certainly not inexcusable,” he replied with half a smile. “And also true. Yes, my name is Vincent Pryce. Pryce with a Y, so you see, it’s completely different. I was named years before the other Vincent Price became a celebrity. Though my people weren’t moviegoing people, so they had no appreciation for the gift they’d given me.” He sat and jauntily brushed his cape back from one shoulder. “And it is a gift. I’ve always loved his movies. House of Wax. The Fly. The Tingler! The sound of his voice, that rumbly, educated purr. And his characters: men of science, men of wealth, men of passion – undone! By ambition, by madness! Who went headlong, laughing, to their dooms.”
“And rapped for Michael Jackson,” said Dex.
“Plus, he introduced me to E. A. Poe,” said Vince with reverence. “And for that, truly, truly I am grateful.”
“Vince has one of the world’s largest amateur Edgar Allan Poe collections,” Lila said, as Pryce rolled his eyes at the word “amateur.” “First editions, letters, ephemera, assorted memorabilia. Movie stuff, posters, film prints of the Poe movies the other Vincent Price made with Hammer—”
“Corman, my dear.” Pryce placed a hand, surprisingly large and steady, over his heart. “He made House of Usher in ’sixty, The Pit and the Pendulum in ’sixty-one, The Raven in ’sixty-three, The Masque of the Red Death in ’sixty-four” – Lila shot Dex a beautifully arched brow – “and all the others with Roger Corman, my dear. King of American independent cinema.” After he had composed himself, Pryce winked at Dex. “Master of cheap thrills.”
“You should meet my friend Tuesday,” Dex said. “She lives for creepy stuff. And she’s right—” Dex waved across the ballroom. Tuesday, auction clipboard in hand, might have nodded in response. “She’s right there. If you bid and win, she’ll come over.”
“I intend to,” said Vince. “What’s the point of bidding if you don’t intend to win?” He took a drink. “Dex. Dex Howard. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”
Dex, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, started. “Oh, me? You mean – of course.” He laughed. “Fire at will.”
Vince cleared his throat.
“Do you believe, Dex Howard,” Vince asked, “that you are real?”
A beat of silence fell between them.
Dex looked at Lila. Her expression was flat, with no hint as to how seriously he was supposed to take her husband.
“Uh … yes?” Dex said.
“Your hesitation speaks volumes.” Vince leaned into him. “How do you know you are real?”
Dex cleared his throat. Swallowed. Decided on:
“Because—?”
