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This could be real. It was bonkers, sure, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t also legally plausible.
She minimized the database window and Pryce reappeared before her on the open web tab, smiling out of the photo that accompanied his Mental Floss profile. He was wearing a bowler and peering through Lizzie Borden’s pince-nez at the photographer with a terrific grin. I would have liked you, she thought. I would have liked you a lot, and I only just missed you.
Pryce had been spooky, too. He had been plumbing the world for madness, perversity, and sensation. But also: possibility, strangeness. In searching the darkness, he was chasing the mysteries of life. Now he was passing the search along, handing it off like a baton.
She envied him a little. She’d chased plenty of things in her life – grades, her own phone line, diplomas, sex, the city, jobs, apartments, new jobs, better jobs, better sex, alcohol, different jobs, different apartments – but somewhere around thirty, she had looked around and realized she’d caught the one thing, all her life, she’d been searching for the hardest: a life on her own terms. For the past three years, she hadn’t moved. She was paying her rent and her bills, chipping away at her student loans. She hung out with Dex sometimes, she tutored her neighbor Dorry, she saw her parents and her brother and sister-in-law and her niece every few weeks for dinner. It wasn’t a bad life, not in the least. Tuesday was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising – though maybe it shouldn’t have been – that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable.
Tuesday was bored.
And now she—
She wanted to raise her hand.
She wanted that baton.
3 (#ulink_49d942f2-a614-5d0f-9d72-7b1869ee7fd4)
THE WOMAN IN BLACK (#ulink_49d942f2-a614-5d0f-9d72-7b1869ee7fd4)
For Dorry Bones, Thursday nights were Tuesday nights.
Tuesday was her neighbor. Tuesday was the coolest f—ing person Dorry had ever met.
Two years ago, after Dorry’s mother died and her father had to sell the house and they moved into the apartment, Dorry had started seeing a tall, pale woman who wore only black. Black T-shirts. Black sweaters. Black pants and sneakers and jeans that were technically blue but so dark they looked black. Her hair was the color of black coffee. She appeared and disappeared and reappeared again: Turning her key in a mailbox. Holding the front door. Leaving the laundry room. Once, in her pajamas – also black, dotted with tiny skulls – on the front lawn after the building’s smoke alarm went off at two in the morning. The woman in black came and went and smiled a small smile at Dorry but never spoke.
Their apartment building was the kind of place that would be incomplete without a ghost or two. It was old and brick, four floors high, and wrapped like a horseshoe around a small green courtyard with pink and purple impatiens and a black lamppost in the center like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some nights Dorry would lie awake thinking about all the other people eating and talking and having sex right next to her, right below her, right beside her and above her, right now, and all the other people who had eaten and talked and had sex in this one giant building for decades. It gave her the same fluttery feeling she got when she stood on the edge of the ocean, like that time (the last time) Mom took her to the wharf in Salem: like she was the tiniest part of something vast and old, something that had been around a long time before her and would keep rolling in and out long after she was gone. It made Dorry feel, for a second, like she was okay, and that the things in her life she couldn’t control – which was basically all of it – weren’t her fault. Because no one ever could control the sea.
They were supposed to have a city apartment for only a little while, to have what Dad called “options” and “flexibility.” That’s why he rented in Somerville instead of someplace out on the commuter rail; he could justify the expense if it was only temporary. Her dad worked in a lab at MIT, and it was super-easy for him to take the bus to work, which Dorry suspected was the real reason they rented in the city – he had never learned to drive, and never would, now, because of the accident. But she’d heard him say on the phone to Gram that it wasn’t any cheaper than the house, thanks to the Gentrifying Hipsters. Her dad had a problem with the Gentrifying Hipsters. They brought a “plague of cocktail and artisanal-olive bars,” restaurants with mac and cheese made from cheeses that sounded like characters from The Hunger Games, stores that sold actual records, and lots of friendly people with small dogs and fun hair. Dorry could see her dad’s point – artisanal donuts were kind of pushing it – but she still liked it. And she especially liked the city’s buses and trains and the subway, because she didn’t want to learn to drive either, or move again, ever.
She wanted to stick around and haunt this place like the woman in black.
She knew the woman wasn’t really a ghost. Ghosts, real ghosts, were a different thing. Dorry was old enough to know she wasn’t supposed to believe in ghosts – and she didn’t believe in them that way, in white sheets and clanking chains, like a kid. Dorry wasn’t a kid. She was in ninth grade. She’d turned fourteen in August. She’d gotten her period a year and a half ago, she’d kissed someone (Wade Spiegel, who maybe would be her boyfriend if he hadn’t moved to Ohio), she’d been wearing a bra since she was eleven, and for God’s sake, the quickest route out of childhood was a dead parent, and she had that locked down. Now she believed in ghosts like a grown-up. Like a scientist. She believed in cold spots and strange lights and electromagnetic anomalies that defied explanation. She couldn’t help it. Ever since the accident, it was the only way to believe she might see her mom again. Without, like, dying herself.
She officially met Tuesday on a lame gray Thursday during her first Somerville March. School had been whatever. She didn’t hate it, but she didn’t love it either. Leaving her old school felt like escaping. Ever since it had happened, they’d all been watching her, like she was a pathetic puppy, maybe with one eye and a limp. It was a relief to be the new kid, the half-Asian girl (her mom was Chinese; her dad was Jewish) who kept to herself and wasn’t even on Facebook. By spring, her new-kid cool had faded to general disinterest. And the disinterest was totally mutual. She’d rather hunt around for every last bite of information she could find about ghosts. Sightings. Famous hauntings. Modern methods of detection. Contact.
But that Thursday she’d been looking forward to delivery from Café Kiraz (they actually delivered frozen yogurt; reason number eight thousand why living in the city was better than stupid old Haverhill) with Dad, and watching his Seinfeld DVDs. If they were watching something, then they didn’t have to talk. About anything, but especially the accident and Mom and the fact that her dad was spending more and more time not at home. At least watching Seinfeld was a way for them to still be together, in the same room, without her father constantly clearing his throat like he was about to announce something. Sometimes Dorry worried that she was the reason her father was staying long hours at work, not that he’d lost track of time or whatever he was working on was so important, his usual excuses. Dorry was always in the apartment when she wasn’t at school; his office at work was the only place her father could be alone. And he wanted to be alone. And the fact that Dorry didn’t want to be alone apparently wasn’t that important to him.
That Thursday, he called from the lab and said he’d be late. Really late.
“There’s a pot pie and some Amy’s enchiladas in the freezer. And maybe a pizza?” He sounded exhausted. She wondered if he’d eaten lunch. He was probably going to drink a lot of coffee and call it dinner. “Does that sound okay, Dor?”
Not really. But all she could say was, “Yeah, no problem. Go make science. And don’t stay out too late.” As soon as they ended the call, she pulled up the number for Kiraz. She’d had her dad’s credit card memorized for months.
As she waited for her sandwich (turkey with green apples), her cup of minestrone, and her vanilla frozen yogurt with double Heath bar mix-ins, she began to sink. Sinking had become something of a problem lately. That was the only way to describe the feeling: one minute she’d be sitting on the couch or her bed, rereading her mother’s old Sandman comics or highlighting entire paragraphs in her American history textbook because it all seemed important, and the next she would feel heavy, like she was made of stone. Solid and cold and dense, so dense she couldn’t move her legs or lift her arms or even look up.
She started sinking after Mom died, a few days after the funeral. Everyone had gone home. Life was supposed to be normal, or whatever kind of normal was possible now. Dad was at the grocery store, and Dorry, alone, sat on the couch and felt herself pressing into the cushions. It was like gravity had tripled. She sat there sinking until her dad came home and asked for help unloading the groceries. And the weight lifted. Just like that. She thought she’d dreamed it at first.
But it came back. It usually happened when she was alone, but not always. Even if she was surrounded by people, the weight made her too flat, too slow, to tell anyone about it. So she didn’t. The weight made her too heavy to care. It happened in fifth-period English. It happened while she was waiting to cross the street, at the dinner table, and that day, that Thursday when she met Tuesday, it happened while she was sitting in the recliner, waiting for the delivery guy. She felt cold and hard and heavy, and she sank without a sound.
Sound. She heard a sound. Someone was thumping down the hallway toward the apartment. Food, she thought, and the sink let go a little, enough for her to get out of the recliner and walk across the living room, enough for her to open the door.
It was the woman in black.
“Oh hi!” said Dorry. She was a little too excited, but it was hard not to be whenever the sink let you go. And it had; it was gone. The woman had vanquished it.
“Hi there,” the woman said, and if Dorry had freaked her out, she was totally cool about it. She pushed her sunglasses up in her hair. She was holding keys, and Dorry realized – right then, for the first time – that the woman in black didn’t just live in her building. The woman in black was her next-door neighbor. There were two apartments at the end of Dorry’s hallway, their front doors adjacent to each other. She had heard muffled music through the wall they shared, had heard the door open and close, but had never met her neighbor until now.
“Are you okay?” asked the woman. “Do you want a tissue?”
Dorry’s hand jumped to her cheek. Her fingers came back smudgy, damp with mascara. She’d waited until she was thirteen to start wearing makeup (Mom’s rule, even if she hadn’t been around to enforce it), and she still forgot when it was on her face. She’d been crying. Sometimes that happened when she was sinking.
“Oh—” she said. “Um. Yes. Thank you.”
The woman dug into her bag for a plastic packet of tissues. “I’m Tuesday,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Dorry,” said Dorry, and wiped at her eyes. Her cheeks felt very hot. She didn’t know why she was mortified, but she was. “I’m waiting for delivery. I thought that’s who you were.”
“Ah, I see,” said Tuesday. “I get pretty sad waiting for delivery too.”
What Dorry did next happened because she’d been sinking, and because she wasn’t sinking anymore. And because this whole time the ghost had been living right next door.
She threw herself at the woman in black. She wrapped her skinny arms all the way around her and hugged like she hadn’t hugged anyone in months, which she hadn’t.
And the woman in black – Tuesday – hugged her back.
That was the beginning. By now, Tuesday Thursdays had settled into a simple pattern: They ordered Indian. They talked about Dorry’s classes and homework, per her dad’s wishes. She wasn’t flunking or anything, but Dorry knew she could be doing better. She’d always been a straight-A to A-plus kind of kid until the accident, which had sort of redefined what did and did not feel important. Homework was definitely the latter. And she had been doing better in school since Tuesday Thursdays started.
But it wasn’t because Tuesday was knowledgeable about the War of 1812 or vectors or Animal Farm or quadratic equations (though she was); it was because Tuesday was her friend. And a grown-up, but the sort of grown-up who made growing up look pretty great. Tuesday came and went when she pleased. Tuesday bought her own groceries and washed her own dishes. She took care of herself. She had a job in the city at the big hospital, and from what Dorry understood, she was great at it – and she cared about Dorry. Having someone care about you makes you want to give a shit, especially if you’re having trouble caring about yourself.
And she had great taste in music and movies and TV. That was the real tutoring Tuesday did: every Thursday, Dorry got a new lesson in the culture she’d missed out on because she hadn’t been born yet. Tuesday had introduced her to every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even the bad ones. To Twin Peaks, which Dorry didn’t really understand, though that seemed like the point. They started The X-Files over the summer. Dorry loved it so much she dreamed about it. It made Dorry want to grow up, because the world was big and strange and exciting, and as long as you had your true partner – and you loved each other so much you couldn’t even, like, discuss it – you would live to fight another monster. You might meet a miracle.
But tonight the pattern was off.
Dorry pressed her hand to Tuesday’s door. It vibrated. Usually when her neighbor was playing music this loud, Dorry knew better than to knock. It meant Tuesday was working. It meant Tuesday was working so hard she wouldn’t notice if a bomb went off.
But it was Thursday.
She knocked three times. Nothing. She held her ear to the door and heard half a lyric – luctantly crouched at the starting line – that sounded like … Cake? Was that the name of the band? Dorry was a little obsessed with the nineties. Tuesday had been treating her to what she called the BMG Music Service experience, which, so far, included a lot of Cranberries, Tori Amos, and Cake. Dorry knew that Tuesday played Cake when she really wanted to concentrate, when she needed the rest of the world to fade away.
She felt a little hurt. But then curiosity swallowed her hurt and she balled up her fist and pounded on the door until it rattled, until the Cake – HE’s going the dist – cut out. She heard foot thumps and then the three friendly clacks of Tuesday throwing her door’s bolts and chains back.
“Hey,” Tuesday said. “Sorry, I got distracted with this crazy – did you see this thing?” She stepped aside for Dorry to enter. “This obituary treasure hunt thing?”
Dorry dropped her purple bag on the floor next to Tuesday’s pile of shoes. The buttons on the straps clattered and clinked. “Nope,” she said. “You forget I don’t have any friends. Or any Facebook friends.” She could make a joke about it because she did have a friend – Tuesday – even if she didn’t have any friends at school. But she really didn’t have Facebook, or Twitter, or anything. Dorry had a phone “for emergencies,” from her grandmother. But she’d never signed up for Facebook because her mother was still out there, smiling like nothing ever happened. Once she’d asked her friend Mish from her old school, who did have an account, to show her her mother’s page. It was still up months after the funeral, and full of comments like RIP, thinking of you all, what a beautiful person, gone too soon, from people Dorry had never heard of. It was weird. She didn’t know how to feel about it. And she didn’t know what was worse: that pictures of her mom, pictures of her and her mom, were haunting the internet forever for anyone to click and comment on, or that one day her father could check a box and make it all go away.
“I forget,” said Tuesday, “you’re the last Luddite teen in America.”
“It does not make me a Luddite,” Dorry said, “to not want to give it up to Mark Zuckerberg.”
“Dear Dorothea.” Tuesday put a warm hand on her shoulder. “The first time you share your private information with an internet monolith is a very special, magical—”
“I’m saving myself for Tumblr,” Dorry said.
Tuesday closed her door and pulled her phone out of her back pocket. “Usual?” she asked, and Dorry nodded, though nothing about this Tuesday Thursday felt usual. There were short stacks of paper all over the living room floor, lined up across the coffee table and the couch cushions.
“What’s the big deal?” Dorry asked.
“A very rich man died,” Tuesday said. She put her hands on her hips and faced the neat piles she’d made. “In his obituary – he wrote it himself – he promised to leave part of his estate to whoever follows his clues. It’s like a treasure hunt.”
“Can he do that?”
“He did it,” said Tuesday. She squatted down and narrowed her eyes. “His obit says to ‘listen for the beating of the city’s hideous heart,’ which is a reference to Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart.’ You know that story?”
Dorry nodded. She’d just read it in English. It was basically a New England English class requirement, to read Poe in October. “Guy goes crazy because the old man he’s taking care of has a big creepy eye,” she said. “So crazy guy kills the old man and hides the body under the floorboards. But then he confesses like as soon as the police even breathe on him, because he thinks he can hear the old man’s dead heart still beating under the floor.”
“Poe’s narrators are always drama queens. ‘I admit the deed!’” Tuesday muttered. “‘Tear up the planks! here, here! – It is the beating of his hideous heart.’”
A black and white blur galloped out of the bedroom and straight through the papers.
Tuesday gently smacked her own forehead. “I am a terrible cat mom. I haven’t fed him yet.”
“On it,” said Dorry. The tuxedo blur – Gunnar – was sprawled on his back on the kitchen linoleum, looking very weak and hungry, or as weak and hungry as a slightly overweight cat can look. “Talk about drama queens,” Dorry said, and rubbed the thick white fur of his belly. His eyes slid closed.
“So anyway,” said Tuesday, her voice echoing toward the kitchen, “I thought ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ might be the decoder ring, the key to deciphering – whatever the clue is. If it were a straightforward substitution cipher, you know, a jumble of seemingly meaningless letters that he gave us and said here, crack the code, someone would have cracked it in five minutes. But the clue itself is hidden. Under the floor. Like the old man. All we can hear is the beating of its hideous heart.”
“Which is only in our minds,” called Dorry over the plinking of cat kibble into Gunnar’s dish.
“He said he already told us where to begin, so I printed off every letter to the editor he ever wrote, of which there are many. I’ve spread them out by month and year.” She looked up. “How do you feel about reading a bajillion letters tonight?”
Dorry walked back to the living room. “What am I looking for?” she asked.
Anything. Anything that didn’t seem quite right, that called attention to itself. Or, as Tuesday said with a shrug, any jumble of seemingly meaningless letters. Dorry threw her legs over the arm of the couch and Tuesday took her cat-scratched leather chair, and for the next thirty minutes, they read.
Dorry was surprised that it sort of bummed her out. This guy – Vincent Pryce – seemed pretty cool. He made a lot of dumb jokes, but he also really, really cared about things. He cared about teaching theater and music in elementary schools. He cared about scholarships for kids to attend summer programs and prep schools and colleges. When a handful of parents tried to get The Diary of Anne Frank taken off their kids’ summer reading lists, he went ballistic.
Pryce also had strong opinions about, of all things, Valentine’s Day. On February 13, 2006, he wrote, “Please – this holiday makes a mockery of one of our greatest capacities as humans, perhaps THE greatest function of the heart: to love and to be loved.” On February 10, 2007: “Ask yourself: why do many of us feel compelled to spend this day proving we love each other, something we could be doing any other day of the year without the absurd theater of chocolate roses or edible underwear?” February 14, 2008: “Roman godlings, bare-bottomed. Flowers that smell of sugar and rot. Hearts. Candy hearts. Chocolate hearts. Stuffed hearts with cheap lace edging. Hideous hearts, all.”
Hideous hearts.
Dorry grabbed a pen and began to circle.
Tuesday’s buzzer rang.
“Thank the Maker,” Tuesday said, and pressed the button under her intercom to let the delivery guy up. She was in the kitchen, clanking silverware against plates, when Raj – their normal Palace of India Thursday-night delivery guy – knocked on the door. Dorry, distracted, opened it.
It was not Raj.
It was a white guy. Tall. Lanky. Dark hair that was somehow annoying – kind of fake-looking and wrong, like a wavy helmet of snapped-on Lego hair. His whole face was long, prickly with five-o’clock shadow, except for his smile, which was soft and wide. He was wearing jeans and sneakers that looked like the kind the rich kids at her old school collected – because that was a Thing, collecting sneakers – and a bright white T-shirt, bright blue V-neck beneath a beat black motorcycle jacket with a rip in the sleeve. He smiled at her, then thought better of it.
“You’re not Raj,” she said.
“No, but he said to say hi. And to give you this.” He had a rumbly voice. He handed her the usual brown paper bag of food, order slip and receipt stapled to the folded flap.
“Tuesday,” Dorry called. “Could you—”
She could feel Tuesday standing behind her.
“You’re not Raj,” said Tuesday, and then, sharp, “Did you pay for our food?”
The man nodded.
“So you could pay for our food but you couldn’t pay your auction bid?” She paused. “Actually, that isn’t much of an argument.”
“No, it isn’t,” said the stranger. “It is far, far easier for me to pay thirty bucks plus tip for Indian than fifty thou for New Kids tickets.”
“Do you know this guy?” asked Dorry. “Or should I call nine-one-one?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” said Tuesday.
“Well. You should decide,” said Dorry. “Because the food is getting cold and I’m hungry.”
“This will only be a second,” Tuesday said. “Take the food.” She looked at the stranger. “You,” she said, “aren’t coming in. But I want to talk to you.”
Dorry cradled the food bag and walked in her sock feet to the kitchen, listening the whole way.
“How did you find out where I live?” Tuesday’s voice was quiet but firm.
“You of all people should know how easy it is to find someone’s address,” he answered.
“Okay, let me rephrase: where the hell do you get off coming to my apartment?”
Dorry set the bag on the counter. Gunnar, having followed her into the kitchen, gazed up at her expectantly. Dorry lifted him into her arms, which wasn’t at all what he’d been hoping for.
“—apologize.”
“Bullshit.”
“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “Which is why I brought this—”
Dorry didn’t need to hear more.
She bolted into the living room, Gunnar bouncing in her arms. “Don’t you TOUCH her,” she shouted, “or I will throw this cat at you.”
The stranger was holding a piece of paper between his first two fingers. Tuesday was reaching for it.
Gunnar sort of sighed.
“He has claws,” Dorry said. “And he knows how to use them.”
