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“It’s okay,” Tuesday said. “This is a classic example of money having its own rules.”
Dorry shifted Gunnar’s weight. It was like holding two bags of warm flour wrapped in a sweater.
“Money has its own sense of what is and is not appropriate human behavior,” said Tuesday. “For example, money” – she indicated not-Raj, who gave a stupid little wave – “thinks it’s okay to show up at a stranger’s apartment so long as he’s hand-delivering a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Does that mean I can come in?” he asked.
“No,” said Tuesday.
“I meant to pay. I swear. My secretary gets requests for money all the time, so she turns them down out of hand. I forgot to tell her this one was legitimate.” He shrugged. “It was a crazy night. And I am truly sorry for the trouble I’ve caused.” He looked down at the floor. “Still making fists with your toes, I see.”
“Stop staring at my feet,” said Tuesday.
The stranger flushed. It made Tuesday smile one of her small smiles, the kind that meant she was playing around. That was enough for Dorry to relax a little. She set Gunnar down on the sofa, next to Pryce’s letters about Valentine’s Day.
“To be honest—” said the stranger.
“Please do,” said Tuesday.
“I have a proposal for you. I assume by now you’ve heard about Pryce’s quest.”
Tuesday nodded.
“I know a lot about him. He’s – he was, I guess – a family … acquaintance. I’ve seen his collection. And, assuming some ‘portion of his great fortune’ includes the collection, I can personally vouch that it’s worth whatever we can do to make it ours.”
“Pretty liberal use of the plural possessive there, Arch,” said Tuesday. She crossed her arms and propped herself against the doorframe.
“I know things,” he said. “You know things, and what you don’t know I bet you know how to find. The check I just gave you – I can write another one, just as big, if you agree to help me with Pryce’s game.”
“No,” said Tuesday.
He opened his mouth in a perfect O. Dorry leaned into the silence growing between them. Because she knew Tuesday, she knew it was a deep-thinking silence. But the stranger – Arch or whatever – didn’t know that. He panicked.
“I’ll double it,” he said. “One hundred thousand for your help.”
“I’m charmed that you take my silence for hardball,” said Tuesday. “Trust me, you’ll know when I’m playing hardball, and that wasn’t it.” She stared at him. “Why me?”
“Because you’re smart,” he said.
“Unlike,” said Tuesday, “the horde of lawyers, accountants, private investigators, and public relations handlers your family has on retainer.”
“They’re smart but you’re smarter.”
“I doubt that.” Tuesday narrowed her eyes.
The guy frowned. Then he muttered, “I met you, I liked you, I feel bad that I flaked on the fifty thousand. And, well: nobody in my … complex family knows who you are, which means you can operate with a degree of anonymity.”
“Fine, that’s why me. Why you? What does the collection have that you can’t get somewhere else? You’re almost passing for aspirational middle class in this J. Crew catalog drag right now—”
“Hey,” the guy said, and smoothed his blue sweater over his stomach. “This is not J. Crew.”
“—but I bet you’ve got four figures in loose change in your pockets. From a financial standpoint, to you, Pryce’s ‘great fortune’ has negligible value. Forgive me for questioning your motives, but contracting me for this is like – if I were to contract Dorry here to help me hunt down a pack of gum.”
“I would do that,” said Dorry.
“I know you would, kid,” said Tuesday. “No, not even a pack of gum. It would be like me hiring a PI to find a wad of gum under a desk. So why do you, dirty, filthy, stinking-rich Nathaniel Allan Arches” – with every adjective Tuesday lobbed at him, he nodded – “want a wad of used chewing gum?”
He tugged on his right earlobe, and Dorry blinked. A tell. He had a tell. The next thing out of his mouth would be a lie, or, if not a direct lie, something that wasn’t entirely the truth. Her mother had had a tell: whenever she was about to drop a Wild Draw Four on Dorry in Uno, she tapped her fingers on the cards.
He inhaled. His chest rose. So many tells, thought Dorry, and looked at Tuesday, who had no tells, or at least none that Dorry had ever noticed.
“Why does everything have to be about money?” he said. “Honestly, and I would expect someone who roots around in the digital drawers of rich people for a living to know this already, if you have enough money, it stops meaning anything. You can’t touch it or taste it or feel it. Then the things that matter become what you can touch, or taste, or – feel.”
“Objects, you mean. Something in Pryce’s collection,” Tuesday said.
“Let’s just say” – his already deep voice lowered, which made the bottoms of Dorry’s feet tingle – “that the value is sentimental.”
Tuesday didn’t respond.
“One hundred fifty thousand,” he said. “Final offer.”
“One hundred fifty is my retainer, plus expenses,” said Tuesday. “I want a working partnership. We split the detecting, the legwork, fifty-fifty. If we win, we split the reward fifty-fifty. I’ll take half, you take half. Or you can buy me out, for however much Pryce’s estate is currently valuing whatever the prize turns out to be.” She smiled. “But for no less than five million.”
Dorry’s throat dried up. She made a little coughing sound halfway between a gasp and a laugh.
“Oh, now you’re playing hardball,” said Archie.
“Still not,” said Tuesday, grinning. “But closer.” She stuck out her hand.
Archie paused.
“Why does everything have to be about money?” Tuesday said. “C’mon, I know you’re good for it. I’ve done the research.”
He slid his hand into hers.
“We start tonight,” said Tuesday. “Because you know anyone else who’s serious has already started too.”
So Archie came in. He introduced himself to Dorry with a handshake, and Dorry felt herself start to giggle, because seriously, a handshake? Then her hand went sort of rigid in his warm grip, and after he let go, her first thought was I did that wrong. Or did she? How was she supposed to shake a guy’s hand, a guy who wasn’t her dad’s coworker, wasn’t her mom’s old college friend, wasn’t saying, while they held her cold hand, I’m so sorry for your loss?
They all sat at Tuesday’s rickety Ikea table and ate and strategized.
“Tell me about Pryce,” said Tuesday.
“He was a weirdo. A true-blue, first-class, dyed-in-the-wool weirdo.” Archie dipped a piece of naan into the malai kofta sauce. “New money, vulgar money. Barely tolerated. And I really don’t think he gave a fuck. Oh—” His eyes darted to Dorry.
Dorry snorted. “Dude,” she said, “you kiss your mutha with that fucken thing?”
“This is your influence?” he said to Tuesday. “Look what you’re doing to the youth.”
“I believe the children are our future,” said Tuesday.
Dorry cleared her throat.
“Oh children,” said Tuesday, “do you have something to say?”
Dorry felt herself blush. She did. She had a lot to say. She coughed. “Um, I think I might – know where to start looking.”
Tuesday’s head jerked like a bird’s. “Wha— that’s great. Where?”
Dorry looked at Archie, blushed again, and looked back at Tuesday. “Do you really trust this guy?” she asked. She didn’t, but she trusted Tuesday completely.
“I trust his money,” said Tuesday.
“I want a cut,” Dorry said.
Tuesday cackled. “And that,” she said to Archie, “is hardball. You got it, kid. I can’t spend five million all by myself.”
“Actually, you can,” said Archie.
“Well, I have no plans to go to college again. Dorry needs it more than I do.”
Dorry knew she was still blushing – she could feel her face almost pulsing, and a cool tight spot in the middle of her forehead – and when she stood up, she shook a little. Even if Tuesday only shared one million dollars, it meant Dad could afford the apartment for as long as they wanted. It meant they would never have to move back to the suburbs, or buy a car or have to drive one. And if neither she nor her father ever learned to drive, they could never hit a patch of black ice and smash through the guardrail of a bridge and sail into the river below. They could never be missing for two days in a blizzard, sealed under ice and snow.
They could never drown in freezing water with their seatbelt still on.
She grabbed the letters she’d been reading before Archie knocked on the door. Gunnar was sleeping on them (of course), and was less than pleased to be displaced. “Pryce had a real problem with Valentine’s Day,” she said, handing the printouts to Tuesday. “Every year, he wrote about what a sham it is. He calls candy hearts hideous hearts.”
She heard Tuesday suck in a breath.
“I started circling the first words, then the first letters, of each Valentine’s clipping. In order. So far I have P A R. It could be spelling a word, right? And didn’t the obit say something about hearing the city’s hideous heart?” She was talking too fast. “We’d have to find them all to be sure, but I bet – I bet the first letter of every Valentine’s letter spells Park. As in Park Street.”
“Park Street station. The oldest subway in America. Of course,” said Tuesday. “Where else but under the ground would the old city’s heart be beating?”
“Where else?” said Dorry. Her own heart was leaping like it would never stop.
4 (#ulink_0ac6f318-d9b1-5507-be6f-7d3c6757543a)
THE CITY’S HIDEOUS HEART (#ulink_0ac6f318-d9b1-5507-be6f-7d3c6757543a)
Tuesday, on the sidewalk outside her apartment, snapped her bike helmet’s chin buckle.
She couldn’t believe she was doing this.
But of course she was doing this. It was the most fun she’d had in an age.
“Archie,” she said.
Nathaniel Arches turned around. “What?”
“I never told you my last name,” said Tuesday.
“I never told you mine either.”
Fair point.
“Are you so surprised by my resourcefulness?” he asked.
“Your resourcefulness,” she said, “is borderline creepy.”
“Isn’t your whole job borderline creepy?”
“I don’t cross the border. I have a code of ethics. I don’t, for example, show up at the apartment of someone I have researched.”
“You just write up dossiers about us that we don’t even know exist.”
“Dossiers that help the people I work with strategically persuade you to become just slightly less rich, so the hospital can build a nice new oncology suite. Besides,” she said, “you knew. You know. You gave those interviews.” He pulled his own helmet over his head as she continued. “You tweeted those memes. You put an idea of yourself out there for me, for anyone, to find.”
“Did you ever consider,” he said, “that I was using my resourcefulness to impress you?” His voice was muffled by the helmet, but his eyes were visible, the same eyes she’d recognized in the ballroom of the Four Seasons. “And that with our powers combined—”
He threw his leg over the motorcycle, parked illegally in front of her building’s driveway. Tuesday didn’t know much about bikes, but she knew his was a Ducati, and that it was very cool.
“Your game needs work,” she said.
The first glow of sunset was disappearing over the top of her apartment building when she climbed on the bike and locked her arms around him.
“Seems like it’s working okay,” he muttered, and ripped the bike to life. She was charmed, begrudgingly; it was the cheater’s way of getting the last word.
They rode through the blue night air, up and over the Somerville streets, on the crumbling elevated highway, past the Museum of Science, crossing the Charles River into the white lights of the city. They swung low through the winding snake of Storrow Drive, pulled off at Beacon, looped around the Public Garden, and slalomed down into the parking garage beneath Boston Common. There was so much beneath the ground in Boston: cars and tunnels and tracks and subway trains. Literal garbage, under the Back Bay – an entire neighborhood built on landfill. No wonder Pryce started his hunt here, at the center of the city, on the corner of the Common, in one of the oldest subway stations on earth. Everything began beneath the ground.
Archie cut the engine. “That tickles,” he said, and Tuesday realized her phone, tucked in her inside jacket pocket, was vibrating. Dorry, probably. She’d been pissed to be left behind, but she’d backed off once Tuesday pointed out that (a) her father would have a fit if he found out his daughter’s tutor had taken her on a wild treasure hunt, (b) they needed someone at mission control, someone who could call the police if they stopped making contact, and (c) only two people would fit on the bike. “I’ll give you the first two,” Dorry’d said. “But the third reason is crap. It’s a T station. I don’t need to ride with you guys to get there.”
But it wasn’t Dorry. It was Dex.
Did you solve it yet you’re killing me
She felt a little guilty. For forgetting about him. And for not, with a fleeting adolescent protectiveness, wanting to share.
Yes! Park Street. Heading there rn, stay tuned
It was officially blue-dark in the Common when they came up out of the garage, only a little past seven, though, so the paved paths were still full of people. The closer they got to the station itself, the brighter and noisier it was. Under a streetlamp, two guys in bandanas banged syncopated beats on upturned plastic tubs while a third did the worm on the sidewalk, the last of the day’s buskers, playing, now, for the locals. Drumming in the city made her walk differently. It loosened her hips. Brought her back into her body, ready to bend and to move.
Her phone buzzed again.
WHAT you mental minx
I knew you’d figure it out
She texted back, Next Dorry did, not me, and felt a pop of pride for her neighbor. Dorry was a good kid. The best kid she knew. The kind of kid who made having kids seem particularly great, if you wanted to have kids, which Tuesday didn’t.
