Читать книгу Tuesday Mooney Wore Black - Kate Racculia - Страница 10

The woman in black was alone.

It was five thirty-five on a warm Tuesday evening in October. She shuffled through the revolving door of the Four Seasons Hotel, her eyes sliding around the room, unable to stick to anything but cool marble, everything tasteful and gleaming under the recessed lighting. She caught the rich murmur of voices from mouths in other rooms. The hotel staff didn’t make eye contact. They knew she wasn’t checking in.

The event registration table was set up, as usual, on the far left of the lobby facing the elevator bank. It was already drawing men in suits like ants to a ham sandwich. WELCOME, proclaimed a foamcore poster on a small easel, TO THE 2012 BOSTON GENERAL HOSPITAL AUCTION FOR HOPE.

“Welcome to the Auction for Hope!” echoed a tiny blonde girl, wearing more makeup than the woman in black wore in a year, gesturing her closer. Her name was Britney. She was an administrative assistant in Boston General’s fundraising office and never remembered that the woman in black was her coworker. “You can check in here, and head up the stairs to your right for the hors d’oeuvres!” she chirped. “The program starts at seven in the ballroom.”

“Britney, hi,” said the woman, tapping her fingers against her chest. “Tuesday Mooney,” she said. “I work at BGH too. I’m volunteering tonight. I’m late.”

“Oh! Of course, I’m so sorry.” She waved Tuesday on, flapping her hands as though trying to clear the air of smoke. “The other volunteers got here a while ago. I didn’t realize anyone was – missing.” Britney’s teeth were very white. She still didn’t recognize Tuesday, and was, Tuesday could sense, vaguely concerned she was a random crazy off the street. Tuesday was five to ten years older than most of the other volunteers, who were generally single, young girls at their first or second jobs out of college, with energy and free time to burn. Tuesday was single but not as young. She was tall and broad, pale and dark-haired, and, yes, dressed all in black. Britney looked at her, not unkindly, as though she were something of a curiosity.

Tuesday couldn’t blame her. She was, to the office, an oddity. She didn’t leave her cube often, communicated almost entirely through email, didn’t socialize or mix with her coworkers. Or with anyone, really. Being alone made her better at her job. It’s easier to notice what’s important when you’re outside looking in.

She wasn’t upset that the other volunteers left without her either. She’d been distracted when they’d gone, talking with Mo – Maureen Coke, her boss, the only colleague with whom she nominally socialized. Mo was also a loner, bespectacled and quiet, unassuming in the deadliest of ways. People often forgot that Mo was in the room when they opened their mouths, which is how she came to know absolutely everything about everyone.

It was a silent skill Tuesday respected.

“Starting today, your mission as a prospect researcher,” Mo told Tuesday on her first day in the development office, three years ago, “is to pay attention to the details. To notice and gather facts. To interpret those facts so that you can make logical leaps. A prospect researcher is one part private detective, one part property assessor, one part gossip columnist, and one part witch.” Tuesday lifted her brows and Mo continued, “To the casual observer, what we do looks like magic.”

What Tuesday did was find things. Information. Connections. She researched and profiled people. Specifically rich people, grateful rich people, people whose lives had been saved or extended or peacefully concluded at the hospital (in that case, she researched their surviving relatives). The information she collected and analyzed helped the fundraisers in the office ask those rich, grateful people to donate tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars; she told them which buttons to push to make that ask compelling.

Whenever the events team threw charity galas or auctions, they asked for volunteers to help with registration, crowd control, VIP escorts, and the myriad other moving bits and pieces that went into making an event run smoothly. Tuesday always raised her hand. She spent forty hours a week digging through donors’ lives, trying to understand why and where and how they might be persuaded to give away their money. Thanks to the hospital’s databases and subscriptions, and all that gorgeous public information lying around on the internet, she knew where they lived, the addresses of their summer houses on the Cape, the theoretical value of their stocks, the other organizations their foundations supported, the names of their children, pets, yachts, doctors, and whether or not their doctor liked their jokes. But she had never met them. She knew them as well as anyone can be known from their digital fingerprints, but volunteering at events was her only opportunity to interact with them in person. To weigh her quantitative assessment of their facts and figures against a first impression in the flesh. Without that, she knew, it was too easy to jump to conclusions.

Plus, the food was usually pretty good.

Her stomach grumbled. Tuesday’s lateness meant she’d missed her comped volunteer meal, and the Four Seasons always had great volunteer meals. She’d worked at events where dinner was a handful of gummy bears and a snack-size pack of Goldfish crackers, but at the Seasons she’d missed gourmet cheesy pasta and bread and salad and tiny ice cream sandwiches, the kids’ table version of the spread hotel catering would put out later for the real guests.

“I guess you know the drill?” Britney gestured down the length of the registration table, at their mutual coworkers, who probably didn’t recognize her either. It was a good feeling, anonymity. “Just ask for their names and check them in on an iPad – there’s an extra one on the end, I think. Guests can write their own nametags.”

Tuesday took a seat behind registration at the farthest end, in front of the last abandoned iPad, and set her bag on the floor. Her feet pulsed with relief. She’d left her commuter shoes under her desk, and even walking the short distance from the cab to the hotel in heels – over Boston’s brick sidewalks – was a rookie mistake. She wasn’t even close to being a rookie, though. She was thirty-three, and she’d never been able to walk well in heels.

Her phone buzzed twice, then twice again. Then again. She felt a small bump of anxiety.

It would be Dex. Dex Howard, her coworker from another life – who could, incidentally, run in heels – and the only person who texted her.

Hey am I on the guest list?

I mean I should be on the list

Constantly.

I really really hope I’m on the list

Because I’m about to get dumped

Across town, at a dark, stupid bar he hated, Dex Howard waited to be proposed to.

Or dumped.

Dumped, definitely.

He sucked a huge gulp of whiskey and propped both elbows on the bar. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking like that: all or nothing, proposed to or dumped. He knew it was ridiculous and self-defeating. He wasn’t about to be anything, other than be met by his kind and affectionate boyfriend of four months – the longest he’d dated anyone consecutively, ever – who’d asked to meet him here right after work. Dex had no delusions. He only had coping mechanisms, and right now his coping mechanism wanted him to believe Patrick could potentially be proposing to him, when in his heart and his guts Dex knew – knew – he was getting dumped.

He checked his phone. No response from Tuesday (big surprise). No other texts. No emails. No calls (who called anyone anymore, but still). The bar was called The Bank, and it was in the heart of the financial district, which meant it was full of douchebags and assholes. Dex could, when the mood struck, be either or both. It was a land of finance bros: white guys with MBAs and short hair and, now that they were in their thirties, wedding rings and bellies that pulled their button-downs tight with a little pooch of fat over their waistbands. In the corner by the window there was a cluster of young ones, fresh out of school, still studying for their CPA exams, still able to drink like this every night and come in to work the next day, half alive. The boys were prettier than the girls. They were downing pints of something golden, maybe the first keg of Octoberfest.

His phone chimed. Tuesday.

I don’t see you on the list

He texted back, WHAT

Also you didn’t deny my previous text

which means on some level you must ALSO believe I am about to get dumped

She didn’t respond.

He’d known Tuesday for years. They’d met at work. She might be a do-gooder nonprofit stalker now, but Tuesday Mooney had started out, like him, as a temp in the marketing department at Cabot Assets, the oldest, most robust asset manager in Boston. At least that’s how it was described in the marketing materials, which Dex, like the innocent twentysomething he’d once been, took on faith for the first year of his employment. After one year – during which he became a full-time employee, with benefits, praise Jesus – he would have described it as the sloppiest, most disturbingly slapdash and hungover asset manager in Boston, though he had zero basis for comparison. He only knew that every Thursday night his coworkers went out to bars, and every Friday morning most of them came in late, looking like they wanted to die and occasionally wearing each other’s clothing.

But never Tuesday. She was the same on Friday morning as she was every other morning: acerbic and goth, never wearing anyone’s clothing but her own.

Like the last Cheerios in a bowl of milk, he would have naturally gravitated toward her, but the universe shoved them together. In an endless sea of tall cubes they were seated across from one another, at a dead end.

“Morning, Tuesday,” Dex would say, slinging his elbows over their partition. “Are we feeling robust today?”

“I’m really feeling the depth and breadth of this portfolio management team,” she’d deadpan, gesturing toward her computer monitor with her palms up. “The robustness is reflected in the ROI.”

“Oh, the ROI? I thought that was the EBITDA. Or was it the PYT?”

“Perhaps the PYT.” She’d squint. “Or the IOU, the NYC, the ABC BBD” – which Dex took as a cue to break into “Motownphilly.”

They’d both taken the job because they needed one, desperately, through a temp agency. Tuesday had something like a history BA, maybe an English minor. Dex had a degree in musical theater. He’d openly defied his parents to acquire it. In hindsight, it might have been his subconscious means of coming out to them without actually having to come out to them. His father flat-out laughed when Dex told him he’d be pursuing a theater degree. He’d thought it was a joke. His father was incapable of imagining any extension of his self – as a son surely was – spending time and money to be taught how to pretend, as though that would lead to any kind of career, which was surely the whole point of going to college. Dex, flush with his own inability to imagine a future for himself that didn’t include a literal spotlight, told him it was his life, his dream, his decision to make – not his father’s. To which his father said, “Fine. Go ahead and waste your own money,” and spat accusingly at Dex’s mother, I told you not to encourage him.

So Dex took himself to school, and took out his own loans, and studied and partied and graduated and promptly freaked the fuck out. He did not comprehend the weight of debt until it was pressing down on him. His theater school friends were either getting support from their parents or working weird jobs at all hours. Dex tried for a year to believe all you needed to be successful was fanatical self-belief, and failed. So he retreated to the safety of his minor in accounting. He had always liked numbers; music, after all, was math.

The job at Cabot was entry level and he figured it out; he was smart and worked hard and it was pretty shocking, to Dex, that that wasn’t the case for quite a few of the people he worked with. The whole place felt like high school all over again, and he was still the odd arty kid no one knew what to do with, only this time he was getting paid, which helped for a while.

And he had Tuesday. Who was just as out of place as he was.

So when Tuesday couldn’t stand it anymore, and jumped ship for a nonprofit, Dex jumped too. To Richmont, a smaller firm, a hedge fund with more assets under management than God, more go-getters, and better alcohol at parties. Dex hated his job at Cabot, sure, hated how buttoned down and conservative it was, how it smushed him into a cube with a computer and a tape dispenser he never used, how it had absolutely nothing to do with anything that he had once imagined for his future, or valued about himself. In finance, there was no professional advantage, for instance, to being an expressive belter. There were no head-pats for one’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular song lyrics, no kudos for one’s flawless application of stage makeup.

And Richmont likely wouldn’t be that different. But he was terrified of giving up the safety of his salary, which was now, he suspected, easily more than twice Tuesday’s. Because he had known her for so long, and in such a limited capacity – they were Drinks Friends, Karaoke Friends, Trivia Friends; he had never even seen the inside of her apartment – it wasn’t weird. But it could have been. Dex didn’t forget that.

He texted, see you can’t say it

you can’t even say ‘you won’t get dumped’ bc you know I’m going to get dumped and it will just be this horrible vortex of pain

Dex calm down, Tuesday replied.

Your level of concern is insufficient, he texted.

“Hello hello hello!” And Patrick was there, swinging the strap of his satchel over his head and taking his jacket off in the same fluid movement. Patrick did everything fluidly, gracefully, as though he never had to think about where and when and how to move his body; his feet were so firmly on the floor they may as well have been glued. He’d been trained as a dancer. Now he was a manager at a Starbucks. That was how they met, at the Starbucks in the lobby of the office building Dex sometimes cut through on his walk to work.

Patrick moved to peck him on the ridge of his cheekbone. “Wait, I forget,” he said. “Can we do this here? Oh fuck it,” and kissed him, because of course he was always going to. Patrick was younger than Dex, less fearful and careful of himself in the open. Dex was only slightly older, but they had grown up in different worlds.

“Hey you,” said Dex, pulling the chair beside him out from under the bar. “Welcome. Have a seat. How was work?”

Patrick rolled his neck on his shoulders. Dex watched. He had never seen such perfectly circular neck rolls. “Fine. You know, same old same old. Ground some beans, pulled some espresso, steamed some milk, almost fired Gary.”

“No.” Dex twisted in his seat, pushed his elbow on the bar, and propped his head on his hand. “Spill.”

Patrick ordered a whiskey and tonic from the bartender. He sat and shook out his shoulders like he was trying to rid himself of something unclean. Patrick had told Dex about Gary. Gary was older, in his mid-forties. Gary had lost his job a few years ago, not long after the crash – he’d done something in finance, which made the decision to work at a financial district Starbucks particularly masochistic – and was taking classes, trying to switch careers (thank God his wife still had her job, thank God the kids were years from college). Patrick liked Gary. He showed up on time and worked steadily and well, even if he wasn’t quite as fast as the twenty-year-olds who could squat sixteen times an hour to grab a gallon of milk from the low fridge.

“He stole,” said Patrick. His drink arrived and he downed it in a single gulp. “I caught him pocketing twenty dollars from the till today. I saw him. He looked around first, to make sure no one was watching, and he just didn’t see me. He popped open the till and took out a twenty, looked around again, slipped it into the front of his apron, and closed the register. I could not believe it. You know, when you see something happening in real life that you’ve only seen in movies? You think, for one second: Where am I? Is this real? Is this my real life?”

He motioned to the bartender for another drink.

“You didn’t fire him?” asked Dex.

“How could I?” said Patrick. “He’s stealing because he needs money. I confronted him, told him I saw what he did. He got all flushed and couldn’t look me in the eye and I honestly thought he was going to throw up all over the register, me, everything. I told him if he ever stole again, I would fire him. Today, this, was a mistake.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Mistakes have consequences, but they don’t have to break us. The next time it happens, I told him, I wouldn’t consider it a mistake.”

Dex thought, I would have fired that guy on the spot.

And then, I do not deserve the love of this entirely decent, generous grown-up.

Patrick slipped his glasses back on and leaned to the side, his arm over the back of the chair.

“You would’ve fired him on the spot,” he said, and grinned.

“What can I say,” said Dex. “I’m a mercenary.”

“You’re not a mercenary. I’m too soft.” Patrick tugged his ear. “I’m a sweet fluffy bunny in a land of wolves. I need to get meaner if I want to get anywhere.”

“Don’t ever,” Dex said. “It would break my heart if you got meaner.”

“Isn’t that what growing up is? Shedding the fat and the fluff until you’re this sleek, perfect beast, entirely the you you were meant to be?” Patrick was gesturing up and down in the space between them, and Dex realized, with a little jolt, that his boyfriend meant him. Patrick thought he, Poindexter Howard – who had dreamed, once, of painting his face, wearing someone else’s clothes, and belting show tunes on Broadway but instead became something called an Investment Marketing Manager, impeccably groomed in cool Gatsby shirts and Rolexes and shiny Gucci shoes, who belted nothing but his pants – was a sleek, perfect beast, entirely the him he was meant to be. Patrick actually thought Dex was himself. He was so young and so charming and so very wrong that Dex finally realized why he’d been so nervous when he first sat down.

“Patrick,” he said, “this isn’t working.”

Tuesday flicked her fingertip up and down, up and down, over the iPad, scrolling through the guest list. Which didn’t include Dex. Richmont, his firm, had bought six tickets for their employees, but he wasn’t one of them. Her stomach rumbled again. She was starving. They were allowed to grab hors d’oeuvres and drinks after the program ended, but that wouldn’t be for hours. At least she was sitting. At least she didn’t have to staff the cocktail party upstairs, wandering among the guests, answering questions, directing them to the VIP rooms or the bathrooms. All she had to do at registration was be pleasant to white guys in suits. It was a talent she’d honed daily all the years she worked in finance.

Dex once asked if her general standoffishness, her “aversion to team sports,” as he called it, came from having grown up in Salem, stewing in the cultural detritus of mass hysteria and (literal) witch-hunting. Salem’s natural vibe was part of it. What happened with Abby Hobbes was part of it too, though Dex didn’t know Abby Hobbes existed. Technically it was possible Dex knew the name Abigail Hobbes. He would have been a teenager in western Massachusetts when the coverage of Abby’s disappearance was at its height, bleeding beyond Salem, though her story never spread as far as it might have – if they’d found her body, if the missing girl had been upgraded to a dead girl. But Dex wouldn’t have had any reason to connect Abigail Hobbes directly to Tuesday. For Dex to know, at the time of her disappearance, that Abby had been her best friend, Tuesday would have had to tell him herself.

“You don’t trust people in groups,” Dex had said to her once, while they were out at McFly’s, one of his regular haunts for karaoke. Well, Dex was there for karaoke. Tuesday was there to drink, and pointedly not to participate. “Or people, really,” he continued. “But especially in groups.”

Tuesday had never thought of it in those terms, but yes, she didn’t trust people. People, in groups, alone – people disappointed you. That was what they did. They abandoned you. They didn’t believe you. They looked through you like you were made of smoke. You had your family, your work colleagues; you needed other humans around so you didn’t go completely feral, but the only person you could trust completely with yourself was yourself. That was, like … Basic Humanity 101.

“I mean … do you?” she said. “Does anyone? I thought that was the first rule: trust no one.”

“Should you be taking life advice from a poster in the basement of the FBI? On a television show?” Dex asked.

“That poster said I want to believe.”

Dex rolled his eyes. “I trust people more than you. But only a little.”

Tuesday hadn’t expected to stay in touch with Dex once they both quit Cabot. But Dex wouldn’t go away. He invited her to lunch. He invited her to the movies. They went to karaoke, even though Tuesday had a strict no-singing policy. They wiped the floor at pub trivia, the only two-person team that regularly took first place. She liked him; she had always appreciated his sense of humor and his intelligence. But he was needy. God, he could be outrageously needy. He texted. He chatted to her at work. In person, he required her approval of mundane choices he might have to make, her assurance that she had heard and understood him. Even the constant invitations, she suspected, had less to do with him wanting her company than not wanting to go into the world alone. Sometimes it felt like it didn’t matter who she was, so long as she was, an audience – any audience – granting him her attention.

She felt her phone buzzing in her bag, vibrating against her leg. Again. And again.

I did it, he texted.

IT’S DONE

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME he was so nice and sweet and young and flexible

She paused, her thumb over the screen. She’d liked Patrick. But this had been coming for a while. Tuesday could tell, from stories Dex told her, from watching the two of them together, that they had fundamentally different versions of reality, and fundamentally different ideas of each other. They were both playing parts.

He was too young, she texted back.

Pls don’t remind me, Dex texted, that I’m a decaying hag

You’re not a decaying hag, she replied.

Tuesday hated texting. Hated it, for its lack of nuance and tone. She always felt she was saying the wrong thing, or saying it the wrong way. But Dex was a natural, loquacious texter, and even by his standards, he’d been texting like mad lately. It meant he was anxious. And lonely. And now that he and Patrick were no longer together …

She felt a cold little stab, the looming threat of being needed.

Hey, he texted. Has anyone from Richmont not showed

She dutifully examined the list. Three of Richmont’s six tickets hadn’t been checked in.

Anders, Grouse, and Bannerman aren’t here yet, she texted.

UGH Grouse, said Dex.

I hate that guy

Why did GROUSE get an invite

He’s never going to show

I’m taking his place

Won’t your coworkers know you’re not him? said Tuesday.

He texted back, I’ll wear a clever disguise

Then: wait my whole life is a clever disguise

A flock of new suits appeared, swerved, headed toward the table. She tossed her phone back into her bag for good.

She’d worked event registrations often enough to intuit the kind of interaction she would have with an attendee the moment she made eye contact. Most people were nice. They smiled when you smiled, offered their names when asked. They were polite and looking forward to free Chardonnay and shrimp cocktail, comfortable with the implicit agreement one makes by RSVPing to a fundraiser: that at some point during the evening, you will be asked for money, and you will say yes.

Then there were people like this one. He came alone. He waited calmly, patiently, at the end of the line forming in front of the girl next to Tuesday, adjusting the cuffs on his suit, smoothing a dark tie between two fingers. The girl next to her was a Kelly – Kelly W.; there were at least three Kellys in the office. She was shy and not, like the other Kellys, blonde; her hair was dull brown, her nose small, her eyes large. Tuesday liked her. When she spoke, it was usually to make a joke so dry it made you cough. But she looked like a mouse, and Tuesday suspected that was why this particular guest was waiting in her line.

Tuesday had spotted him as soon as he crossed the lobby, moving with the confidence of someone who owns every cell of his body, every atom of the air around it, and every right in the world to be exactly who and where he is.

He was the kind of person who expects to be recognized, and likes to make a big deal when he isn’t.

Tuesday was in the middle of checking in a gaggle of attorneys when he reached the table in front of Kelly W.

“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—?”

He didn’t get a chance to say more before Vince charged ahead.

“Precisely. Because. Simply because,” Vince said. “Because you have accepted the central, implicit thesis of existence – you exist as real because you know, as of yet, no other way of being. But that’s the rub, aye. There are so many ways of being, of being real, of living, right now. And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self. The selves, whether they be wrought or revealed, recognized at long last.” Vince’s voice quieted. “Tell me, Dex Howard. Who are you? How were you made, and how much of your making was by your own hand?”

Dex grinned at him. He could not help it. “I am a human,” Dex said. “I was made by Harry and Phyllis Howard in western Mass. in 1978, probably during a snowstorm. I made myself—” Dex swallowed. “Do you want a real answer?”

Vince and Lila both nodded.

Dex considered. There were many answers. All of them were more or less real. Had his making and unmaking taken place on his high school’s stage, when he was in the habit, yearly, of becoming fictional people? Or had his making been one great decisive action, when his father told him he could waste his own money on school and he agreed? Or—

He remembered his armor.

“On the day I went for an interview at a temp agency, I wore a suit, because a suit fit the part I was auditioning for,” he said. “And they looked at me like I had three well-groomed heads and immediately sent me to temp in finance. So I guess that’s when I made me, when I made this me that you see here before you.”

“A fine distinction, this you.” Vince nodded gravely. “We are many. All of us.”

“Yes,” said Lila under her breath. “I am aware I married a fortune cookie.”

“In a cape,” said Dex. “Well done.”

No one in Tuesday’s section of the ballroom was bidding. She’d expected as much – she was staked out way in the back, surrounded by corporate-sponsored tables filled with midlevel executives who had already made their own, more modest contributions to the night’s total. She pressed her clipboard to her stomach. She was still hungry. The illicit satay she’d snuck from Dex had only made her hungrier. She wasn’t allowed to hit the buffet until after the auction, technically, but if she didn’t get more to eat soon, she was at risk of passing out. Tuesday was a fainter. “Your blood has a long way to go,” her doctor had said after Tuesday passed out in tenth-grade band and hit her head on the xylophone, “to get from your heart all the way down to your feet and back up to that big brain of yours. Your blood cells have to be marathoners. Marathoners have to take care of themselves.”

“So you’re saying I’m a giant with a big head.”

“You know you’re a giant with a big head,” said her doctor. “Eat more salt.”

The cream and gilt walls of the ballroom were broken up by enormous gold-draped windows. Tuesday nestled herself against one of the drapes, slipped out of her shoes, and closed her eyes. She always saw more with her eyes closed. Like the suit sitting at the table four feet to her right; he was angry about something. She could hear the fabric of his suit jacket sliding, pulling as he hunched his arms. He set his glass down hard. His voice – he was talking about nothing, really; work stuff – Dopplered in and out, which meant he was moving his head as he spoke, side to side, trying to catch an ear. He couldn’t sit still. The other people at the table weren’t listening to him. He was angry because to them, he was invisible. I see you, thought Tuesday, and opened her eyes.

Nathaniel Arches was standing in front of her.

He looked down at her bare feet, gripping the crimson carpet.

“That the secret to surviving this thing?” he asked. “Making fists with your toes?”

“Better than a shower and a hot cup of coffee,” she replied, and balled up her feet.

A wave of noise crashed from the other side of the ballroom. Two bidders were going head-to-head for the New Kids tickets. The auctioneer pattered, Do I hear seventy-five hundred, seventy-five hundred – do I hear EIGHT, eight thousand, eight thousand for the meet-and-greet of a lifetime, the New Kids in their home city, in the great city of Boston – do I hear – I hear EIGHT—

“You should try it,” she said.

“Take off my shoes? But then I won’t be able to make a quick getaway.”

“You’re telling me the Batmobile doesn’t have an extra pair of shoes in the trunk?”

“It doesn’t have a trunk,” he said. “Or cup holders.” He looked down at the tumbler in his hand, half full, brown and neat. “I’ve been meaning to do something about the cup holder situation.”

“But not the trunk.”

“It’s not like I take it to Costco.”

Tuesday laughed. She’d been trying not to, and it came out like a snort.

—do I hear eighty-five – EIGHTY-FIVE, do I hear nine? Nine thousand? To hang tough with the Kids?—

“You’re fun,” he said.

“And you’re very pretty,” she said back, and that made him laugh.

“Fun and a fundraiser.” He leaned against the wall beside her. “How’s that working out for you?”

“I’m not a fundraiser,” she said. “I’m a researcher.”

“What do you research?”

“Prospects. I’m a prospect researcher.”

“Ah, so you research people like me.” He tapped his HELLO MY NAME IS sticker.

“I’ve researched you,” she said. “Actually, you.”

He brightened. “And what can you tell me?” he said. “About myself, I mean.”

—TEN! I have ten from this gentleman here in the red tie. Yes – oh I can tell, I can tell you’re a fan! But I have to ask, it’s my job: do I hear ten thousand five hundred?—

“That you don’t already know?” Tuesday said.

“Impress me.”

She opened her mental file on Nathaniel Arches. Looked over his tweets. His investments. His vague pronouncements. The rumors. This was her favorite part of the job, a holdover from being the kid whose hand always shot up first with the answer. She loved to prove how much she knew.

She was about to say You don’t know you’re rich – because he clearly didn’t; if her research had a common theme, it was incurious hunger, a dumb desire for more, as though he had no idea he’d already been born with more than most humans will see in six lifetimes—

But Nathaniel Arches turned and opened his eyes at her, wide. She had never seen his eyes before. In all those press photos, his eyes were slitted, protected, too cool. Now they were open, dark, steady. He was looking at her like he was capable of curiosity. Like he was searching for something.

Or someone.

She slid this information, full value yet to be determined, up her sleeve like an ace.

“You don’t know you’re rich,” she said.

“You think I’m rich?”

“You’re a few notches above rich,” she said, turning to stare straight ahead.

“What’s a higher notch than rich?”

“Stupid rich,” she said. “Then filthy rich. It gets fuzzy once you’re over a billion.”

—do I hear eleven! ELEVEN! – Hey – hey, man, you’ve got some competition for biggest New Kid fan over here. You’ve got some competition!—

“What does a billion even mean?” Nathaniel said.

He grinned at her with all his teeth and raised his hand high.

“Fifty thousand!” he shouted.

Every face swung around and pushed them against the wall.

The auctioneer was a cheerfully sweaty guy named Tim. He had gray hair and a red nose and Tuesday had seen him call auctions before, but she had never seen him look like he did now: surprised.

The room held its breath.

“Well!” Tim shouted into his microphone, and the room let go – it exhaled, it hooted, it whistled and shouted. “Sir! Sir! Out of the back corner and into our hearts! You don’t mess around! Do I hear fifty thousand five hundred?” Tim laughed. He turned back to the first competing bidders. “Guys? What do you think?”

Tuesday smiled – cheerfully, professionally – at the room. She saw Dex up front, kneeling on his chair and cackling, open-mouthed.

“You’re nuts,” she said to Nathaniel around her teeth.

“Takes one to know.” Nathaniel smiled back.

“Fifty thousand going once!” said Tim.

“Do you even like the New Kids?” she asked.

“Not really. Do you?”

“Fifty thousand going twice!”

“Not – particularly—”

It happened then: the beginning of everything that would come after.

A dark figure on the edge of Tuesday’s vision stood up at the front of the room not far from where Dex was sitting – in fact, exactly where Dex was sitting, at Dex’s table.

“Sir!” Tim the auctioneer cried. He turned away from Archie and flung his arm toward the figure like he was hurling a Frisbee. The room roared. “I hear fifty thousand five hundred!”

The figure was a tall man with silver hair, wearing a cape – a cape? – a cape! Tuesday peered across the ballroom. The man turned.

“Do I hear fifty-one thousand?”

The man wobbled.

Crowds feel things before they know things. This crowd of investors and developers and venture capitalists, of vice presidents and senior vice presidents, of fundraisers and gift processors and admins and researchers, mostly white, mostly men, mostly straight, rich and not rich and not much in between, but humans, all of them humans, felt it. Felt something. It stilled on nothing more than premonition. It waited for the man in the cape to turn around and face it. It held its tongue.

The man in the cape wobbled again. He blinked. He didn’t act as though he knew where he was. His arms were raised, tense and defensive. A woman in a striking teal gown began to rise beside him, to pull him back to her, to help him. But it was too late.

He screamed. He threw his head back like hell was raining down from the ceiling and covered his head with his arms and screamed and screamed in the otherwise silent ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel.

His final scream died in an echo. The old man in the cape straightened. He held his hands out, fingers splayed like a magician.

“Gotcha,” he said.

Still nobody moved. Nobody knew what was happening.

The old man’s eyes opened as large as his lids would allow and glittered in shock, as if he’d recognized a friend long lost across the chasm of time.

Then he took two steps and fell down dead.