Buch lesen: «Tuesday Mooney Wore Black»

THE OPENED TOMB

The Tillerman house was dead. Over a century old, massive and stone, it lay slumped on its corner lot, exposed by the naked December trees and shrubs growing wildly over its corpse. It was ugly, neglected, and, despite its size, withered; a black hole of a house. If the real estate agent were the kind of person who ascribed personalities to properties – he was not – he would have said it was the loneliest house he had ever sold.

His instincts told him this would be a strange, quick sale, with a giant commission. When he’d told the owner that, out of the blue, they had a buyer for the Tillerman house, some guy named “R. Usher,” the owner said, after a long pause, “Don’t sell it for a penny less than listed.” But the agent was anxious to get this over with. He had been inside the Tillerman house once before, and he hadn’t forgotten how it felt.

A figure appeared on the sidewalk, rounding the corner up the street. The agent shielded his eyes against the white winter sun to get a better look. A man. Wearing a long black coat and a giant black hat, broad and furry, something a Cossack might wear against the Siberian winter. The real estate agent smiled to himself. Yes. This was exactly the buyer you wanted when you were trying to sell a haunted house.

“Hello, young man!” said the figure, waving, ten feet away now. “I assume you’re the young man I’m supposed to meet. You are standing, after all, in front of the house I’d like to purchase.” A bright red-and-purple-plaid scarf was looped around his neck, covering the lower half of his face. He pulled the scarf down with a red mitten to reveal a ridiculous curling white mustache. “Young man,” said the buyer, “allow me to introduce myself. Roderick Usher.” And he held out his hand.

The agent, while technically younger than the buyer, resented its being pointed out to him. He was years out of school, up and coming in Boston real estate, and, yes, selling this property for the listed price of $4.3 million would be a coup, but he wasn’t a young man. He was a man. He shook Mr. Usher’s hand and gestured to the property. “Shall we go inside?” he said, and pressed the quaver out of his voice.

Dead leaves crackled beneath their shoes as they walked under the portico and up the front steps. The lock to the Tillerman house was newly installed, but the key never wanted to work. The agent turned it to the left gently, then the right, then the left again. “What a beauty she is,” said Mr. Usher, his hands clasped behind his back, head tipped up to take in the carvings around the door, flowers reduced to geometric lines and patterns, a strange mishmash of Arts and Crafts, Nouveau and Deco, that didn’t jibe with what the agent knew about when it was built. It was almost as if the house had continued to build itself long after it was abandoned. “If she’s this lovely on the outside,” said Mr. Usher, “I can’t imagine what—”

The lock turned at last, and the agent pushed the door open.

The first thing that struck him was the smell. Of rot and garbage, of meat gone rancid, of animals that had been dying in the walls for decades. He pressed the back of his suit sleeve to his nose without thinking, then lowered it, eyes watering. The house had no electricity – when it was first built it did, but the wiring hadn’t been up to code since Woodrow Wilson was president – but it did have enormous ground-floor windows on one side of the great hall, which cast light throughout the first floor and down into the vestibule. It was enough to see by. It had been enough, on the agent’s previous showing with a buyer, for the buyer to take one look around and say, “Let’s get out of here now.”

Let’s get out of here now, said the agent’s brain.

“What a glorious – oh – oh my!” said Mr. Usher, and swept past him into the house. He took off his giant furry hat, clutched it in both hands at his chest, and spun back to the agent. Grinning. His front teeth were large and crooked. “My goodness, do you know what you have here? Can you feel it?”

He didn’t wait for the agent to answer, and charged up the steps, through the archway, and into the great hall.

The agent followed, slowly. His feet did not want to move. It was exactly what had happened to him the last time he entered the Tillerman house: his body did not want to be here. An uncontrollable part of his brain – his otherwise rational, adult brain – reacted to this place as though he were six years old. Six years old, and pissing himself on Halloween because his big brother, in a scuffed and stage-blood-spattered hockey mask, leapt out at him from the dark.

He cleared his throat. Took the steps one at a time. Until he was standing in the half-dusk of the great hall. Mr. Usher, who’d been dashing around the room, turned back to him.

“She died here,” he said. “Can you feel her?”

The agent managed something like a smile.

“Long, long ago, you came to Matilda Tillerman’s,” Mr. Usher continued, “she, the last surviving heir of all that Tillerman wealth – you came to her house to drink and to dance, to laugh and to talk, to be alive, together, in this glorious house. They all came here, were well met here, from every corner of this city, every nook and cranny. But something happened, nobody can say for sure what, and Matilda shut her doors. Shut out the entire world and made of her house a tomb.” He sighed and laid a hand gently on one of the columns supporting the upper gallery. “And a beautiful tomb it is.” Plaster flaked beneath his fingertips.

He tipped his head to the side. “Young man,” he said, “I’m going to buy this house. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, so you can stop looking so frightened. But I would ask a favor. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”

The agent, relieved to the point of tears that this showing was nearly over, would have permitted the buyer anything. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Marvelous.” Mr. Usher dropped his furry hat to the floor. It sent up a puff of ancient dust. “I have lived for a good long while. Enough to have borne the world,” he said. “And sometimes, the world is far too much for me. Too great. Too painful. Too lonely. I expect, if Ms. Tillerman will allow me to interpret her past actions, she may have felt the same. Is it selfish then, or self-preserving, to shut oneself away? At what point does one give up, so to speak, the ghost?”

The agent swallowed. He didn’t know what to say. No one had ever asked him a question like that before. It made him almost as uncomfortable as the house. It was too personal. It was too—

He had, once or twice, imagined it. How it would feel to say, to his bank account and his car and his condo and his girlfriend and his job, Go away. Leave me alone. So he could rest, and listen, and think, and maybe have a chance, one last chance, to remember what he’d been meaning to do before all this life he was living got started.

“I’m not sure,” he told Mr. Usher, “what to say.”

“An honest response,” Mr. Usher replied. “I appreciate that. I—”

A gust of frigid wind howled through the still-open door and lifted clouds of dust and spider webs from the walls and the floor. Delicate debris filled the air. The buyer coughed. Then the breeze caught the door and slammed it home with a crash.

The agent felt his entire body electrify. Mr. Usher jumped, and laughed.

Then: a second crash.

Smaller, closer, nearby in the house, off to the right. The agent’s body twitched violently and he doubled over, hands on kneecaps. He couldn’t stay here. This house was too much for him. He heard Mr. Usher walk across the great hall and pick something up off the floor and mutter to himself. Oh, you clever house, the agent thought he heard. What else are you hiding?

“Come on, dear boy,” said Mr. Usher, suddenly at his side, helping him upright and clapping him gently on the back. “It’s enough to frighten anyone, opening a tomb.” He smiled, the curls of his mustache lifting almost to his eyes. “Makes one feel a bit like Lord Carnarvon.”

The agent didn’t know who that was.

“Best hope there’s not a curse,” said Mr. Usher, walking back down the steps toward the door and the light, “for disturbing her.”

Boston

1
THE DEAD MAN’S SCREAM

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.