Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia

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СКАЧАТЬ pieces. If she’d been researching him for the hospital, she would have based her assessment of his net worth on real estate (the Castellated Abbey on Nantucket was worth thirty million alone) and his history of philanthropy; he had a personal foundation that distributed millions annually to performing and visual art and literature programs at public schools across the country.

      But since she was researching him for herself, she focused on the haunted collection. That was what made him tick, and she was sure that’s what would be at the heart of this quest, and its prize. He certainly had the wealth and the inclination to give away a monetary prize, which could be even greater than his known assets would suggest – he vocally and vociferously distrusted banks and the stock market (“thieves and swindlers, all!”), so his cash was probably all in gold. Probably bricked up in a basement vault next to the amontillado. But still, that wasn’t what he valued.

      Money alone – that wouldn’t be the prize. That wasn’t what his legacy would be.

      “This isn’t that crazy,” she murmured to her computer. A lawyer could probably treat this – scavenger hunt? game? – as a contingent bequest of a portion of the larger estate. Pryce was leaving assets, defined however loosely, to someone, but specifying that someone by conditional deed and not by name. A lawyer could help him set everything up legally, and practically, too; if there were physical clues hidden around the city, she doubted Pryce had planted them all. She checked the open record they had for him in the development database, made by another researcher long before her time. No lawyer was listed under his contacts, just his wife.

      Tuesday tapped the end of her pen against her teeth.

      This could be real. It was bonkers, sure, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t also legally plausible.

      She minimized the database window and Pryce reappeared before her on the open web tab, smiling out of the photo that accompanied his Mental Floss profile. He was wearing a bowler and peering through Lizzie Borden’s pince-nez at the photographer with a terrific grin. I would have liked you, she thought. I would have liked you a lot, and I only just missed you.

      Pryce had been spooky, too. He had been plumbing the world for madness, perversity, and sensation. But also: possibility, strangeness. In searching the darkness, he was chasing the mysteries of life. Now he was passing the search along, handing it off like a baton.

      She envied him a little. She’d chased plenty of things in her life – grades, her own phone line, diplomas, sex, the city, jobs, apartments, new jobs, better jobs, better sex, alcohol, different jobs, different apartments – but somewhere around thirty, she had looked around and realized she’d caught the one thing, all her life, she’d been searching for the hardest: a life on her own terms. For the past three years, she hadn’t moved. She was paying her rent and her bills, chipping away at her student loans. She hung out with Dex sometimes, she tutored her neighbor Dorry, she saw her parents and her brother and sister-in-law and her niece every few weeks for dinner. It wasn’t a bad life, not in the least. Tuesday was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising – though maybe it shouldn’t have been – that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable.

      Tuesday was bored.

      And now she—

      She wanted to raise her hand.

      She wanted that baton.

       3

       THE WOMAN IN BLACK

      For Dorry Bones, Thursday nights were Tuesday nights.

      Tuesday was her neighbor. Tuesday was the coolest f—ing person Dorry had ever met.

      Two years ago, after Dorry’s mother died and her father had to sell the house and they moved into the apartment, Dorry had started seeing a tall, pale woman who wore only black. Black T-shirts. Black sweaters. Black pants and sneakers and jeans that were technically blue but so dark they looked black. Her hair was the color of black coffee. She appeared and disappeared and reappeared again: Turning her key in a mailbox. Holding the front door. Leaving the laundry room. Once, in her pajamas – also black, dotted with tiny skulls – on the front lawn after the building’s smoke alarm went off at two in the morning. The woman in black came and went and smiled a small smile at Dorry but never spoke.

      Their apartment building was the kind of place that would be incomplete without a ghost or two. It was old and brick, four floors high, and wrapped like a horseshoe around a small green courtyard with pink and purple impatiens and a black lamppost in the center like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some nights Dorry would lie awake thinking about all the other people eating and talking and having sex right next to her, right below her, right beside her and above her, right now, and all the other people who had eaten and talked and had sex in this one giant building for decades. It gave her the same fluttery feeling she got when she stood on the edge of the ocean, like that time (the last time) Mom took her to the wharf in Salem: like she was the tiniest part of something vast and old, something that had been around a long time before her and would keep rolling in and out long after she was gone. It made Dorry feel, for a second, like she was okay, and that the things in her life she couldn’t control – which was basically all of it – weren’t her fault. Because no one ever could control the sea.

      They were supposed to have a city apartment for only a little while, to have what Dad called “options” and “flexibility.” That’s why he rented in Somerville instead of someplace out on the commuter rail; he could justify the expense if it was only temporary. Her dad worked in a lab at MIT, and it was super-easy for him to take the bus to work, which Dorry suspected was the real reason they rented in the city – he had never learned to drive, and never would, now, because of the accident. But she’d heard him say on the phone to Gram that it wasn’t any cheaper than the house, thanks to the Gentrifying Hipsters. Her dad had a problem with the Gentrifying Hipsters. They brought a “plague of cocktail and artisanal-olive bars,” restaurants with mac and cheese made from cheeses that sounded like characters from The Hunger Games, stores that sold actual records, and lots of friendly people with small dogs and fun hair. Dorry could see her dad’s point – artisanal donuts were kind of pushing it – but she still liked it. And she especially liked the city’s buses and trains and the subway, because she didn’t want to learn to drive either, or move again, ever.

      She wanted to stick around and haunt this place like the woman in black.

      She knew the woman wasn’t really a ghost. Ghosts, real ghosts, were a different thing. Dorry was old enough to know she wasn’t supposed to believe in ghosts – and she didn’t believe in them that way, in white sheets and clanking chains, like a kid. Dorry wasn’t a kid. She was in ninth grade. She’d turned fourteen in August. She’d gotten her period a year and a half ago, she’d kissed someone (Wade Spiegel, who maybe would be her boyfriend if he hadn’t moved to Ohio), she’d been wearing a bra since she was eleven, and for God’s sake, the quickest route out of childhood was a dead parent, and she had that locked down. Now she believed in ghosts like a grown-up. Like a scientist. She believed in cold spots and strange lights and electromagnetic anomalies that defied explanation. She couldn’t help it. Ever since the accident, it was the only way to believe she might see her mom again. Without, like, dying herself.

      She officially met Tuesday on a lame gray Thursday during her СКАЧАТЬ