Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ it was Thursday.

      She knocked three times. Nothing. She held her ear to the door and heard half a lyric – luctantly crouched at the starting line – that sounded like … Cake? Was that the name of the band? Dorry was a little obsessed with the nineties. Tuesday had been treating her to what she called the BMG Music Service experience, which, so far, included a lot of Cranberries, Tori Amos, and Cake. Dorry knew that Tuesday played Cake when she really wanted to concentrate, when she needed the rest of the world to fade away.

      She felt a little hurt. But then curiosity swallowed her hurt and she balled up her fist and pounded on the door until it rattled, until the Cake – HE’s going the dist – cut out. She heard foot thumps and then the three friendly clacks of Tuesday throwing her door’s bolts and chains back.

      “Hey,” Tuesday said. “Sorry, I got distracted with this crazy – did you see this thing?” She stepped aside for Dorry to enter. “This obituary treasure hunt thing?”

      Dorry dropped her purple bag on the floor next to Tuesday’s pile of shoes. The buttons on the straps clattered and clinked. “Nope,” she said. “You forget I don’t have any friends. Or any Facebook friends.” She could make a joke about it because she did have a friend – Tuesday – even if she didn’t have any friends at school. But she really didn’t have Facebook, or Twitter, or anything. Dorry had a phone “for emergencies,” from her grandmother. But she’d never signed up for Facebook because her mother was still out there, smiling like nothing ever happened. Once she’d asked her friend Mish from her old school, who did have an account, to show her her mother’s page. It was still up months after the funeral, and full of comments like RIP, thinking of you all, what a beautiful person, gone too soon, from people Dorry had never heard of. It was weird. She didn’t know how to feel about it. And she didn’t know what was worse: that pictures of her mom, pictures of her and her mom, were haunting the internet forever for anyone to click and comment on, or that one day her father could check a box and make it all go away.

      “I forget,” said Tuesday, “you’re the last Luddite teen in America.”

      “It does not make me a Luddite,” Dorry said, “to not want to give it up to Mark Zuckerberg.”

      “Dear Dorothea.” Tuesday put a warm hand on her shoulder. “The first time you share your private information with an internet monolith is a very special, magical—”

      “I’m saving myself for Tumblr,” Dorry said.

      Tuesday closed her door and pulled her phone out of her back pocket. “Usual?” she asked, and Dorry nodded, though nothing about this Tuesday Thursday felt usual. There were short stacks of paper all over the living room floor, lined up across the coffee table and the couch cushions.

      “What’s the big deal?” Dorry asked.

      “A very rich man died,” Tuesday said. She put her hands on her hips and faced the neat piles she’d made. “In his obituary – he wrote it himself – he promised to leave part of his estate to whoever follows his clues. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

      “Can he do that?”

      “He did it,” said Tuesday. She squatted down and narrowed her eyes. “His obit says to ‘listen for the beating of the city’s hideous heart,’ which is a reference to Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart.’ You know that story?”

      Dorry nodded. She’d just read it in English. It was basically a New England English class requirement, to read Poe in October. “Guy goes crazy because the old man he’s taking care of has a big creepy eye,” she said. “So crazy guy kills the old man and hides the body under the floorboards. But then he confesses like as soon as the police even breathe on him, because he thinks he can hear the old man’s dead heart still beating under the floor.”

      “Poe’s narrators are always drama queens. ‘I admit the deed!’” Tuesday muttered. “‘Tear up the planks! here, here! – It is the beating of his hideous heart.’”

      A black and white blur galloped out of the bedroom and straight through the papers.

      Tuesday gently smacked her own forehead. “I am a terrible cat mom. I haven’t fed him yet.”

      “On it,” said Dorry. The tuxedo blur – Gunnar – was sprawled on his back on the kitchen linoleum, looking very weak and hungry, or as weak and hungry as a slightly overweight cat can look. “Talk about drama queens,” Dorry said, and rubbed the thick white fur of his belly. His eyes slid closed.

      “So anyway,” said Tuesday, her voice echoing toward the kitchen, “I thought ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ might be the decoder ring, the key to deciphering – whatever the clue is. If it were a straightforward substitution cipher, you know, a jumble of seemingly meaningless letters that he gave us and said here, crack the code, someone would have cracked it in five minutes. But the clue itself is hidden. Under the floor. Like the old man. All we can hear is the beating of its hideous heart.”

      “Which is only in our minds,” called Dorry over the plinking of cat kibble into Gunnar’s dish.

      “He said he already told us where to begin, so I printed off every letter to the editor he ever wrote, of which there are many. I’ve spread them out by month and year.” She looked up. “How do you feel about reading a bajillion letters tonight?”

      Dorry walked back to the living room. “What am I looking for?” she asked.

      Anything. Anything that didn’t seem quite right, that called attention to itself. Or, as Tuesday said with a shrug, any jumble of seemingly meaningless letters. Dorry threw her legs over the arm of the couch and Tuesday took her cat-scratched leather chair, and for the next thirty minutes, they read.

      Dorry was surprised that it sort of bummed her out. This guy – Vincent Pryce – seemed pretty cool. He made a lot of dumb jokes, but he also really, really cared about things. He cared about teaching theater and music in elementary schools. He cared about scholarships for kids to attend summer programs and prep schools and colleges. When a handful of parents tried to get The Diary of Anne Frank taken off their kids’ summer reading lists, he went ballistic.

      Pryce also had strong opinions about, of all things, Valentine’s Day. On February 13, 2006, he wrote, “Please – this holiday makes a mockery of one of our greatest capacities as humans, perhaps THE greatest function of the heart: to love and to be loved.” On February 10, 2007: “Ask yourself: why do many of us feel compelled to spend this day proving we love each other, something we could be doing any other day of the year without the absurd theater of chocolate roses or edible underwear?” February 14, 2008: “Roman godlings, bare-bottomed. Flowers that smell of sugar and rot. Hearts. Candy hearts. Chocolate hearts. Stuffed hearts with cheap lace edging. Hideous hearts, all.”

      Hideous hearts.

      Dorry grabbed a pen and began to circle.

      Tuesday’s buzzer rang.

      “Thank the Maker,” Tuesday said, and pressed the button under her intercom to let the delivery guy up. She was in the kitchen, clanking silverware against plates, when Raj – their normal Palace of India Thursday-night delivery guy – knocked on the door. Dorry, distracted, opened it.

      It was not Raj.

      It was a white guy. Tall. Lanky. Dark hair that was somehow annoying – kind of fake-looking and wrong, like a wavy helmet СКАЧАТЬ