Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia
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head jerked like a bird’s. “Wha— that’s great. Where?”
Dorry looked at Archie, blushed again, and looked back at Tuesday. “Do you really trust this guy?” she asked. She didn’t, but she trusted Tuesday completely.
“I trust his money,” said Tuesday.
“I want a cut,” Dorry said.
Tuesday cackled. “And that,” she said to Archie, “is hardball. You got it, kid. I can’t spend five million all by myself.”
“Actually, you can,” said Archie.
“Well, I have no plans to go to college again. Dorry needs it more than I do.”
Dorry knew she was still blushing – she could feel her face almost pulsing, and a cool tight spot in the middle of her forehead – and when she stood up, she shook a little. Even if Tuesday only shared one million dollars, it meant Dad could afford the apartment for as long as they wanted. It meant they would never have to move back to the suburbs, or buy a car or have to drive one. And if neither she nor her father ever learned to drive, they could never hit a patch of black ice and smash through the guardrail of a bridge and sail into the river below. They could never be missing for two days in a blizzard, sealed under ice and snow.
They could never drown in freezing water with their seatbelt still on.
She grabbed the letters she’d been reading before Archie knocked on the door. Gunnar was sleeping on them (of course), and was less than pleased to be displaced. “Pryce had a real problem with Valentine’s Day,” she said, handing the printouts to Tuesday. “Every year, he wrote about what a sham it is. He calls candy hearts hideous hearts.”
She heard Tuesday suck in a breath.
“I started circling the first words, then the first letters, of each Valentine’s clipping. In order. So far I have P A R. It could be spelling a word, right? And didn’t the obit say something about hearing the city’s hideous heart?” She was talking too fast. “We’d have to find them all to be sure, but I bet – I bet the first letter of every Valentine’s letter spells Park. As in Park Street.”
“Park Street station. The oldest subway in America. Of course,” said Tuesday. “Where else but under the ground would the old city’s heart be beating?”
“Where else?” said Dorry. Her own heart was leaping like it would never stop.
Tuesday, on the sidewalk outside her apartment, snapped her bike helmet’s chin buckle.
She couldn’t believe she was doing this.
But of course she was doing this. It was the most fun she’d had in an age.
“Archie,” she said.
Nathaniel Arches turned around. “What?”
“I never told you my last name,” said Tuesday.
“I never told you mine either.”
Fair point.
“Are you so surprised by my resourcefulness?” he asked.
“Your resourcefulness,” she said, “is borderline creepy.”
“Isn’t your whole job borderline creepy?”
“I don’t cross the border. I have a code of ethics. I don’t, for example, show up at the apartment of someone I have researched.”
“You just write up dossiers about us that we don’t even know exist.”
“Dossiers that help the people I work with strategically persuade you to become just slightly less rich, so the hospital can build a nice new oncology suite. Besides,” she said, “you knew. You know. You gave those interviews.” He pulled his own helmet over his head as she continued. “You tweeted those memes. You put an idea of yourself out there for me, for anyone, to find.”
“Did you ever consider,” he said, “that I was using my resourcefulness to impress you?” His voice was muffled by the helmet, but his eyes were visible, the same eyes she’d recognized in the ballroom of the Four Seasons. “And that with our powers combined—”
He threw his leg over the motorcycle, parked illegally in front of her building’s driveway. Tuesday didn’t know much about bikes, but she knew his was a Ducati, and that it was very cool.
“Your game needs work,” she said.
The first glow of sunset was disappearing over the top of her apartment building when she climbed on the bike and locked her arms around him.
“Seems like it’s working okay,” he muttered, and ripped the bike to life. She was charmed, begrudgingly; it was the cheater’s way of getting the last word.
They rode through the blue night air, up and over the Somerville streets, on the crumbling elevated highway, past the Museum of Science, crossing the Charles River into the white lights of the city. They swung low through the winding snake of Storrow Drive, pulled off at Beacon, looped around the Public Garden, and slalomed down into the parking garage beneath Boston Common. There was so much beneath the ground in Boston: cars and tunnels and tracks and subway trains. Literal garbage, under the Back Bay – an entire neighborhood built on landfill. No wonder Pryce started his hunt here, at the center of the city, on the corner of the Common, in one of the oldest subway stations on earth. Everything began beneath the ground.
Archie cut the engine. “That tickles,” he said, and Tuesday realized her phone, tucked in her inside jacket pocket, was vibrating. Dorry, probably. She’d been pissed to be left behind, but she’d backed off once Tuesday pointed out that (a) her father would have a fit if he found out his daughter’s tutor had taken her on a wild treasure hunt, (b) they needed someone at mission control, someone who could call the police if they stopped making contact, and (c) only two people would fit on the bike. “I’ll give you the first two,” Dorry’d said. “But the third reason is crap. It’s a T station. I don’t need to ride with you guys to get there.”
But it wasn’t Dorry. It was Dex.
Did you solve it yet you’re killing me
She felt a little guilty. For forgetting about him. And for not, with a fleeting adolescent protectiveness, wanting to share.
Yes! Park Street. Heading there rn, stay tuned
It was officially blue-dark in the Common when they came up out of the garage, only a little past seven, though, so the paved paths were still full of people. The closer they got to the station itself, the brighter and noisier it was. Under a streetlamp, two guys in bandanas banged syncopated beats on upturned plastic tubs while a third did the worm on the sidewalk, the last of the day’s buskers, playing, now, for the locals. Drumming in the city made her walk differently. It loosened her hips. Brought her back into her body, ready to bend and to move.
Her phone buzzed again.
WHAT you mental minx
I knew you’d figure it out
She texted back, Next Dorry did, not me, and felt a pop of pride for her neighbor. Dorry was a good kid. The best kid she knew. The kind of kid who made having kids seem particularly great, if you wanted to have kids, which Tuesday didn’t.
“So what are we looking for?” asked Archie.
“I have no idea.”
“Then let’s go see what we can find,” he said. “Maybe it’ll scream at us.”
Park Street had two entrances, gray iron-and-stone structures like twin mausoleums dropped at the edge of the Common, heralded by the symbol of the