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 of snapped-on Lego hair. His whole face was long, prickly with five-o’clock shadow, except for his smile, which was soft and wide. He was wearing jeans and sneakers that looked like the kind the rich kids at her old school collected – because that was a Thing, collecting sneakers – and a bright white T-shirt, bright blue V-neck beneath a beat black motorcycle jacket with a rip in the sleeve. He smiled at her, then thought better of it.
“You’re not Raj,” she said.
“No, but he said to say hi. And to give you this.” He had a rumbly voice. He handed her the usual brown paper bag of food, order slip and receipt stapled to the folded flap.
“Tuesday,” Dorry called. “Could you—”
She could feel Tuesday standing behind her.
“You’re not Raj,” said Tuesday, and then, sharp, “Did you pay for our food?”
The man nodded.
“So you could pay for our food but you couldn’t pay your auction bid?” She paused. “Actually, that isn’t much of an argument.”
“No, it isn’t,” said the stranger. “It is far, far easier for me to pay thirty bucks plus tip for Indian than fifty thou for New Kids tickets.”
“Do you know this guy?” asked Dorry. “Or should I call nine-one-one?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” said Tuesday.
“Well. You should decide,” said Dorry. “Because the food is getting cold and I’m hungry.”
“This will only be a second,” Tuesday said. “Take the food.” She looked at the stranger. “You,” she said, “aren’t coming in. But I want to talk to you.”
Dorry cradled the food bag and walked in her sock feet to the kitchen, listening the whole way.
“How did you find out where I live?” Tuesday’s voice was quiet but firm.
“You of all people should know how easy it is to find someone’s address,” he answered.
“Okay, let me rephrase: where the hell do you get off coming to my apartment?”
Dorry set the bag on the counter. Gunnar, having followed her into the kitchen, gazed up at her expectantly. Dorry lifted him into her arms, which wasn’t at all what he’d been hoping for.
“—apologize.”
“Bullshit.”
“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “Which is why I brought this—”
Dorry didn’t need to hear more.
She bolted into the living room, Gunnar bouncing in her arms. “Don’t you TOUCH her,” she shouted, “or I will throw this cat at you.”
The stranger was holding a piece of paper between his first two fingers. Tuesday was reaching for it.
Gunnar sort of sighed.
“He