Kate Racculia - Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Kate Racculia 2019

Cover design Micaela Alcaino @HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Kate Racculia asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008326951

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008326968

Version: 2019-09-04

For all the people I’ve found

(and who have found me)

How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn.

Billionaires, all of us.

—URSULA K. LE GUIN

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page TUESDAY MOONEY WORE BLACK Kate Racculia

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

2006

The Opened Tomb

2012

1. The Dead Man’s Scream

2. The Obituary

3. The Woman in Black

4. The City’s Hideous Heart

5. Bloody Marys

6. Hunch Drunk

7. Dead People

8. This Means Something

9. Library Voices

10. Takeout and Delivery

11. Much Worse

12. Caught Up

13. Death and the Neighbor

14. Games People Play

15. Dead Man’s Party

16. Interview with the Widow

17. This House is Falling Apart

18. More Than a Feeling

19. Heart on a String

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Kate Racculia

About the Publisher

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.”