Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  Park stared at her for a good few seconds. Uncomfortable seconds. Then he nodded assuredly, as if he had verified an internal calculus.

  “I will help your school.”

  “Penny Sykes is in the basement of Travers Hall,” Wheeler said. “She might be a little sedated, but again, it’s what she wanted. My plan is to have a sleep lab there. A good night’s sleep is the key to health, which of course goes hand in hand with beauty.”

  “Assist Ms. O’Brien,” Park said to Kim.

  While Wheeler was expounding upon the salubrious benefits of slumber, I was already on my way out the door while bringing up Josie’s name in my phone’s contact list.

  “Let me drive you,” Kim said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  At the station’s exit, I heard Park’s voice behind me.

  “I will purchase Llewellyn, Ms. Wheeler. And you will no longer serve as president.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wheeler said. “You said…”

  “…that I would help your school. Not you, Ms. Wheeler, but your school. To reiterate your own words, this is bigger than all of us. Oh no, please, think positive thoughts. Right now, the contorted frown on your face, it is highly unattractive. You owe yourself, and your movement, more than that.”

  Like a proper gentleman, Kim held the door open for me, and I walked through, laughing.

  83

  As it happened, Josie was in Auburn for work, which meant she was twenty miles away. Still, she must’ve driven like Jeff Gordon, because she arrived not even five minutes after we got to Travers. There was a quarter-sized mustard stain on her white blouse and her hairclip had failed to rein in her hair, but for the first time in a long, long time, she looked happy. Before I even said hello, she ran to me and gave me a bone-crushing hug.

  “You found her,” she said. “You found my baby.”

  “We’re almost there,” I said.

  “She’s in the basement? What, like in a dungeon or something?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t sound like it, but I have no idea what we’ll see down there.”

  “And is this your partner?” Josie asked, gesturing to Kim.

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Sykes. My name is Brent Kim, and I am providing support to Ms. O’Brien at this particular moment, but we are not partners in any capacity.”

  “Okay,” Josie said. “‘No,’ would’ve worked, too.”

  “I like to be as clear as possible. Shall we proceed?”

  Kim led the way and we followed him to the entrance of Travers. The building looked no different than the last time I was here, the windows obscured by white paper, red and green LEDs blinking off the numerical keypad lock by the doors.

  “He’s very polite,” Josie murmured.

  “He’s also got some moves,” I said, feigning a punch and a kick.

  “Looks the part.”

  To our surprise, the door swung open from the inside. Perhaps since my breaking and entering, Wheeler had increased the security, because in front of us was an imposing figure in a Selene police uniform, whose arms were as large as my thighs.

  “This is a restricted area,” he said.

  In Kim’s hand was a gun, and the gun was pointed at the guard’s head.

  “Please take out your handcuffs and get on the ground, face first,” he said.

  The guard did as he was told.

  “I thought you said he could do karate,” Josie whispered to me.

  “We were told that your daughter’s health may be compromised, so time is of the essence,” Kim said, apparently also gifted with amazing hearing. He cuffed the guard behind his back and around the wrought-iron bench. Then he told the guard, “My apologies. You can talk to Chief Sumner after we are through; he’s aware of us and our actions. We need to enter the basement of Travers Hall to extricate a sequestered student. Can you please help us?”

  The guard snorted a laugh and said nothing. Kim took one hand and put it against the guard’s mouth while running his fingers up the guard’s trunk-like right forearm and pressed his thumb into a spot. The guard’s eyes filled with tears and his groin darkened while Kim muffled his scream. Kim took his thumb off and the guard looked drugged.

  “Can you please help us?” Kim asked again.

  “Room L-02. There’s another guard down there.”

  “Thank you,” Kim said.

  We entered the lobby, which still looked as if somebody had taken a bucket of black paint and dumped it everywhere. The only difference was that there were more lights now, making it easier to see where we were going.

  “I was here not too long ago,” I said. “I can lead us down there.”

  We took the staircase down. As soon as Kim opened the metal door that led to the basement, we heard a voice.

  “Taylor? Our shift ain’t over for another hour.”

  The gun, the cuffs, the same. Except unlike Officer Taylor, this guy wouldn’t have to change his underwear because he complied quite nicely.

  “Two doors down,” he said. “I gave her lunch today.”

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Didn’t see her, but the tray from dinner last night was empty. Code is 13026. Same for the other girl.”

  “What other girl?” I asked.

  “There’s another one in L-01.”

  L-02 wasn’t far, just two doors down. Josie grabbed my hand and squeezed it as Kim entered the code. The electronic lock buzzed and he opened the door.

  “Penny?” Josie said.

  The space wasn’t much bigger than a college dorm room, a bed, a dresser, and a door that must’ve led to the bathroom. It didn’t smell great, sweaty like a locker room, musty like an attic. The walls were painted gray and all the furniture was clinical white.

  “Mom?” said a tiny voice.

  That’s all that Josie needed to hear. She ran in and found her daughter in bed. Her hair was matted and her eyes were red and bloodshot, but it was the same girl in the photograph I’d been carrying on my phone for the last month. Thinner, definitely, but not dangerously so. Josie enveloped Penny into her arms, into her body, into herself.

  My baby, my baby, Josie said over and over again through tears, while her daughter repeated, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Their words were becoming fused, incantatory, an intermingling of joy and relief. A white woman and an Asian girl, looking nothing alike, and yet they were undeniably mother and child. They had their work cut out for them, but right now, they were together, and that was enough. Watching their reunion, my mind drifted to two people who were no longer around, Marlene and Ed. I hoped both my old friend and my old boss were up there somewhere, resting a little bit easier now.

  I turned to Kim to thank him, but he was already gone.

  I left Josie and Penny to their own devices and proceeded to L-01. Was this girl a backup in case Penny didn’t pan out?

  L-01 looked no different than L-02 but smelled less rank, probably because whoever was here hadn’t been cooped up for as long as Penny had been.

  “Anybody home?” I said.

  A young Asian woman was in bed. As I approached her, she opened her eyes.

  “Hello,” she said. “Is it already time for dinner?” She spoke, surprisingly, with a Spanish accent.

  “No,” I said. “Do you know where you are?”

  She looked at me but wasn’t really looking.

  A vacant smile. Whatever she was on, it was more than what Penny had gotten. What emotional turmoil had brought this poor girl to this mess? I didn’t know, but one thing for sure: she wasn’t going to find any answers here.

  84

  “Hello…Carson?” I said to the spiky-haired blonde girl at the front desk of Tender Llewellyn Care.

  “Katie,” she said.

  “One of these days, I’ll get it right.”

  She buzzed me in. A week after finding Penny, I’d gotten a phone call from Faith saying she
wanted to thank me in person. I was on my way back from Rochester to look up an old house survey for one of Ed’s clients, so this late fall afternoon was as good a time as any to stop by.

  “Siobhan!”

  Before I knew what was happening, her arms were around me.

  “You know, it wasn’t so long ago that you trapped me in the basement of Fordham Hall with the lights out,” I said.

  She laughed and let me go. Her green hair was hidden under a strikingly red bandanna, but there was something else different about her.

  “You look so…happy, Faith.”

  “That’s because I am,” she said, “and you’re the reason why.”

  I followed her down the main hallway, and when her footsteps became slow and careful, mine did likewise. In one of the dorm rooms was Christopher, sound asleep. I didn’t get a good look at him as Faith just wanted me to have a quick peek, but he was snoring lightly.

  We backed out as quietly as we had entered. I followed Faith to her room, located across the hallway. Her room, which had been a pigsty the last time I was here, was still a pigsty. I leaned against the door frame as Faith excavated a seat on her bed.

  “There he is,” she said, “my Christopher.”

  “You like him.”

  “I love him.”

  “That’s good,” I said, not knowing what else to say, really. I was glad he was in a better place, but he’d also been a huge pain in the ass not that long ago.

  “It’s more than good, Siobhan. Not only did you save Penny, but you saved Christopher, too. When he confessed to you about what he did to Penny, that was his rock bottom, and now with all that horror behind him, he can be a person again here in TLC.”

  “He transferred out of Lenrock?”

  “Christopher’s not going to get the personal attention he needs from that indifferent behemoth of a school. It was one of the stipulations of his release from the hospital after his suicide attempt, that he got the best psychological care possible while still pursuing his undergraduate education.”

  Looking at Faith, I thought about Kathy Bates in Misery, playing the crazy nurse who’d kept James Caan captive. Maybe that’s a little harsh, because Faith had a good heart and wasn’t insane, but nonetheless, there was something desperate here.

  “How are things here, without your mother?”

  “You mean without our president.”

  “Sure.”

  “Like Christopher, Llewellyn, too, has hit her rock bottom. Now that President Wheeler is gone, we can begin the process of healing.”

  Could two broken people mend each other? Maybe. I wished Faith and Christopher the best of luck and left for the lobby.

  “Goodbye, Katie,” I said to the girl at the desk.

  “It’s Carson. Katie’s shift ended five minutes ago.”

  85

  “It’s really happening,” Craig said.

  I’d just sat down at Elkwood when he handed me his phone. It was Friday night, all the diners grateful to put another workweek to bed. A couple next to us were already chomping down their meal, both digging into the tempeh and grits special.

  The headline from The Binghamton Bulletin:

  Park’s Purchase of Llewellyn College Unanimously Approved by Trustees

  I scanned the article and saw that Vera Wheeler would no longer serve as president of Llewellyn but rather as Chief Educating Officer of the Park Educational Institute: “I’m very excited about this new opportunity that will arise from having strong financial support for Llewellyn College. The future has never been more enthralling.”

  “I’m surprised Wheeler’s still involved, after what you told me about the police station encounter with her and Park,” Craig said.

  I handed the phone back to Craig. “Park said he was a man of his word; I’m glad to see it’s true. Before I left Llewellyn after recovering Penny, he told me what happened in the basement of Travers would never happen again, and that he would personally make sure Wheeler is held accountable for her actions.”

  “So he makes her Chief Educating Officer?”

  “It’s a made-up title. She’s not in actual jail, but this’ll have to be close enough.” I tapped on the photo on the newspaper story, a shot of Broadhurst Hall. “Can somebody just buy a college?”

  “It’s not something you see every day, but yeah, it’s a thing. It even happens to state entities, like when New York’s Regents College became Excelsior a while back. Higher education is, like everything else in our capitalistic world, a business, and if investors think they can make money…”

  “I wonder if that’s why Park bought it. They’ve excavated another huge hole on the south side of campus. To match the one in the north, I guess. I don’t know what his plan is, but the man’s got one. Anyway, one interesting bit of news deserves another.” While I fished out my folder from my backpack, the waitress came over to take our drinks order. A no-brainer, as the Moscow Mule was the five-dollar drink of the day.

  I pushed two pieces of paper toward Craig.

  “You must’ve done some good old-fashioned digging through public records.”

  “Wasn’t easy, as they’d both changed their names twice through two marriages, not to mention they were foreign ones, South Korea and Ukraine.”

  “I was about to say there isn’t much I can understand here outside of numbers.”

  “That’s right,” I said, and smiled. “But that’s all you need.”

  Craig scrutinized the two birth certificates, Ahn Ga In on the left, Vera Breznova on the right, Cleo Park and Vera Wheeler as they were born. Craig chuckled.

  “So it wasn’t plastic surgery or Botox or voodoo that kept these two ladies looking so young. They just turned forty!”

  “Wheeler lied about her age because she’d developed quickly and wanted to model when she turned eleven. Not sure why Cleo pretended to be older—it’s weird as women are known to do the opposite.”

  “Weird does fit her profile.”

  “I can’t imagine Park doesn’t know, so there must be a reason.”

  Our drinks came, a pair of copper cups with a lime garnish. Like our neighbors, we both ordered the special.

  “May I propose a toast?” Craig said.

  “Of course.”

  “To you solving your first case, and for me for my first week of cognitive behavior therapy.”

  We clanged. We drank. Ginger beer, vodka, and simple syrup: sweetness with a kick.

  “That’s great, Craig. But…”

  “But what?”

  “You and me…we get along, but…I just don’t want you to be doing this because you think you and I are going to…oh jeez, I should just shut up.”

  Craig reached over and held my hand. “You’re just being you, low expectations. And I’m just being me, ever the optimist. It’s okay, Siobhan, I understand. Maybe you and I won’t work out. But then again, maybe we will. All I know is that in order for me to move forward, I have to do this work, and it’s good. It’s hard, but it’s good. But enough about me and my complexes, what about you? Are you still on the fence?”

  “About what?”

  “Well, not too long ago, when I’d looked over your paperwork to take over the agency, you weren’t sure.”

  I took another sip. “Let’s just say I’m surer than before.”

  “Your email from this morning mentioned the Krishna folks got in touch with you,” Craig said.

  “That was an easy one. I showed excerpts of the amrita video to Dharma, who communicated it with the rest of the Krishna Roots, the old-timers. As much as they still love their guru, they realized it wasn’t going to work with him. So for the first time, the two factions are working together, old Krishna and corporate Krishna, which is good because although they aren’t as financially strapped as Llewellyn was, after the firing of Michelle West and her cohorts, they desperately need new leadership.”

  “Do we dare hope better days for them?”
>
  “Hope is free,” I said, and we toasted for a second time. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, by the way.”

  “I got your text, so no worries. How are Penny and Josie doing?”

  “Better after signing for their UPS delivery. They got the check from Park Industries for two million dollars.”

  “Right on schedule.”

  “Which reminds me, they wanted me to thank you for looking over their non-disclosure agreement.”

  “Thankful enough to give me 5%?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Damn,” Craig said, feigning disappointment. “And what about Maria, the other gal you found in the basement of Travers Hall?”

  “The Korean girl born on Mallorca of all places—she’s on a plane back home as we speak. Her exchange program with Lenrock is, shall we say, over.”

  “I still don’t understand how Wheeler convinced her that being drugged in a windowless room would help her.”

  “Her fiancé broke up with her…via text.”

  “Yikes.”

  “They were supposed to get married this summer.”

  “I can see why she might have been depressed.”

  As soon as I drained the rest of my drink, my purse rang. On my phone, the caller read as BRENT KIM. I couldn’t remember him ever calling me, and I definitely did not have him as a contact.

  “Take it, but don’t be too long because here comes our food.”

  The waitress, balancing one dish on her forearm and another on her right hand while carrying a pitcher of water with her left, set our dishes in front of us.

  “Brent?”

  “Hello, Ms. O’Brien. Apologies for interrupting your evening.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t remember adding you into my phonebook.”

  “You did not. Park Industries owns and operates your cell tower, so we can push certain notifications through the carrier.”

  “Is that, like, legal?”

  “It’s in your end-user agreement, the finest of fine prints. Regardless, Mr. Park would like to talk to you.”