Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  I walked to the pink cord, strung so straight and tight it would have thrummed if I’d plucked it. Along one side of the staked-out area, the marsh grass extended a few hundred yards into a body of green-brown water. A mile or so away, two white smokestacks pumped white lines of smoke into the sky.

  Across the construction site from the marsh, the white trailers gleamed in the sun. Blinds covered the windows.

  I didn’t see the men until they were nearly beside me. They must have come from the woods. The tall, thin one had gray hair, parted at the side and thinning but well cut, and a country-club tan. He looked in his mid-sixties and wore a blue tailored suit and black leather ankle boots. The other, much younger, was enormous and balding. He wore black trousers, a white polo shirt that stretched over his belly, and white tennis shoes. He carried a surveyor’s wheel in one big hand. His skin was bright white, almost blue-white, almost as translucent as Sheneel’s. He looked, I realized, like the man Johnny said hit him with a bat after he found Alex Greene dead.

  ‘Hello,’ said the older man.

  I tried to smile.

  They moved close to me, one on either side. The older man said, ‘You didn’t see the No Trespassing signs?’

  ‘I saw them.’

  He looked me over with the whole-body judgment some men use. ‘You don’t belong here,’ he said.

  ‘Nor do you,’ I said.

  Now he smiled. ‘I own this land, miss.’ His teeth looked artificially whitened.

  ‘That doesn’t mean you belong here.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Lillian Turner.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sheneel’s teacher.’ My surprise at his knowledge seemed to please him. ‘Detective Daniel Turner’s sister. And, I regret to say, wife of a particularly troublesome man.’

  ‘That’s scary.’

  ‘Perhaps it should be. I certainly don’t want strangers knowing so much about me. I would worry about what they might do with that knowledge.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Edward Phelps.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And your friend?’

  ‘You can call him Peter.’

  ‘Peter Lisman?’

  ‘Very good,’ Phelps said.

  Lisman’s face was pale and strange. I asked, ‘Are you related to Sheneel Greene?’

  Phelps answered for him. ‘Of course not.’

  I still spoke to the big man. ‘But you found Sheneel’s body?’

  Phelps answered again. ‘We were in the last stages of buying this property. Peter was checking land boundaries.’

  Lisman stepped closer to me.

  I wanted to run. ‘Are you capable of talking, Peter?’

  ‘He’s my assistant,’ Phelps said, as if that was an answer.

  ‘But you talked to the police after you found Sheneel. You showed them where she was.’

  He stared at me impassively.

  ‘You kept your mouth shut when you hit my husband at Alex Greene’s house, though.’

  Phelps said, ‘To my knowledge, Peter has never met your husband.’

  ‘A brief encounter?’ I asked.

  Phelps nodded to Lisman, and Lisman stepped to my side. I stepped back so that I could see them both. Phelps asked, ‘Why are you here? This is private property. It’s fenced in. Signs tell you to stay out.’

  ‘Sheneel was here.’

  ‘Yes, she was, but that changes nothing.’

  Lisman moved again, so I couldn’t see him and Phelps at once. If I backed away, I would back into him.

  ‘I’ll leave,’ I offered.

  ‘No, not anymore.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Phelps spoke to his companion, ‘What do we want, Peter?’

  Lisman said nothing. If I ran, would he catch me? I could outrun Phelps. But the Land Rover stood fifty yards from us, and I would be lucky to get through the fence gate before they caught me. I said to Phelps, ‘You got right back to business after Sheneel died.’

  ‘You think I’m disrespectful?’

  ‘You might be worse than that.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked again.

  I felt the closeness and the threat of the men. ‘Honestly? I wanted to see Sheneel’s blood on the ground.’

  The smile returned but gentler. ‘You’re a little late for that.’

  ‘You’ve plowed everything under, haven’t you?’

  ‘If you own the machine, you use it, right?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  Again, the smile. ‘Clearly, you don’t own the machine.’

  ‘I would like to leave now,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure you would.’ Then he spoke to Lisman behind me. ‘Will we keep the young lady here?’

  Lisman answered for the first time. ‘No, sir.’

  His voice was strangely high and pinched, and I turned to look at him. He stared back without expression.

  ‘Be on your way, then,’ Phelps said.

  I backed away and started toward the gate.

  Phelps called after me, ‘Or you could join me and my family for an early dinner.’

  I stopped and already felt the grip of his words. ‘Why would I do that? Why would you want me to?’

  ‘We have more to talk about – more matters to consider.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Let’s talk over dinner.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘With the work I do and in my social life, I meet many others in positions of power.’

  I had no idea where he was going. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘For instance, the provost of your college.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What’s your provost’s policy concerning inappropriate relationships between faculty and students?’

  My face was hot. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had any.’

  ‘What’s the policy concerning affairs between a member of the English Department and, say, a man in History? And what’s your husband’s policy?’

  ‘You asshole—’

  ‘I don’t pretend to understand higher education,’ he said. ‘When I was young, I attended Princeton for only a year and a half. But I do understand something about how universities govern and police themselves. You see, I left Princeton by mutual agreement with a disciplinary committee. I agreed that I would withdraw from the university and they agreed that they wouldn’t report my activities to outside law enforcement. But that was a long time ago. Do universities still work that way?’

  ‘I’ve done nothing against the law.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you have. But I’m guessing that at a minimum you’ve broken the trust of people you care about.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘As I’ve said, I’m inviting you to dinner. I’ll feed you.’

  I followed the Land Rover in my car as it drove out to the Interstate and then south toward the city. Afternoon traffic was thickening, but Lisman, at the wheel, maneuvered among the cars and trucks with fluid speed, slowing only when I got blocked in and couldn’t tail him. Heat from the sun radiated from the windshield and I dropped the visors and turned the air conditioner on full, but I sweated anyway. My cell phone rang, and I checked caller ID. Johnny was calling. What could I say to him? That I was driving to Edward Phelps’s house because Phelps had threatened to tell him about the nights I’d spent with Tom Corfield?

  I silenced the ringer.

  Phelps lived in the old Ortega neighborhood on the west side of the river. A long black driveway wound from the road to a cul-de-sac from which a car could pull into a triple garage or drop passengers by a front door that rose halfway into the second story. Wisteria vines climbed the brown brick walls and clung to the chimneys at both ends of the house.

  Phelps got out at the front door, and I parked behind Lisman at the side of the driveway. When I met Phelps on the front steps, he said without any irony that I could hear, ‘I’m glad you can join us.’

&
nbsp; Inside, the high-ceilinged front hall opened to a double balcony. Behind the front hall, a wide entrance led to a dining room with glass doors looking out over a long backyard that sloped down to the river, where a narrow dock protruded into the water. Halfway down the sloping yard, landscapers had created a terrace and sunk a swimming pool shaped like a teardrop.

  Lisman disappeared through a hallway, and Phelps led me into the living room where Stephen Phelps sat with a thin blond woman, drinking from cocktail glasses.

  ‘I believe you met my son Stephen when Alex Greene died,’ Phelps said, ‘and this is his wife, Kathryn. This morning, your husband insulted them, though I’m sure they won’t hold you responsible for his behavior. I thought that we could clear the bad air through civilized conversation and a nice dinner.’

  ‘Which you’ve forced me to attend.’

  He nodded his acknowledgement. ‘In my experience, civilizing forces are rarely gentle.’

  Lisman entered through another door, carrying a tray of five drinks.

  ‘Scotch and sodas,’ Edward Phelps said, ‘every afternoon when the heat is high.’

  As Lisman exchanged full glasses for the ones that Stephen and Kathryn Phelps already had, the blue-veined skin on his big hands looked strangely delicate – almost glasslike.

  ‘They have you do all kinds of jobs,’ I said to him. ‘Real estate surveyor, driver, household servant.’

  Stephen Phelps laughed. Strangely. He stared at me as if we shared an inside joke, as if he knew me well.

  But his father said, ‘Peter is completely reliable.’

  Lisman brought the tray to me and I took a drink. ‘You look just like Sheneel,’ I said. ‘But taller and fatter.’

  He said nothing and left the room.

  Edward Phelps said, ‘You and your husband are ruder than you need to be.’

  ‘I don’t like to be coerced.’

  ‘Then don’t act as if you need to be. I’ll tell you this only once. I’m bigger than you. Smarter. Stephen is too. Even Kathryn, who spends her days playing tennis and doles out childcare to two nannies and a babysitter – she’s bigger than you. You will do well to recognize that. Life will be easier for you and your husband if you do.’

  Lisman came back into the room and said in his pinched voice, ‘Dinner is ready.’

  We went back through the front hall to the dining room. Already sitting at one end of the table, with her back to the windows, a woman watched us come. She wore a teal-and-gold dress with long sleeves and a collar that came high to her neck. Her face was a mass of scars. The skin on one side of her forehead had grown over most of an unmoving eye. She had penciled in eyebrows where none grew. Her skin stretched tight over bony cheeks. She had pinned her remaining strands of black hair behind her head. Her right hand looked healthy and had the skin of a woman in her mid-fifties, but the pinky and the ring finger on her left hand seemed fused together and the index finger was gone, a knot of shiny skin where it should have been.

  Edward Phelps directed me to a chair next to the scarred woman and introduced us. ‘My wife, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Cecilia, this is Lillian Turner. You’ve met her brother, Daniel.’

  The woman smiled from one side of her mouth.

  Two servants brought platters of fish and steak from the kitchen. As we ate, Kathryn Phelps told the others about the change in management at one of the clubs where, it became clear, she was the top tennis player in her age bracket. Stephen told his father about his progress in getting a piece of land re-zoned for heavy industrial and industrial-water use. But he kept glancing at me as he talked. Cecilia Phelps picked at her food with a fork.

  Then Edward Phelps said, ‘We’re ignoring our guest. What interests you, Lillian?’

  I asked, ‘What did they catch you doing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At Princeton. You said you went for a year and a half. Why did they kick you out?’

  Cecilia Phelps said, ‘Edward has always been known for his sense of fun.’

  He said, ‘They didn’t catch me doing anything. It involved a misunderstanding with a young lady.’

  ‘What kind of misunderstanding?’

  ‘The kind that ends a college career.’ He smiled with his hard white teeth.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘And what are you building on the land where Peter Lisman found Sheneel?’

  He cocked his head to the side. ‘If the zoning changes go through, as Stephen assures me they will, a waste refinery for high-grade pulp. The land has freshwater sources and is close to our other facilities. Are you interested in paper processing?’

  Cecilia Phelps cleared her throat.

  Her husband turned to her. ‘Yes, dear?’

  The scarred woman looked at me. ‘Do you have children?’ Her voice was clear and soft.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Why not? Choice or incapacity?’ When I said nothing, she added, ‘It’s a simple question.’

  Edward Phelps said, ‘Dear, you’re embarrassing her.’

  ‘My husband has been in the Navy,’ I said. ‘We were waiting until he got out.’

  ‘In case he died?’

  ‘Or something,’ I said.

  ‘Now he’s out?’

  ‘We’re taking time to heal.’

  She stared at her plate. We watched her. ‘A woman should have children,’ she said. ‘Even if they turn out to be little bastards.’

  ‘Who would like more wine?’ her husband said.

  When the servants cleared the table, he said to me, ‘I’ll give you a tour of the house and then we can walk outside.’

  Stephen Phelps said, ‘I can do it.’

  His father fixed him with a stare. ‘You take care of Kathryn.’

  ‘I’d like to go home,’ I said.

  ‘Soon.’

  He showed me through the downstairs rooms – a sitting room with oil paintings, some recent and some old, depicting the faces of various family members and ancestors; a media room with a large screen on one wall and windows blacked out against sunlight; a library with shelves lined closely with books.

  ‘Come,’ he said, and led me into a room with dark leather easy chairs, a dark leather daybed, a large wooden desk, and more books. ‘This is my room, my escape.’ He went to a cabinet and found a bottle of Maker’s Mark and two glasses. ‘Drink?’

  ‘No.’

  He poured me one anyway. ‘Cecilia must eat early for health reasons that you don’t want to know about. So I often drink through the rest of the evening.’ He handed me one of the bourbons, but left his hand on the glass so that our skin touched. When he let go, he stayed close to me. ‘She’s incapable of pleasure. Did you know that? If I touch her, she feels only pain. The doctors say that burns can be like that, even old burns.’ His breath smelled of whiskey.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘It was a long time ago, when Stephen was little more than a baby.’ He reached for my hand, but I pulled away. ‘It involved your husband’s friend. He calls himself Papa Crowe, but back then we called him Jacob. He did small jobs for us. He took care of the gardens. He carried the dirty clothes to the laundress. He changed the oil in the cars. That’s what he did before the fire. Then the stove blew up.’ He showed me his white teeth and reached for me.

  I stepped around him. ‘I’m leaving.’

  He said, ‘I’ve told you what I can do to you. But I’ve said nothing about what I can do for you.’

  ‘I want nothing from you.’

  ‘Nothing?’ He looked perplexed. ‘There was a time when I wouldn’t have accepted that as an answer. I expect Stephen still wouldn’t. But we grow old – and such things diminish. Walk with me a little, and then you can go back to your faithful husband and your relationships with your students and fellow teachers, whatever they might be.’

  We went out through the dining-room doors on to the patio and down a set of broad concrete stairs toward the swimming pool and rive
r. We stopped on the pool deck. Below us, two large live oaks, their lower branches draped with Spanish moss, framed the green lawn. The river, more than a mile wide, shined golden in the early evening sunlight.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said.

  Across the water, a sailboat moved in the gentle breeze. A pair of brown pelicans cut across the middle distance.

  He said, ‘Did you know that sunsets wouldn’t happen here without the particulates from my mills? The air would be too clear. Nothing to refract the light. Three hundred years ago, if you canoed up this river in the evening, you would have seen dull skies.’

  I said, ‘I don’t understand why you’ve brought me here.’

  ‘I wanted you to see how much I have to lose. I live a good and happy life. It’s not without hardships – my wife, of course. But I’m comfortable. With very few limits, I do what I want. Few people in the world can say as much. If anyone threatens me, I’ll do everything necessary to protect myself. Do you understand that?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I’m glad. You and your husband need to stop interfering.’ He watched the pelicans as they flew downriver, dipped toward shore, and disappeared. ‘I take no pleasure in protecting myself.’

  ‘Did Sheneel threaten you?’

  ‘I’m not talking about Sheneel. I’m talking about you.’

  He spoke quietly, and I asked as quietly, ‘Did you kill Sheneel?’

  He rubbed his chin with his hand. ‘No.’ He gave me a tired smile. ‘But I protect what’s mine.’

  ‘Did Stephen?’

  His voice remained quiet. ‘I know you’re smart, but my message isn’t getting through.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ I said.

  ‘You should be, dear,’ he said. ‘You should be.’