Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  A corridor wide enough for a truck to drive through ran left and right. Each hallway was terminated by an impressively large circular window, covered over with white paper. I took a left and walked down, passing by a staircase and an elevator to my right. I pressed the UP button on the elevator. Nothing lit up, so there probably wasn’t power going to it yet.

  I kept walking until I stopped in front of the first door, the number 1 embossed on its obsidian surface. All the doors looked identical, a porthole-sized window placed about normal height, which meant it was a little too high for me; all I could see was the ceiling, which was, you guessed it, black. I tried the doorknob and it opened right up.

  There were four rows and four columns of oblong stainless steel desks, each of them with two chairs. A small circular sink was installed in the middle of each desk. On the left and back walls were oval-shaped cabinets and shelves, and six large circular windows lined the right wall, each one with a smaller circular window embedded inside on the bottom that opened on an axis.

  The color black and the geometric shape of a circle—whoever designed this was in love with both. Maybe a little too much.

  Faith thought there was some nefarious goings on here, but as far as I could see, it was an ordinary classroom, with a dry-erase board hanging in the front and a pull-down screen above it for projections of PowerPoint slides and whatnot. I took snapshots with my phone.

  I exited Room 1 and entered Room 2, which looked like a mirror image, the dry-erase board and the cabinets reversed. Rooms 3 and 4 were also the same. On my phone I searched “Travers Hall” and found it on Llewellyn’s website: a science building that was set to open next year. The information was scant; usually on these types of pages, they say why the building was being built, who the donator was, the progress so far, etc., but there was nothing.

  And then I entered Room 8, and it was filled with body parts.

  Not human body parts, but the mannequin equivalent. Half of the room was taken up with what looked like the rolling industrial laundry baskets that hotels use, and these baskets were organized and overflowing with limbs and heads and torsos. Perfectly shapely legs, with heel-ready feet pointing to the ceiling. Arms both straight and akimbo, some ending with a hole instead of a hand. The most striking of the baskets were the two heaping with heads. Many didn’t have actual faces, but some did, and these kind of freaked me out. Peeking out from the pile of bald plastic heads were eyes, blue and green and brown, some staring right at me.

  The mannequins were not new, their bodies scuffed, hands with fingers broken off. On a few of them, I found price tags from department stores taped on the bottoms of their feet—Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, Sears, K-Mart, the usual suspects of retailers. I tried to think of why a science building would house mannequins. Chemical experiments with a certain kind of plastic? A study of physics requiring human-sized dummies? I knew I was wrong, so I kept looking.

  Room 9 was a normal boring classroom. Next.

  Room 10 had desks like others, but there were no sinks. And instead of cabinets in the back, there were brown boxes. Smallish, about the size of a liquor box, stacked about six feet high. They were labeled BRU, BLO, BRO. I slid a box down, and behind it was another one labeled RED.

  It felt about twenty pounds. I used my car keys to cut along the tape. Individually vacuum sealed in clear plastic bags, it looked like a box full of minks or otters or some exotic tubular animal pelt (chinchilla?). But then I saw what they really were: wigs. The box I’d opened was BLO, blond, packed to the hilt with glossy golden hair. Mannequins in one room, wigs in another. Interesting.

  When I entered Room 12, my phone chirped.

  *** A MESSAGE FROM LLEWELLYN COLLEGE ***

  It is safe to return to your classes and buildings now. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please dial Public Safety at x1000.

  From the hallway, I heard footsteps and voices. Sounded like two people. They somehow must’ve gotten the message earlier than me. I hadn’t shut the door all the way and I wasn’t about to do so now. Like Room 10, 12 also had boxes stacked high, and in one place there was a gap between the boxes and the wall. It was the only place where I could hide, and the voices were getting louder. I walked as quickly and as quietly as possible and crammed myself in the empty space, my arms stuck close to my side so I would fit. Standing motionless behind the boxes, I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear, and it was a good thing I did make myself scarce because they entered here, in this very room.

  The door slammed shut behind them.

  27

  “Didn’t I tell you to close the door when we left?”

  It was a woman’s voice, almost as a deep as a man’s.

  “Don’t yell at me, Val. You were the last to leave.”

  A man’s voice, almost as light as a woman’s. It was like something out of a Saturday Night Live skit, the man playing a woman and the woman playing a man. If this wasn’t actually happening, I’d think it was a joke.

  “Shit. You’re right. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. This bomb thing just threw us for a loop.”

  A set of footsteps came closer. If they pulled away any of the boxes near me, there was nothing I could do. The footsteps stopped, and I could hear the person breathing. I opened my mouth so they wouldn’t hear mine. A box at the height of my stomach was being pulled out. There were four boxes above that one, still enough to cover me, as long as they didn’t topple.

  “Jesus, can’t you see I need help here?” Val said.

  The other set of footsteps hurried over. The box was pulled fast, and the boxes above teetered, but luckily, my face was there to keep them from falling down. I stood cheek to cardboard until somebody pulled the box and stabilized the rest of the stack.

  “I finished the first draft of the syllabus last night,” the man who sounded like a woman said.

  I heard a blade cut through the box tape.

  “You have the abstract for the course catalog?” Val said.

  “What do you take me for, an amateur?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Hands-on experience creating and evaluating hair and skin products. Emulsions including creams and lotions; surfactant systems including shampoos and gels.”

  Val chuckled. “That actually doesn’t sound half bad.”

  “I broke down the fourteen weeks into three sections, the face, the body, and the…”

  A pause.

  “Come here,” Val said.

  They were hugging—I could feel it and hear it. Comforting one another.

  “Twenty years of researching polymers…and this is what it has come to, skin creams and shampoos.”

  “I thought we were done talking about this, Roberto.”

  “I don’t understand how you can just be…”

  “A professional?”

  A few footsteps, Roberto walking away from Val? Crinkling sounds—maybe Roberto digging his hands into the box. Frustrated and angry.

  “Look at this shit! A million false eyelashes for us to, what, run fucking experiments?”

  So that was what was in these boxes. And now I had a pretty good guess at what this building was about—cosmetics research. Was Faith not so far off after all? Because if this were true, it certainly seemed like Travers Hall would turn Llewellyn into an institution of higher Barbie learning. There were already trade schools that taught makeup, hair styling, that sort of thing. Offering a major in it seemed like a dangerous move to make, potentially disastrous for the reputation of an accredited college.

  More crinkling sounds, and then an empty thud hitting the floor. Then a heavy, forlorn sigh.

  “You’re just gonna have to pick all that up,” Val said.

  Feet shuffled around.

  “You don’t have to clean up my mess,” Roberto said.

  I got the feeling these two were more than just colleagues. There was an aged, comfortable vibe to the
m, either by marriage or a long-term relationship.

  “Why did this happen to us?” Roberto said.

  “Why does anything happen to anyone. Things were good when Fairchild was around, and now with Wheeler, they’re not. It’s a cycle. Things will…”

  “Come on. You don’t really believe that, do you? This is different. This isn’t just a regime change. There’s a reason why Collins is going with Wheeler.”

  “Collins is going because she’ll do what it takes, which is more than I can say for you. Or for me, for that matter,” Val said.

  Footsteps moved toward me, and then darkness, as the box flew over the stack in front of me. On pure instinct, my arms shot up, and now I was holding up that thrown box up over my head. It wasn’t heavy, but I hoped I didn’t have to hold it up for long.

  “Did you see what she’s going to present?”

  “She emailed me her PowerPoint slides, too,” Val said.

  “We wouldn’t last two seconds up on the podium.”

  “I don’t know how she’s gonna keep a straight face.”

  “Probably by thinking about her fast track to tenure,” Roberto said.

  Now the footsteps were moving away, which was good because my arms were starting to shake.

  “We still have to configure the two labs upstairs before the end of the week,” Val said.

  “My meeting’s at three, so I can spare a couple of hours.”

  Door opened, lights off, door closed.

  28

  I waited a few more seconds before I put the box down on the floor. I opened up the box Roberto and Val had tossed and pocketed a pack of false eyelashes for Faith. Pasted onto a white cardboard and wrapped in clear plastic, they were a pair of happy, hairy eyes. Crazy what some women went through to feel pretty.

  So the mission was a success, except now I was inside Travers and didn’t know how I was going to get out without alerting the guards. I didn’t have Faith’s or Molly’s number, so I looked up TLC and dialed it.

  “Hello,” the voice said.

  “Carson,” I said.

  “Katie.”

  “You know what’s going on?” I said.

  “I do,” she said. “Give me five minutes and you’ll hear back.” Click.

  I felt like I was in a spy movie. Another text from 111-111-1111 vibrated my phone.

  take stairs to basement

  emergency door not hooked up to alarm

  But to get to the staircase meant I had to sneak out of this room, sneak out to the hallway, and open the door to the staircase, sneakily, without alerting the guard at the door, not to mention other professors who might be roaming the halls. How did the Womyn know the layout of Travers, anyway? They probably broke in at some point. Or maybe they had the blueprints of the building. The other option was to wait it out —at some point, the guards had to leave for the day —but was I really going to stay here for the next four to five hours? I had to remember that this was a college, not Fort Knox. Except it was littered with private security people like Brent Kim, plus actual cops from town. I had to be careful here, because these weren’t rent-a-cops.

  I made my way to the door. I opened it as if I were in slow motion, as if any sudden movement would set off a bomb. Because everything was new, nothing made noise, not the turning of the knob, not the languid swing of the door. I hazarded a peek and it took every ounce of my self control to stifle a scream, because there was a guard right here, his back to me. Close enough that I could see the fabric of his navy blue uniform. Again, I opened my mouth to silence my breathing. In the tiniest of increments, I pulled the door back toward me, but before I could shut it completely, white noise screamed out of his walkie-talkie.

  “The fuck,” the guard said. He yanked the walkie-talkie from his belt buckle. “Yeah, whaddya want?”

  “There’s something going on with all the sinks here in 28.” It was Val.

  “I ain’t a plumber.”

  “Please, just get up here. We’ll need your approval anyway for maintenance to come over.”

  “Fine,” he said. I listened to him opening and closing the door to the stairwell, and waited until I heard the fainter sound of the same door opening and closing upstairs until I made my move to the stairwell.

  I pushed open the beige steel door to the basement just a crack, in case there were more guards posted down here. I didn’t see anyone, but then again, I probably couldn’t, as the lights weren’t on. I slipped through the stairwell door, gently closed it, and waited for my eyes to adjust. Outside of an occasional rush of water running through pipes, it was noiseless here in the basement of Travers. From where I was standing, I noticed tiny blue blinking LEDs, embedded where the ceiling met the wall. I took a left and a few steps until I was standing below the LED. I was just about to turn on the flashlight on my phone to examine it when I heard the walkie-talkie static again, entirely too loud for it to be coming from anywhere but here in the basement. I flattened myself against the cool wall.

  “Why do you want me to look at it?” the male voice said, far down the hallway but moving closer. A beam of flashlight swayed as he walked toward me. More static, and words I couldn’t make out. “No, the protocol is that you come down first, then I go up there.”

  Now the guard was close enough that I could hear the walkie-talkie.

  “Can’t. It’s like a game of Twister here. I got both hands on this pipe and if I let go, it’s gonna spray all over the fucking place.”

  “Jesus. All right, but this is on you if we hear about it,” the guard said.

  The outer beam of the flashlight grazed my shoes, but the guard was too distracted to notice. He opened the door wide open and sprinted up the stairs. I let out a large breath of relief; my body felt almost numb from the tension.

  I turned on my phone flashlight, shined it on the blue LED —it was a status indicator for backup lighting, the kind that turned on during a power failure —and hurried to the far side. Along the way, I maneuvered around clusters of empty office chairs and student desk-chair combos.

  At the end of the hallway was an emergency door, as my mysterious texter had promised. There was a metal bar that clearly stated opening this door would cause an alarm to ring. I pushed. Silence. Even though it was overcast, the light blinded me. I pulled out my sunglasses from my pocket and put them on. The hedges were ahead of me, and there was no one around. I closed the door, walked away at a leisurely pace, and passed through the thicket once more.

  29

  Even though I’d only spent one night at Llewellyn, it felt like I’d been away for a week. The mailbox at my office agreed with me, as there were sixteen envelopes piled inside the mail bin, way more than normal. Three of them were credit card offers for Ed Baker. How long until the snail-mail spam lists found out about your demise and let you go? There’s that theory that as long as someone remembered you in this world, you weren’t allowed to move on. Perhaps the unsolicited mailing lists were keeping a legion of the dead from ascending to the next plane of existence, which I suppose was a bad deal for the spirits. But as a flesh and blood creature of this plane, I was glad for these envelopes with Ed’s name on them. I wished he were here so I could tell him about all the nutty things I found out about this case so far.

  Scanning my notes, I came upon something Faith told me: “Josie tracked Penny’s period in a ledger.” What the fuck was that all about? I probably should call her, if for no other reason to give her an update. But now I just needed a little bit of time to myself.

  My office phone rang. Jesus Christ, what now?

  “Kim Shee-Bong.” Déjà vu all over again.

  “Josie. Maybe I should mention that nobody calls me that anymore. In fact, I don’t think anybody ever did, not even my own birth mother the one time I met her, so maybe you should just cool it with calling me by my Korean name, okay?”

  Silence.

  Was that a tad on the bitchy side? Maybe. It was just after one
, but it felt like five o’clock. Yakking with Professor Marks, all that sneaking around in Travers Hall, I was hungry and stressed and I guess taking it out on Josie, who was now…crying?

  “Josie?”

  “Fuck you, Siobhan, fuck fuck fuck you!”

  Click.

  Holy shit.

  As soon as I placed the handset back in its cradle, it rang again.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Siobhan, it’s your friendly neighborhood officer of the law.”

  “Keeler. How are you?”

  “Fine, until I had to walk down from my desk to deal with your agitated friend here.”

  “Friend?”

  “The one who just called you. Josephine Sykes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s here. In custody. I suggest you get here because she just burned her one phone call on you, and from what it sounded like, it didn’t go so hot.”

  The Athena Police Station wasn’t far, not even a five-minute drive from my office, but before I rose from my desk, I paused. I got a bad feeling I’d fucked up.

  Once you get a client, check up on them. To make sure they are who they say they are.

  Thanks, Ed. Maybe next time, you come into my head a little earlier?

  I opened up my browser and went to TLOxp, TransUnion’s background checking service. There was no easier way to look into someone, which is why I felt even dumber for not doing it until now. I punched in “Josephine Sykes” into the search box and chose the state of New York.

  Josie said her husband had died when Penny turned ten, so that would’ve been eight years ago. Except according to TLOxp, that was when they’d divorced, and Andrew Ulster, 39, was doing just peachy, living in Albany with a new wife. Okay, so she lied about her husband. What else?

  Employment: she wasn’t working for Lenrock. She was working for a temp company. Not exactly a lie.