Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

  “Is something wrong?” Krishvananda said.

  “You’re enjoying this,” I said. “You know the effect you have on people and you take pleasure in the power you have over them.”

  The elevator dinged and he gestured for me to exit.

  “To your left, ever-observant Siobhan,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Was this a good idea? This was not a good idea. I drew in a long breath and exited the elevator. The fourth floor was deserted, like the way it was when I’d come up here with Cynthia Bard. Krishvananda led me past the Meditation Room and then a series of office doors —Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Executive Officer—and towards the end of the hall, where there were two sets of identical vases, each as tall as a person. They were both made of silver, gleaming against the spotlights above and below. The vases were set in front of a rectangular inset of mirrored walls so it looked like there was an infinite number of them reaching far into the horizon.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Up.”

  “But we’re on the top floor of Meadowlark.”

  “One can always aim higher,” Krishvananda said.

  As he walked behind the vase on the left, I watched him expand into a million identical copies through the reflections of the mirrors…and instead of appearing on the other side of the vase, he vanished.

  “Just do what I did, Siobhan,” his echoing voice said. “I will not lead you astray, my child.”

  I walked his way and shielded my eyes against the spotlights and smacked an elbow into a wall.

  “That hurt,” I said.

  “I didn’t realize you were going so fast. You’re fearless, aren’t you?”

  “Just following your directions, Krishvananda.”

  “Now feel the wall in front of you and go as far left as you can, then as far back as you can, then left again, and finally forward.”

  It was like I was inside a maze, a narrow one that only allowed one person at a time. Though I wasn’t claustrophobic, if I stayed here much longer, I probably would be. I was completely enveloped in darkness and there were spaces so constricted that I felt my own breath against my lips. The walls felt weird, soft but almost…skinlike? Like it was alive. Was my breathing becoming labored because I was freaking out or because I was walking uphill?

  Thank goodness for sunlight. I saw it and I rushed to it, though when I finally got out, my eyes took a good thirty seconds to adjust. I was in what looked like a small greenhouse, except instead of plants and irrigation apparatuses, it was a living area. A twin bed, a wooden table and two matching chairs, a tub and toilet behind a curtain in one corner, the bare necessities of existence. But I hardly saw any of that because my eyes went wide angle on me. Located at what must be the highest corner of the Meadowlark building, I was surrounded by the ravine and the river below, the smoky Adirondack Mountains beyond, and the crazy beautiful splotches of yellow, green, and red of autumn worn by all the tree leaves in between. Because all the walls were glass and because we were situated right at the edge, it seemed like I could step right into the vertiginous vista below. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, on the opposite side was the granite slab that Meadowlark was built into. The afternoon sun transformed that rock face into an ever-changing display of silvery sparkles.

  “How is this place not visible from the ground?” I asked.

  Krishvananda poured hot tea from the electric pot into two cups that were sitting on the desk. Also on the desk was the same gray folder he’d been handed a few minutes ago. He sat on one chair and I sat in the other. Strong mint tea, hot and cool at the same time on my tongue.

  “Ankh—that’s what I call this personal sanctuary—sits at the northeast corner on the roof. I know Meadowlark looks like a box, but it actually isn’t. On the right side, it’s angled out as it rises, enough so that from the ground, you can’t see Ankh at all. Also, the outside is coated with the same white paint as the roof, except this is see-through paint so we can look out but one can’t look in.”

  “Openness and privacy at once,” I said. “Seems a shame it’s only for you.”

  “It’s fun to be the guru,” he said. “But you know what else is fun? A private detective pretending to be a reporter.”

  I took another sip of the tea and said nothing.

  “Of course I know your little secret. There is nothing that happens inside this building that escapes me, even when I was in Mumbai. I don’t care about your ruse because our motives are aligned.”

  He pushed the gray folder towards me.

  “This was why Dharma put on his show just now,” I said. “A distraction.”

  “Dharma made his willing sacrifice,” Krishvananda said. “What you will find in that folder are financial documents that show some rather creative lending between Llewellyn and Krishna in the last twenty years. Highly questionable transactions, quite possibly illegal. Krishna is a non-profit, and Llewellyn is an educational institution, and they have been commingling their assets without the knowledge of either board, to make up for their budget shortfalls. In short, they have been cooking the books. Those documents, Siobhan, will give you leverage over Vera Wheeler and Michelle West, the two who are doing everything they can to ruin what I have built here.”

  “And you’re doing all this just to help me out,” I said, doubtfully.

  “You still have contacts in the media. Once you verify what I’ve purported here, I’m certain you’ll do the right thing. You were a reporter once. Your moral compass hasn’t changed direction.”

  “And you get to bring down Krishna once more so you can pick it back up.”

  “It’s not that simple, but it can be. As long as we deal in plain facts instead of lies. Do you know what bothers me most about all this anti-aging initiative at Krishna and Llewellyn? It’s just another gateway to push drugs and surgery when there is a better path.”

  “Amrita.”

  Krishvananda beamed his winning smile once more. “You have been paying attention. I want to show you, Siobhan,” he said. He reached out with his beautiful hands, palms open. “Will you allow me?”

  And now here was that mischief at full power. I knew this was bad news, I knew he was bad news, but my body wanted it. My body wanted him, I could feel it, the tingling, the itch, the ache. It would be so easy to give in to him, just take two steps forward and let him take me away. My desire for him grew hard in my bones, primal and nasty and dirty and hot.

  I took the folder and ran down the stairs as fast as I could. Thrust back into the darkness of the maze, bumping against its supple walls, I heard Krishvananda’s laughter fading behind me.

  71

  No wonder he’d had the whole place following him like a god back in the day. As I rode the elevator down to the third floor, I still felt Krishvananda’s pull on me. That guy—that guy was dangerous.

  Back in my room, I opened the folder he’d given me and looked through the sheaf of spreadsheets and statements, all of it beyond my level of comprehension, but I knew Stacy could tell me if there was any truth of what Krishvananda had alleged, and Craig would be able to determine the legal implications. Moving large chunks of cash around was never a good sign, so if that indeed turned out to be the case, we were probably talking about jail time for a few unlucky scapegoats.

  And one scapegoat in particular caught even my numerically neophyte eye—Vachess Holdings, which came up over and over again throughout the sheaf of documents. I flipped back to my notes and saw that Christopher’s parents ran a hedge fund. Universities and colleges often employed hedge funds to enrich their endowments.

  Helping Christopher’s parents so they could stay.

  A quick Google search brought the serious faces of Brandon and Sabine Vachess from their website, standing together with their arms folded in front of what looked like a classic rich-person’s office, a huge dark mahogany desk and an Old Master painting on the wall. Their “About” page li
sted their clients, and both Llewellyn and Krishna were on there.

  There was a knock on my door.

  “Good evening, Siobhan!” The ever bubbly Cynthia Bard. “I was afraid maybe you’d left already.”

  I glanced at my watch—five o’clock. I’d asked for a late checkout but I’d blown even the extended deadline.

  “I was supposed to be out of this room two hours ago. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh please, don’t be. In fact, I’m so glad you’re still here, because I’d like to show you something. May I?”

  After fighting off Krishvananda and his sexy Jedi mind tricks, what I wanted more than anything was to take a little solitary breather, like just close my eyes and conk out for half an hour or something, but duty called.

  “Of course,” I said, and followed her out.

  “We’re not going far, just back to the Sunrise Room.”

  Following the Dharma show, there were still a few objects askew in the main hallway, a couple of chairs facing the wrong way, a sheet of paper peeking underneath the curtains. Cynthia saw it and picked it up immediately.

  “I know I’ve already said it, but it really isn’t usually like this. Between the food poisoning last night and the police chase this morning, it must seem like Krishna’s a center of bedlam.”

  “I’m fully aware these are extenuating circumstances,” I said. “You really don’t have to worry about me writing about any of this.” Really, she didn’t.

  “That is so very gracious of you, and we at Krishna thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your understanding. And as a gesture of our gratitude, I’d like to offer you something that shows us in a more positive, forward-thinking light.”

  She opened the door to the Sunrise Room and the enormous banner on the wall behind the lectern:

  THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS

  THE FANTASTIC FUTURE OF KRISHNA

  “It’s time that we shared our concepts with the rest of the world in the most impactful manner,” another voice said behind me. It belonged to Michelle West, who strode forward with an outreached hand. “So nice to finally meet you properly, Siobhan.”

  I’d seen her when I’d encountered Wheeler, but only briefly. She was about my age, her wavy brunette hair salted with strands of gray. In a tight black pantsuit with sharp creases, she had the air of someone who told people what to do and relished doing so.

  “It’s very impressive,” I said, wondering why West was being so cordial. I’d thought by this time, Wheeler would’ve told her I wasn’t a journalist at all—unless, of course, that she and West weren’t close at all, just using one another.

  “We’d originally scheduled this presentation for next week for our board members and trustees, but we pushed it up a week to tomorrow morning. I know you were ready to leave today, but would you do us the honor of sticking around one more day? You’d be our guest, of course, and since you’re already all packed up, I’d like to offer you a room in Javani, the new, green-certified annex of ours.”

  As bribery-y and pleasant as that sounded, I felt I’d gotten what I needed and it was time to move on.

  “Look,” West said. “Can I level with you?”

  “Please do,” I said.

  “I know you met with Krishvananda. I know he’s here. I’ve known it since the day he slithered back into the building.”

  “I overheard you talking with Cleo Park and Vera Wheeler. By the statue. You feigned ignorance…”

  “…for Vera’s benefit. The less she knows about Krishvananda, the better.”

  “So his secret hideout up there isn’t much of a secret.”

  She laughed. “Let’s just say we have hospitality go up there once a week to change his sheets and empty the garbage.”

  “And you accept his presence because he still wields power over a number of Krishna devotees.”

  “At this point, our relationship is less like a treaty, more like a cease-fire. Kicking him out would cause more problems than it would solve.”

  Cynthia cleared her throat. “Michelle, I believe two of our board members are waiting in the lobby for us?”

  West clapped her hands. “Thank you, Cynthia. Siobhan, the four of us will be dining tonight at Iron, a lovely restaurant in the city center, and we’d be honored if you were to join us.”

  It was almost six o’clock now and the prospect of driving for the next three hours didn’t seem too appealing. But then again, being stuck at a restaurant with these two people plus another two, all of them barraging me with anti-Krishvananda propaganda, didn’t feel so hot, either. But maybe I’d learn something that would help me with my case, and I would be able to get a good night’s sleep for an early departure tomorrow morning. There was no way in hell I was gonna stick around for another useless presentation, but they didn’t have to know that.

  72

  The board members were a silver-haired couple, Nolan and Cressida Brooks, bluebloods to the core. Three times in our two-hour conversation, they mentioned their son was at Harvard. But in their youth, they’d been wild and crazy kids, some of the earliest disciples of Krishvananda at the Krishna ashram.

  What West and Cynthia wanted me to hear was from primary sources on the other side, and as expected, the Brooks’ stories were not flattering of the experience. In fact, they sounded borderline criminal. The disciples who broke the rules—which could be as innocuous as kissing another member or drinking a cup of coffee—were “disciplined” by having to keep a yoga pose for hours at a time. It reminded me of stress positions, what is used in modern “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Repeat offenders were kept in pitch-black rooms for days, a way to purify their desires, and of course, while the disciples were struggling to maintain their ascetic lives, Krishvananda had at least six girls he banged regularly.

  “Yes, he did marry one of them, that is true,” Nolan Brooks said. “But that was because he was painted into a corner. He married her to save face. They divorced not even a year later.”

  I nodded and jotted down notes into my notepad. I didn’t doubt that these things happened, but I couldn’t see how any of this was going to get me closer to Penny. Except I did know. Time to rattle the cage a bit.

  “Krishvananda mentioned something about loans between Krishna and Llewellyn College. Would you guys know anything about that?”

  If the Brooks had been involved, they were master actors, because it was news to them. West, on the other hand, wore a fake smile that put the Joker to shame.

  “Michelle?” I asked. “Have you heard about this?”

  “Just sounds like more deflection,” she said, but she sounded neither convinced nor convincing. “I’m sorry, guys, but I need to take care of some stuff back at the office. I need to call it a night.”

  Sitting in my fancy-schmancy room in the Javani building, I put my feet up on the ottoman and took in the moonlight. It was quite soothing here, the walls painted a pale green, wooden blinds on the window, a flare lamp that washed a soft light over the room. A speaker embedded into the ceiling could be hooked into a phone or play New Age music, so I chose the latter, tranquil electronica flowing forth from the grille.

  My only regret of the evening was that I hadn’t brought up the loans earlier so I wouldn’t have had to slog through their pitch, but no matter. Now that I was alone and had a few hours before turning in for the night, I had the time the space to think this case through. It hadn’t been quite two weeks yet since I started a search for Penny, but it felt longer. Ed had told me about a missing persons case that took him three years to solve, having to travel to three countries to finally find the man who had changed his name, his Social Security number, and even his face. I didn’t have three years. From what Josie had warned me of Penny’s disease, I barely had three weeks.

  I sat at the desk and turned on my laptop. I placed my notes around it. My mind was clear and focused. And of course, my phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize.

  “
Siobhan?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Beaker. You remember me, right?”

  Dance music with heavy bass drowned out his words. “Of course. I can’t quite hear you because of all the noise. Can you either speak louder or…” A few seconds later, Beaker came back on the line, with the music more muted.

  “I’m sorry, there’s a house party still going here and it’s kind of crazy. There was also an ambulance here, and that sort of stuff turns a party even crazier.”

  “Did somebody get hurt?”

  “No, well, yes. I’m calling about Christopher. He’s here.”

  “If you handcuff him to a radiator, I’ll pay you a thousand dollars.”

  “The ambulance was for him. He took a fistful of pills, but luckily it was mostly my allergy meds, which apparently you can’t OD on. So he’s okay, but they just took him to Athena General. He’s staying there for at least a couple of days for observation. It’s really fucked up, what he tried to do. He was kinda drunk, but I didn’t…nobody expected him to pull something like this.”

  “Thanks, Beaker. But you know, I did ask you to call me as soon as you saw him.”

  “I was gonna, I swear,” he said. Just like that, he turned from a concerned adult to a pleading teenager, which I suppose he still technically was. “He came in yesterday but I had two prelims plus a twenty-pager for my lit class so I didn’t even see him until this afternoon.”

  I thanked him and hung up.

  I was exhausted, and could have used a few hours in a bed, but Christopher was the key to finding Penny. I’d already lost him once, and this time, I wasn’t going to fuck it up.