by Sung J. Woo
“Thank you for taking such good care of him,” I said.
“Of course. Breakfast will be arriving soon, and I’ll be by later to check in, love.”
Christopher remained silent after she was gone. I took out my phone and brought up the Facebook photo Beaker had sent me.
He glanced at it, and of course, it made him weep. I waited. He blew his nose again, then sat up in bed and propped his pillows against his back.
“Okay,” Christopher said. “That’s enough tears for one day.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Why did you try to kill yourself last night?”
He cleared his throat. We locked eyes. Can you guess what happened next?
I waited until he stopped crying.
“I’m afraid something terrible has happened to Penny, and it’s all my fault. All my doing.”
“What did you do?”
“I got her pregnant.”
I remembered that short story of Penny’s that Hajira related to me had some seriously deranged parts with a baby.
“It happens,” I said.
“No, I made it happen. I poked holes in the condoms every time we had sex, and we had sex a lot. Until she got knocked up.”
I stared at Christopher for a good five seconds. Had I underestimated him, what he’s capable of?
“It was your idea?”
“Grace’s. But I still did it.”
“You don’t seem like a guy…”
“…who could do something so terrible?”
I nodded.
Christopher looked like he was about to burst into tears again, so I asked before I’d lose him to another deluge, “This has to do with your parents, doesn’t it? Their financial involvement with Llewellyn and Krishna.”
Something clicked loose in him. I’ve seen this behavior before from people harboring secrets who are ready to let it go: a profound sense of relief.
“You know, when I think back to how this started, I almost want to laugh, because it doesn’t make any sense. How could something as simple as my father asking me about my childhood friend Grace end up here?”
That’s exactly how it began, according to Christopher. His parents made a terrible bet with some risky investments, and when the losses in Llewellyn’s endowment got heavy, they made the even bigger mistake of using their own assets to try to recover. When Christopher’s dad realized that Grace was going to be attending Llewellyn, he desperately hoped it was a way for him to make contact with the Parks for a possible cash infusion.
“I hadn’t talked to Grace for years, but we’d always gotten along and it shocked and saddened me to see the person she had become, mostly because of her mother. And father, too, by his absence. He’s never been there for her, so all she’s got is her mother, but not really. Grace was depressed, away from home, and I was there for her…and when I told Grace that my family’s got money issues, she comes up with this crazy idea that’s going to solve both of our problems. Of course we were drunk off our asses when she proposed her plan, laughing ourselves sick, but then the more we talked about it later…the less outlandish it seemed. You have to understand, her mom Cleo is a master manipulator, and there’s no one she manipulates better than her own daughter. That woman isn’t capable of giving love. The only person she loves is herself.”
“I get that but what I don’t understand…Grace wanted to you to get Penny pregnant…for Cleo? Why would Penny getting pregnant help Grace with her mother?”
Christopher closed his eyes and sank deeper into his pillow. He probably wished he would fall in and disappear altogether.
I held the test tube I’d found in his room for him to see.
“Was this part of it?”
I put it in his palm. He pinched it between his thumb and index finger and gazed at it.
“Trace amounts of semen were found in there,” I said.
“Mine. Grace wanted to make sure I was healthy, that I wasn’t shooting blanks, or something. She was so scared—she’d told her mother already, and if this didn’t work, if I couldn’t get Penny pregnant…”
I held his gaze and held my silence, willing him to go on.
“I didn’t know. You have to understand that I didn’t know, not until later. That Cleo wanted…what remained.”
“Remained after what?”
“The abortion,” Christopher said.
I pulled the chair by his bed and sat down.
“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Cleopatra Park wanted the fetus? For what?”
“I don’t know! I didn’t ask, okay? I didn’t want to know, I just wanted to help Grace.”
“And why would a doctor…”
“The doctor who performed her abortion was someone President Wheeler knew. I think he also worked for Park Industries.”
Wheeler. Of course she was involved; she had to be. She must’ve known her school was running out of money. I thought she was a little nuts, but it looked like I’d vastly underestimated her nuttiness.
“Why Penny?” I asked. “Why did you choose her?”
“Korean blood. That’s what Grace’s mother told her, that she wanted Korean blood. Penny and Grace were the only two Korean freshpersons this year. And since there is no way she’d let Grace get pregnant…”
I didn’t know what to say. All of this sounded so ludicrous, and yet here we were.
“It’s all fucked anyway. The bank foreclosed our house last week.”
Helping Christopher’s parents so they could stay, Grace had said when I’d trapped her in the hospital bathroom.
“How did Penny find out about all this?”
“The doctor told her exactly what was going on with, you know, the remains.”
“Why would he do that?”
“The only explanation Grace and I came up with is that Wheeler told the doctor this was all on the up and up, that Penny was being paid. I don’t know, there was so much screaming and shouting at that point. I tried to calm her down by coming clean and telling her everything, and goodness, was that ever the wrong thing to do. As far as she was concerned, I was a part of the whole plan, and you know what? She’s right. I fucked her and I fucked her over. I’m a horrible, terrible human being.”
“Excuse me,” Elsie said. She was standing by the door, holding a cafeteria tray.
I rose from the bedside. “Hello, Elsie.”
“Are you okay, Christopher?”
He turned away and wept into his pillow.
“He’s just going through some stuff,” I said.
“His attending physician will be coming in shortly,” she said. She put the tray down on the nightstand then left the room.
“Thank you,” I told Christopher. “It wasn’t easy, what you just said.”
“I’m so ashamed.”
“Just a few more questions. Are you okay to answer?”
“I’ll try.”
“How did you know Penny was taken to Krishna?”
“I have a friend there, Dido…”
“…blue hair, we’ve met. What happened to Penny after you arrived at Krishna to settle her down? Where did she go?”
He shrugged. “I wish I knew. She was already gone.”
We both turned to the knocking sound against his door. Stethoscope around the neck, a white coat, a serious face: the doctor.
“I’ll let you know when I find her.”
Christopher nodded. I left.
76
In the hospital parking lot, I sat in my Accord and watched the comings and goings of cars. A waifish man, looking young enough to have just received his license, got into the black sedan sitting opposite me. He closed his eyes and looked utterly spent, and when he opened them again, he saw me staring at him. He averted his gaze immediately, perhaps embarrassed at me catching him at a vulnerable moment. He pulled out.
A white SUV took his place. The husband got out and hurried over to help his wife, who looked
super pregnant. But she still insisted on carrying her purse, much to the chagrin of her husband. I could see this was an argument they had often, and not even an argument at this point, more like an inside joke. They made their way to the hospital entrance, holding hands.
Every car in this parking lot was owned by a person, and each person possessed their own personal history. This was life, and it was exhausting. Or maybe it was just me who was exhausted, running short on sleep and overwhelmed by what Christopher had just told me.
Poor Penny. Getting pregnant, having an abortion, and then finding out your best friend and your boyfriend were not who you thought they were. No wonder she went bonkers—a lot of people would.
Now that I was armed with Penny’s unfortunate story, what next? As much as I wanted to confront Wheeler, I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her. After spending time in Krishna, the weak link in the chain seemed obvious: fragile Dr. Christine Collins, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Llewellyn and Wheeler’s lackey.
I opened up the Llewellyn app on my phone. I remembered seeing two addresses for some of the faculty, and it was the case with Collins. Underneath her school office was her home address, right in the town of Selene. Because it was Monday, the chances of her being back from Krishna were high. The app, in its all-knowingness, made it super simple to see her classes and office hours. She taught her first class at 4 p.m., so it made more sense to go to her house first.
I punched Collins’s address into my GPS and drove north on Route 90 under the steel-wool gray skies that threatened rain then made good on its promise. Halfway there, an apocalyptic deluge of a shower pelted my windshield and roof, and it was good to hear that drumming around me. The world could use a little washing now and then.
By the time I got to Selene, the rain had petered out to a mist. I parked off-street and walked up the red-bricked path to Collins’s yellow house with black shutters, a modest bungalow with a front porch complete with a hammock. I rang the doorbell.
The front door didn’t have any windows, but there were two long translucent pieces of stained glass flanking it, and behind the flowery designs I made out a figure methodically making her way toward the door.
“I know you’re there, Christine,” I blurted out.
Like a deer caught in headlights, frozen, not a sound.
“You’ve got a class to teach at four. I’ll just get in the hammock and be all nice and relaxed by the time you come out. Is that what you want?”
“I’ll call the police,” she squeaked.
“What, because I’m trespassing? Fine. I’ll go back to my car on the street and wait there.”
Her silence telegraphed her mulling it over. She opened the door, but just a crack.
“What do you want?”
“A chat.”
“I have nothing to say. If you have any questions, you can contact Llewellyn’s Media Relations department.”
“Oh, I see. So if I were to call up Media Relations and ask about the missing student at Llewellyn who got knocked up and had an abortion performed by an alumnus doctor, who then took that aborted fetus and…”
The door swung wide open. Collins leaned against the frame for support. She was a pale person to begin with, but now she looked positively ashen.
“Thank you,” I said, and strode through.
As soon as I got into her house, I regretted it immediately.
If it was possible for a person to explode, Collins would’ve gone off like a geyser. She resembled a desperate tweaker right now, her eyes darting back and forth, her fingers strumming an invisible instrument. Not great. In fact, possibly dangerous. Collins slammed the door closed and threw the deadbolt. My mind sped through an inventory of my purse. My mace. I’ve never used it, and never did I think someone smaller in stature than I would be my first victim, but here we were, two small women facing each other in the foyer with its umbrella can and an embroidered Home Sweet Home sign hanging in a frame.
“It’s not right,” Collins said. “What you’re doing is not right.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I’m just telling you what I know.”
In her right hand I caught a flash of metal.
77
The knife was the thin filleting kind for gutting fish. It probably did a fine job of gutting humans, too.
Collins took a step towards me, and I took an involuntary step back. This was her house; she knew it inside out, so I was already at a disadvantage. To the left of me was a set of stairs, and to the right was the living room, but this foyer was a cramped space and Collins, in her current unstable disposition, was a jungle cat ready to pounce.
“Are you really going to stab me?” I asked. “Really?”
“I don’t know,” Collins said. “It’s possible. Anything is possible because nothing is possible for me anymore. My life is…my life is over.”
I felt something soft behind me—a cushion. I tried to remember what was back there, I didn’t dare turn my head because the second I did, I imagined her coming at me like Norman Bates in the shower. A built-in bench, that’s what it was, so this must be a seat cushion. Not much of a shield for a knife attack, but better than nothing.
“Christine…please—”
“I’m a chemist, not a zoologist. What the hell do I know about pigs?”
Pigs?
She stared at her knife. “I butchered it. I took it apart. And you, you’re making me see it all over again.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I felt the hairs on my arms standing on end. I had to get her to talk rationally here, or else she really was going to cut me. Think fast, Siobhan. She’s a woman of science.
“What was the medical basis for your actions?” I asked.
Maybe it was just the weirdness of the question itself, but it did take Collins out of whatever violent spell she was under. “I suppose it sounded convincing enough, going beyond the placenta or the amniotic fluid, which we were already researching to create serums and creams…”
“So on a scientific level…”
And that was all the time I was gonna be able to buy, because Collins slapped her empty hand against her thigh. “No, no, no! I was weak, I was scared, I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore. And I don’t care. I don’t care what the fuck —”
Ding-dong!
Collins fell to immediate silence when the doorbell rang. We stared at each other. I slowly shook my head and shrugged, letting her know this was not what I’d expected, either.
Ding-dong!
And now there was a different noise, something metallic and mechanical at the door. We both watched as the deadbolt was thrown back into its unlocked position. The door opened. White turtleneck, black slacks: Brent Kim.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” we both echoed.
He moved like a dancer, as he always did, gliding across the foyer in a relaxed, easy fashion. Collins, remembering that she had the knife, raised it up to her chest, like a boxer ready for a fight.
Kim held out his right hand, an open palm. “Christine, your knife. Please.”
He could’ve said, “Twinkle twinkle little star,” and Collins would’ve relinquished her knife just the same. Shorn of her blade, Collins fell to the floor and sobbed. I helped her up to the bench because, well, she looked so pathetic down there. I placed the cushion, the one I’d considered using to parry her shivving a minute ago, behind her back. Collins took the other cushion and hugged it like a stuffed animal. She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth.
“I don’t know what that was about,” Kim said, “so let’s move on.”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“One of my associates captured your license plate last night. You’re quite a runner from what they tell me.”
“You weren’t there at Ondaga Plain?”
“No,” he said. “I would’ve caught you.” He wasn’t jesting or boa
sting, it was just a fact to him, and he was probably right.
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to ask you to stop all that you’re doing, Ms. O’Brien.”
“You’re asking,” I said.
“Yes. Asking for your cooperation. We are aware you are being paid for your services by Ms. Josephine Amber Sykes. We will remunerate you double what she’s paying to mitigate any loss of revenue on your part. We understand you are a detective and you wish to resolve your case, but that will no longer be a possibility.”
As before, his hyper-civility grated on my nerves. “And if I don’t comply?”
Kim clasped his hands together. “I wouldn’t recommend it. This comes directly from Mr. Park, and he is not a man you want to refuse.”
“So Mr. Park is perfectly fine with a missing sick girl and his wife using unborn babies for her makeovers?”
I knew I was taking a chance here, but it was worth it. I never thought I’d see it, but here it was: the splintering of the Brent Kim façade. For a moment, his glassy, robotic face registered emotion.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Your turn,” I said to Collins.
“Please,” she said. “Please just leave me alone.”
“Is there any truth to what Ms. O’Brien just said?” Kim said.
The edge in his voice straightened Collins right out. “Not human babies, no. We used pig embryos, oral porcine placental extracts. But we told Cleo they were…”
“We?” Kim asked.
“Vera Wheeler and myself.” Collins shook her head. “It’s all madness. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that was asked of me. The only thing I could have done—should have done—was to say no. But I didn’t. I can’t lose this job, not after my last…” She didn’t say more, but I could infer the rest. Slept with a student, made up some bogus bits on her CV, academic faux pas that derails your career.
“You did all this…to save your job?” I said. “Really?”
“You don’t understand,” Collins said. “It’s incremental, what Vera forced me to do. Cross one line, and the next line becomes easier. Our college is about to go under, it’s more than just me, hundreds of people are going to lose their jobs, their healthcare, even their retirement. Vera gave Cleo what she wanted…”
