Skin Deep Read online

  Skin Deep

  A Siobhan O’Brien Mystery

  Sung J. Woo

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Sung J. Woo

  Cover and jacket design by Mimi Bark

  ISBN 978-1-947993-95-2

  eISBN: 978-1-951709-13-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: tk

  First trade paperback edition February 2020 by Agora Books

  An imprint of Polis Books, LLC

  221 River St., 9th Fl., #9070

  Hoboken, NJ PolisBooks.com

  For Dianne, Heather, and Sarah

  three sisters who welcomed me into the fold

  and Dawn

  who showed me what it means to serve with a full heart

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

  - William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old”

  1

  My assignment this morning was Dr. Henry Michaelson, who was getting out of his white BMW with a box of donuts and two cups of coffee in a paper tray—treats for his girlfriend and son. He walked across the courtyard of the apartment complex with a faint smile.

  Crouched behind a prickly bush, I trained my 300mm zoom on his unsuspecting face.

  Click. Click.

  Taking photographs of people in secret is capturing a kind of innocence. Which is ironic, because more often than not, the images serve as confirmation of guilt.

  As Michaelson disappeared through the building’s entrance, I caught a whiff of eggs and bacon. My stomach growled. Surveillance makes the tummy grow fonder—for food, that is. I slipped the camera into my backpack and made my way to the shiny diner on the corner. Autumn chill had firmly descended here in upstate New York. It’s the time of the year when I feel like I’m either wearing too many layers or not enough, there’s no in between. Today, I was a wool scarf away from being comfortable.

  On the weekends he had his son, Michaelson wasn’t supposed to have overnight female company, yet here he was, thinking he was being smart by hiding out at his girlfriend’s apartment instead. Michaelson might lose custody of his boy, and I felt bad about that. In the three days Ed and I had been casing him, he took good care of his son, taking him to the movies, the park, the mall. But he wasn’t paying us; his pissed-off ex-wife was.

  A bell on a string rang when I opened the door of the Tick-Tock Diner. A rush of warm air and the buzz of eaters greeted me. I’d passed by this place a few times since their grand opening last month but hadn’t had the occasion to stop in. It didn’t look all that different from its former incarnation, Time to Eat Diner. Like before, a gigantic round clock behind the counter grinned at me with oversized googly eyes. The new owner didn’t want to spend money to redecorate so they kept the same temporal theme.

  “Just you, miss?” the host asked. He was fat and jolly and was wearing a pretty obvious hairpiece that made his head resemble a Brazilian nut.

  “Just me,” I said.

  He led me to a cozy two-seater booth by the windows. The faux leather upholstery was cracked along the edges and taped at one corner with black duct tape, but it was still cushy and comfortable. Coffee, two eggs over easy, rye toast, home fries. If I could eat breakfast every meal, I would. I cleaned my plate before the waitress had a chance to refill my cup.

  “Hungry, were we?” she said.

  “Very,” I said, and handed her my credit card.

  She took it and was about to step away but stopped.

  “See-ohb-haan?” she asked, reading my name off the card.

  “That’s what it looks like, but it actually sounds like Show-vahn. It’s Irish.”

  “Like your last name, O’Brien,” the waitress said. “You’re Irish?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked.

  The waitress laughed.

  “I’ll be back with your receipt, lassie.”

  2

  Nestled in the valley between the Catskill Mountains, the city of Athena is a picture of fall perfection from the second week in October until Election Day. Some people prefer the flowers of spring, full of promise and warmth, but I’ve always been attracted to the quiet fires of fall, the final burst of color before winter.

  On Buffalo Street, a bearded crooner busked by the water fountain. I threw five dollars into his guitar case and clapped when he finished his song about getting stung by a bee (“Bee, bee, why, why?”). At the end of the block, I entered the white-brick building and rode the elevator to the third floor.

  I was already excited for my plan to come in later in the week and surprise my boss Ed with a fresh coat of paint on the door of our office. Ed was not a fan of surprises, but I figured this was not a bad one, since I didn’t plan on changing the color or anything. It was a heavy wooden door with a large translucent square window, the name of the firm stenciled on the glass: ED BAKER INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY. The door was painted black with dark gold trim, a reassuring combination of professionalism and class. Friday was my second anniversary. Ed probably didn’t even remember—or care if he did—but I wanted to express my gratitude. Instead of hiring someone with more experience (any, truth be told), he’d taken a chance on me, a laid-off newspaper reporter who wrote restaurant and movie reviews and occasional human interest pieces, neither Woodward nor Bernstein.

  Our office wasn’t much, a Keurig sitting on a wide filing cabinet in the back and three desks, one for Ed, one for me, and one for Stacy, our part-time bookkeeper. Ed had the biggest one, with two wooden armchairs in front of it for clients. Behind him was the only window, and he often stared out at the city below and the verdant landscape beyond when he thought through a case.

  I placed my purse on my desk.

  “Good with Michaelson,” I said, removing my jacket. “Got the photos.”

  Ed’s chair was, as usual, facing the window, and his head was tilted in an angle that suggested he’d nodded off.

  “Ed?”

  I walked over to his desk. Slumped in his chair, he clenched his left arm with his right hand. I placed my fingers on his wrist, but I already knew I wouldn’t feel a pulse. His skin was cold. The expression that remained frozen on his face was somewhere between a grimace and a smile, but only for the next thirty-six hours. Everyone knows about rigor mortis, but few realize that the body goes slack a day or so later.

  The way Ed had grabbed his arm suggested heart attack. He was on medication for high blood pressure, and for type 2 diabetes, too. He was not the healthiest person I knew. A few crumbs of his half-eaten glazed donut were embedded in his mustache, so I brushed them off. Now that my assessment of the scene was complete, I stood next to him with my hand on his shoulder. I saw what he saw last, the bronzed beauty of the mountains in the distance, and I wept.

  3

  One of the more popular stories I’d written when I used to be journalist with the Athena Times was a profile of the funeral home in town, and in the week I spent with the Lesters, I saw a dozen bodies rolled into the basement and sat through three services. I witnessed cremation, embalming, and of course, the preparation for an open casket viewing, which meant dressing the body and applying makeup. You’d be surprised at the amount of primping the men receive—in many cases, it’s more than women because women tend to take better care of themselves and look fairly fabulous even dead.

  They’d done a nice job with Ed, even shaped his unruly eyebrows
. In black suit and red tie, surrounded by folds of white silk, he looked at peace. I’d never seen Ed in any kind of formalwear, as his dress code for work was a button-down shirt and a pair of faded jeans, so it was odd to see him so prim and proper. It was almost like it wasn’t him at all, but of course, it was.

  The Lester family owned both Athena Funeral Home and Athena Ambulance Service. The oldest joke in town was that maybe they took their time to get to an emergency so both of their businesses would benefit. I must’ve heard that joke a dozen times during my visits for my newspaper piece, and yet each and every time, Gwen Lester smiled, shrugged, and said, “We’re here to serve the citizens of Athena during their greatest times of need.” I was glad she was taking care of Ed, because there was no one else. Ed had a brother in Akron, but he was blind and couldn’t be convinced to travel for the funeral. That was it for his family—his parents were long gone and so were an uncle and an aunt, and he’d never married.

  Including me, only six people attended Ed’s service. I knew them all, as three were recent clients and the other two were Keeler, an Athena cop who sometimes helped us with our cases, and our bookkeeper, Stacy.

  “I kept telling him to stop eating those Cinnabons for breakfast,” Stacy said.

  “But they’re so good,” I said, and that got her do a half chuckle, half cry.

  “Gonna miss the big guy,” Keeler said.

  “I miss him already,” I said.

  The service took less than fifteen minutes, and that was including me going up to the podium and muttering a few words of remembrance. I hadn’t prepared anything, just said the usual things—a fine man, a great boss, etc. I’d only known him for a couple of years, but I’d spent more time with him than anyone else in the room, probably combined, and arriving at that fact made me sadder than anything else.

  Stacy, Keeler, and I went out for drinks afterwards, but my mind drifted after a couple of rum and cokes. What the hell was I going to do now? I’d spent a couple of years as an apprentice to a private detective. I just got my license, the guy at the bureau had let me take the exam early thanks to a favor he owed Ed, but there was so much to this business that I knew nothing about. I could find another job with another agency, but which? I remembered a friend from a long time ago telling me that a shitty job with a good boss was better than a good job with a shitty boss. For the last two years, I had it great on both fronts, and now I was about to have neither.

  Did I mention I turned forty a week ago? I don’t care what they say, forty is not the new thirty. Forty is two drinks maximum, a balky knee, and lower back pain.

  4

  When I arrived at the office next morning, a man in a suit was waiting outside the door.

  “Robert Schafer.” He handed me his card. “I was Ed’s attorney. My condolences.”

  He took a seat in one of the client chairs, so I sat behind Ed’s desk. It was weird to see the office from this vantage point. My eyes kept drifting to my own empty desk. Ed’s was just enormous, one of these steel jobs from the fifties. It’d probably taken a team of weightlifters to move it in.

  “Ms. O’Brien?” Schafer said. “Did you hear what I said?”

  I apologized. Schafer said he understood my distractedness, but that didn’t temper his impatience. He now spoke louder and slower than necessary, making me feel slightly stupid.

  “Ed left the firm to you. Not you specifically, but to whomever was his partner, or if not a partner, then an assistant. You qualify as the latter.”

  “I own this agency?”

  “Yes, but I’m afraid it isn’t much of an inheritance. The only asset Ed had was his car, worth about four thousand at book value. There are presently no sizable debts, so the business is not leveraged in any way, but there isn’t much left in the operating bank account. Looking at the average rate of outflows, there’s enough for the agency to run for three months if there was no new business coming in. I brought some paperwork with me, but please don’t sign anything now. Hire your own lawyer and have them review it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It’d been just three days since Ed’s passing and this was the last thing I expected. Schafer must’ve noticed my bewildered expression, because his voice softened a notch.

  “You can also close up and liquidate. I estimate you may net somewhere around twenty thousand dollars. It’d be like a severance.”

  I nodded. Schafer rose, shook my hand, handed me a paperclipped sheaf of papers, left.

  I turned around and stared out the window. It was an overcast day, everything muted and gray. The phone rang. By reflex, I answered it like I always did.

  “Ed Baker Investigative Agency. Siobhan O’Brien speaking.”

  “Kim Shee-Bong?” the voice asked.

  It took me a second to realize that the caller was not announcing her name, but my own.

  5

  I can’t say exactly when I realized my parents were not related to me by blood. As strange as this may sound, it was a gradual realization rather than a sudden epiphany.

  People have trouble believing me when they meet my freckle-faced, red-headed Irish father and my blonde, six-foot Nordic mother. Didn’t I ever look into a mirror? They’d asked. I certainly had. I was a beanpole Asian girl with thick, straight black hair. Let’s say the Heavens parted and Jesus came surfing down a cascade of cumulus clouds. That’d be surprising, right? My eyes would be wide open, but they’d still be narrower than the calm pair of blue glow-dishes my mom has in her sockets.

  But truth is truth. They were Dad and Mom, and I had no reason to think differently until other people’s questions forced me to think. Like the time I got lost in the mall and the security guard wouldn’t turn me over to my parents because she was convinced they were kooky kidnappers, or the old lady at the grocery store who refused to believe me when I told her I was an American. “But where are you really from?” was the question people eventually asked, and I did not have an answer.

  Adolescent years are difficult for everyone, but they were especially hard for me. The prime objective of a teenager is to be like everyone else, and I had been like no one else. There were just a handful of Asian kids in my upstate New York hometown of Lyle, and of course they all had parents who looked like them. The technical name for a person in my situation was “transracial adoptee,” but I was what I felt: a freak.

  When I turned fifteen, my parents sent me to St. Paul, Minnesota for two weeks. My mother had grown up across the river in Minneapolis, so she knew there was a large population of Korean adoptees and a camp where kids like me got together to learn about their heritage. Since I was a hormonal, bratty teenager, I didn’t want to go and thought the whole thing was “stupid,” “a waste of time,” and most likely “completely lame,” but as soon as I got there, I started a journey to find myself. At Camp Wooram, I learned the Korean alphabet, I sang “Arirang” with my new friends, and made kimchi (my fingers stayed red for a day). For the first time, in an auditorium packed with Korean adoptees, I didn’t feel alone. I went for three more years, then after college, I flew to South Korea to visit the motherland.

  Mother. Land. Literally the land of my birth mother, whom the adoption agency was able to track down after six months of searching. We all went to South Korea, including my brother Sven. (Obviously, my dad got to name me while my mom got to name little bro. Sven is black, by the way. Nothing is simple in the O’Brien household.) Sven was eight then, sweet as anything and amazed at how, in this city, everybody looked like me.

  “All the babies, too!” Sven said in the subway. They all stared at us, of course, a sea of black-haired and yellow-skinned people, my people.

  We hired a translator to come with us for the meeting with my birth mother, but there was almost no need, as my story was the default template of so many like me. My birth mother got knocked up after a one-night stand, the deadbeat took off, and since single mothers were shunned like lepers (still are to a large degree—Korea, you really
need to step up to the 21st century) and she had no support from her family, she had little choice but to give me away. I enjoyed meeting her. We shared the same high forehead, which, for some reason, didn’t surprise me. What did completely disarm me was her laugh, because it sounded exactly like mine. I guess I thought my laugh was something I’d created, but as it turned out, it was more like my forehead.

  I don’t know what I’d expected from meeting my birth mother. Catharsis? Revelation? I’d felt neither. Satisfaction, yes. Not like eating a good meal, but more like finishing a crossword puzzle. It was a thing I’d started, and I was glad to have done it. Maybe it was as simple as this: I’d found my answer, so now I could move onto the next question.

  A year after graduating from college, I went to work at Camp Wooram as a counselor, where I became close friends with Marlene Sykes. Like me, she was also adopted by a pair of well-meaning white folks, but unlike me, she had a younger non-adopted sister, Josie. Marlene’s mom was told she couldn’t get pregnant, which is why they adopted, but then it turned out that the doctor was wrong.

  And that was who was on the phone now, little Josie. It didn’t take me much time at all to identify her, the way she called me by my Korean name, something she used to do back when we all lived together in Rochester: me, Marlene, Josie, and an elusive fourth housemate whom we had to scramble to replace a half a dozen times in the three years we shared that big old house on Waring Road.

  Marlene was like the sister I never had, my bestie. She was killed in a head-on collision with a sleep-deprived truck driver, just two days after we’d all celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. It still hurt to think about her, which is probably why I rarely did.