Skin Deep Read online

  “Is it any wonder Kodak went bankrupt?” Josie said.

  “I feel old just holding this thing,” I said. “I still remember what a big deal it was when we got the extra long cord for the only phone in my house, so I could drag it to my room to talk privately.”

  We rose from our stools. When Josie slung her purse on her shoulder by pulling on the strap with her thumb and middle finger, I flashed on the young woman I used to know before she became a mother. Many a Saturday, we four girls line-danced to Garth Brooks at our local bar, going a little crazy when the jukebox landed on our favorite, “I Got Friends in Low Places.” We leaned over the pool table with our low-cut tops and skin-tight skirts, catching the eyes of the geeks from RIT and the jocks from U of R. What simple times they were.

  Outside, the clouds were back with a vengeance, making an earlier arrival of nightfall.

  “I’ll give you an update when I find out anything,” I said. “No matter what, I’ll call you in a week to see how you’re doing.”

  “Okay,” Josie said.

  We waited for a second, watching each other. I thought she was going to offer another hug, but she didn’t; maybe she was waiting for me to do it.

  I watched her walk away until she turned the corner and disappeared.

  9

  I opened the door to my apartment and was greeted by silence, sweet silence. It’d been a long day, and I looked forward to being alone with my thoughts. I like people, but I like being by myself more, though I would never take the Thoreau route and live in the middle of nowhere. What makes me feel best is to be here in my one-bedroom apartment, with strangers above me, below me, and beside me. It’s like every moment I spend alone here, I’m choosing to do so, and that makes me feel better about myself. No doubt this makes me some kind of a weirdo, but that’s fine. We’re all weirdos in our own way.

  I stood in the kitchen and watched my Lean Cuisine meal carousel inside the microwave. I imagined what it would’ve been like if Josie had talked to Ed instead of me today. Ed had been a big guy, six-two and two-fifty, with a baritone that rivaled Barry White’s. Everyone who came into our office left feeling like they’d be taken care of. I was five-three, a hundred and ten after a big dinner, and the only reason why Josie wanted me on this case was because of our personal connection. Would strangers who came to Siobhan O’Brien Detective Agency really hire me?

  The microwave dinged. I carried my sad excuse for a dinner to the couch and turned on the television, and wouldn’t you know it, there was black and white Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat and a fedora.

  “You won’t get into trouble?” a woman asked him.

  “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble,” he said.

  I turned the TV off and set aside my meal. Okay, so I didn’t look like Sam Spade. But that could be a plus. In my fifteen years of writing for the Athena Times, the only quasi-investigative journalism I’d done was a story between two rival hair salons. I faked my way as a shampoo girl and accidentally stumbled upon a state assemblyman’s torrid affair with one of the hairdressers. As awesome as Ed was at what he did, he couldn’t have worked at a hair salon. Though the idea of him with a curling iron and chatting up the ladies kind of cheered me up.

  On my first day of work, Ed and I had sat in his Buick, watching the front porch of a house whose mail kept getting stolen.

  Any time you’re confused about anything, he’d said, make a list.

  I got up from my couch, went to my desk, and found my yellow pad and pen.

  David Girard, missing persons reporting officer

  Green haired girl

  Pierced girl

  Tender Llewellyn Care

  Every case started with a few names and a place. We ran a skiptrace for a client this past summer in an effort to find her long-lost brother, and it had been a doozy, connecting through seven states and more than a dozen cities. I’d taken notes. The notes were in the office. My dinner was now cold, but it wasn’t frozen, so I ate it. Then I drove back to the office.

  10

  It was eight thirty and there were plenty of lights still on in the building. On our floor, we had a civil engineer and a lawyer, and they were both still working away. Whatever happened to the eight-hour workday?

  I flipped on the lights in the office. I opened the filing cabinet for my notes and found a hanging folder pushed all the way to the back. Inside the well was a thin white box with a bow on it.

  It was a very beautiful white pen inside a black case lined with felt, like jewelry. I couldn’t figure out what the pen was made out of—it didn’t look or feel plastic. Maybe bone, because there were slight variations in the color and it had a certain heft. A small white card was taped onto the bottom of the case. “You made it to year number two, Siobhan,” Ed had written in his tiny handwriting—for a guy who looked like a linebacker, his personal font was six-point. “The pen is mightier than the sword, and even the gun.”

  So he’d remembered.

  I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered what Schafer, Ed’s lawyer, had told me this morning, that I could walk away from this with 20K in my pocket. Heading my own shop with just two years of apprenticeship was sheer folly. But Ed did leave his agency, his only real possession, to me. And I did have a case.

  On my desk was the stack of papers Schafer had given me. I sat down, uncapped my brand-new pen, and signed my name on nine different pages. Congratulations to me. I already knew the best way to celebrate.

  I walked over to the supply closet and dragged out an open box pushed against the wall. A gallon of black paint, a pint of gold paint, brushes and trays. I was in my sweats, so already in uniform. I covered the floor around the door with yesterday’s edition of the Binghamton Bulletin and got down to work.

  Another one of Ed’s pieces of advice to me was to think about the case while doing something rote, like washing the dishes or painting a door. Airs out the brain, he always said. The window pane now fully blue-taped, I dipped my brush into the tray and applied the first stroke like my dad showed me years ago, going over it just once, top to bottom.

  The girl with the green hair knew where Penny was. If she didn’t tell Josie, she probably wasn’t going to tell me. So I’d do a lot of sitting and watching. It’s pretty amazing how much information just being in one place and paying attention can reveal.

  Josie had said that the reporting officer seemed like he was just going through the motions. Was that because it’d been a long day or because this was a fairly common occurrence at Llewellyn?

  “And I thought I had it rough today.”

  Behind me was Craig, the lawyer who was two doors down. No matter the time of day, Craig always looked like he could use a strong cup of coffee. It was mostly his watery blue eyes that made me want to yawn, which I just did.

  “I’m sorry about Ed,” he said. “I was in Syracuse on a case all last week and just heard about it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Hey, can I ask you to look something over?”

  Craig nodded and I brought him the document Schafer gave me. He flipped through it like a pro. “You already signed it.”

  “But I haven’t handed it in. Ed’s lawyer said I should have my own guy look it over, so if you have the time? I’ll pay you for your trouble.”

  “No trouble,” Craig said. “This is a template contract you can download off a website, I see these once a week. It won’t take an hour for me to read it.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  He pointed at the glass panel of my door. “So you gonna change the name?”

  “I don’t know. I only decided to keep the place running half an hour ago.”

  Craig chuckled. He loosened his tie and hitched up his pants. This suit, like all the others he owned, didn’t quite fit him, the sleeves slightly long, the waist too wide.

  “Well,” he said. “Good luck with the painting. I’ll have this for you tomorrow afternoon.”

  �
��Okay.”

  I was halfway done with the front part when I heard him lock up for the night.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re gonna do fine.”

  I plucked off a loose paintbrush bristle before it stuck onto the door forever.

  “With this door or with my brand-new agency?”

  “A little of both,” Craig said.

  I watched him walk down the hallway. He never took the elevator, always the stairs. There’s a vending machine at the end of the hall, and I’ve never seen him feed it a dollar bill. Private eye Siobhan was having an a-ha moment: Craig used to be fat.

  He looked back and waved before leaving me to my job, and that’s when I realized that I sort of liked Craig. Which is strange because usually I know I like a guy right away. I’ve bumped into Craig at least a hundred times since I started working here because his office is on the way to the bathroom, and all that time, nothing, and now this.

  Life. I’ll never understand it.

  11

  It’d been a few years since I’d been on Llewellyn’s serene campus by the lake, but colleges don’t change all that much. They may add a building or two, a new statue or a sculpture might grace the garden—but there was something very obviously different about this place, and you didn’t have to be a detective to notice: male students.

  After parking my black Honda Accord in one of the designated visitor spaces, I stood in the visitors parking lot and saw my first, a guy in a Buffalo Sabres jersey. Then a pair of dudes, with white earbuds and eyes glued to their phones. Now that I was thinking about it, I did vaguely recall hearing rumblings about the college possibly going co-ed a few years ago,, but that was right around when the Times was being gutted and my mind was on other, more pressing things, like how I was gonna keep my apartment and buy food.

  No question, women’s colleges were a dying breed. Vassar, Skidmore, Bennington, these had all once been female-only institutions of higher learning, but they eventually brought in men; Radcliffe used to be the top women’s college until it was absorbed by Harvard. When I’d interviewed the new president here five years ago, Vera Wheeler, there hadn’t been an inkling of this. In fact, I remembered her specifically declaring her single-most important agenda was to continue Llewellyn’s traditions.

  Another change was the security guard posted at the entrance of the parking lot. I walked over to her and we met at her glassed station. Vasquez, according to the name tag on her navy blue uniform.

  “Good morning,” she said. “What brings you to Lewie?”

  She was a short Latina with a big smile, but there was something else there. Concern. Weariness? She didn’t trust me, and I didn’t understand. These people made their living by being nice to prospective students and parents. So my gut told me to lie.

  “Is WILL still a thing?” I asked.

  Vasquez smiled again, and this one was genuine. “Of course. We may have opened our doors to men, but that doesn’t change who we are.”

  “Broadhurst, right?”

  She nodded. “Just follow this path from here to the red building over there, but it sounds like you know your way.”

  “I do, thanks,” I said. WILL stood for Women in Lifelong Learning, a program for older students. It was one of the items Wheeler had highlighted during our interview, something I wouldn’t have remembered had I not read over my piece before coming here. Preparation was, as always, half the battle.

  The ivy growing over Broadhurst Hall had turned crimson like the rest of the trees, the red bricks harmonizing with nature into a ready-made postcard. A clock tower rose from the center, its gray peak tiled with oval-shaped slate like the scales of a dragon. Now half past ten, the bells above rang throughout the campus with their reverent resonance, a simple ding-dong as if someone was at the door. Having attended a large institution for my undergraduate years (SUNY Buffalo), I’ve always been envious of schools like Llewellyn. Well, maybe now I’d get my wish. It actually made sense to register as a student; I’d have full access to the campus without raising any alarms.

  I walked up to the massive white doors of Broadhurst, big enough for a horse-drawn carriage. That’s what the building used to be, the carriage house of Horace Llewellyn himself back in the day. The sunflower-shaped brass handles were polished to a shine, and so was the rest of the lobby inside. A set of ruby red Victorian sofas and chaises were arranged in an inviting semi-circle in the center of the room, and a receptionist sat primly behind an ornate antique wooden desk, its feet shaped like lion’s paws. I didn’t remember seeing the enormous chandelier shining above, either, the last time I was here, but it was hard to miss its gaudy gleam now.

  “Pretty bright, isn’t it?” the receptionist said. Her name was embossed on a transparent prism, Gloria Reedy. She had on enough makeup to be an opera singer. “I’ve gotten used to it, but almost everyone has your initial reaction.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “The couches were reupholstered at the beginning of the semester. Believe it or not, the chandelier has always been there. We just had every crystal resurfaced and the metal buffed. I imagine it looked like this a hundred and fifty years ago, except back then it’d have been candles instead of light bulbs.”

  “Must’ve cost something to restore it like that.”

  “Students! The more the merrier. This is my tenth year here, and we’ve never had it so good.”

  “When did you start registering male students?”

  “Just this year—you’re seeing the inaugural class, the Neil Armstrongs.”

  “Quite a change,” I said. A pair of students walked by, heading for the open double doors to the right that led to the administrative offices. Boy and girl, they held hands as they disappeared through the doorway.

  “I suppose. Like in the past, that would’ve been two girls holding hands,” Gloria said with a wink. “We’ll survive. We’re tough. Anyhoo, I’ve talked your ear off and I don’t even know your name or why you’re here.”

  I told her I wanted to register for WILL, and she held up her hand for a high-five.

  “You go, girl! I celebrate every lady who comes in here to keep on learning. I applaud you, Siobhan!”

  And then she did actually applaud. I took a small bow, which delighted her to no end. Gloria wrote up a visitor’s sticker for me to apply on my jacket then told me to go up to the second floor to sign up.

  12

  Climbing the stairs, I saw that not all parts of Broadhurst got the facelift. The white paint on the walls was chipped along the baseboard, revealing an unsavory sky blue hiding underneath, and when I arrived at the registration office, I sat in an orange plastic thrift-shop-reject of a chair to fill out a web form on an old desktop computer. The keyboard and mouse had once been white, but now they’d both aged to the color of coffee-stained teeth.

  So the place wasn’t overflowing with cash. Back when I wrote the story, I learned that schools like Llewellyn depend heavily on student tuition to survive, unlike, say, Lenrock, their gigantic counterpart on the other side of the lake. Lenrock has six billion dollars in their endowment, which means that if they generated a five percent return through investments, they had $300 million a year. Llewellyn’s endowment was eight million, total. As usual, the rich got richer while the poor struggled to make ends meet. The infusion of male students probably did mean a fair amount of financial relief.

  After filling out some non-virtual paperwork (i.e., pen on paper) and paying my processing fee, the registrar instructed me to go downstairs for my photo ID. I was about to take the stairs when I saw a man off to the side pressing the button for the elevator.

  The man was a cop. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, but it was as plain as the beard on his face. It’s the way cops stand that always outs them, the way they hold themselves, a confident rigidity that I think half of them don’t even know they’re doing.

  When he turned to press B on the panel, I saw the ID dangling from his belt: DA
VID GIRARD. That was the name of the officer who’d filled out the missing persons report on Penny, but that had been from the Selene Police Department. What was the likelihood that there was another David Girard around here? This had to be the same guy. But then what was he doing with a Llewellyn ID?

  The elevator dinged, signaling its descent. Girard smelled of a fairly strong cologne, and I felt a sneeze coming on. I tried to stifle it, but it still sort of half-assedly came out.

  “God bless you…?” Girard said.

  “I didn’t want to fill the elevator with my germs.”

  He laughed. “Thank you.”

  “Aren’t you an officer with the town’s police department?”

  “That’s right,” he said. Only in movies are cops stupid and incompetent. In my own experience, they rarely miss a thing. And they never tell you more than what they want you to know.

  “I just signed up as a WILL student. Getting my photo ID.”

  The elevator opened and Girard gestured for me to exit first. It was all very utilitarian down here in the basement, beige concrete walls and industrial pipes by the ceiling running along the wide corridor.

  “That’s where I’m going, so you can follow me,” he said.

  “So are you guys, like, providing security for Llewellyn?”

  “Yes.”

  It was like pulling teeth with this guy. “How long?”

  “Just started this semester.”

  “Why would a college want police protection?”

  “What’s with all the questions, miss?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe it’s just being back in college, getting ready to be intellectually inquisitive, academically eager, that sort of thing. It’s been twenty years since I had homework.”

  That seemed to soften Girard a bit. “It’s a cost-saving shared-services initiative that the mayor of Selene and the president of Llewellyn came up with. I supervise the rookies who are getting their feet wet. I hope that satisfies all of your curiosities.”