A Measure of Darkness

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “A while. Two or three years, I think.”

  “After your show closed.”

  A chary smile. “That’s how you found me.”

  I nodded.

  “It didn’t end well.” She reached down to scratch the dog’s head. “Different visions.”

  “How did you two connect in the first place?”

  “Leah? I’ve known her since I was nine. We went to school together.”

  Big red neon letters: data point. “Where was that?”

  “Watermark.”

  She spoke the name like it was something everyone knew, or ought to.

  “Sorry, I’m not familiar.”

  “It’s near Tomales. In Marin.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “Me? Oh no. I grew up in the city. Leah…I think she’s from Texas, originally.”

  “A boarding school.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Cathie Myers squinted at the cards. “What am I supposed to do about this? Is it going to screw up my credit?”

  “I’d call the bank.”

  She sighed. “What a nightmare.”

  “You never opened an account with Wells Fargo.”

  “No.”

  “Never received a statement, a renewal notice.”

  “Never. I’ll sign an affidavit, or whatever. This has nothing to do with me.”

  “Can you think of a way someone might’ve gotten ahold of your information?”

  “I mean, I’ve had cards stolen before,” she said. “This is the first time the police showed up.”

  She flipped the page facedown. “They don’t send cops for identity theft. What’s going on here, really?”

  “Ms. Myers, I have a few other names I’d like you to look at, and tell me if you recognize any of them.”

  I watched as she ran down the list.

  She said, “Karla, she was with us.”

  “At Watermark.”

  She nodded.

  “Any idea where she is now?”

  “None.”

  “Does the school have your information on file?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “If you gave them a donation, for example.”

  “I don’t give them money,” she said. “I don’t have money to give, and if I did, I’d have other priorities. It was forty years ago. I was only there for a little while before I left. I haven’t had a thing to do with them since.”

  “You stayed in touch with Leah.”

  “She’s my friend,” Cathie Myers said, frowning again. “That’s separate.”

  I wondered how different two artistic visions had to be to ruin a four-decade friendship. “What about the others?”

  With an air of disdain she resumed scanning the list. “Her I don’t know. Not her, either. Kelly Doran—we had a Kelly, but her last name was Modigliani. Like the painter. I don’t know the rest of them. I told you, I was only there briefly. Can you please tell me what’s going on?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, “there’s one more thing I’d like you to look at.”

  When photographing decedents for the purpose of obtaining identification, we try to arrange their features in the plainest, most inoffensive way possible. There’s a question of respect and another of effectiveness: you’re more apt to recognize a face when not distracted by an agonized expression.

  It’s not always practical. Nobody looks normal with a caved-in skull or a bullet hole through the eye.

  The challenge with Jane Doe had been framing. Too tight and you lost a sense of scale. Too wide and the bruised throat came into view. I’d aimed for the sweet spot in the middle, but you could still see dry scratches, the unnatural looseness around the eyes.

  Cathie Myers said, “I don’t know her.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I’ve never seen her in my life.”

  “Okay.” I put the photo away and began gathering my things. “Thanks.”

  She was staring at me, gray bangs quivering. “Who is she?”

  “We haven’t been able to identify her.”

  Her eyes returned to the spot on the table where the photograph had lain, as if to claw back its memory. She was putting it together. “That’s who stole my identity?”

  I said, “There’s no reason to assume it bears directly on you.”

  “Well, sorry, but, it’s my name, so I think it does.”

  “Thanks for your time, Ms. Myers.”

  “Wait a second.” She started out of her chair, uprooting the dog, who began hopping around, pawing at her calf. “Hello? Hang on, please. You can’t just drop this on me and leave. Excuse me.”

  I gave another useless smile. “If I learn more, I’ll be in touch.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Sunday, January 6

  8:50 a.m.

  The Watermark School was closed for winter break. The office would reopen on Monday, January 7. If I wished to leave a message, I should feel free to do so after the beep. Otherwise, I could submit a request through the contact form available at www dot the watermark school dot com. Please be advised that it could take several weeks to receive a reply. Thank you very much.

  The school’s homepage was basic and sunny, all primary colors and rounded fonts. A slideshow boasted healthy-looking children, ranging in age from five to the mid-teens. They hiked. They played saxophone. They stood in an emerald glade, painting in watercolors. Dewy-eyed they encircled a teacher, who displayed the monarch butterfly cradled in his palm.

  They planted in the school garden, they harvested the vegetables, they chopped those vegetables for soup.

  They—

  I squinted.

  They welded?

  There she was, a little girl kneeling amid a hail of golden sparks and hot dripping slag, a helmet obscuring her face. Along her skinny nape lay a shank of hair secured with a Hello Kitty barrette. She swam inside her protective leather jacket, shoulders landing at her elbows. Made to guess, I would’ve put her at no older than nine.

  The image dissolved as the next slide faded in: an adolescent boy, lazing in a hay cart, ukulele in hand and mouth open in a yodel.

  Near the top of the screen, superimposed on a graphic of silhouetted trees, the school motto:

  Independence—Curiosity—Responsibility

  I moused up to ABOUT US.

  Since its establishment in 1951, the Watermark School has continually blazed trails in progressive education.

  The operating principle, I gathered, was that children are happiest and learn best when left alone to do as they please.

  Watermark enforced no formal grade structure; classes were offered, but there was no requirement to attend them; boys and girls lived in co-ed dormitories. These and other unusual policies emerged from the pedagogical theories of the school’s founder, an Englishman named Conrad Erasmus Buntley.

  To a great extent, Buntley was Watermark, and the history page read like a tribute to him—a creation myth, presented in heroic terms. Born into extreme poverty, he was an autodidact, illiterate to the age of ten. He’d worked as a printer’s devil, a merchant seaman, and an actor before discovering Jungian analysis and making several pilgrimages to Switzerland.

  Buntley endorsed what he called “teaching the whole child,” arguing that human growth had far more to do with what happened outside the classroom than in.

  Today these ideas are commonplace, having been co-opted and diluted by the educational mainstream. When C. E. Buntley introduced them, however, they provoked controversy and, often, fierce resistance.

  Dusty black-and-whites of Buntley accompanied the text. Slope-shouldered, in rumpled tweeds, he munched the stem of a meerschaum pipe, his smile giving forth a pile o
f smudged, jostling teeth. Combed across his pate, like vapor trails, were two white wisps; in the next photo the hair flew out on end as he swung an ax, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. Rigorous physical labor played an important role in the Buntley worldview.

  “As nutritious soil is to the flower,” he wrote, “so is the health of the body to the mind.”

  There was a heavy emphasis on self-reliance, although its precise flavor differed from the stuff I’d read in high school, Emerson and Thoreau. C. E. Buntley’s argument emerged from a pragmatic observation: children were, at heart, selfish.

  “One may claim, with some measure of truth, that all mankind shares this egotistical aspect. However, it is most pronounced in the young, for whom hands of the clock hold no sway. Past and future do not exist; there is only the eternal present, which is to say, the desire of the mind in the moment. One may as well cry at the rising tide as fight against this tendency. Therefore we do not fight it. We allow it to exist. Only in freedom will the child come to integrate both halves of the personality, the Shadow and the Light.”

  Perhaps the most radical of Buntley’s beliefs was the notion that each member of the community, regardless of age or station, must have an equal say in the creation and enforcement of school rules.

  Watermark is an ongoing experiment in true democracy, where everyone—staff and students alike—shares in rights and responsibilities. Most famously, the whole school gathers once a week for Town Hall. Motions are proposed, grievances aired, and consequences meted out according to the standard of one person, one vote. At Town Hall, a child of six holds the same power and the same obligations as a teacher of thirty years’ experience. Thus, every Watermark citizen learns diplomacy, integrity, and fairness.

  An inset showed a grave young boy in a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt, cross-legged on a Persian rug, his hand aloft.

  I’d asked Cathie Myers: A boarding school?

  In a manner of speaking.

  I navigated to the photo galleries, looking for Jane Doe or a younger version of her. The pictures didn’t adhere to any organizational scheme; no dates, captions, or names.

  One gallery showed off the students’ handiwork. Shaker-style furniture, watercolors, ceramics. The images linked out to a store where you could buy these very items, each accompanied by a handwritten artist’s statement. Food for sale, too: sauerkraut, pickles, and jam. All profits went back to the school.

  I tried the FACULTY tab.

  No staff photos; no departmental rosters, just a general description of what sort of person taught at Watermark.

  For teachers accustomed to more traditional educational hierarchies, the experience of genuine equality with students can prove a challenge at first…

  A sublink to EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES informed the curious that none, at present, were available.

  Other than C. E. Buntley, I found only one other person named, the current principal, Camille Buntley. She wasn’t explicitly called out as C.E.’s daughter. No need, once you saw her photo. Both shared the same cake-wedge nose; the same rhomboid forehead like the broad front of a mansard roof. She posed against a tree trunk, noon sun pushing cubist shadows down her face and flattening an insurrection of hennaed curls.

  I clicked back, skimming the first few pages’ worth of Google search results.

  The elder Buntley had his own Wikipedia page, its contents lifted from the Watermark website.

  There were reviews from school ratings sites; the place consistently received five out of five stars.

  The online student creative writing journal, last updated in 2013.

  A piece in the Marin Independent Journal about Watermark’s fiftieth anniversary, in 2001, was pure puff.

  The rest of the results trailed off into iterative garbage, the internet doing what it does best: cannibalizing itself, then vomiting itself back out at ten times the volume.

  I called Nwodo.

  She said, “Interesting.” Her tone was hard to read.

  I said, “It’s about a two-hour drive out there. I don’t think my knee can handle it.”

  “You want me to drive you.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t want to come.”

  “No-go for the next day or so,” she said. “I caught a new one down Fruitvale.”

  “I saw that,” I said. Another shooting; property of C shift. “Tuesday, then.”

  “I didn’t think you worked Tuesdays.”

  “I don’t, technically.”

  “Didn’t think your office covered Marin, either.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Technically,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  A beat.

  She said, “I’ll pick you up.”

  * * *

  —

  FORENSIC IT HAD news for me regarding Jasmine Gomez’s cell. I went upstairs to talk to the tech.

  “First off,” he said, “you need to realize, this is a Samsung SPH-i500.”

  “Okay.”

  “From two thousand three.”

  He waited.

  I said, “Old.”

  “In phone years, ancient. To be honest I can’t understand why anyone would still be carrying it around, aside from sentimental value.”

  “Or they can’t afford a new one.”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “That too.”

  His name was Craig. He was fortyish, with a red goatee and one of those braided-leather belts.

  “Anyway,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “we don’t have a cable for it. And it’s not like I can go to, I dunno, RadioShack. I mean, these things are living at the bottom of a landfill. I had to get one off eBay. So that took a few days. I go to plug it in, it’s been switched off for so long that the battery won’t hold a charge. So now I have to get a new battery, too. Seller in Minsk. Expedited shipping.”

  He made these feats sound comparable to unearthing and translating the Rosetta Stone.

  “Great,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Here’s the thing,” he said.

  The thing is never a good thing.

  “The thing is,” he said, “it’s a, kind of a quirk, of this particular model, that when you swap out the battery, it wipes the user data.”

  I stared at him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So, I mean, you can appreciate why they stopped making that model.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I mean, talk about a design flaw.”

  “Everything’s gone,” I said.

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, I know how important this is to you.”

  “It’s not gone.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s gone. Yeah. But, it’s just not—I was able to use ZombieFile to recover some of it. Here’s the thing, though.”

  “Another thing.”

  “The thing is,” Craig said, “ZombieFile isn’t compatible with that OS. That OS is from two thousand three. In operating system years, that’s—”

  “Ancient.”

  “Prehistoric. They stopped issuing patches for it in two thousand nine. And it’s not like the developer who wrote ZombieFile had it in mind.”

  I said, “Is the data gone, or not?”

  He turned to his computer and clicked open a file.

  A pane of gibberish appeared.

  “So,” he said, “yeah.”

  He appeared to realize then that I was on crutches. “Did you want to, like, sit down?”

  * * *

  —

  ARMED WITH CATHIE Myers’s name, I managed to persuade Leah Horvuth not to hang up on me. She confirmed that she had attended Watermark; like her former friend and collaborator, she had been enrolled briefly, between the ages of eight and ten. I emailed her a scan of the credit card in her name along with
a photo of Jane Doe. She didn’t recognize either, though she discerned my purpose almost instantly.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  I said, “I’m going to ask you to delete both files, please, and empty the trash on your computer.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll—okay.”

  “Thank you. You mind doing it now, please?”

  “Okay…” Faint clicking; an electronic crinkle. “Okay, I did it.”

  “Thank you. As I told Ms. Myers, in our view, you don’t need to be concerned for your safety. Though you might want to run a credit check.”

  “I don’t understand,” Leah Horvuth said. “What’s this have to do with the school?”

  “We’re exploring various possibilities.”

  She exhaled. “She looks so young.”

  I said, “You did delete the photo.”

  “Yes, I—it’s just a—it’s upsetting, to…” She paused. “How is Cathie, by the way?”

  “She seemed fine,” I said.

  “I should call her,” she said. “I was sorry about the way we parted.”

  “I’m sure she’d appreciate that. One thing we didn’t discuss in detail was her time at Watermark. I got the impression it wasn’t totally positive for her.”

  “Well, it’s not for everyone, that’s for sure.”

  “Did something happen to her while she was there?”

  “Something inappropriate, you mean.”

  “If my victim was a student, anything I can learn would be helpful.”

  “I never had anything happen to me. If Cathie did, she never mentioned it. I suppose it’s possible. Ninety percent of the time, we were unsupervised. Anything’s possible,” she said, “when nobody’s watching.”

  Monday, January 7

  7:55 p.m.

  Five minutes prior to the start of the weekly support group for homeless trans youth, I clomped up the steps to The Harbor, leaning heavily on the handrail. Nobody answered my knock, and I peered through a leaded sidelight window at the gloomy parlor. The receptionist’s desk was unattended.