A Measure of Darkness

by Jonathan Kellerman

  I drew her attention to a paragraph on the ninth page of the Coroner’s narrative.

  I (Willis #543) interviewed Camille Buntley, principal of the school where decedent Sepp was enrolled. I inquired regarding ownership of the vehicle (CA lic. 9Z78354) driven by decedent Sepp. She advised that the vehicle belonged to the school and was available for general use.

  “Now look here.”

  I paged ahead to a section of the narrative added later, by a different coroner.

  I (Morawiecki #199) contacted the California Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a copy of the vehicle registration for the truck CA lic. 9Z78354. This was furnished to me (item 22). The registered owner of the vehicle is Donald Bierce of San Francisco, CA. I telephoned Bierce. Bierce advised that he was the registered owner of the vehicle and stated that the truck was used primarily by his son Zachary Bierce, a classmate of decedent Sepp’s at the Watermark School.

  Nwodo said, “That guy. The teacher with the beard.”

  I nodded. “It’s his truck Charlie’s driving. Camille lied. And when we were up at the school, Bierce lied to us about being a newbie. I made a remark that it must be different teaching here than at other schools. You remember what he said?”

  “He didn’t have a point of comparison.”

  “Right. Which is true.”

  “Because it’s the only school he’s ever been at.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Then he realizes what he’s said and tries to backtrack. He tells us it’s his first time teaching, he’s only been there a year. A guy who goes from student to faculty? He’s not going to mention that? These people have institutional pride. As a matter of fact, I’m a graduate, myself. Unless you don’t want us to know you were around back then.”

  “They’re close in age,” Nwodo said. “Bierce and Winnie.”

  “And Charlie Sepp. And Meredith Klaar. They’re classmates.”

  “If Watermark had real classes,” she said. “I understand Bierce distancing himself from Charlie. His car was used, his pal’s dead. What’s the connection to Winnie now?”

  I clicked my laptop to a new page and showed it to her.

  She said, “This reads like bad student poetry.”

  “That’s cause it is. It’s the Watermark creative writing journal. Third from the bottom.”

  She scrolled down. “ ‘The valley is my mother,’ ” she read. “ ‘My father, the stones.’ ”

  “Keep going.”

  “ ‘My sisters and brothers are animal bones.’ ”

  “See the author?”

  Nwodo said, “ ‘Chief Wyn.’ ”

  “Our victim kept a blog,” I said.

  It detailed—in photos, in words—Winnie Ozawa’s travels, thoughts, experiences. There were quiet periods and periods of frenzied writing; bursts of lucidity and incoherent, drug-addled screeds. She used her pen name, never her real name. The entries began shortly after her departure from Watermark, and they ended the previous November.

  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend Charlie who died six years ago this week. Normally I’m not the type of person who gives a shit about anniversaries but hey it’s been on my mind.

  A lot of people when someone dies they say that he or she didn’t deserve it but when it comes to Charlie it’s true. He was a really good person. I don’t say that lightly, I’ve met a lot of people and I know how bad people can be. Charlie was good inside. Not everybody understood that because he was very private, he didn’t like everyone to know what he was thinking.

  Teenagers die from cancer or another disease, people feel sad but they aren’t afraid. They get excited and organize a bike ride to raise money. Suicide is different. No one talks, it’s like the word is a curse. In my opinion that’s a shame because one of the best things you can do to help someone who wants to hurt themselves is to speak to them directly. I regret that I wasn’t able to do that for Charlie. I tried. I’m not making excuses for myself though.

  People still don’t know the truth about what happened. Even his parents don’t. That bothers me, they deserve to know. It’s taken me some time to admit this to myself. I was scared back then. Now that I’m older I can understand why it’s important for them to know the truth even if it’s painful. Not just his parents but everybody, maybe that way some good comes out of it. For example if someone out there is having the same feelings, they should realize they don’t have to feel alone like Charlie did. We have to bring it into the open otherwise there’s no way to learn and the same shitty mistakes can happen again.

  Whose fault is that?

  November 18, 2018 @ 3:49 a.m. by Chief Wyn 0 Comments

  CHAPTER 29

  Monday, April 8

  It was my turn to drive.

  Nwodo had coffee waiting. I didn’t need any; anticipation had sharpened my senses. She didn’t touch hers, either.

  Over the San Rafael Bridge, the sky arched smooth and delicate, like the rim of a china cup, the edges of the Bay tucked in tightly along the coast.

  We made good time. It helped that we’d been there before, knew what to look for.

  The Watermark School

  2.2 miles

  Nwodo said, “Go slow.”

  * * *

  —

  A DRY SPRING had baked the track, leaving hard, jarring ruts. The car lumbered, its weight slopping from side to side. Wildflowers tunneled up through the dirt, spots of purple and yellow, forget-me-nots, redwood sorrel, western bleeding heart. The blooms lurked in the mottled shadows along the side of the road, like escapees hoping to hitch a ride.

  Nwodo leaned forward, one palm braced against the dash, peering through the bars of tan light that spliced the canopy.

  Watching for small bodies at play.

  As we came through the tree line and the prow of the campus pushed into view, I was surprised to encounter a riot of noise and movement. For some reason I’d been expecting the stillness that had greeted us on our previous visit. But it was a beautiful day. The kids were out in full force to take advantage of it, kicking up a haze, mingling cries of delight and distress.

  Only in freedom will the child come to integrate both halves of the personality, the Shadow and the Light.

  In the air hung a tang of smoke; a charcoal thread drifted from the chimney in Camille’s office. Nwodo and I headed in the opposite direction, toward the classrooms.

  We found Zach Bierce sitting one-on-one with a boy of ten, who was reading aloud from The Lorax with difficulty, stammering the rhymes. Seeing us, the boy immediately stopped and shut the cover, glaring at the ground.

  “Mr. Bierce,” I said.

  Bierce frowned. He had on the same purple down vest, the same beige Dickies. His beard had grown out, its sharp edges ragged, as though he hadn’t moved from that spot in many months.

  He laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow, okay, Cyrus?”

  The boy bolted the room.

  Bierce waited until Cyrus had disappeared from view, then removed his glasses and began cleaning them on the corner of his shirt. “I don’t appreciate you barging in. He has it hard enough as is without feeling judged by strangers.”

  “Nobody’s judging him,” Nwodo said.

  “You’re strangers,” Bierce said.

  From a distance came the ringing of the forge, dull wallops from the woodshop, a drunkard’s rhythm.

  “Is there a good place to talk?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  Nwodo said, “Someplace more private.”

  Bierce worked his lips and replaced his glasses. With a grunt he raised himself up. He’d been sitting in a child-sized chair, and his joints cracked and popped as he reassumed adult stature.

  * * *

  —

 
THE SIX MEMBERS of the Watermark faculty occupied a squat house set behind the dining hall. You couldn’t accuse them of extravagance. Zach Bierce shared a bedroom with two other teachers. No closet. No television. Good housekeeping; everything tidy by necessity. Even so, an odor lingered, the brooding funk of captive male.

  There was one twin-sized bed along the wall and, perpendicular to it, two more stacked in a bunk, curling snapshots thumbtacked to the rails. Unfinished cube bookcase, white pine and bare screws. Chest of drawers in the same boxy style. A multicolor rag rug, trampled flat, covered scant floor space.

  Before entering, Bierce slipped off his shoes and asked us to do likewise.

  He plopped down on the open bed. There was nowhere for us to sit unless we wanted to fold ourselves into the bottom bunk. I positioned myself in front of the dresser, resting an elbow along the upper bedrail. Nwodo switched on her phone’s voice recorder and set it atop the bookcase.

  Zach Bierce said, “Is this going to take long? I have an afternoon meeting.”

  Nwodo began by telling him we had Meredith Klaar in custody. She lied and said Meredith had confessed to everything.

  I said Winnie Ozawa had male DNA under her fingernails, and that, in claiming to have started at the school only last year, we knew he was attempting to mislead us.

  We knew it was his truck Charlie Sepp had been driving when he died.

  We’d read Winnie’s blog, where she wrote that Charlie’s death was not an accident, but suicide, and that she intended to make that information public.

  We stopped, leaving the splintery walls to suck up the echo of our voices.

  Bierce cleaned his glasses again, checking the lenses for smudges. He was young, and handsome in a cozy, rumpled way, his brown eyes ringed with gold. Watermark’s very own resident poet-philosopher, rubbing his belly and dispensing life lessons.

  Girls giggling and whispering in his wake.

  Evoking, in a certain kind of woman, feelings of protectiveness.

  He put his glasses back on and gazed at us. “Where should we start?”

  “The party,” Nwodo said.

  “It might be better to start at the beginning?”

  A teacher. Posing a question. Expecting a certain answer.

  When he didn’t get it, he tried again.

  I said, “Tell us about Charlie.”

  Bierce could’ve walked away.

  Instead, he lectured.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE FRIENDS. Him, Charlie, Meredith, a few others around their age. They regarded themselves as the wise elders of Watermark. Not many kids made it all the way through to seventeen. The attrition rate during the early teens was high. Most couldn’t hack it. Freedom was easy at eight. An eight-year-old had little self-awareness.

  Then the shock of puberty ripped your moorings loose, forcing you to reckon with your own individuality.

  Easier to quit, retreat to conventional society, slip on a straitjacket. Find a nice, normal, expected form of rebellion to carry you through to adulthood. Then: shackle yourself to a job. Procreate. Watch TV. Climb, meek and numb, into your waiting grave.

  Watermark prepared you for a life extraordinary. It required a special kind of courage. Those that did manage to hang on until graduation were a special breed.

  They shared a powerful bond.

  Winnie had occupied the periphery, drifting in and out when it suited her. She was an exception—her own special case.

  For her, Watermark was the straitjacket.

  Zach was the oldest chronologically. That didn’t mean he was in charge. If we thought that then we didn’t understand the first thing about Watermark.

  It was a democracy. A real democracy, unlike the sham most people referred to when they used that word. Everyone had a say. Roles shifted. Alliances formed and dissolved. Feelings came and went. They were figuring it out. Instability was inherent to the process.

  You grew accustomed to autonomy. At first you wallowed in it. Then it became like oxygen. You didn’t know any other way to be. To have the outside world poke its snout in, gobbling at the core of your being, came as a rude awakening.

  Charlie Sepp was from San Diego. His parents were divorced. His father was a fashion photographer, a complete piece of shit who’d never shown a speck of interest in Charlie. His mother, a former model, had full custody. Over the summer, she’d gotten remarried. Her new husband had kids from a previous marriage who lived back east with their birth mother. Now the man wanted to move to New York City, so he could be present as they grew up. Not only did Charlie’s mother consent, she decided to drag Charlie along, as well: uprooting him in the middle of the academic year and tossing him into some preposterous Connecticut prep school.

  Everyone agreed that this was an act of pure selfishness. None of her justifications held up. She claimed, for instance, that she wanted Charlie to be a role model to his new step-siblings. But the prep school was hours from Manhattan; at most Charlie would come home one weekend a month. Anyway, if he ended up going to college, he’d be out of their lives soon enough. So that was bullshit. Also bullshit was her claim that she didn’t want to leave Charlie behind in California. As if she couldn’t afford a cross-country plane ticket. As if she ever came to visit him at Watermark.

  No. Her real purpose was to compensate for the stepfather’s control over her by asserting her own control over Charlie. Adults did that constantly—impose arbitrary rules to reassure themselves of their own power. They treated children as dumb extensions of parental will, and most of the time, they got away with it, because children were conditioned from birth to think of themselves as needy. Your time was not yours. Your physical safety was not yours. Your bodily functions occurred at the whim of another.

  The children of Watermark knew better.

  They knew, because they were living, breathing counterexamples. They had been awakened.

  Which made Charlie’s mother’s behavior even more wicked.

  Bad enough to keep a child locked in captivity. Far worse was removing the blindfold; letting him gape, dazzled, until he could finally see…then returning him to his cell and pretending like there was no sun and never had been. It was the most craven form of abuse. The sheer condescension: who did she think she was fooling? Once you’d felt freedom you couldn’t unfeel it.

  Charlie Sepp had a sense of self. He wouldn’t stand for it.

  His reaction was that of any rational being with dignity threatened with extinction.

  You go out on your own terms.

  I said, “Did he tell you what he intended to do?”

  Bierce nodded. “Of course.”

  “You didn’t try to talk him out of it?”

  “We talked about it, sure. We all did. We opened it up to the group for discussion.”

  Nwodo said, “Who’s the group?”

  Instead of answering, Bierce said, “Not everyone felt the same way. Some of us thought he was making a mistake. But our feelings weren’t Charlie’s. Our life situation at that point in time wasn’t Charlie’s.”

  I said, “Winnie—”

  “Was opposed. Vocally.”

  “She didn’t do anything to stop him, though.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Bierce’s smile implied the question was meaningless. “She was outvoted.”

  Nwodo said, “Was Camille part of it?”

  Bierce started. “No. No. Absolutely not. Camille knew nothing. She still doesn’t. To be quite honest I don’t think we trusted her right then. We couldn’t be sure whose side she was on. She hadn’t tried to persuade Charlie’s mother to change her mind.”

  “She took your side when the cops asked about the truck.”

  “Which I appreciate. But she did t
hat to protect me, the individual. And—before you start making assumptions, let’s be clear: I didn’t tell Charlie to use the truck. You think I wanted him to do that? That was my truck he destroyed. He took the keys without asking. If he had asked, I would’ve told him no way, figure it out on your own.”

  I said, “What did you expect him to do?”

  “We never got into specifics. It was in theory.”

  “You voted. That’s specific.”

  “We voted not to interfere,” Bierce said. “Ultimately the decision was Charlie’s.”

  Nwodo said, “He was sixteen.”

  “If he’d been six, the result would’ve been the same. His choice. His right.”

  Silence.

  “Look,” Bierce said, “I’m not necessarily saying I’d vote again the same way, today. But what happened, happened. Obviously no decision-making process is perfect. I could sit here and tell you we made a mistake. Who would that benefit?”

  “Not Charlie,” I said.

  I was poking at him, but Bierce seemed to take my words as an endorsement. He nodded. “Precisely. There was no clear and present benefit to Charlie, given his unique life circumstances. He wanted to make a statement about what Watermark meant to him. I didn’t dishonor that then, and I won’t now. I have a responsibility to my current students.”

  Nwodo’s jaw tightened, briefly, before she regained a noncommittal detective’s stance. “Was Charlie’s death the reason Winnie ran away?”

  “I assume that had something to do with it.”

  “Did you vote on whether she could go?”

  Bierce laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Rights of free passage are inviolable. Besides, Winnie didn’t ask for our permission. She did what she wanted. She always did.”

  “Who decided to deal with her, now? What was the vote count there?”

  Bierce looked at the far end of the bed. “That’s not how it occurred.”

  “You read her blog. She was going to talk.”