A Measure of Darkness

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Wrong,” Bierce said, as if correcting poor grammar. “I never saw the blog. I had no idea it existed until a second ago when you told me. Meredith called me. Winnie had showed up at her place, high on meth, ranting about how it’s wrong that Charlie’s parents don’t know. After she’d passed out on the couch, Meredith texted me, could I please talk some sense into her.”

  I said, “Why did Meredith come to you for help?”

  “It’s always like that. She has a panic attack, and I have to clean it up.”

  He sounded annoyed, but I could also see him puffing out, warming to his position of authority. “ ‘You need to talk to her, Zach. You need to talk to her.’ ” His imitation of Meredith Klaar—nasal, badgering—was regrettably accurate. “I said, ‘Forget about it, she’ll sleep it off.’ But Meredith wouldn’t let it go. And when Winnie woke up, she wouldn’t, either. That’s their dynamic. Meredith refuses to talk about things, which pisses Winnie off, and makes her talk about them more. ‘Silence is a form of consent,’ et cetera.”

  He fluffed his beard. “It was nonstop for weeks. That’s why I came down: so Meredith would stop pestering me already. If you think about it, she’s the one who created the problem. Winnie was sitting on it for years, there was no reason to assume she was being serious. Anyway, why would Charlie’s parents believe her? She’s a junkie. If Meredith could learn to relax, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Whatever. That’s how she is. I accept it.”

  Nice of you, oh great sage.

  “And honestly, the entire situation sucked, because on the whole I admire Winnie. I might disagree with her, but at least she had the courage of her convictions, which is more than I can say for Meredith.”

  “What would you say about her?” Nwodo asked.

  “She’s weak. She votes with whoever is going to win. Her interest was never Watermark, it was what might happen to her.”

  We let him sit there.

  He said, “Okay? Anything more?”

  Did he really think that we were done? That we would nod and smile and encourage him to resume the more pressing business of teaching?

  Nwodo said, “You came down for the party.”

  “Also Meredith’s idea. She thought the atmosphere would be more conducive than confronting Winnie in private and making her feel cornered. But the place was so loud we couldn’t talk. You can see how Meredith’s mind works, though. Pure avoidance tactic. I was waiting for the right moment to say Let’s leave, but she went ahead and preempted me. And, of course, Winnie was high and paranoid, so she lost her shit. She said she didn’t care, she was going to tell Charlie’s parents, going to talk to the press, write an article. Completely unhinged.”

  He glanced at us, hoping to find sympathy for his predicament. When we refused to give it to him, he went on. “I told her: ‘Stop making this about you. It’s bigger than one person. Think about the consequences for the school.’ I was attempting to do damage control.” He paused. “I suppose I could’ve framed it better.”

  Nwodo said, “What happened next?”

  Bierce shrugged. His moment of introspection—if that’s what it was—had passed. “It was Meredith hit her first, with the shovel.”

  Not him. Never him.

  “Then Winnie fell over, and Meredith ran. I can’t believe she did that to me. Well—I can. I should’ve expected it, from her. But, really? You’re the reason we’re in this mess and you bail? She took her car. I ended up having to call an Uber.”

  Shaking his head at the indignity.

  I asked Bierce why he felt compelled to keep going. Why couldn’t he have stopped, called an ambulance? For this he had no ready answer.

  Nwodo did: Bierce had intended to kill Winnie all along. “You said it yourself. She’s a loose cannon. You’re the one that stands to lose the most.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t know how you’re going to do it, but you know you have to.”

  “No, that’s wrong.”

  “No, Zach, it’s right,” Nwodo said. “You’re waiting for your chance. Then the fight breaks out and everyone’s distracted. Here it is. You go for it.”

  He removed his glasses and began polishing them.

  “Once you got started, though?” she said. “I think you liked it.”

  “You’re free to believe whatever you want,” Bierce said.

  He was shaking his head again, and smirking.

  I scanned the bookcase, lined with field guides and Nietzsche.

  Nwodo’s eyes had settled elsewhere, on the upper bedrail, along which ran the tacked snapshots. She nodded me toward the leftmost picture.

  A band of teenagers, arrayed in front of a fallen log.

  Crunched together with that mixture of self-consciousness and avidity that is the defining feature of adolescence.

  I recognized a younger Meredith Klaar, wearing a drab pageboy and looking startled by the camera flash. I recognized Charlie Sepp by his shock of platinum hair. Gawky, a mouth that couldn’t decide whether to grimace or grin.

  The young Zach Bierce, leaner, confident, clean-shaven, and strong-jawed.

  Winnie wasn’t present. Yet I felt her by her absence.

  A life extraordinary. According to Zachary Bierce, that was what Watermark prepared its children for.

  Charlie Sepp, dead.

  Winnie Ozawa, dead.

  Zach Bierce and Meredith Klaar: killers.

  I imagined them gathered in the woods, counting hands.

  All in favor.

  All opposed.

  There were two other teenagers in the photo.

  A girl with a frizzy mass of curls.

  A boy half a head shorter than the rest.

  Who’s in the group?

  Bierce saw what we were seeing and shoved his glasses back on. His features bunched as if against a frantic gust of wind.

  I untacked the photo.

  Bierce said, “You can’t do that.”

  I used my phone to take a photo of the photo. I showed it to Nwodo for approval, then tacked the original back up.

  Nwodo said, “It’s time to go, Zach.”

  Silence.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing,” Bierce said. “What this place means. The students who come here have nowhere. You’re ruining something beautiful.”

  “It was you who did that,” Nwodo said.

  Bierce sighed. We would never understand.

  He indicated the dresser, which I was blocking. “Mind if I get my coat?”

  Such a tiny room. Hard to believe three grown men could live there without losing their minds. I scooted sideways so that Bierce and I could exchange places. I wasn’t watching him. I was grinning at Nwodo, ready to start celebrating with her.

  Behind me a drawer opened with a wooden squeak.

  Nwodo leapt up, grabbing for her weapon. “Gun gun gun gun gun.”

  Looking back, I know I screwed up. I’d turned my back on him in the first place.

  I pivoted, too slowly. My right knee was still stiff.

  Zach Bierce had pivoted, too, to face us dead-on, the rising profile of a blued pistol silhouetted dimly against his torso.

  In my memory the ensuing seconds have an element of slapstick to them, Nwodo and I jostling against each other, skidding on the rag rug in our stockinged feet. You can all but hear a manic player piano.

  My hand is up. Through a strained bloodless V of thumb and forefinger, I see the luxuriant underbelly of Bierce’s jaw, the yielding flesh beside his Adam’s apple where he drives in the barrel.

  Then a missing frame.

  Whip-crack of the shot.

  The bullet traced a more or less vertical path, crossing slightly from front to back and slig
htly from right to left and exiting through the top of Bierce’s skull four inches behind the coronal suture. The crown of his head ruptured. A jammy starburst of gray matter and blood dashed the wallboards. Tumbling, malformed, the bullet continued along, embedding itself, along with chips of bone, up near the juncture of wall and ceiling.

  Backspatter stippled my palms and sleeves; my face and scalp ran warm and wet.

  Nwodo’s white blouse would never again be worn.

  Bierce collapsed and fell straight down, the base of his skull grazing the front edge of the dresser drawer and tipping his chin toward his chest. He landed in a compact pile with his legs tucked beneath him. His spine bowed and he folded in half, coming to rest with his forehead touching the rug, exposing the rictal obscenity of the exit wound, as though he’d somehow put his face on wrong, and was leering up at us inscrutably.

  CHAPTER 30

  Hours later, when long shadows merged and darkness stole over the valley, the campus of the Watermark School lay in repose. Behind the dormitory windows welled the occasional sob. The children had been shepherded inside, doors closed and curtains drawn.

  Camille Buntley hunched on a tree stump in the carnival light of ambulance flashers.

  What will happen?

  Over and over during our conversation she returned to that same question. I took it less as a call for information, more of an existential problem.

  If Watermark ceased to be, would she?

  I showed her the snapshot taken from Zachary Bierce’s room and asked her to identify the unknown girl and boy.

  She blinked at it stuporously. Began to mumble.

  They were two of her best teachers.

  She couldn’t afford to lose half her staff in a single day; the children couldn’t bear it.

  “I need their names, please,” Nwodo said.

  The boy was Myles Spencer. The girl was Shannon Swint.

  Camille regarded the photo. “I forgot how Shannon used to look before she shaved her head. She used to complain about how itchy it was.”

  I remembered the meeting hall, a woman with close-cropped hair, sprawled on her stomach, wiggling her toes like a sunbather.

  “Everyone’s changed,” Camille said.

  I disagreed. I wasn’t about to argue.

  3:09 a.m.

  Inching through the trees, I toggled the wipers to clear away a gauze of dust and pollen that had accumulated on the windshield.

  Nwodo had stretched out in the passenger seat, shutting her eyes. She didn’t have her seatbelt on, and I didn’t want to disturb her. When I had to brake suddenly, she pitched forward.

  If we’d been going any faster than five miles per hour it might’ve been serious. As it was, her elbow bashed into the glove box. She’d wake up the next day with an ugly bruise.

  She faced me, breathless, seething; turned to face the road ahead.

  The blond girl in the nightgown sat cross-legged in the dirt, picking at a scabby knee.

  Nwodo got out of the car and advanced. “Hey.”

  The girl didn’t respond. Nwodo grabbed her by the arm. “Hey.”

  The girl shrieked, squirming as Nwodo yanked her to her feet and hauled her close.

  “You little shit. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  I hurried to unbuckle my seatbelt.

  “You’re going to get hurt. You’re going to hurt someone else.”

  The girl was putting up a struggle, thrashing and letting out high-pitched noises. In the white blast of the headlamps her face glistened with tears. Nwodo continued to shake her and yell.

  If she did get killed it would be her fault. Was that what she wanted? Maybe it was, if she was that stupid. Whatever she thought she was proving, she was wrong. She wasn’t proving anything. She was just another idiot like the rest.

  “Delilah.” I got between them, prying at Nwodo’s fingers.

  With a moan the girl tore away from us and plunged into the void between the trees. Darkness snuffed the pallid flicker of her body. I could mark her receding path by the sound of twigs snapping, bare feet slashing through the grass.

  Nwodo stumbled over a root, cupping her mouth to scream.

  “Stay out of the fucking road.”

  The cords in her wrists stood taut. The musculature of her neck bulged. I waited for her rage to abate, listening to the fleeing girl’s dying footsteps, the ascendant forest nocturne.

  FOUR

  Aftermath

  CHAPTER 31

  My brother got married on a grim, gray Saturday afternoon in December, six months after the original planned date of Memorial Day.

  Several factors had conspired to cause the delay.

  First Andrea got into a fight with her stepmother, who wanted to wear a dress in a color of her own choosing. Somehow this disagreement morphed into a referendum on their entire relationship, including how Andrea treated her father, which by the way was disgusting, even though he would never say anything about it, but somebody had to, because it was disgusting.

  One could say that Andrea’s response lacked the nonjudgmental equanimity she strove for in her moment-to-moment life: she disinvited the both of them. Then Andrea’s younger half sister wrote an email chewing Andrea out about it, and Andrea disinvited her, too.

  The stepmother and half sister next went to Andrea’s biological mother, who—for some reason—attempted to intercede on behalf of her ex-husband and the woman who had supplanted her. By the end of that phone call, nobody from Andrea’s immediate family was coming, and the deposit for the restaurant was withdrawn. In the three weeks it took to reestablish peace, the desired date had been given away to another party.

  Next came the Great Gluten-Free Cake Debate, and a second venue change after the vegetarian option proved inadequate. Then there was Andrea’s dearly beloved college roommate, confusingly also named Andrea, who was due in September, but who ended up going into labor in July and spending the next several months trapped with the baby in the NICU, unable to leave Denver. For my suggestion that they have her participate over Skype, I was rewarded with a frosty request to mind my own business.

  There was the argument over who should officiate. All four of Andrea’s parents agreed that it should be a minister. Andrea didn’t want a religious ceremony. She wanted a mindful one. Although my parents didn’t care one way or the other, they sided with Andrea, because they wanted to be supportive of their future daughter-in-law, a gesture that led to Andrea’s stepmother referring to my mother as a “loony tunes bitch” in an email that she accidentally CC’d to Luke.

  I was spared most of these gory details. Amy served as the primary conduit for information. Whenever the train had again jumped the rails, my mom would call her up to cry. After performing thirty minutes of free therapy, Amy would hang up and summarize for me: Back on or Back off, depending.

  To which I would encourage Amy to look on the bright side: for the rest of our lives, she would be known as the Good Daughter-in-Law.

  To which she would reply either All part of my master plan or Not worth it, depending on her mood.

  In the end it felt nothing short of miraculous that the wedding came off, let alone that calendar year.

  The ceremony took place at the Salinas Vipassana Center for Human Insight and Planetary Harmony, a brown adobe box whose main meditation hall offered a panoramic view of lettuce fields. The bridesmaids wore saffron. Luke and I sported matching saffron ties. My mother wept. The officiant was a woman who held a master’s in divinity from the Graduate Theological Union at UC Berkeley as well as a Certificate in Soto Zen Buddhist Studies. Amy had found her on Craigslist.

  * * *

  —

  IN OTHER WAYS, it had been a busy summer, followed by a busy fall.

  Informed of Zachary Bierce’s death, and faced with the audio recording
of his confession, in which he freely advertised his contempt for her, Meredith Klaar changed her story.

  No longer was she a free and independent actor. Now she was a victim, forced under threat of retribution to go along with Bierce and the others. It was their idea, Meredith declared. Finally—finally—she felt ready to tell the truth. She volunteered to lay out the whole foul chain of events, starting with Charlie Sepp and leading up to the present day. She appeared genuinely taken aback when the DA brought her up on murder and conspiracy.

  But that’s not fair she said.

  A partial fingerprint taken from the handle of the shovel was found to be a match to Meredith Klaar’s right thumb.

  In light of the circumstances, the DA was also reexamining the accident that had killed Jasmine Gomez to see if it might be upgraded to vehicular homicide.

  * * *

  —

  FOR FAILING TO register as a sex offender, Lawrence Lee “Dickfish” Vinson received a ninety-day jail sentence.

  Shortly after he began serving, he requested a meeting with his court-appointed attorney, Dennis Lipper. Larry informed the lawyer that for the majority of 2018 he had been residing in a crawl space beneath an old mansion in West Oakland. He didn’t mind living there, despite the frequent loud parties; it was dry and relatively warm, and there was a convenient toolshed, from which he would occasionally borrow items for use. He liked to build things, radios and so forth.

  On the night of December 21, he was in the crawl space, working on a project, when he heard a disturbance taking place outside. It had to be a knock-down fight because he could hear the noise over the blasting music.

  Larry waited a little while, then opened the entrance panel and peered out between the cans. He witnessed a man, bent before the open shed doors. He could not state definitively what the man was doing, but it looked like he was shifting sacks of soil. The man closed the shed door, then placed a flowerpot in front of the doors, as if to pin them shut, before walking away.