A Measure of Darkness

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A Measure of Darkness Page 15

by Jonathan Kellerman


  I hobbled down off the porch and peered upward. The second-story windows were glossed black.

  I lifted my foot, shifting weight as I rechecked the tab of paper, wrinkled and soft from two weeks in my wallet. I had the correct time, the correct night. Maybe the group had been canceled, or hadn’t yet resumed following the holidays.

  To my left, a pair of figures approached, shouldering close together.

  Clad in ill-fitting clothes, toting colossal knapsacks, they had the stooped shuffling gait of people desperate to avoid attention. I watched them pivot off the sidewalk and disappear down the side of the building.

  I went over to look.

  A concrete footpath led through a gate, where a deck joined The Harbor to a second house, larger and set back from the street. Visually the two structures had little in common, making it easy to mistake them as unconnected.

  The shades of the second house were drawn, thin frames of canary-colored light leaking from a room on the top floor. At a west-facing entrance, I encountered a mechanical five-button lock.

  I rang the bell.

  Above me, the shade flapped back.

  Footsteps descended. The door cracked.

  “Can I help you.”

  The speaker was a trans woman, rawboned and olive-skinned and tall enough to look down at me. She assessed me with mistrust, hugging the inside edge of the door with her torso in case she needed to slam it.

  I said, “I’m here for the meeting.”

  She said nothing.

  I offered her the torn flyer tab as evidence of my sincerity. She didn’t take it.

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  “I spoke to Greer,” I said.

  True enough. I had spoken to her.

  “Wait here.”

  Five minutes passed, ten.

  I rang again, then began knocking. Not loudly, but persistently.

  From behind me came the squeal of the gate.

  Greer Unger stepped onto the deck and planted herself on an islet of starlight.

  “This is private property,” she said. “You need to leave.”

  “I thought your groups were open to the public.”

  “You’re not the public.”

  “Did you speak to your colleagues?”

  “What?”

  “You said you needed to speak to them before you could talk to me.”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “It’s been two weeks,” I said. “I’ve been calling you.”

  “Maybe take a hint.”

  I hadn’t heard a car pull up. I glanced around. “You live close by?”

  “That’s none of your business. Now please go.”

  “I’ve been able to get a general sense of where Jasmine’s from.”

  “Great. Then you don’t need me.”

  “It’s not enough to find her family. I’m telling you, because I want you to understand that I’ve tried to do this without asking you to violate your obligations.”

  “Ask me or don’t. I have no intention of complying.”

  “I get that you have your duties. One of mine is to take custody of Jasmine’s property. I don’t know if she was living here or what, but if I have reason to suspect that you’re holding back items that belong to her, I can get a court order. I can—hang on. Hang on. I’m not saying I’m going to do that. I’m saying we—you and I—are on the same side here. We’re trying to do what’s best for Jasmine. We may disagree about how to get there. I believe you when you tell me you’re concerned for her privacy. I’m asking you to consider her dignity, too.”

  “Privacy,” she said, “is one hundred percent non-negotiable.”

  Her gaze had strayed, and I became aware that the door to the second building was ajar, the tall trans woman leaning out, other figures lurking behind her, watching and listening.

  Greer Unger raised her voice. “Safety is non-negotiable. Now I’m asking you, once and for all, to get the fuck out of here. Or, yeah, I’ll call the cops, and I don’t care how ‘funny’ you might think that is.”

  I said, “Have a good night.”

  Greer Unger wasn’t done with me. She followed me as I limped down the footpath to the sidewalk. I started toward my car, and she continued to follow me.

  “Chrissake,” I said, “I’m going.”

  She said, “Twenty-five-oh-five Dana. Drive there. Take the long way.”

  * * *

  —

  TWENTY-FIVE-OH-FIVE DANA WAS around the block. Heeding her instructions, I went past, to Ellsworth, and came back up Dwight, arriving to find her waiting for me out front.

  She lived in a third-floor walk-up. We took the steps at a glacial pace.

  I said, “That was for show, back there?”

  “I meant every word. I’m not doing this for you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I’m glad it’s fine,” she said.

  I sighed. Two more flights to go.

  The place was in many respects a twin to her office, albeit a couple degrees more intense. Tapestries bedecked the walls, interspersed with left-wing iconography. Hard to miss the poster that read SAVE A PIG, EAT A COP.

  An ornate oaken hutch huddled in the corner. With its curlicues and scrolls, it looked out of place and vaguely ashamed, like a waiter at an orgy. Glassware and crockery occupied half the cabinetry; the other half had been given over to books.

  On the table, dinner for one, rice and beans, rusting over.

  “Must be nice,” I said, “being able to walk to work.”

  “Sit down,” she said, waving at a spavined sofa and heading for the bedroom.

  I limped to the hutch. More books lined its counter, wrinkled paperbacks on gender theory, paperback erotic fiction, some newer-looking fantasy novels.

  Greer Unger came back clutching a grungy hiking backpack in both arms. She stopped and shot me an icy look.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m always interested in what people read.”

  She left the backpack against the arm of the sofa and took a seat at the dining table, mashing at the food in an attempt to revive her appetite.

  I eased onto the sofa, put on gloves, and tugged open the backpack.

  Topmost was a quarter-full packet of white faux feathers, identical to those Jasmine had used to make her angel’s wings.

  Greer Unger said, “I had a friend build the frame.”

  “I saw the video. Pretty amazing.”

  A tiny smile. Fondness at the memory. Or contempt for me.

  I asked Greer if she’d been at the party.

  She shook her head. “I was getting over a cold.”

  Setting the feathers on the floor, I began excavating the backpack, a layer at a time. Socks. Padded bras. Panties, rolled into candles; compression shorts.

  “I wasn’t lying,” Greer said. “I don’t know the first thing about her family. She made a clean break.”

  I nodded.

  “Who’d you speak to,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “You said you figured out where she’s from.”

  “Didi Flynn told me.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know her.”

  “I do.”

  She didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. In our phone conversation, Didi had denied knowing Greer. I’d interpreted that as an attempt to run interference, but now I wondered if other emotions were in play—rivalry, for instance.

  “How long was Jasmine staying with you?” I asked.

  “Just a few weeks. The guy she was living with kicked her out.” She took in a forkful. “Par for the course.”

  “You think he’d be able to help me find her parents?”
/>
  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “You know his name?”

  “Adam? Aaron? Something like that. I think he’s a truck driver, or a bus driver. He was abusive. Jasmine told me he once pointed a shotgun at her.”

  I recalled Greer’s immediate reaction to the news of Jasmine’s death.

  Was she killed?

  “So, yeah,” Greer said. “I don’t think she was bringing him home for Thanksgiving.”

  I’d emptied most of the bag to reach the lowest stratum. Money. Bottle of prescription painkillers. Widening the drawstring mouth, I peered inside.

  Not a totally clean break.

  Pressed flat against the nylon sidewall was a sandwich bag containing snapshots.

  I took out the bag and held it up.

  Greer reacted with surprise, putting down her fork and coming over.

  Jasmine, circa twelve, in a red satin ball gown and a golden wig. She hadn’t yet perfected her feminine self: nascent puberty had given her a fleecy mustache, and her chest was sunken. She laughed, waving a wand in the direction of the camera. Indoor shot, blast of flash. I studied the background for distinguishing details. Nothing.

  Next: a photo booth strip, snipped in half, leaving two frames of Jasmine and a young girl. Mid-teens. Jasmine had begun to shave. She had begun to grow her hair out. She had discovered eyeliner. They both had. They made kissy faces. No way to identify the second girl.

  Next: Jasmine, not as Jasmine, but as Kevin. Boxy jeans. Shapeless T-shirt. No makeup. Aside from the long hair, she read as masculine. Actually, context rendered the long hair masculine, too—bringing out bone structure, calling attention to the breadth of the shoulders.

  Beside him, three or four years older, a young man in a khaki Marine Corps service uniform.

  They stood close together, grinning.

  Brothers.

  At one point, at least, they loved each other.

  And now?

  They made her life hell.

  I asked Greer if she knew either the girl from the photo strip or the Marine.

  She shook her head.

  “Did he mention having a brother?”

  “No. She didn’t.”

  I didn’t bother to correct myself. She was never going to like me.

  I unfolded the last item in the sandwich bag, a piece of high-gloss paper, ragged at one edge. A yearbook page, decorated with inside jokes, wishes for a good summer, appeals to keep in touch. To Kevin Gomez’s senior portrait someone—perhaps Kevin himself—had added gigantic breasts in purple ink.

  Of greater interest to me were the names of his classmates.

  Data points.

  I repacked the bag. When I stood up to heft it, I nearly tipped over.

  “God,” Greer said. She’d grabbed my sleeve instinctively. Now she withdrew, as if she had touched something unclean and could still feel its webby residue. “Give it here.”

  She threw the bag on her back and we left the apartment.

  On the landing I paused to adjust my crutch. “I appreciate the help.”

  She said, “Would you really have gotten a court order?”

  “I don’t know. Would you really have called the cops?”

  Greer Unger burst into laughter.

  CHAPTER 17

  Tuesday, January 8

  5:58 a.m.

  A silver BMW coupe slowed outside my building, and I stepped from the lobby into a chill, clinging mist. Delilah Nwodo leaned to push wide the passenger door. “You okay?”

  “All good.” I pressed on the little bar to urge the seat back; it complied unhurriedly, with a smug hum. Unzipping my fleece, I slotted the crutch in the backseat and stretched out on the heated leather.

  In the cup holders were two gas-station coffees. “Bless you,” I said.

  The car glided north along 580, the radio murmuring Top 40. A viscid gray dawn climbed over the hills. On the San Rafael Bridge, the wet air ripened into rain, and we reached the Marin Peninsula under a full-blown downpour. The blocks of San Quentin Prison squatted between damp humps of dun and mustard, a square jaw confronting the Bay. I’d never been inside. Not for work. Luke had served his time down south.

  Nwodo noticed me staring. “Million-dollar view,” she said.

  “Rent-controlled,” I said.

  “All your friends live nearby.”

  “I smell an opportunity.”

  “Somebody call Zillow,” she said.

  Two routes took us where we needed to go, up through Petaluma, or out toward Point Reyes. Nwodo opted for the latter, and we pushed coastward through a briny slime.

  Bay Area folk are jealous of their territory, the rich buffet of color and texture packed into its confines. Today gave few reasons to brag. A dank duochrome prevailed, matte silver and green-black, curled fog strangling the pines. Nwodo seemed to enjoy driving. Her smooth hands worked the wheel with ease, taking one hairpin after another, under the sporadic flare of opposing headlights: commuters, sleep-addled, bound for San Francisco. We startled them; they weren’t used to anyone coming their way; they jerked their wheels, ducking the center stripe.

  Before we retreated inland, I caught, through two blades of stone, the briefest glimpse of the ocean. Kamikaze whitecaps, jagged gray shelves in languid collision, warfare incessant and soundless through the glass, until the abrupt contours of the land drew a curtain.

  Misnamed, the Pacific.

  I pressed myself down into the seat, rubbing the humid, pebbled leather, seeking the substrate beneath me. Even as we plunged into the valley, a green, corrugated womb, I could feel the sea shouting behind us, drunk, dissatisfied, swinging its fists and demanding a sacrifice. In my nostrils lingered a primal stink, of iodine, and blood; of life forever putrefying, waking only to die again.

  Approaching the northern edge of the county, where Marin bled into Sonoma, the road cast off a spur, then another, contracting to a pitted fire route that dropped between slabs of bedrock and moss. Signs of civilization grew fewer and farther between; redwoods rose up like a broken bower. GPS showed the campus as a scarlet balloon drifting over a lake of pale green, until the system gave up on us at last, its computerized voice falling silent as though chastened.

  A weatherworn sign appeared on the shoulder.

  The Watermark School

  2.2 miles

  Nwodo eased off the asphalt and into the trees.

  The car bounced over stones and furrows, through mud and puddles, slewing in melting vehicle tracks. The rain had stopped. Scant light penetrated the upper canopy, only to tangle in Spanish moss.

  A landscape of negative space, wraithed and unfathomable. Nostalgic appeal for Buntley, the Englishman? Any minute now I expected a swarm of giggling wood nymphs to dart out, bewitching us, sowing mischief, grafting animal heads onto our bodies.

  I cracked my window, taking in the mingled scent of leaf rot and living pine. I thought I could still smell the sea, too, and its indelible violence.

  “Shit.”

  My heel slammed into the footwell; pain flared up my leg. Nwodo had stomped the brake and was hunched over the steering wheel, wheezing through parted lips.

  In the middle of the road was a young girl.

  Ten years old, towheaded and bony, she crouched down, the hem of her white nightgown slopping in the muck. Only the poor driving conditions and color of the fabric had saved her from being struck. As it was, not more than three or four yards separated the BMW’s bumper from her frail, folded body.

  Whatever she had been doing—examining an insect, scrawling with a stick—she stopped now and gazed back at us with a lacerating directness. She stood, opening her arms, as if to claim ownership of the world. Light shone through the thin gown. Naked beneath.

/>   She turned and fled barefoot into the glare.

  My heart was racing, my knee aflame. Through the open window I could hear the tick and drip of the forest. “Jesus.”

  Muttering, Nwodo released the brake.

  We rolled forward.

  A gap opened in the trees, delivering us into a muddy turnabout, beyond which sprawled the trough of the valley, clear-cut and open to the sky. Strewn along its length was a series of short clapboard structures. Their colors had faded to varying degrees under the cyclical beating of sun and moisture. Most had been outfitted with rooftop solar panels; one sprouted a satellite dish. Blocky wooden signposts indicated the way to the music room, sport court, kitchen, dining room, garden—destinations accessible via wending paths of mismatched brick and stone.

  We parked the car and got out amid a cottony stillness.

  The girl in the nightgown had vanished.

  No signs of any children.

  Of anyone.

  Nwodo said, “They’re not back from break yet?”

  A rebuke. You dragged me out here for what?

  Tire marks crisscrossed the clearing. Students recently dropped off. “The answering machine said yesterday.”

  A flash of blond caught our eyes.

  Nwodo and I followed.

  The girl stayed just ahead of us, a suggestion of movement, a trail of muddy footprints on the pavers. Past the dormitories; past the kiln.

  Not much thought had been given to master planning. The layout felt alternately claustrophobic and yawning, weeds surging unchecked to exploit the vacuum. I humped along, perspiring inside my fleece, fingers grazing the ax-bitten surface of a chopping block as we sidestepped a listing eight-foot stack of firewood, carelessly tarped.

  Before us lay a long, low structure with a curved top: a Quonset hut, painted zinc white and hugging the ground, like some enormous surfacing earthworm.

  Above the entrance hung a sheet metal sign with raised lettering.

  MEETING HALL

  The footprints ended at the double doors.

  From inside came a woman’s voice.

 

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