A Measure of Darkness

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Why don’t you believe me,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess you just don’t seem like the type.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Well, so tell me.”

  “I am telling you.”

  I said, “Let’s go back a second.”

  “No. No. I don’t want to go back. I don’t know what it is you want me to say. I’m telling you I don’t remember. Who cares? She’s dead because of me.”

  “Without a clear sense of what you did and did not do—”

  “I killed her. What’s unclear about that? This is—I don’t know what it is. It’s crazy. I’m making this easy for you. How often do you get someone coming in saying ‘I did it’?”

  “Generally they can provide corroborating information.”

  “I am.”

  “About everything except the main part.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Silence.

  It was after one in the morning.

  Time for another risky bet.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to drive you home. You sleep on it, and we can try again tomorrow.”

  I rose. Meredith didn’t.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said.

  I felt so punchy, I nearly laughed. “Okay.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I will not leave.”

  “I’ve heard what you have to say. There’s no reason—”

  “Arrest me.”

  This was one of the stranger conversations I’d ever had. “You want me to put you in handcuffs and take you to a cell.”

  “Why else am I here?”

  I began gathering up my documents and photographs. “Sure, I’ll arrest you.”

  “Then do it.”

  “When I’m ready.”

  She stared at me with utter contempt. “I have to, like, buy you dinner first?”

  I rapped the table. “Come on. Time to go home.”

  She gripped the chair, as if to anchor herself.

  I left her there and went to ask for help. The pickings were meager. Graveyard shift, squad room lights doused, a single deputy chicken-pecking while his radio babbled prophecy.

  I knocked on the shift commander’s door. He put down his fidget spinner. I explained the situation to him. He made me explain twice more. Still confused, he walked with me over to the viewing room.

  On the monitor, Meredith sat upright, jogging her leg, her hair tucked behind her ears. She looked like she was waiting for the results of a medical test.

  “She’s begging you to arrest her and you’re telling her no?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He nodded contemplatively. “You’re Vitti’s guy.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

  “You managed to bring her in,” he said, walking away. “I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure out how to get her to leave.”

  I said, “Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

  * * *

  —

  ALL INTERVIEW ROOMS are the same.

  There are white or gray walls, thin polyester carpeting, shaded dark to hide stains. Sticky scuffed table. Folding chairs, or tubular chairs, purchased in bulk by County Procurement. You might imagine that the table and chairs are bolted down. They are at the jail. Everything in jail is bolted down, because everything is a weapon. No such care extends to your average station room. Detectives like to move things around, change the layout to their psychological advantage.

  What TV gets wrong is the lighting. No matter how good a show is, no matter how edgy the dialogue or gritty the backdrop, the interview scenes invariably take place under two isolating spots, one each for cop and subject, the background gradating into shadow. I understand why they do it—more dramatic—but it gets under my skin. Never have I seen an interview room that was anything less than blindingly bright.

  I went down the hall to the room where Meredith Klaar was keeping her petulant vigil, pausing before I entered to change the wall slider from IN USE to VACANT.

  I unlocked the door and stepped inside. “Time to go.”

  Under that bright and unremitting light, I saw it coming: the glossy flash of bruise-blue hair, chipped nails and bared teeth.

  A silver tracery as she swung a chair at my head.

  I ducked.

  This was a reflex, and a lousy one at that. She was aiming for the head of an average man, who’s five-foot-nine. Dropping six inches brought me right into the line of fire.

  The leg caught me on the temple, staggering me sideways. Meredith lost her grip, and the chair flew into the wall, barely missing the thermostat panel, which concealed one of the CCTV camera lenses.

  She fell, jackknifing over the table, then sprang back, assuming a Karate Kid–style fighting position. She looked ludicrous. But ludicrous can still scratch and bite.

  I rounded on her, palms up.

  De-escalate. Stop this before it got any further out of hand.

  “Listen,” I said.

  She leapt at me. I grabbed her wrists, swung her around, slammed her into the wall.

  “Calm down. Meredith.”

  She thrashed, pumping her legs, trying to knee me in the nuts.

  “Backup,” I yelled. Her wrists were so slender that I was able to grip both in one hand, freeing up my other arm to pin her across the throat. “Room five.”

  She spit in my face.

  “Backup. Now.”

  Footsteps.

  The chicken-pecking deputy barreled through the open doorway. “Aw shit.”

  He jumped in to grab her legs, and we wrestled her down to the ground.

  “My mistake,” I said, cuffing her. “I guess you are the type.”

  The side of her face was crushed against the smelly carpeting, giving her fish lips. But through that, I could see her smiling.

  She’d gotten her way.

  CHAPTER 28

  As soon as a new form of communication arises, people will find a way to use it to embarrass themselves. Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.

  I suppose the same held true with the arrival of the camera, the telegraph, the telephone. But I have to believe that the computer age will have us suffering all out of proportion, far beyond any statute of limitation.

  You can burn paper. You can hang up a phone. A compromising Facebook post, hasty tweet, or indiscreet selfie? They’ll haunt you forever, because nothing digital ever dies.

  The best you can do is smother it and pray.

  Hence the booming business known euphemistically as online reputation management. Flood the web with redundant sites. Cross-link them. Post bogus reviews. Send bogus lawyer letters and removal requests. Tweak the algorithm, pushing unfavorable content farther and farther down the list, and filling the top spots with applause.

  Google has conditioned us to accept that whatever comes up first is what we actually need: instant gratification as a proxy for truth. Who bothers browsing beyond the tenth page of search results? Let alone the fortieth.

  I hadn’t.

  When you searched for “Watermark School,” the first hit returned was the school’s homepage. The second was the Wikipedia entry on C. E. Buntley. The third was the warm-’n’-fuzzy article celebrating Watermark’s golden anniversary, in 2001. There was the student creative writing journal, and the multitude of ratings sites that awarded the school five stars.

  Then a hundred miles of internet gobbledygook.

  I remembered the invoices piled on Camille Buntley’s desk.

  We-B-Klean.

  Their site featured the same vacuum-cleaner/race-car logo.

  Their corporate mission statement:

  Protecting Your Good Name in Cyberspace

  They we
re based out of Latvia. Basic management packages began at three thousand dollars per month, but could be tailored to fit the client’s needs.

  They, too, had received nothing but five-star reviews.

  * * *

  —

  IF YOU LOOKED, as I had, for “Watermark School,” you got the impression that everything was fine and dandy.

  Likewise when you typed in Camille Buntley’s name or her father’s or any of the top ten most predictable search terms—including “Winnie Ozawa.”

  We-B-Klean was concerned with traffic coming through the front door.

  For all their raves, they’d forgotten about side doors. Or they deemed those doors not worth worrying about. Or they hadn’t been paid enough to close them.

  Side doors such as “Meredith Klaar,” for example.

  It came up as the seventeenth hit, after her numerous social media profiles.

  Struggling to find a place

  For many children unhappy in conventional settings, the Watermark School has served as a haven. But can it survive in a changing world?

  February 21, 2009

  Meredith Klaar has never enjoyed school.

  “I hated it,” Klaar, 13, says, of her previous school, located in her hometown of Somerville, Massachussetts. “Everything was so programmed. The people were programmed, too. It’s not like that here.”

  The “here” Klaar refers to is the Watermark School, a private educational institution for ages six through seventeen, located in a remote valley at the northwestern edge of Marin County…

  Like the article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, this one appeared in the Marin Independent Journal. But the tone of the coverage had soured in the intervening eight years.

  The Buntley approach, always controversial, had begun to appear obsolete in a high-speed, highly competitive culture. Hands-off had given way to helicopter parenting, free play to Mandarin lessons and coding club. Watermark’s failure to adapt, the piece suggested, had had material consequences: in recent years the student body had shrunk by more than 50 percent, giving rise to a chronic shortage of funds.

  Camille Buntley’s response was, in effect, to shrug. Since its inception, she said, Watermark had faced naysayers, busybodies who would force upon others a single model of education. Parents who wanted robot children were not the parents they aimed to reach. She pointed out that the school’s track record for college placement remained excellent—on par with other top private schools. Several recent graduates had gone on to the Ivy League.

  Far more meaningful to her, however, was knowing that those students who had not gone on to college had done so of their own volition. She challenged the assumption that a bachelor’s degree was the be-all and end-all of a young person’s life.

  Certainly not when it comes to personal happiness she said.

  Nor were financial straits anything new. Her father had plowed his life savings into buying the land. He’d operated on a shoestring budget and spent much of his tenure fighting off creditors.

  The beauty of Watermark Camille said is that its success does not depend on fancy equipment or expensive facilities. It springs, rather, from the fertility of the child’s own mind.

  A few bills did not trouble her. They had yet to complete their annual fundraising drive. Last year they’d had enough left over to buy a new kiln. Without fail, their families and alumni came through.

  To understand their devotion, she said, all you had to do was speak to the children. Ask how they felt.

  For her part, Meredith Klaar wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “This is more than a school to me,” she says. “It’s my home.”

  On balance, the piece was unflattering, but not damning. The portrait it sketched was one of gradual decline, rather than a downward spiral. It would hardly seem to merit the expense and hassle of an internet scrubber. To the contrary: I detected a gleeful note in Camille’s stubbornness. Suffering fools had become the Watermark way, overcoming persecution a mark of pride.

  Yet the link to the article appeared nowhere in the first four hundred Google results, at least not in response to conventional search strings. Suggesting that she—or someone—had paid to have it suppressed.

  I began trawling the paper’s online archive.

  In short order I’d reached the marrow: a dozen other headlines, detailing a protracted conflict between Watermark and local authorities. Notably, none of the links returned with a standard search.

  September 2008: School fined $5,000 for improper electrical line

  March 2009: County investigates allegations of hazardous materials

  Some of these skirmishes were substantial.

  May 2009: Measles outbreak sends two to hospital

  Others felt like much ado about nothing.

  February 2010: Student veggie stand dinged for missing vendor license

  You could chart the rising friction on a graph, a line peaking in October 2010.

  HHS wants school shut down

  Citing numerous safety and public health code violations, Marin Health and Human Services yesterday submitted to the County Board of Supervisors a letter requesting the temporary closure of the Watermark School…

  Reasons for the closure included rodents in the kitchen and structural problems with the Quonset hut. I saw those as pretexts—final straws. Camille had spoken out against the establishment one too many times, for too long failed to pay her fines. The matter had also been referred to the California Association of Independent Schools, which planned to open its own investigation.

  This is not the first time Watermark has come under the microscope. In 2005, Children and Family Services responded to complaints of child endangerment, after a seven-year-old student was found wandering the highway, several miles from the campus…

  That charge had been overturned on appeal.

  Still. It was a bad look.

  By the opening of academic year 2011, the situation had improved, enough so that Watermark had regained its accreditation on a probationary basis. A settlement was reached for the outstanding fines, and the county agreed to back off.

  For a while, things went quiet.

  Then:

  Coroner rules boy’s death an accident

  December 21, 2012

  A single-car crash that took the life of a sixteen-year-old student at the Watermark School last month has been ruled an accident, the Marin County coroner said in a statement Wednesday.

  The boy’s name was Charlie Sepp. He was described as quiet and well liked, known around campus in his capacity as manager of the woodshop. An inset photo showed a young man with a lopsided smile and floppy white-blond hair, settled amid a tangle of disembodied limbs.

  According to the article, Watermark kept an old Ford F-150 that licensed students were permitted to use, provided their parents had signed a waiver. It wasn’t uncommon for Charlie to drive into town to purchase lumber or other supplies from the hardware store.

  The week before Thanksgiving, 2012, he helped himself to the keys.

  The next day, the driver of a FedEx van called 911 to report a vehicle off the road, its front end buried in the trunk of a redwood. Without a seatbelt, Charlie Sepp had gone through the windshield.

  When you searched for his name, the link came up as the two thousand two hundred thirty-ninth hit.

  Saturday, April 6

  5:55 p.m.

  Nwodo landed on a Friday afternoon and went home to sleep. The following evening we convened at my apartment, where I’d commandeered the kitchen table to lay out my dossier: laptop, notes from my interview with Meredith, inch-thick stack of printouts.

  She said, “I leave you alone for one week.”

  I made a sucking sound: Barnacle.

  We reviewed the newspaper articles.

  “You can see why C
amille’s afraid,” I said. “They’ve just pulled through a rough patch. They’re getting back on their feet and a kid dies.”

  “It could bring everything crashing back down.”

  “So she buries it. Soup to nuts.”

  “You have to admit, it worked,” Nwodo said. “They’re still around.”

  “True. There’s nothing illegal about what she’s doing. She’s protecting her school.”

  “And herself.”

  “Feels skeezy, though.”

  “One hundred percent.”

  I said, “What I do find unusual is the radio silence from Charlie Sepp’s parents. I’m them, I’m suing the shit out of Watermark. I checked. Nothing in the news, no court filings.”

  “Even if they signed a waiver,” she said, “how often do those hold up?”

  “There are a million lawyers out there who’d be happy to take a run in civil court. Worst-case scenario, sue and settle.”

  She said, “They’re rationalizing. Charlie knew how to drive. Accidents happen.”

  “Okay. Now ask yourself how they react if it wasn’t an accident.”

  Nwodo looked at me.

  I said, “I had Coroner’s in Marin send me a copy of the report. He drove straight off the road. No skid marks. Far from conclusive, but you have to wonder. A lot of single-car crashes are suicides. I’ve heard numbers as high as thirty percent. We get faced with it all the time, and we rarely know for sure. You don’t have access to the main variable, which is the decedent’s state of mind.”

  “What was Charlie’s state of mind?”

  “Parents and friends describe him as a normal teenager, but people will do anything to avoid a suicide tag. ‘Could I have prevented it? What did I do to make his life so unbearable? Is there some genetic time bomb, ticking away inside me?’ Without strong evidence, I go with accident. Reading between the lines, that’s what Marin did.”

  “So what’s the issue?”