The Shards, page 27
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WHEN IT WAS NOTED IN THE ATTENDANCE records that Matt hadn’t been at Buckley for the past two days, Dr. Croft’s secretary called the Kellner residence in Encino and wanted to know when Matt was coming back to school, and Matt’s parents, Ronald and Sheila, neither of whom I’d ever seen, let alone met, were unaware of Matt’s absence. And I knew why: Matt was more autonomous than any of our classmates, the only one living by himself in a pool house with its own garage in the back of the massive property on Haskell Avenue. At this point in his adolescence Matt was rarely watched over by his parents anymore—in fact I’d never heard Matt mention either one of them and had no idea what his father did for a living. The reason that Ron and Sheila Kellner didn’t know that Matt hadn’t been to school for two days was precisely that he’d often be completely out of their sight, and sometimes a week would pass without either of them glimpsing their son. What this dynamic suggested was perhaps a more extreme example of what many of us experienced as teenagers in the late 1970s and into the next decade, whereby not engaging with your parents for days on end didn’t seem particularly weird or abnormal—my parents, for example, were absent for more than two months on a European cruise throughout the autumn of 1981, when I was seventeen, and neither they nor I had any issues or trepidation about this whatsoever.
One of the reasons Matt Kellner was given such particular leeway was that his GPA was okay, his SAT scores were serviceable (and weren’t going to get any better—he wasn’t going to retake them, unlike me in late October) and he never got into trouble—Matt was just an avid purchaser of marijuana who looked old enough to buy his own beer illegally and never got carded at any of the liquor stores he frequented along Ventura Boulevard. In fact no Buckley kid had ever gotten into any real trouble during those years and I could count on one hand the number of physical altercations between the boys in our class starting from seventh grade onward—I couldn’t even remember the last time two guys in our class got into an actual argument; this just didn’t happen at Buckley, the atmosphere was too controlling to allow it, everything was too constrained. I may have been impressed that Matt never got busted for buying—and smoking—as much weed as he did but, then, everyone’s mild drug use was fairly under control in 1981 and there was no such thing as rehab—at least for teenagers like Debbie Schaffer or Jeff Taylor or Matt Kellner—it wasn’t ubiquitous yet. In fact I don’t think any of us knew a single individual who was prescribed meds. (Robert Mallory, we would find out, was the first.) There were also no DUIs, there were no overdoses, there were no suicide attempts, and of course, there were no school shootings anywhere—all of this would come later. And Matt Kellner, even though he might have been numbed with marijuana and was having a sexual relationship with me for over a year, was deemed a good kid with decent grades who kept to himself, living in some kind of underwater fantasy world: stoned in the pool was where he resided in a marijuana haze and that was all he ever needed; this was what gave Matt sustenance, the late-afternoon sun, the scent of chlorine, the shade of the palms above the hammock he rested in, the Specials singing “Ghost Town” coming from a pool house lined with surfboards and an aquarium that stretched along a wall he zoned out on while stroking Alex the cat.
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RON AND SHEILA KELLNER ASSUMED that Matt’s schedule was as routine that week as it had always been since he moved into the pool house in the middle of tenth grade, which coincided with when he got his driver’s license: he would get up early, he would swim some laps, sometimes one could hear reggae faintly coming from the pool house at that hour, before Matt left for school, and then he’d pull the red Datsun out of his garage and head to Buckley. Matt would rarely come up to the main residence to grab breakfast even though the housekeeper always laid something out in case he did; he usually preferred to stop by the McDonald’s in Sherman Oaks before school. For Matt school lasted until three, since he wasn’t involved in sports or any extracurricular activities, so he was often back at the pool house by four at the latest. On weekends he would sometimes drive to the beach alone, down the coast to Newport and beyond, and—this is key—he always left a note on his desk in the pool house telling whoever came across it where he’d gone and when he’d be back. On some nights Sheila Kellner would glimpse the guesthouse from the windows in the second-story master bedroom and the only light would be coming from the aquarium or from candles Matt had lit, lined against the pool, where Matt swam until he went to bed, but she rarely saw him, as if Matt was keeping himself purposefully invisible to his parents. Sheila noted that she realized over that weekend there was no aqua glow emanating from the windows of the guesthouse since the aquarium had been drained, and she didn’t see any candles or hear sounds coming from the pool. The Jacuzzi hadn’t been used either.
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AT LUNCH SUSAN TOLD US that the Kellners began cooperating with the Los Angeles Police Department once it became apparent that no one had seen Matt for at least three or four days, possibly six—Ron Kellner hadn’t seen his son since late last week and it was now Wednesday—or knew where he was and that’s when he became officially missing. The last time Ron Kellner had seen Matt was the previous Thursday, when he walked down to the pool house to ask Matt if he had replaced the headlight on the 280ZX and Matt told him he never drove it at night so what was the hurry—he’d do it next week. Frustrated—and seeing how stoned his son was while he complained about how much homework he had to complete—Ron took the Datsun to the Nissan dealership in Encino, where they quickly replaced the headlight, serviced the car and adjusted the suspension and then washed it while Ron sat with the owner of the dealership in his office—and because it was Ron Kellner it took under an hour instead of leaving the car at the dealership overnight. Ron returned the car to the pool-house garage, told Matt that the headlight had been replaced and that if he wanted to keep the car he needed to take better care of it, and Matt muttered his thanks. It was confirmed that Matt had been at school the previous Friday and the last person who had seen him at Buckley was Angelo, the head of security, who had been directing traffic in the parking lot and remembered Matt driving past him and out the school gates at roughly three-fifteen—Matt was alone in the car and wearing sunglasses and Angelo confirmed that there was nothing strange or unusual about the sighting. The Kellners’ housekeeper saw Matt when he returned to Haskell Avenue that afternoon.
No one saw him Saturday or Sunday, which, again, wasn’t unusual, and there wasn’t anything off about Matt not showing up at Buckley on Monday morning—maybe he wasn’t feeling well, maybe he felt like skipping a day, maybe he slept in late and decided to hit the beach instead. But he had probably slipped away sometime that weekend, though no one was even vaguely certain of this because the Kellners never checked the separate garage where Matt kept his car—at least not until Wednesday morning, when Dr. Croft’s secretary called and asked when Matt was returning to school and Ron Kellner first noticed the red Datsun was missing, and Sheila Kellner realized she hadn’t seen any lights in the guesthouse all weekend—and it was odd that the pool was never lit on Saturday or Sunday night. It was also odd that this time out Matt hadn’t left a note or a message telling anyone that he was leaving or where he was going or that he wouldn’t be attending school for the next few days. It became easier to locate how long Matt Kellner had been missing because of the details Sheila supplied about the lights, even though she admitted that they didn’t really know precisely if this absence was “typical” of their only child or not. It wasn’t something that would have concerned or even worried them otherwise, until they found out that Matt hadn’t been to school for three days and then the fear set in.
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THE THING THAT SCARED ME most about Matt’s disappearance was that I knew it wasn’t random and that something had been leading up to the disappearance; there were specific details in a narrative that was being carried out by someone, and on that day Susan announced the disappearance, it started forming in my mind that maybe Matt had become the fourth victim of the recently named Trawler, the person who had been responsible for the home invasions and the abductions and three murders because a similar pattern had been closing in on Matt: there were the anonymous silent phone calls, there was the rearranged furniture within the residence, there were the fish that disappeared, there was the missing cat—we didn’t know the significance of the posters yet—but I kept forcing myself to calm down because Matt was male, and so he really wasn’t part of the pattern, and why, then, should I be so worried about that particular narrative? But my mind wandered restlessly to the question: What if there wasn’t a pattern? What if we assumed that there was a pattern and there actually wasn’t—that it was more random than what it looked like? After all, the home invasions targeted both women and men—both genders had been bound and assaulted—which hinted that the Trawler never really adhered to a standard narrative in the first place when it came to his targets. And what if there had been other victims—adolescent, male—that no one knew about yet, and not just the three pretty teenage girls that occupied the media with their youth, their freshness, their smiles in the photos flashed on the local news as a stinging reminder of how doomed they all were? I also wondered in the initial days of the disappearance if Matt was just an unstable dude I never really knew who fled down the coast for a week just because he didn’t give a fuck and would be back by next Monday—shake the paranoia that had been gripping him, take a break from the classmate who’d become obsessed, get out of Encino and head to Manhattan Beach, Newport, San Diego, wherever.
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AT THE ASSEMBLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING both Dr. Croft and Susan mentioned for the first time the disappearance of Matt Kellner in their separate addresses to the student body and asked anyone who had information about Matt to please come to the administration office—and no one did. I noticed that Ryan glanced over at me in the packed courtyard, his blond hair newly cut and brushed back, looking remarkably composed even while he kept clenching his jaw. (Or maybe he was just chewing gum, I hoped. I was turning everything into a drama and trying to pull back from doing so.) And then, afterward, by the row of lockers the seniors shared, Ryan asked in a low voice, “Do you know what happened?” He asked me this, of course, and in such a way, because he was the only one who knew my history with Matt. I didn’t say anything, just shook my head. Ryan stared, leaning against his locker. “Well, where do you think he is?” he asked. I grabbed a book and stared back at Ryan, keeping it together, trying to play everything casually, Ryan being the last person I wanted to notice how frightened I actually was by his questions and how they implicated me: Do you know what happened? Where do you think he is? “I think he’ll be okay,” I said in a steady voice. “I think he went up to Santa Barbara or Ojai.” Ryan nodded reluctantly, and then asked me if Matt had ever done anything like this before—just split without telling anybody. I thought about the last year—the period between the summer of 1980 and this past Labor Day—and realized, no, Matt had never done anything like this before. This was, in fact, very unlike him.
I didn’t tell Ryan that but simply said again, “I think he’ll be okay.”
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SOMETHING WAS BUILDING WITHIN me and I didn’t know what to do with it. My mind kept flashing on the phone calls Matt accused me of, the empty aquarium, the missing cat, Matt’s furious paranoia. What kept weighing me down with fright was that I knew that something had been happening to Matt that caused him to disappear—I believed there were forces beyond Matt’s control that led to his disappearance and had been circling him weeks before he was “officially” missing. There was no other angle from which I could look at what happened to Matt Kellner: he had been targeted, and these forces entered into his life and before it became too late to figure any of this out they had simply taken him. The nights after I heard of Matt’s disappearance, and before the body was found, I smoked the weed I bought from Jeff Taylor to get me to sleep but it was too strong and caused me to vividly dream until I woke up doused with sweat, paralyzed. What made the fear that caused the need for the marijuana so maddening was that there was no one to talk with about the fear or to tell my dreams to or talk about Matt with: my own girlfriend, who I’d committed myself to, was under the innocent assumption that Matt had only been my weed dealer and hadn’t asked me anything else about him since she answered the phone on that Sunday he called while I was passed out.
When Susan did ask me about Matt after the assembly where she announced that Matt had disappeared—purposefully not in front of any of our friends—I just brushed her off. She asked me if I knew anything and when was the last time I saw him and how close were we really and I hated everything this intimated and how her questions, like Ryan’s, seemed to implicate me in Matt’s narrative. My anger about Robert Mallory—that Susan and Thom talked to him about me—had faded and the only thing I said to Susan was that Matt had been freaking out about something and I didn’t know what. But you guys were close, right? Susan asked, insisting. Didn’t you hang out all the time? Didn’t you spend weekends with him? Weren’t you good friends? Didn’t he tell you what he was freaking out about? I realized while we were standing beneath the eaves, about to walk into a classroom together, that we were talking about an angle that she was presupposing—that I knew Matt Kellner better than I’d ever revealed, and that this constituted an intimate relationship Susan was now acknowledging and that she was certain about and that I was now confirming by answering her. I don’t think Susan was necessarily intimating that Matt and I were having actual sex—I had never admitted it to her, she had never flat-out asked—but she would joke teasingly about our friendship and maybe I confirmed something by going along with it, never denying the jokes, in fact making another joke to link with hers. But in the scope of things none of that mattered—it all seemed small—because another day passed and Matt Kellner didn’t appear at Buckley on Thursday. And I somehow knew that something awful had happened to him, and even worse, I thought: if it was at the hands of the Trawler it might be months before his body was found.
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AND THEN WE HEARD THAT A BACKPACK was discovered by a ranger down the coast in a parking lot in Crystal Cove State Park, above a bluff overlooking the ocean—and it had a name and address tied to it on a small ID tag that proved it belonged to Matt Kellner. The only reason the backpack was brought to the attention of the Orange County Police was that there was blood all over it and the name checked with the missing-person report that Ron and Sheila Kellner filed with the Los Angeles Police Department. This was what Susan was told by Dr. Croft, who warned her that the information was considered too upsetting to reveal to the school at large, especially the students in seventh and eighth grades, and so Susan just reiterated at the mid-morning assembly on Friday that Matt Kellner was still missing and that anyone who had information should please come to the administration offices, adding that anything offered would be kept completely confidential—whatever that meant. Was that a message to me? When I wondered this it made me almost physically sick. There were moments when I imagined I could walk into the administration office and control the answers to the questions I’d be asked but I also knew that there was no way the questioning wouldn’t lead to the sexual nature of our friendship—it was an inevitability that I didn’t want to face, plus I had no real info about the disappearance anyway, only my fearful dreams and fantasies, my writer’s intuition and sense of drama, the things I heard that weren’t there. But then the fear would ratchet up when I realized I was perhaps the only person who knew about the aquarium and the rearranged furniture and the missing cat—it would hit with a queasy force that Matt probably hadn’t told anyone but me. I’d calm myself with the fact that no one really knew anything yet and that Matt could totally be fine, lying on a towel somewhere, glistening with suntan oil, lounging in the autumn heat, stoned, listening to Foreigner on his Walkman.
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BUT THE BLOODSTAINED backpack found in the parking lot at that beach in Orange County was sufficiently ominous to ramp up the fear level. It simply seemed like the prelude to discovering another death even if no one was admitting this yet, and after Susan confided in us that she had just learned this detail that morning questions were asked by our group for which there were no answers: what was he doing in Crystal Cove State Park, did Matt inflict a wound upon himself, was that why the backpack was stained with blood, how much blood was on the backpack, what was in the backpack, did anyone see if Matt was with someone, why had the backpack been left in a parking lot, where was his car? But the questions were just perfunctory, a kind of mimicry I thought the group felt they had to perform, and there was no real urgency or concern behind any of the questions tossed at Susan—not from Thom or Debbie or Jeff or Tracy—and since she didn’t have the answers to any of them the questioning drifted away. I noted that Robert never asked a single question about Matt, and neither did Ryan. I was the only one in a state of disbelief that no one seemed to really share—it might have been “eerie” that a student was missing and “freaky” that the backpack had been found and “the missing kid” got people mildly excited if only for a moment, and then school life went on.
