Still unable to reach the teacher on her cell phone, Mary decided to call the police and request an investigation. By then, it was ten minutes past nine o’clock.
When the group hadn’t turned up by midnight, the police intensified their search. Unfortunately, however, nobody knew where the group had headed for their painting project, and it wasn’t until close to dawn that they located four abandoned easels clustered at the southern shore of Merced Lake.
Alerted by the police, Mary rushed to the scene. The four easels stood on the shore as if waiting for the morning mist to clear. Catching the first rays of morning sun, they cast long shadows that stretched all the way to the water’s edge. The air was still, as it had been the previous day, and the lake surface was absolutely smooth. In their skewed-diamond formation, the four easels had the air of tombstones.
From the names on the palettes left at the foot of each easel, there was no question that the four canvases belonged to the teacher and students from Richmond Junior High.
It was then that Mary knew for certain that something terrible had happened to her daughter.
It was a strange sight. Each of the easels held paintings of an almost identical composition. As the dawn light slowly illuminated the canvases, Mary felt as if she could almost see the souls of Christine, the teacher, and the other two girls standing in front of the dewy easels.
The young teacher and the teenagers had stood at the same spot and painted the same view in nearly the exact same manner.
They had made use of a stationary windsurfer to emphasize the stillness of the lake, using light and shadow to evoke the strong autumn light. Perhaps all four of them had painted the same subject matter for educational purposes. The teacher might have chosen to have all of the girls undertake the same subject matter so that she could better critique the nuanced differences of each student’s approach.
Not unexpectedly, the teacher’s painting was executed with a finesse of a different caliber, in a style that went beyond photorealism. The branches that framed the lake were arranged almost symmetrically, and the windsurfer loomed larger-than-life in the center of the painting. The air between the leaves of the trees seemed absolutely still.
And yet, there was also a strange tension, as if at any moment something held captive within the canvas might suddenly burst forth. In the foreground, the shore of the lake seemed distorted and lacking a normal sense of perspective. It was unclear what its unnatural undulations were meant to convey. The lake was still and glassy, but pregnant with suspense, as if some unknowable being might at any moment rise up from its depths and shatter its surface.
Seen from a slight distance, the landscape suggested the features of a face. The tree branches hanging down from above suggested eyes, the surfboard a nose, the shoreline a mouth. The face’s expression was serene for the moment but imbued with an ominous air as if rage lurked just beneath the surface. There was only a paper-thin line between the opposing forces of stillness and movement, inspiring a feeling of apprehension in the viewer.
The three students’ paintings seemed to take their cue from the teacher’s. Perhaps the girls had unconsciously imitated the teacher’s style. They had done their best to render the landscape faithfully, resulting in an awkward style that was neither photorealistic nor abstract. Only Christine’s painting had a unique feature that set it apart from the others: she had blacked out the face of the surfer in the lake’s foreground.
The windsurfer had gotten too close to shore and was now having a hard time getting back out into the open water. Apparently he was new to the sport and not yet competent at it. His sail hung shapeless, fluttering uselessly, and he seemed stumped as to what to do next. The art teacher had done a remarkable job of portraying his hapless stance and expression as he waited for the wind to pick up.
By contrast, Christine had painted the young windsurfer’s face as black as his wetsuit. At first glance it seemed as though perhaps she had intended to silhouette his form against the afternoon sun, but that wasn’t it. She had rendered the surfer smaller than her teacher had, cramming him into the left-hand corner of the canvas. Despite his small stature, he seemed as heavy as metal, like he might sink straight to the bottom of the lake were he to fall in. Completely devoid of any hint of an inner life, he seemed more like a robot than a human being.
The teacher’s painting, and Christine’s painting … Both were imbued with a disturbing quality. The teacher had drawn inspiration from the menacing air of the lake’s surface and had chosen to distort the shoreline with surreal undulations, while Christine had rendered the surfer like a dead man.
That afternoon, a surfboard was found washed up to the bank at another area of the lake. Still half in the water, the outhaul line connected to the boom was tangled in the thick brush at the water’s edge. The surfer was nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t take the police long to identify him as a U.C. Berkeley student. The missing boy had shared an apartment with a fellow student, and the roommate reported that the surfer had never returned home the night before. The roommate hadn’t thought much of it at the time since the other boy had frequently stayed out all night without checking in with anyone.
Counting the windsurfer, a total of five people had disappeared. No trace had been found of any of them to this day.
As Kitazawa ended his account, he paused for a moment before adding, “There appears to be a connection between these disappearances in the U.S. and the ones in Japan. Or is it just coincidence? All of these mysterious, unnatural disappearances have taken place directly over a fault line.”
Kitazawa stopped there, waiting for the others to respond as he slowly took a seat on the sofa.
The computer monitor still showed the map of the suburbs of San Francisco, but nobody was looking at it anymore. It was clear that Kitazawa’s story wasn’t a lie or an exaggeration. He had simply presented the facts, pure and simple. But all three of them were at a loss for words. They had no idea how a geological phenomenon like a fault line could play a part in human disappearances.
Before starting grade school, Saeko had spent most of her summers with her paternal grandparents. Built in a traditional Japanese style, their home stood on a large lot, lush with greenery, behind the Atami Kinomiya train station. The garden exuded a heady scent of earth and the wind often brought in gusts of salty sea air, muffling the mountain’s own scent. On the other side of the hedge that enclosed their property, there ran a small brook called Ito Creek whose soft susurrations seemed to cool the air. Whenever Saeko’s father could get time away from his job, he had enjoyed taking Saeko fishing there.
It had been Saeko’s job to find the bait. When she turned over large rocks in the garden to expose the damp earth underneath, the pungent smell of earthworms and mud wafted forth.
Whenever she found a sizeable earthworm, she pinned it down with the toe of her shoe and the edge of a rock to sever it in two. She plopped half of the worm into her bait box and left the other half under the rock.
Even if you cut an earthworm in half, it’ll grow back if you give it enough time.
Saeko’s father had taught her about the regenerative abilities of earthworms. Loath to diminish the precious supply of worms, she made it a practice to always only harvest half of each worm.
When she was finished collecting bait, Saeko’s father would emerge from the house.
“Sae, let’s go!” he would call, affectionately shortening her name. Then he would thump her on the shoulder and start down the path towards the creek. On the way, he made no effort to match his stride to his daughter’s, and she had to scamper to keep up. She kept her gaze locked on her father as she scrambled after him, always lagging behind by a few paces, determined not to be left behind.