Bret Ellis

Bret Ellis is the narrator and central consciousness of the book, first seen as a seventeen-year-old at Buckley and later heard revising the story of the events of 1981 from a distance of four decades. His account follows several intertwined pursuits: his desire for closeness with Matt Kellner and Thom Wright, his suspicion that Robert Mallory is connected to Matt’s disappearance, and his attempt to turn a frightening, uncertain history into a persuasive public narrative. The older Bret’s final reflections complicate that narrative: he acknowledges how dramatically he misrepresented the confrontation with Robert, and how the story he told became both a defense and a source of social power before collapsing under evidence that Robert was not the Trawler.

Identity and Retrospective Narration

As a senior at Buckley in 1981, Bret moves among an affluent school’s familiar routines while privately experiencing relationships and dangers that those routines do not make easy to name. His narration is retrospective rather than simply contemporaneous. At the first lunch with Robert, the older Bret interrupts the remembered scene to say that, forty years later, he is writing with knowledge of what happened and can now identify the “secret narrative.” The distinction between the seventeen-year-old’s partial understanding and the adult narrator’s later interpretation shapes the account throughout.

That distance does not produce a single, settled version of events. Bret repeatedly describes what he believed, what he could not explain, and what he later inferred; the narrative’s central mysteries are filtered through his recollection and his interests. His account therefore requires readers to distinguish what he witnessed from what he suspected and from what he later told other people. By the end, this distinction becomes essential: Bret’s narration reveals not only the crimes he tried to explain, but also his capacity to reshape his own part in them.

Attachments, Desire, and Performed Normality

Bret’s relationships are marked by unequal desire and by the effort to conceal what he feels. His attachment to Matt becomes especially clear when Matt rejects the possibility of a relationship. Bret leaves Matt’s pool house devastated, reaches his car on Haskell Avenue, and breaks down in tears. The older narrator identifies this as a formative rejection: Matt did not feel for him what he felt for Matt, a pattern Bret says would recur in his life. At the time, however, he was still seventeen and sustained by hope.

His feelings for Thom Wright take a different form. Bret is eager to be useful to him and accepts a request to drive him to the airport, regarding the errand as a privilege because it gives him time with Thom. But on that drive, Thom asks him to keep an eye on Susan Reynolds while Thom is away. Bret hears the request as an invitation to spy on Thom’s girlfriend, not as the simple favor he had wanted to perform. He recognizes a conflict between the agreeable role he has played and his own judgment, and begins to see Thom differently.

With Susan, Bret’s relationship involves confidences as well as concealment. When Matt disappears, Susan asks Bret how close he and Matt had been. Bret avoids a full answer because the questions make him feel implicated in Matt’s story, and because Susan does not know the nature of his connection to Matt. At school, Bret later returns to public affection with Debbie Schaffer, embracing and kissing her in front of Ryan Vaughn. He describes this as a deliberate plan to supply the displays of affection Debbie wanted and to keep his own feelings to himself. Calling himself the “tangible participant,” he adopts a role that lets him appear to be moving through ordinary school life even as he feels increasingly detached from it.

Matt’s Disappearance and Bret’s Suspicions

Matt’s disappearance changes Bret’s private unease into an urgent search for an explanation. When Ryan asks where Matt might be, Bret offers the reassuring possibility that he has gone to Santa Barbara or Ojai, while privately recognizing that Matt has never disappeared without warning before. Bret connects Matt’s absence to earlier incidents: phone calls Matt accused him of making, an empty aquarium, a missing cat, and Matt’s growing paranoia. He becomes convinced that forces outside Matt’s control had been circling him and had ultimately taken him. The conviction is powerful, but it is not the same as proof, and Bret has few people with whom he feels able to discuss it.

Bret goes to Matt’s father, Ronald Kellner, seeking an account of what happened. Ronald makes clear that the family does not know the truth and shows Bret crime-scene photographs. Bret later tells Dr. Croft at Buckley that he has also seen Matt’s autopsy report and that the injuries described there do not look accidental to him. These documents deepen Bret’s suspicion, but do not resolve the case. His account turns repeatedly on that gap between alarming evidence and certainty: he believes Matt was attacked, and he comes to suspect Robert, yet the story he can tell remains partly conjectural.

In Palm Springs, Bret’s concern about Susan draws him into another attempt to understand Robert’s movements. After arriving at his aunt’s house, he thinks about Matt and Audrey Barbour and about the danger he believes Robert may pose. He drives to Susan’s grandparents’ home, only two minutes away, and sees Susan’s BMW and a white Cadillac in the driveway. The sight briefly reassures him that she is there, until he notices a black Porsche at the curb. The episode shows how Bret’s fear has come to organize ordinary observations: a nearby car becomes a possible sign of Robert’s presence, and suspicion directs Bret’s actions even when the evidence remains incomplete.

Exposure, Accusation, and an Unreliable Account

Bret’s suspicions become a direct accusation when he speaks with Abigail Mallory. After Abigail describes Robert’s overdose and his placement in a facility in Jacksonville, Bret says that Robert was with Matt during the week Matt disappeared. He tells her that he possesses a tape recorded on the night Matt died and believes the other voice belongs to Robert. Bret then lays out his theory: that Robert drugged Matt, took him to Crystal Cove, assaulted him, and brought him back. The account establishes what Bret believes and why he confronts Abigail; it does not independently establish the truth of every allegation.

The tape itself gives Bret evidence of a frightening and apparently genuine ordeal. Listening to it, he recognizes the voice of Matt, hears the speaker repeatedly order him to eat, and concludes that Matt is being made to eat a fish from his aquarium. He continues listening as the recording makes clear that Matt is distressed and frightened. For Bret, the tape confirms that Matt was subjected to cruelty before his death and that the aquarium’s missing fish matter to the mystery. It still does not, on its own, identify the other speaker conclusively. Bret’s later belief that the voice is Robert’s remains part of his case against Robert rather than a fact established by the recording alone.

Bret also learns that his own secret has been recorded. In early October, he and Terry Schaffer have sex in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Neither knows that someone has photographed Bret entering the bungalow and taken pictures through the shutters. The concealed camera turns Bret’s private life into material that can be used against him, making surveillance one of the forces connecting his personal relationships to the broader threat.

At the end of the confrontation in Century Towers, Bret is wounded but survives. At Cedars-Sinai, he tells the police that Robert called him in distress and that he went to help a suicidal friend. He says Robert had trapped him in the apartment and that he had defended himself with a knife. Bret repeats this account to the police, doctors, the Reynolds family, and Laurie Wright. He also tells them that Robert had a history of psychiatric treatment, had been connected to Katherine Latchford, and was implicated in Matt’s death and other crimes. The confidence and repetition of Bret’s story lend it authority, but the older narrative reveals that his account is not a neutral report of what happened.

Bret’s injuries required 115 stitches, yet his description of the encounter includes details that the available evidence does not independently validate. He says that he went to help Robert, fought back after being trapped, tried to keep Robert from falling, and that Robert then jumped. The narrator presents the statement as a rehearsed story that Bret repeated until it became familiar. Its function is clearest in what Bret tells his classmates after returning to Buckley: that Robert was the Trawler, had attacked Susan and Thom, and had leapt to his death after being exposed. Bret displays his stitches and receives a brief transformation into a school celebrity. His account gives the students an intelligible villain and casts Bret as the survivor who defeated him.

Consequences, Revision, and Lasting Attachment

The public narrative does not hold. Letters from the Trawler show that Robert had been watched and addressed as “the God” by the people responsible for the crimes. The letters had not named victims or described the home invasions; Robert apparently failed to connect them to the crimes and at one point thought they might be from admirers or someone he had dated. This information changes the meaning of Bret’s accusations: Robert may have been dangerous and unstable, but he was also a target of the Trawler’s obsession, not the serial killer Bret had insisted he was. Abigail disputes Bret’s account of what happened at her condo, and the older Bret acknowledges that his dramatic version became the core narrative for a time without making it true.

As the Trawler remains active and claims responsibility for Audrey Barbour’s death, Bret’s certainty that Robert was the killer becomes untenable. His classmates’ interest turns into avoidance. People stop greeting him; students and teachers look away; he stands alone at assembly and eats by himself. The reversal is not simply from hero to outcast. It exposes the cost of the version Bret had built: once events contradict its central claim, the same classmates who had been captivated by it no longer want to hear him.

The final retrospective shifts the book’s center away from the mystery alone. Writing the account again after decades, Bret says the facts of that fall were receding, while his emotional understanding of being seventeen had become clearer. Matt returns in dreams and in ordinary moments, and Bret recognizes that the book is also about his desire for him. He reconsiders Susan’s numbness as an influence on his own work and recognizes the depth of his love for Thom, a longing that never found a lasting counterpart in adulthood. He also revises his earlier judgment of Debbie, recognizing more complexity in her than he had allowed when he first thought of her as merely entitled.

This late act of writing neither resolves Bret’s relationships nor settles every uncertainty around the crimes. Instead, it recasts narration itself as part of his life: first a means of surviving suspicion and securing an audience, then a story whose claims are challenged, and finally an effort to recover feelings that he had long held at a distance. Bret’s most consequential change is not that he arrives at a perfectly verified account, but that he begins to recognize how desire, fear, and self-protection shaped the one he told.