Under the Bridge (14 page)

By the bridge, he drove. He felt a little foolish, parking his car by the telephone booth, and wandering into the garishly lit convenience store. Kids bought Slurpees. Kids bought Cokes.

“Come and pick me up around 11:00,” she'd said. “I want to buy a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear.”

He returned to his car and thought of her beside him only days ago. He thought and hoped he would return to his house and find Reena cuddling up with her grandmother, drinking some tea and saying she'd just spent the night at a friend's and overslept.

The simplicity of the Missing Person's report is a fraud of sorts, a betrayal. The few lines have almost no relation to the tragedy of their meaning. And yet there they were. Filed by a dispatcher at 1:50 on November 15, a Saturday.

So began and ended General Report 97-27127 headed with four words:
Missing Juvenile Female Report.

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING,
the young girls of Shoreline met in the foyer.

“What happened under the bridge on Friday night?” Brandy asked Willow.

“What happened to that girl?” Ashley said.

“Be quiet,” Willow said. “Don't mention anything.” She stood up suddenly, fixing the girls with a look, a little fierce, but mostly worried, and she walked away quickly as if pursued.

“Let's ask Syreeta,” Ashley suggested.

“She wasn't even there that night,” Brandy said.

“She wasn't with Warren?”

“No. She went home early.”

“But she's always with Warren. Did they have a fight?”

“She had cramps or something.”

Out in the smoke pit, with only a minute before the bell rang, Brandy and Ashley sat on the low gray wall. Boys on bicycles swerved over the long green soccer field and attempted tricks. The boys rose with their front wheel lifting off the wet grass; they reversed direction with a sudden and seemingly precarious contortion. Kiara looked to the clouds to see if they'd yet begun to float or fade. It seemed like they'd spent the month in fog. Two crows rose up in the sky, and maybe they were from the bird sanctuary, Kiara thought. She didn't understand why the crows always flew together, in pairs—these quartets of dark, beating wings. Poppies from Remembrance Day lay in the crevice of the concrete; some of the flowers were now burned and ashen.
We are the dead,
Brandy and Ashley had recited solemnly on the veterans' holiday.
Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved.

A boy sat alone in the smoke pit. He was often alone, though he smoked and wore a Nike sweatshirt and wore his hat just like Erik Cash. He was
very small, with the face of an unfortunate urchin, and his body was far too delicate.

This boy, Terry, wished he was taller and meaner and could be adored by girls like Ashley and Brandy. They were so sweet, so cute, so pretty, so hot. Ashley's skin must feel like cotton. Terry talked to her once. She was reading a book in homeroom, and he went right up to her, yanking on his baggy pants, and he told her his favorite book was
Fingerprints
by R. L. Stine.

“Have you read that?” he asked her. “That is some scary shit!”

Often, when in his bedroom, watching
The Simpsons,
his favorite show, Terry would think that he looked like Bart Simpson, with his spiky hair and thin arms. He would be in his bedroom that night, alone, watching a movie on his “entertainment center” and he would think about what happened under the bridge because everybody was talking about it, and how everybody was saying to keep it secret, and so as far as he knew, nobody had said anything to a teacher. Everyone was saying keep it quiet. Later, Terry would recall that of the night under the bridge, he knew, but did not tell, because everyone was saying, “Just keep it on the down low.”

N
ADJA ARRIVED AT
Seven Oaks on Tuesday, November 15. Nadja, whose family life was often described as “unfortunate,” was nonetheless possessed of a certain nobility. Social workers who met Nadja were struck by the young girl, for she seemed unlike their other charges. Her family life may have been horrible, but Nadja was neither wounded nor fragile, and she worried more for the fate of her little sister, Anya, than for her own predicament, which was, more or less, orphaned. Anya and Nadja both had long, black hair and high foreheads and sharp noses and green eyes. Nadja had grown four inches in the past year, and she'd found herself towering over her little sister. She wore clothes from the Salvation Army. Flat black shoes and plaid shirts and men's cardigans. Sometimes she wore an old navy blue pleated skirt she'd found at the St. Vincent de Paul. She thought it must have been part of a rich girl's private school uniform. Nadja's last name was Barusha, and sometimes people told her it sounded like a car. “A
fast
car,” Anya would say. Sometimes Nadja flipped off cops for no reason at all. She didn't like cops, and she didn't trust anybody. Her new roommate was Josephine.

This girl is full of herself,
Nadja thought, seeing the photos on the wall, the photos of Josephine. The fashion magazines, the photos of models taped to the mirror. Nivea cream and Chanel perfume and a Guess handbag were all dumped on the empty bed, her bed, so Nadja picked up the clutter and chucked it on the floor. She wanted to sleep. She'd had a rough day, getting “assessed” by these people at Seven Oaks. She hated talking about herself.

She wanted to call Anya and tell her she was okay now, in this place called Seven Oaks, but Anya would be asleep in her new foster home. Anya's new family were retired shopowners who lived in the tiny suburb of Oak Bay. “I've got a skylight here!” Anya exclaimed. Nadja missed Anya terribly.

She climbed into bed. Several hours later, Josephine arrived and turned on the light, and Nadja introduced herself. Josephine stared boldly at Nadja: another assessment of sorts. She observed the green eyes of Nadja, her long neck, her slightly crooked nose. Nadja said very little and then turned away, lying on her side, looking out at the trees, wishing to forget the things she remembered sometimes when she slept.

“Have you ever heard of me? I'm Josephine Bell.”

“Yeah, sure,” Nadja said, though she had never heard of Josephine.

“I'll tell you something, but you can't tell anyone,” Josephine said suddenly.

“Yeah, I won't.”

Who is this girl? Nadja wondered. I've just met her and she starts telling me all this.

“I hate Reena. I
hate
her. She lied to me all the time. She made up all these stories. I got pissed off. She hated me because I'm so beautiful.”

Nadja turned toward Josephine and saw only the pale curve of the girl's cheek. Their room was very dark, and the light was of the moon through the forests. Was Josephine so beautiful, she wondered, and she listened some more.

“We beat her up, and then this friend of mine,” Josephine continued, “she called me in the morning, and she said, ‘Reena's dead.' And I was like, ‘How is she dead?' And my friend said, ‘We continued it and we threw her in the water and blood was coming out of her mouth.' My friend told me that she drowned Reena and Reena tried to get out of the water.”

Nadja turned away from Josephine, turned so her body lay closer to the forests and the moon. Nonetheless, Josephine went on with her story, indiscreetly and carelessly. She did not even know Nadja and must have assumed the girl was like the others in View Royal, who had listened to her story and been both skeptical and unconcerned. Nadja, in her worn white T-shirt, with her slightly slanting green eyes and rare Russian surname, was in fact very much unlike the others in View Royal, and, thus, Josephine would have been wiser to not boast so callously.

J
OSEPHINE AND
K
ELLY
asked Principal Olsen if the school had a newspaper.

“Well, we usually do. What do you need a newspaper for?” Principal Olsen replied.

“One of our friends is missing, and we want to see if there's anything in the paper about it,” Josephine said, breezily.

“Yeah, we want to check it out,” Kelly said, chewing on a strand of hair.

“She was with us on Friday night at the Mac's,” Josephine volunteered.

Kelly nodded, her eyes never leaving Josephine's face.

“Well, that's just terrible that she's missing,” Mrs. Olsen said. “What do you think could have happened to her?”

“She runs away all the time,” Josephine suggested. “Maybe she tried to kill herself.”

“I saw her walk up the highway,” Kelly interjected. “So she probably got picked up by a bunch of guys. That's what guys like to do. They probably took her away with them and that's why she's not around.”

“Well, I think she jumped off the bridge into the Gorge!” Josephine announced, excitedly.

“I really hope your friend is found,” Mrs. Olsen said, before reminding Josephine that she should really demonstrate her commitment to education by attending class that afternoon.

Mrs. Olsen would later write, “As a principal and former counselor, I have both training and many years of experience in observing both verbal and nonverbal communication. I was left with the clear impression that both Josephine and Kelly were mixing together fact and fiction.”
Moreover, she found that “neither girl expressed any emotion or concern about the missing girl. There was a distinct lack of effect.” The whole conversation with her two students, Principal Olsen notified police, was “very disconcerting.”

•   •   •

Kelly and Josephine perused the Times-Colonist for news of a missing girl. (“I think that was the first newspaper I ever bought,” Josephine said later. “I usually just buy magazines.”)

Their hearts may have skipped when they saw the headline of the newspaper dated November 16:
TEENAGE MURDER REMAINS UNSOLVED.
But the article reported on the case of two Oak Bay teenagers who had gone to Seattle for the weekend and been discovered shot and killed in a town in the middle of Washington. The killers had never been caught; the killers committed their murder ten years ago.

As for local news, the weather forecaster predicted for Wednesday, showers; for Thursday, showers; for Friday, heavy mist. Under the drawings of clouds and raindrops, a line of text read, “Rain, rain, go away, but it won't.”

Masked bandits had smashed into a home and made off with two thousand dollars. Gingerbread house recipes were on page C5. Councillors refused to okay a high-rise.

As for crime and attacks, the only news concerned a woman who had been badly bruised by a “ferocious feline.” The unfortunate woman had been taking her silky terrier, Rufus, for a walk when a cat in an alley lunged at her. “I've never seen anything like it,” the woman, now with one hundred and twenty-nine bites, explained. “It was behind a Volkswagen and it took a six-foot leap out at me, with God as my witness.”

Kelly and Josephine might have come across the pan of
Mame,
put on by the Victoria Operatic Society. The play about a high-spirited woman living in New York in the 1920s was “marred by melodramatic acting,” and an actress who “gives the part her all, but can't yet carry the brash self-assurance the role demands.”

The girls expected the headlines:
BODY FOUND IN GORGE,
or even, MISSING GIRL, 14. But the absence of such news of Reena confused
them as the absence of her body in the black waters would soon confuse the men of the Dive Unit.

“So where's Reena?” Josephine asked, reaching for the comics and the classified ads.

“I don't know,” she'd later say was Kelly's sardonic reply. “She's probably floating around somewhere.”

W
ITH BARRETTES
in her brown hair and the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled down over her hands, Kelly sat before her guidance counselor.

Mrs. Smith looked at the notes from Kelly's teachers:

“Kelly,” Mrs. Smith said, gently, “what are these issues with your teachers about?”

“I'm a slow learner,” Kelly said. “I need to learn at my own pace. And teachers make me keep up. And they make me do the work. And I get angry. And I explode.”

Mrs. Smith nodded. Mrs. Smith was a soft and comfortable woman who wore very large glasses, and her hair was gray, and though she was beloved by many students at Shoreline, she had, on this Tuesday morning, heard not a word about the missing girl, the beaten girl, the drowned girl.

Mrs. Smith was meeting Kelly to discuss the referral process, which was a polite term for removal. Later, Kelly's parents said it was Kelly who wished to leave Shoreline because she didn't like all the bad kids, but Mrs. Smith's notes from the counseling session of Tuesday, November 18, state that Kelly was being referred to another school due to her confrontational manner and the fact that she was constantly “disrespectful,” “disobedient,” and “disruptive.”

Mrs. Smith needed to prepare a form for Kelly's transfer to the new school, and, as required, she asked Kelly if she had a probation officer.

“No,” the girl responded, “but I might.”

“Well, what's this about, Kelly?”

“People think I beat up somebody.”

“Why do people think that?”

“Well, they think I was with a group of people who beat this girl up at the back of the Tillicum Mall. I wasn't anywhere near it.”