Under the Bridge (16 page)

Mr. Hyde-Lay began his lectures on the Garry oak with a modest statement: “The Garry oak is one of the most distinctive and certainly one of the stateliest trees growing in the Oak Bay landscape. We're really fortunate. It's such a rare and beautiful tree, and it adds so much character to the community.

“The Garry oak grows to massive proportions in the deep, rich, loamy soils found in many parts of Oak Bay. It can grow as tall as seventy feet. But, as you know, it's always under urban pressure.” He paused and his listeners nodded, sharing his fear of construction on their beloved gardens.

“Now, I thought I would tell you a little about growing your own Garry oak. The first thing I would say to you is be careful. Be careful where you plant your acorn because the tree will be enormous, and it could live for four generations. The best time to collect acorns for planting is October and November. There are, of course, a few predators that enjoy consuming the Garry oak acorns—the filbert weevil and the filbert worm find the acorns particularly delicious.”

After the laughter from the elderly crowd, Mr. Hyde-Lay discussed the merits of a bathtub test for the young acorn, and the types of garden soil to be chosen, and the best way to plant the tiny acorn in the dark and ready ground.

He then warned of the dangers of transience and darkness.

“Garry oak trees develop with a deep tap root and can be very difficult
to transplant if left in temporary locations for too long, so keep this in mind if you plan to move your young oaks. The deep tap root gives the young Garry oak a very good degree of tolerance for time without water, but when choosing a planting site, it should be noted that the Garry oak seedlings will begin to decline if their light requirements are not met.”

Mr. Hyde-Lay then reached for his woven basket, and he moved to the tables covered in floral cloths. He dispensed acorns, perfect acorns, without bruise or flaw, and the members of the Horticultural Society seemed grateful for the unexpected gift.

“In closing, remember that once your young oak begins to grow, it may be necessary to protect them from browsing animals. Fend off those lawnmowers and weed-eaters too. As a rule of thumb, to guarantee the survival rate of your native oaks, allow the most natural conditions to prevail.”

•   •   •

“Josephine gives me this little piece of paper,” Nadja told her little sister, “and she's like, ‘You want proof? Well, this is your proof. That's Reena's mother's number. Call it up. Ask her if Reena is home.' So I called, and I had to lie. I had to pretend I knew Reena. I asked if she was there, and her mom said, ‘No, I haven't seen her since Friday.' She just sounded so sad, Anya, and she said she was really worried. I could tell she was.”

“Oh my God,” Anya said. “We're going to the cops right now.”

Nadja lit a cigarette, and she looked at the trees.

“We're walking there right now,” Anya said, with the dramatic surety of a thirteen-year-old girl. “I know where it is. It's right near here, and that sucks that the cops are right near me, but that's the way it is. Come on. Let's go. There's one cop there who's a nice guy.”

Nadja nodded, and the two girls began to walk away from Anya's foster home. The drivers in their Jaguars and Mercedes may not have recognized the two sisters, for they were strangers in the cloistered neighborhood, and Anya had been living with the benevolent strangers for only a few weeks now. Oak Bay was many miles from View Royal, and the two girls did not need to worry about being spotted by Josephine or her minions, and yet before they reached the police station, they both hesitated.

The Russian sisters were not fond of cops, and both girls had lived in
ways that Josephine and Dusty may have dreamed about in their fantasies of being tough and outlaw. The two sisters were, as their many probation officers and social workers could attest, “street smart,” and yet this did not mean that they were lacking either bravery or morality.

The girls were so close to the station. The station was on Hampshire Road, and the sisters were now on St. Ann's. A yellow traffic sign emblazoned with a black duck normally might have amused them—only in Oak Bay would there be a “brake for ducks” sign—but today their mood was grave. Thin wisps of cloud drifted over the evergreens.

The girls hesitated.

Dusty had threatened to “fuck up” anyone who told on her, and yet this was not the reason they stopped and remained near the willow tree.

Nadja reached in her black leather purse for a cigarette. “Let's have a smoke,” she said, “and then we can decide.”

•   •   •

Suman called the Saanich police station once more. “I was so frustrated,” she recalls. “I'd phoned there a few times since the Saturday. I told the man on the phone that Reena was with Dusty and Josephine. The police just said, ‘Hey, kids go missing.' They just treated her disappearance like it was one more kid who'd gone AWOL. I told myself, maybe she's partying, but I still had this horrible feeling because Reena
would
phone.”

Suman took it upon herself to call Seven Oaks, and she spoke to both Dusty and Josephine. “Have you seen Reena? I know she went to meet you on Friday night.”

“I saw her at Wal-Mart,” Dusty said, “but I left and she didn't come with me.”

“Well, let me talk to Josephine,” Suman said, wearily.

“Reena didn't come home last night, Josephine. I know you said you haven't seen her since Friday, but I'm worried about her so can you please tell me if you've heard from her?” Suman tried to steady her voice as she spoke to the blonde girl. She'd met the girl once on Halloween. Josephine had come to her house on this night and Suman had observed the girl as a dark force. “She is blonde, but she's dark,” Suman explained to her husband. The darkness, she felt, was in Josephine's spirit, in her heart, in her eyes.

Now, Josephine seemed indifferent to her concern over her missing daughter.

“Harsh,” she said, brusquely. “I'll let you know if I hear from her.”

Now, as the Russian sisters hesitated by the Oak Bay police station, Suman went into her daughter's room and sat on the bed by her daughter's teddy bears. She held a cup of tea with cumin and fennel and yet she could not warm herself or settle the unease. “I just knew she was dead,” Suman recalls, “but I didn't want to say it out loud. I knew she was lying somewhere dead, but I thought she must have been in an accident. I never thought she was murdered. Murder never entered my mind.”

•   •   •

Nadja lit the cigarette and said to Anya, “I don't know if we should do this.”

Anya nodded. Though she was only thirteen, she was quite wise, and neither reckless nor naive. She thought for a while, and then she announced, with great conviction: “I think we
have
to do this.”

“What if it's not true?” Nadja asked, and she leaned against the tree, her shining hair much more vivid than the dull and aged bark.

“It's true,” Anya said. “It's true.”

“But you don't know that,” Nadja argued. “Josephine could be talking bullshit. You know how people bullshit me all the time. I could say to you, ‘My mother's dead. My boyfriend's dead. I killed them.' It doesn't mean it's true.”

“But you talked to Reena's mother, right? And you said she sounded so sad.” Season's Greetings, a sign said on the grand old fire hall. Nadja looked, too, at the firemen's decorations—the merry tinsel bells. “Christmas is coming up,” Anya continued, “and Reena's mom won't see her daughter. I can't let this go by me. I'm sorry.” Anya shook her head and looked at her big sister, fiercely, pleadingly. “I can't….”

“Okay,” Nadja said, and she brushed the dust of bark from her hair, and stubbed out her cigarette. The two sisters walked to the blue door of the police station. Together, the two sisters walked inside.

Not much had changed at the Oak Bay Police Department since 1906. In those days, the only crime in the village occurred during the carnival
or the horse races, when pickpockets (out-of-towners) roused constables to search the streets. Otherwise, the village was peaceful and sirens seemed not to exist.

On the day the sisters appeared, a dispatcher was on the phone. “You've got a cat stuck in your car?” she said to the elderly gentleman. “Okay, sir, just calm down….”

Nadja sat on the leather bench, impressed by the fact that there were
carpets
here. She had never seen carpets in a cop station before. Brochures on the wall behind her advertised missing children, like a young boy who had been missing for as long as Nadja could remember, a boy named Michael Dunahee. Photos of children aged by computer technology were pinned on the wall.
FIND THIS CHILD,
the sign said,
MISSING SINCE
1989. Nadja looked away toward the pamphlets on drug addiction,
VICTIM'S RIGHTS. CELEBRATE CULTURAL DIVERSITY,
another pamphlet said, above the photo of a white-haired woman in a crimson sari. “We have much to gain from each other,” the pamphlet said. “Celebrate cultural diversity. It's who you are.”

Anya was up by the glass window of the front desk, yelling at the lady. Anya often yelled for no real reason other than she liked to be heard.

She said she wanted to speak to Don Gardner. “What's it regarding?” the lady asked.

“It's confidential,” Anya replied.

Sergeant Don Gardner could tell you, proudly, “Oak Bay has one of the lowest crime rates in the entire province.” Why is that? “There's no real slums. It's affluent. It's a high-end community, so most of the crime we're dealing with is rowdy teenagers.”

In fact, the most recent homicide in Oak Bay occurred in 1971, meaning there had not been a murder in the village for twenty-six years. Sergeant Gardner could hazily recall a few details of this one murder on his watch—a gay lover, a gay couple, some kind of dispute.

So, here were these two girls before him now. He took them into an interview room. He recognized Anya right away. She was hard to forget for she had the charisma, the energy, of a volatile actress. Once, a friend of his had been driving his car down the sedate Hampshire Road when he'd caught sight of Anya washing her foster father's car. Even the way she held the hose, the rather joyous, slightly erratic manner in which she
pranced about, created an unusual spectacle on the street of the elderly.

“I'd dealt with Anya before and I guess she thought she could trust me or I treated her fairly,” Don Gardner recalls.

Rapidly, Anya told him that a girl named Josephine from another foster home, not her foster home, but another one where Nadja lived, this girl, Josephine, she said she went with this girl Reena Virk to the Gorge Bridge, and she went up to Reena, and she put her cigarette out on her forehead, and then they all started to beat her up and jump on her, and they broke her arms and her jaw and her nose, and then she was rolled into the water.”

“Rolled into the water?”

“They killed her,” Nadja said, suddenly, and with great contempt. “They killed her in the Gorge!”

“When did this happen?”

“Josephine said it happened on Friday night about 10:00.”

Don Gardner looked at his notes, written in shorthand. Seven Oaks. Cigarette. All beat her up. Jaw. Nose. Broken. Water … Gorge….

Don Gardner, knowing of Anya's theatrical ways, thought silently, “Maybe a lot of this is embellished.” But the sisters seemed so genuinely upset, that he wrote up a report and drove himself over to the Saanich police department, the station nearest to the Gorge.

•   •   •

Murders were more common at the Saanich police station, though still rare—two or three homicides a year, most usually occurring, the police will tell you, “when someone's high or in a bad marriage.” Murders by young girls were rarer still, and thus there was some cynicism about the story of the Barusha sisters. “It sounded pretty farfetched,” a Saanich investigator said.

Investigators looked into the records for last Friday evening. Friday 14, the night of the Russian satellite. A janitor called to report a broken window at Shoreline School around 9:25. Sergeants Hodginson and Basanti went to the school at 9:45 and broke up the crowd of youths. Later that evening, the dispatcher on duty received several calls of concern about the “thing in the sky.” People were worried a fire in the distance might be spreading their way; people believed there might have been a plane erupting in the sky. But there were no reports of this fight,
so vicious and savage. Certainly no one in the homes, well lit and respectable, with waterfront views called in to report seeing a fight or a beating, down by the Gorge.

Constable Green called up Shannon Lance, a detective in the Youth Unit and he asked her to take a look into this story reported by two sisters.

“It was a bizarre story, but you never know, sometimes the most bizarre thing can become reality.”

Five minutes later, Scott Greens phone rang, and Shannon Lance told him she'd looked into the missing persons files. “Scott,” she said, “Reena Virk is missing. I'm looking at the report right here. 97-27127. Her mother, Suman Virk, has called Missing Persons several times since Friday. It says on the report that on 11-14, Reena went to meet two friends, Josephine Bell and Dusty Noble, at the Wal-Mart. She phoned her young brother from the Mac's at Craigflower and Admirals and said she was on her way home. That was at 10:30. That was the last time her family heard from her.”

“She never came home?”

“No. She said she was on her way, but she never arrived home.”

“When Shannon Lance received the Missing Persons report, that's when we started to feel something untoward could have happened to her,” Scott Green recalls. In this way, Reena's file was moved from Missing Persons, and labelled as: Possible Homicide.