Under the Bridge (17 page)

E
ARLY ON
T
HURSDAY MORNING,
around 8:30, Constable Shannon Lance of the Saanich Police Department drove up the long and steep road that led to the group home named Seven Oaks. She was unarmed and in plainclothes when she spoke to the supervisor of Seven Oaks. The supervisor was not surprised by the appearance of a police officer, for the girls in Seven Oaks were without families, and often they were without manners or spirituality, and thus often they were in some kind of trouble. They stole cars; they overdosed; they consorted with criminal types. The detective was brought into the home, and Dusty was introduced to Shannon Lance.

“Do you know why I'm here?” she said.

“Is it about Reena?” Dusty replied.

“As a matter of fact, it is about Reena.”

“Well,” Dusty said, earnestly and easily, “the last time I saw her was on Friday night. Josephine called her to see if she wanted to come to a party with us, and we all agreed to meet up at the Wal-Mart. But when we met her, she didn't want to go to the party with us after all. She said she would see us later. She left with some guys. Me and Josephine went to the party at Portage Park, but we never saw Reena there. We called her on Saturday, and her mom told us she was missing. That's what happened,” Dusty said.

Constable Shannon Lance observed how soft Dusty's voice was and how easily she told of Reena's whereabouts. Dusty's voice did not seem to belong with her heavy body and her shiny black leather coat with a thick belt wrapped around the waist.

Dusty herself ran right up to Josephine's room soon after speaking to the detective.

“Oh my God, Josephine,” she said, “the cops are here. They're downstairs. They want to talk to you.”

“We're going to jail,” Josephine said. “You know, Dusty, we might go to jail!”

“Jail's not so bad,” Dusty said. “I've been there before. It's kind of fun.” But she started to pace, and both girls, as Josephine would later recall, were “harsh freaked out.”

Dusty said, “I told them we met Reena at the Wal-Mart, and she didn't want to party with us, and she left with some guys.”

Josephine nodded and smiled approvingly at her sidekick. She lifted her lipstick but did not have time to apply the gloss, for a Seven Oaks worker knocked on the door and told her that her presence was required immediately in the office. “Right now, Josephine,” she said. “Go downstairs.”

“Do you know why I'm here?” Shannon Lance said to her.

“Is it anything about Reena?” Josephine asked, and then as Shannon Lance would later note, she “quickly rattled off similar information to Dusty.”

“We went to the Wal-Mart and met Reena, and she said she didn't want to go to the party with us, and she left with some guys. Her mom told us she's missing, but we didn't see her after the Wal-Mart.” Josephine smiled at the detective, and then said, arrogantly, slightly bemused, “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I could not corroborate or disprove the story,” Shannon Lance later wrote in her report.

Another girl may have been frightened by the arrival of the detective, frightened that she would be punished for being a rat and a traitor, but Nadja was not. Nadja observed the arrival of a police car, and five minutes later, saw an unhandcuffed Dusty run outdoors, as if she “was flying out of the house.”

Nadja walked outside, straight over to Dusty.

“Why are the cops here?” she demanded of Dusty.

“That thing about Reena,” Dusty said, and her voice trembled, and she seemed near tears. “The cop is here to investigate that.”

“Dusty, is this just a stupid story? I'm gonna kick your ass if you've been bullshitting me.”

“It's true. It's true,” Dusty said. “She's dead.” She said it several times then, as one chants a pledge. “She's dead. She's dead. She's dead.” And
then she began to pace and smoke and cry, and she turned away so Nadja would not see her tears.

Nadja would later describe Dusty as being “off the walls.”

“Holy shit,” Dusty said. “I'm so scared.” She lurched forward slightly and clasped her hands to her face.

“So why are you going around telling everybody if you didn't want to be ratted on?” Nadja asked her.

“Because I trust the people I told.”

“Yeah, well, when it comes to something like murder, there's going to be somebody who can't keep it to themselves.”

Dusty looked up at her then, and she was very wide-eyed and timid.

“This is really hard for me,” she said. “I can't believe this all happened. I just punched her a few times. I didn't mean for this … I left—”

Suddenly she stopped and seemed to steady herself, and she rubbed the tears from her cheeks. Josephine was crossing the lane, wearing a certain look of triumph, and on her cheeks there was a rosy blush.

“Dusty,” she said, “the cop totally believed my story!”

Dusty seemed to cheer up and she smiled at Josephine, turning away from Nadja. “The cop, she believed me too.”

“What did you guys tell her?” Nadja asked.

“We said we saw Reena at the Wal-Mart and then she left with some guys and we went to Shoreline but she never showed up.”

“Nice story,” Nadja scoffed. “You think they're going to believe that?”

“Oh, she totally believed it,” Josephine said. “She was saying, ‘Okay, okay.'”

Josephine's wrists were unhandcuffed as well, without bruises, impossibly slim and white.

“Well, I've lied to cops before, and they said okay, and the next day, they arrested me,” Nadja told her.

“Really?” Josephine asked.

“Yeah, cops lie,” Nadja said, as if speaking to one who was very naive.

“I know they lie,” Josephine said, and Dusty began to cry once more.

“They're going to wipe your mop,” Nadja said, somewhat wistfully.

J
OSEPHINE,
as she often did, now sat in Kelly's bedroom, away from the drum kits and the bookshelf, by the mirror. “I could do my makeup for three hours,” she would later recall. It was a kind of art, the art of her vanity. She would marvel at the curve of her lips and the blue of her eyes. Mascara, she could place it on her eyelashes without the slightest smudge.

“I can't believe the cops came to you,” Kelly said. “How the hell did they get your name?”

“Well, they came to
my
house, so
I'm
the one in real trouble.”

“Do you think Dusty ratted us out?”

“No way. Dusty's totally paranoid. She won't even talk on the phone because she thinks our phones are tapped. She always told me jail was fun, but now she's just crying, ‘I don't want to go to jail! I don't want to go to jail!' Plus I talked to Laila, and she said she told Dusty to not say anything.”

“Look,” Josephine said suddenly, and with great enthusiasm, “if the heat comes down, we'll go to Mexico!”

Kelly, who was sitting on her bed surrounded by laundry and schoolbooks, smiled suddenly at the suggestion of escape.

“We can learn Spanish!” she said, and perhaps envisioned herself as suntanned and fluent in the warm climes of Tijuana. “Yeah,” she said, “if the heat comes down, we'll go to Mexico.”

“Dusty did say jail's not so bad,” Josephine said. “She said it's actually kind of fun. It would be kind of cool to go to jail, and then when you got out, you could say to your friends, ‘Hey, yeah, what's up, I just got out of jail.'” Josephine seemed to consider this idea, suddenly, and seriously. After all, what could prove more to her minions that she was truly hard core than having served some time in lockdown?

“I'll kill myself if I go to jail,” Kelly said. “I'm going to Mexico.” The idea had enthralled her, and so Josephine decided to indulge the fantasy,
though later she would admit the girls were not so organized in their plan of escape. (“We didn't figure anything out. We didn't even think about getting fake passports.”)

The girls said it several times, so it sounded like a song:
If the heat comes down, we'll go to Mexico.

“I'm your best friend, Josephine,” Kelly said. “I'll always be there for you.”

“Kel,” Josephine promised, “I'll do anything for you.”

W
HEN
N
ADJA WOKE,
she saw Josephine sitting before the mirror.

To Josephine, she said: “Why don't we go down to the Gorge, and you can show me what happened and where the body is.”

“Sure,” Josephine replied, bending forward to rub Nivea cream into her soft knees.

Nadja thought to herself,
If the cops can't figure out this shit, then me and Anya will.

The two girls took a bus first to Oak Bay Junior High School to get Anya.

Anya, in her classroom, heard her sister yelling her name. “Here comes Nadja!” she thought, and she asked her teacher if she could go see her sister in the hall for a second.

“Jo's going to take us to the scene,” Nadja told her, “and show us what happened. Get your stuff. Let's go.”

In this way, Anya found herself asking for permission to be excused from class. Almost feverishly, she said, “Don't tell anybody, Mrs. Aitken, but me and my sister are trying to find out what happened with this murder down in View Royal.”

“Well, I guess that's more important than school,” Mrs. Aitken said.

“I think so,” Anya replied, and she grabbed her cigarettes and schoolbooks and ran out to the field where Nadja and Josephine were laughing at the rugby players in their huddle, their stupid jock jerseys so full of sweat and dirt.

The girls rode on the bus, rode away from the green and floral streets of Oak Bay to the suburb just off a lonely highway. Nadja observed the location carefully. A Mac's store at the intersection behind a gas station, the Comfort Inn, a bridge with green handrails.

The girls went under the bridge. They entered the cavelike space.
Nadja looked toward the dark water, saw the wooden beams that held up the bridge. Seagulls flew above, but there were no police officers in the dark waters looking for the body. None. Nobody at all. She cursed the cops silently and wondered,
Why did they not listen to me?

Anya's acting skills on this day were extraordinary, and Nadja bit her lip to keep from smiling proudly.

“I can't believe you killed her,” Anya said. “That is so cool!”

“This is the log,” Josephine said, “where Reena sat, and she was sitting right here when I pushed my smoke into her face.”

“Harsh!” Anya said. “I can't believe you did that! That is so cool!”

Encouraged, Josephine went into greater detail. “Her skull was crushed,” she said. “We kicked her, and she was just lying right here, and we broke her teeth and kicked her in the stomach. She was screaming, so we knocked her out.”

“I'm so proud of you!” Anya screamed. “You killed her! The bitch is dead!” She jumped up and acted impressed.

Nadja shivered suddenly, and the sky was so gray, and it had started to rain.

She moved closer to Josephine and said coolly, “Who were the other girls?”

“All Shoreline people, and Dusty,” Josephine said.

Nadja covered her nose and felt queasy suddenly. There was such a terrible smell. “It just
reeked
under there,” she would later recall. Still, she persevered.

“So,” she said, walking toward the water's edge, where the grass gave way to the rough sand, “you pushed her in here?”

“No,” Josephine said, and she raised her hand and pointed across the bridge, toward the shore below the old white schoolhouse. “She was pushed in over there.”

Nadja looked over to the land by the schoolhouse. The distance was a significant one, and surely Reena couldn't have been carried so far, for Josephine had said she was fat, and if Reena was beaten up so bad that her skull was crushed, surely she couldn't have walked on her own across the bridge.

“How the fuck did you get her over there?”

“I have no idea. I wasn't there for that part.”

Anya now looked as well to the dark pool of water below the schoolhouse, and like her sister, she wondered how Reena could have made it
to the other side of the bridge. “How in the world did she get over there? Did she fly or something?”

“I told you. I wasn't there for the second part.”

“I'm trying to believe you here,” Nadja said, impatiently, “but this is not making sense.”

“Well, let's go over there. I'll show you.”

The rain was falling still, and Nadja was wearing her short navy pleated skirt, and she did not want to go over there. It smelled so bad, the most terrible smell, and she was shivering. She began to walk away without saying a word, and the two girls followed.

She walked up the stairs where Reena too had walked and fallen and been dragged and walked again. Nadja turned back just to see the place once more, to inscribe the site into her memory. The water was very dark and murky, and the waves were slight but still rising. Nadja wished to see a man with a black wet suit and an oxygen tank, a man who was searching for a missing girl who may have been on the bottom, alone and wounded, but no man rose from the depths of the Gorge.

•   •   •

Anya spoke to Scott Green first, a polite and amiable young officer from a family of crimefighters—his father in the Victoria Police Department, his great-grandfather in the Sioux City Police Department, a relative of his mother's in the FBI. He was only thirty-three, and yet his hair was starting to recede at his temples. Anya stared at the hair on his forehead, and she thought it looked kind of funny, the way the front dipped down and then receded. “Your hair kind of looks like the McDonald's M,” she told him.