Under the Bridge (47 page)

Never again did the Saanich station witness an evening like the one on Friday, November 21. Never again were the cells full of girls with ponytails and braces and platform shoes. How strange that night seemed in retrospect. All those girls, some suspects for murder, some with information about a murder, in the station after being pulled off the green field, sobbing to the older men, sassing off the detectives, crying for their boyfriends, saying they saw nothing, saying they heard it but
did not believe.
Girls with their names like brands of perfume. Chandelle and Laila, Syreeta and Marissa, Eve and Melody. Some of the girls had been stunningly beautiful, with soft hair and softer skin; some had been burly and rude, with heavy bodies and rough eyes. But they'd spoken of broken arms and whispers and lurings and blood in the water.

The presence of so many girls in their station remains simply a truth, an anomaly, a rather bizarre and unlikely event. A complete mystery. “I guess it was socioeconomic,” Poulton offers. “The group dynamic,” Bond suggests. “The mob mentality. It was definitely unusual to see so many young females involved in an incident,” Hobday observes. “The kids in the beating and murder, not one of them came from an intact family.” Of the witnesses, she says, “They were just your typical girl next door.”

In the exhibit room, marked pieces of property remain in boxes. Willow's yearbook. Josephine's Nivea cream. A shard of glass from the bottle of Polo Sport perfume. Maya's pillowcase with daffodils and a tiny blood stain. Kelly's drawings of decapitated bodies and bullets flying at an officer going, “Oink, oink, oink.” Adidas, Nike, Calvin Klein. A white sock recovered from Seven Oaks Group Home. A letter Dusty wrote to Warren in juvie. (“Hey hon, whad up. I have a lot of questions
I need answered.”) A Shoreline yearbook with inscriptions such as, “Call me baby, let's party all summer long. Love ya forever.” Josephine's notebook of phone numbers recovered from Reena Virk's home. Like a poem or a trove, the real clues might have been uncovered here—some clues to the lives and dreams and lack thereof, some sensations and longings, some meaning in these seized possessions of adolescence. But the exhibits remained sealed, kept from the public while, in the parlance of the police, “legal matters remain pending.”

Principal Frances Olsen left View Royal and now lives on a houseboat reachable only by kayak or canoe. Her former school, Shoreline, is no longer a school for teenagers who memorize war poetry.
Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved and were loved.
The school is now a middle school for those in grades 6 to 8. The purpose of this transition was not to obliterate a site where a murder may have been planned but to accommodate, according to the school board, a change in the population.

Seven Oaks is also no longer a “receiving and assessment home.” A former worker explains that after the murder, “We were shut down by the Ministry. The girls went home to their families, if they had them, and if not, they were put into foster homes. The Reena Virk murder had a huge, huge effect on all those girls. They were really traumatized.”

When speaking of Nadja, the woman from Seven Oaks softens her voice. In the town, no one has ever learned of Nadja's actions. Her heroism and determination are known only by those involved in the investigation. “If the Russian sisters hadn't come forward, there's a chance we might never have learned about the murder,” a detective admits. Perhaps the body would have drifted for weeks on end, been discovered rather than searched for, ruled death by accident or death by suicide. Perhaps. Nobody could say for sure, in retrospect.

“After they shut Seven Oaks down, all the girls left, except for Nadja,” the care worker recalls. “She had nowhere to go. She stayed with us until Christmas. The day she left was one of the toughest days of my life. She had to leave. And she was crying. I was crying. It was horrible. She's just an amazing girl, and when she left, she was at the highest risk she'd ever been.”

Of Nadja's current status, she says only, obliquely: “She's taken a turn for the worse, unfortunately.”

Anya, like her sister, seemed to vanish from Victoria, as if absorbed by the endless clouds and forests of evergreen.

Warren's father lays pipeline in the Rio Grande. He is near sixty now, his face weather-beaten and still ruggedly handsome. In the high heat, he recalls the “horrendous” times with Warrens mother, the “bottles of vodka under the bed, in every drawer.” He is not unaware of his own mistakes, but insists he did not “abandon” Warren. “My lawyer told me to get out of town because Warrens mother was trying to get all my money. I was going to get set up in California, and Warren would have come down at Christmas. My wife wanted him there. It all would have been fine. It would have been fine.” He visits his son when his health and time permit, and he plans to go to Warren's parole hearing. He's not one to cry, but now and then, tears come to his eyes when he thinks of the places he's been—the deserts and the red suns, these places Warren will never be able to see: Tunisia, Libya, Las Vegas, the Rio Grande.

Grace Fox moved away from the lane of swans and herons. Josephine's mother moved to Asia. Mrs. Smith, the beloved school counselor, moved off the island to a smaller, quainter town.

Amy, Reena's counselor, still works with troubled young girls, but the budgets are always being refined, reduced, and the program she's now with is said to be removed soon, so the girls Amy deals with will be on their own.

Maya is not in View Royal anymore. There are too many ghosts for her there. The ghost of her dead father, the ghost of Reena. She says, “I put this all behind me when I turned nineteen,” and she talks to few people from her past. In 2002, her best friend, Willow, passed away suddenly. Willow had once written to Warren, “I miss being able to talk to you and have you understand. I am here for you and always will be.” The coroner had found that Willow's unexpected death was a result of “an arrhythmia, an irregularity or loss of rhythm of the heart,” and Willow's death was classified as natural.

Eve has moved away as well, and says the night under the bridge is one she cannot recall. Laila can be seen on downtown streets, still with her long hair and Cleopatra makeup. She has lost interest in kickboxing, and her body is softer, fuller now, less taut and powerful. Her philosophy
on life is, generally, “What's in it for me?” She has refused to cooperate with the Crown. For a while, she lived with a man who was known to the police, described in their files as “armed and dangerous.”

Of all the girls, Dusty is the most likely to recall the night under the bridge. “I think of Reena all the time,” she says, with her voice still strikingly melodic and lovely. Once she was a “dangerous young lady,” but her run-ins with the law ceased soon after she was no longer a teen. “I kind of feel at fault for what happened to Reena,” she admits. “If it wasn't for me and Josephine, she wouldn't have been there that night.” She does not speak of a wish for closure or putting it behind her. “I can't heal. I can't get over it. Reena was really hurt, and I was part of the beating. Even if she'd survived that, she would have had real damage. And then, a life was taken. I don't think I'll ever get over it.”

Of the justice system, Dusty believes, “We should have got more time. We were monsters. We did a terrible thing.”

Of her mother, Dusty is forgiving. “I don't put the blame on anyone for my behavior back then. It sucked. My mom couldn't control me, so she just said, ‘You're gonna do it anyway. Go ahead.'” Dusty laughs at media reports that Reena's demise was tied to their shared love of Jack Batley. “He was just a typical boy who thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. I never slept with him. I was a little kid. I didn't know what love was.”

Now twenty-three, Dusty has two daughters of her own. It is her daughters who changed her, she believes. (“I got to do whatever I wanted when I was a kid, and that's not going to happen with my daughters.”) The presence of two little girls softened her, saved her and makes her all the more admiring of the Virks. “Reena's grandmother hugs me at the trials. I wouldn't be able to hug someone who did that to my daughter.”

“We did a terrible thing,” she says again. “There's nothing we can do about it now. I want to make my kids be civil and nice. That's my job. That's all I can do.”

•   •   •

Here is the person driving the Karmann Ghia: Reena's little brother, Aman.

At fifteen, he began to resurrect his uncles car, cleaning off the spider
webs, scraping away the rust. The car became his passion, and he himself slid under it, examining the intricacies of motor and brakes. He buffed it endlessly, shone the windows, washed away the silvery mazes of webs. When he turned sixteen, and not a day after, Aman began to drive his car past the street named Earl Grey and to the strip mall that housed the Salvation Army. Once, in Brady's Fish and Chips, Aman commented to his friend on the beauty of the dark-haired girl behind the counter.

“He had no idea who I was,” Syreeta says, wistfully. “The Virks were never rude to me. In fact, they were the only people who ever treated me like I wasn't a bad person.” She wished she could say something to the young boy, but what could she say? She would only smile at him, and think again, “I should have let Warren walk me home.”

Aman might pass the truck owned by Kelly's father. No longer does the logo bear his last name of Ellard, but simply his initials, “L.E.”

Aman drives to visit his grandparents. Mukand and Tarsem have observed Reena's brother and sister grow up, without incident or even rebellion. Both children, they see as reserved and quiet. The murder of Reena is not spoken of, for the subject is incomprehensible, too shattering, and instead they speak of classwork, of travels, of jobs, of friends.

The television is often on at the Pallans' home, and the screen presents reruns of old American sitcoms and news stories of abductions or forest fires. When speaking of the trials of Kelly Ellard, Mukand can grow feisty and scathing, despite his polite nature. “Judge Nancy was so lenient.” He says of the rogue juror, “Maybe she knew Kelly or was very, very stupid.”

Reena's grandmother, a Jehovah's Witness still, finds her hope in the thought of seeing Reena again. “I'll see her again,” she insists.

Her husband, tending to the fireplace, says with a resigned sigh, “You'll never see her again.”

Tarsem shakes her head, smiles, refuses to engage in an argument, for her faith is strong. She feels the possibility of goodness whenever Aman comes over, with the car, brought back, revived. He is so happy, speaking of the new brakes, and how he placed them in the dark shell underneath and she thinks, tomorrow.
Tomorrow I will give him the note.
It is a note she wants him to see, a note she's been saving to give to him. He'd written it when he was a child, when Reena was at the Kiwanis shelter. He had written: “Reena, please come home.”

*

One night, Marissa and Tara see Syreeta at “the club” and hug her, before explaining they are running off to crash a friend's bachelor party at The Fox, the strip club in the Red Lion Inn. Syreeta and Diana often thought of going to The Fox just to see why guys liked it so much, but when it came time to enter the club, they'd lose their nerve. (“We just couldn't go through that door.”)

At the strip club, Tara and Marissa wander past the tables of men in baseball caps and flannel shirts. On the television screens, dirt bikes soar into the sky, performing feats of impossible gravity. The stage is circular and raised high above the men. A country and western song is playing, and the girl on the stage is dancing slowly, taking off a leopard-skin bra, roaming about in black leather chaps.

The next girl on stage moves in a more arrogant and harder way. Marissa thinks she looks familiar, the blonde girl on stage, and she nudges Tara. “Is that Josephine?”

The girls both look up at the blonde girl above them, in the center of the dusty spotlight. Her blonde hair is down to her shoulders, and she wears black leather boots with seven-inch heels, a black leather vest, and a bra of white lace. But her face is the same, with full lips and dimpled chin, the same taunting smile that seems at odds with the features, both classic and innocent.

Josephine sees her former friends and schoolmates, and as she struts close to the edge of the stage, she waves at Marissa and Tara, with a slight awkwardness, as if aware that, unlike the men, they know exactly who she is.

Marissa waves back halfheartedly, but Tara turns away with disgust.

The men gaze at and long for the girl on the stage, for they know nothing of her beyond her willing postures and arching body. They do not know that she once lured Reena Virk out on a moonlit night with a promise of a party. They do not know that her mother told police of a conversation in which Josephine spoke of graves and burials. They have no idea that the near-naked girl on stage once thrust a burning cigarette into a lonely girl's forehead, and the next day threw a dead girl's shoes in a trash can.

Josephine, despite efforts of police and Crown, has never once appeared in a courtroom as a witness. She has never betrayed Kelly, despite
hearing the tapes of Kelly's accusations. She has instead toured the strip clubs of the land, taken the money thrown at her, danced, and been told of her beauty.

Marissa and Tara now walk away from the stage while the men continue to stare up at Josephine, and she reaches down to collect all of their money, and then saunters off, to the applause, toward the back of the stage where she is no longer illuminated but back in the ordinary darkness.

November in View Royal is now, as it was then, a gray season, with a constant fog that seems suspended in heavy clouds, like a sheath, over the mountains and above the firs. The town falls under this weather of melancholy, accustomed to the way the rain blurs their vision as they drive, turns the firs of the tall trees a particularly vivid shade of green. No Russian satellite has fallen from the heavens ever again. No mysterious explosion of brightness and falling fire causes the youth of View Royal to turn their eyes upward. Every year on the anniversary of Reena's death, flowers appear at “The Reena Virk Tree,” a maple sapling planted in her honor. Every year, articles are written about “teen bullying” and proclamations that “Reena Virk will live forever in our memory.”