Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  “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.

  Mexico

  JOSEPHINE, 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.”

  The Other Side

  WHEN NADJA 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.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said, but he laughed. “So you had Josephine take you to the scene. Can you tell me where it was?”

  “It’s by this bridge. We went under the bridge with her, and she showed us this log. That’s where Reena was sitting. Josephine told us she went up to Reena and put a cigarette right out on her forehead, just burned a hole in her, and then everybody surrounded Reena and started beating up on her. They just beat the living crap out of her. Josephine told me she was screaming.” Anya shook her head. She was talking to herself more than to the police officer now. “I’d like to see how Josephine would go through pain like that. Just imagine that you were that person getting beaten up and thrown in the water, with your arms broken. That is so….” She paled then, and it seemed as if she’d been hurt herself, as if she was wounded too.

  “Did she say who beat Reena up? Did she give you any names?”

  “Well, there was Josephine and another girl who lives with Josephine. She’s a big chick. I forget her name. She’s got blackish hair. She thinks she’s a Miss Tough Girl. Whatever. She thinks she can beat up anybody. Josephine told me Reena was screaming! So they knocked her out by kicking her in the head, and then they took her to the other side.”

  “The other side?”

  “Yeah. I don’t believe that part. How could they get her to the other side when she was unconscious? How could they bring her all the way over the bridge and then down to the other side? They would have to do that because there’s no way Reena could have walked that far. We asked her, and she just said, ‘I have no clue.’”

  “But you do believe Reena’s dead?” Scott Green asked, thinking, This is one bizarre story.

  “Yeah, I do! She’s been planning this for a while. She wanted to kill Reena because Reena lied about some guys, and because Reena was jealous of her beauty, or something. Her beauty? Come on! Give it up! Jealous of her beauty? She’s kind of ugly. Sorry, anyway, she told me they killed her on Friday night around 11:00. I don’t even get the point of killing someone. What’s the point of doing that? What’s the point of beating somebody up? Josephine is so proud of it. She goes around telling everybody. Well, someone could go right behind her back and just go to the police. I mean, that’s what me and Nadja did.”

  Scott Green nodded, and the girl (“a typical teenager,” he would later say) continued.

  “And the other thing I don’t get is: what was Reena thinking? Wouldn’t she think, ‘Hey, something’s up. There’s all these girls who don’t like me and they want me to go under a bridge.’” Anya reached for a cigarette and lit the match on the zipper of her black boot. “I’d figure it out right there. I wouldn’t even go under the bridge. You know why? Because I, like, watched this movie once, and this one girl brought this other girl to a dark place and beat the living crap out of her and killed her. But the girl, the killer, she left one of her earrings behind. She lost it, accidentally I guess, and the cops found it when they were investigating, and they traced it back to the girl, the killer. So when we were down there today, I was like, ‘Josephine, did you leave any earrings? Did you leave anything they could find if they investigate?’ She goes, ‘Nope. I was being very smart. Took all my jewelry off. Went there, beat her up. I made sure I had no blood on me. I made sure that she had no blood of mine.’”

  Sergeant Scott Green interrupted Anya then as soon as she reached down to put out her cigarette on the precinct floor.

  “Anya, how would you suggest we solve this case?” he asked, and if there was a slight condescension, she was used to this in the voice of older men.

  “I would suggest that me or Nadja talk to Josephine’s friend on the phone and get her to admit it. You guys could record her on the phone talking about killing Reena. And if you guys had a tape recorder, I could record Josephine on the phone. You’d see how stupid she is. She is a really stupid girl. I could get her to admit everything. She would just tell me exactly what she did. She thinks no one will find out what she did. Well, duh. There’s Reena’s family. She thinks nobody will find the body. Well, come on … you guys should investigate, you know. Try and look for something, like blood, down at the place where it all happened.”

  “Sure.”

  “And do you know those people who go underwater to find a body? I think that should happen because she could be down at the bottom. And after everything is sorted out, I think Josephine should be arrested. She planned this, and it happened. And Reena’s been missing since Friday, and when Nadja called her mother, she said she sounded so miserable and sad. Christmas is coming up. This is going to be the hardest thing for her parents. I think I have the right to tell you guys this. I do have the right.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Just imagine the pain she was in, and Josephine’s so proud of herself,” Anya said, but she noticed the constable seemed like he wasn’t li
stening to her anymore and perhaps was even smiling. She had offered to tape the killer, but he did not take her up on this suggestion.

  She looked at the officer once more, before leaving the room.

  “Your hair is really weird,” she said, and she smiled at him while he walked her to the door.

  Nadja was more forthright with Scott Green and she did not even notice the strange pattern of his hair. “I saw the cops yesterday at Seven Oaks, and I almost had a heart attack. I was like, ‘Oh my God. What are they doing here?’ I asked you guys specifically to keep this confidential.”

  “We will. We’ve only told the supervisor at Seven Oaks because we had to get permission to speak to Dusty and Josephine.”

  “Well, you can’t trust people. I certainly don’t. Anyway, Josephine took me to the bridge this morning, and she showed me the place where it happened. It’s on the other side. They finished beating her up and threw her in the water. I don’t know how they got her to the other side. I think she mentioned something about low tide, so maybe they dragged her over there if the tide was really low. I asked Josephine how she got her over there, but she said she wasn’t there. All I know is Josephine set it up. She’s planned this for a long time. She didn’t do it, but she was the one who caused it. She did most of the beating, and Kelly killed her.”

  “Why did she want Reena dead?”

  “She told me the first day we met. I was going to bed, and she just starts telling me. She said Reena lied to her all the time and made up stories, and Josephine got pissed off. She said Reena was jealous of her and hated her for her beauty. She told me she knew how she wanted it to go, in her mind. She wanted Reena killed. And then Kelly phoned her up on Saturday morning and said, ‘She’s dead.’ Kelly drowned her in the water.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “At first I thought she was bullshitting me, but now, I do sort of believe it. But it does bother me, the part about her getting to the other side. If Reena was heavy, how could they carry her? I find that weird. I don’t get that part. But you guys said Reena is really missing, and she hasn’t been found. Josephine gave me Reena’s mom’s number, and her mom said Reena hasn’t been home since Friday and she’s missing and she’s worried. So just in case it’s true, I thought I should tell you guys. Maybe it’s a fluke. I don’t know. Maybe those girls found out a girl named Reena is missing and they decided to make up this story. I just don’t know if it’s true, but I want to know if it’s true! I haven’t had much sleep since Josephine keeps bragging to me about this fucking murder shit. My sister thinks it’s true. I just don’t know, but if it is true, I guess I’m going to pack myself up and get out of that house. I’m not going to share a room with those two psychopaths.”