Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  “Yes, that could be hard on the sleep. Now, do—”

  “Josephine’s pretty stupid, you know. I keep asking her all these questions, and she’s not even getting suspicious. Dusty’s really worried though. She’s miserable. Oh, I know something else!”

  “Go ahead.”

  “She said they ditched Reena’s shoes downtown in the garbage. And she said Reena’s jacket is missing. They went back on Saturday, and they looked for Reena, and they looked for her clothes, and they couldn’t find this Adidas jacket. She said there was blood on the jacket. Somehow, somewhere. And another thing, I’m scared for my little sister. I don’t want her being taken back to school in a cop car. Can you get her a taxi?”

  “Yes, we’ll have a taxi take you back.”

  Nadja sighed. The thought of anything cruel or violent happening to Anya troubled her, and she suddenly wanted to leave the station. “That Mr. Officer, I spoke to before I met you, he was being a real shithead to me. Sometimes you cops are nice, but he was really mean to me.”

  “We’ll make sure that the officer who takes you back is nice.”

  Nadja sighed once more. She did not ask for anything in return for her bravery, and no medal of honor was offered on this particular day. She thought again of the waters and the darkness. She raised her voice suddenly, and she stared at the detective so directly that he looked away.

  “I told you this on Wednesday,” she said. “I’ve been wondering why haven’t you guys searched the water.”

  “Well, we need more help to find out if this did in fact happen.”

  She raised her voice even louder now. “I want to know for a fact if this happened or not!”

  “So do we,” he said, meekly, agreeably.

  “I’m getting told this is true. I’m giving all this information to you. I don’t even know if it is true. All I know is this girl Reena is missing.” She screamed then, at the silent room, and the silent man. She screamed: “How many Reenas are there in this goddamn world?”

  Something’s Happened Here

  TWO YOUNG GIRLS have come forward and told us they’ve heard about a girl who was killed. It’s our belief that it is a suspicious circumstance. We don’t have a list of suspects, though it seems that they’re all young girls living in the vicinity of View Royal. The girl, the alleged victim, is named Reena Virk. She has been missing for a week.”

  A week? Sergeant John Bond thought to himself. A week, and we’re just talking about this now? John Bond, a charismatic detective with a shaved head and abundant energy, had been called in to attend the Joint Forces meeting. Bond was considered one of the best detectives in View Royal, for, as one admirer says, “He just gets people to confess everything. They feel like he’s their big brother. He’s the kind of guy you just want to bare your soul to.”

  “Maybe she’s walking the stroll on Government Street,” he said.

  “No. There’s no indication that she’s been involved in the sex trade.”

  “Well, has she ever run away before?”

  “Yes. She was at Kiwanis for a few days. But she’s always been accounted for.”

  Okay. Every night for the past fourteen years, she’s accounted for, and now she’s not accounted for—for seven days, John Bond thought to himself. Something’s happened here. He glanced at the file on the table marked “Barusha: Suspicious Circumstances.”

  “Any boyfriend in the picture?” Sergeant Ross “Roscoe” Poulton asked. He was a healthy-looking man, with a neatly trimmed mustache and piercing blue eyes. Like Bond, he’d been a cop since the age of eighteen, and yet due to the peaceful nature of the island, both men had dealt with fewer than a dozen homicides.

  “No boyfriend,” Shannon Lance said, and she handed the two detectives the photo provided by the Virk family. It was Reena’s last yearbook photo, and in it, her lips were almost black. The photo was not particularly flattering and yet anyone could see the clear hope in her closed, broad smile.

  “There was possibly some type of encounter under the Craigflower Bridge,” the detectives were told.

  A list of names—in police lingo “the players”—was written on a blackboard. Josephine, Dusty, Kelly, Laila.

  “Some of these girls are supposed to be from Shoreline School, Krista,” an officer said to the young constable who worked in the Street Crime Unit in View Royal. “Do you know any of the girls who might be involved?”

  Krista thought of the young girls she often encountered when she broke up parties on Shoreline field. The only Kelly she knew was Kelly Ellard, the daughter of her husband’s good friend Lawrence Ellard. She’d known Kelly for years, even gone camping with her.

  In a small town coincidence, Krista had been at Kelly’s house last Saturday, the night after Reena Virk had gone missing, sitting in the kitchen, eating chili. Her husband and Kelly’s father drank beer and talked about their slow pitch softball team.

  She remembered now how Kelly had come downstairs, saying she was going out to “look for a missing girl.” Seeing Krista, the cop, at the kitchen table, Kelly’s face went white. “My husband said, ‘What’s Kelly’s problem? She looks like she saw a ghost.’”

  “A light bulb went on,” Krista recalls of that moment in the Joint Forces meeting. “I thought to myself, ‘This is going to get ugly.’”

  “I knew Kelly better than any investigator on the file, and I thought, ‘She’s the type who could get away with this.’ I wanted to walk away.”

  Out loud, she said, “The only Kelly I know is Kelly Ellard.”

  Another detective spoke up. “We got the records from Shoreline and Kelly Ellard is the only Kelly in the school.”

  “What do you think we should do?” the detectives asked Krista, for she seemed to be the one with the most knowledge of the teenage players.

  “I have a kind of bond with this girl Maya. She’s a good friend of Kelly’s, and if Kelly was involved in something at Shoreline, chances are Maya would have been there.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Kelly if you know her?” a detective asked.

  “Kelly’s the type who will just tell you to fuck off.”

  *

  Back in his office sitting under the photographs of vintage planes, John Bond decided this: the Gorge should be searched by helicopter immediately. Even if it was a useless exercise, it, at the very least, would show the girl’s parents there was an effort to find their daughter. Unfortunately, all the helicopters were in use. The APEC conference, a meeting of world leaders, was to be held in Vancouver, and the helicopters were required to protect the security of President Clinton and the prime ministers of Canada and Japan.

  Because all the police helicopters were unavailable, he called his friend Glen Dychuk at 1:50 in the afternoon. Glen worked for the Coast Guard and told Sergeant Bond he could take him up in the Messerschmitt first thing in the morning.

  Sergeant John Bond went under the bridge.

  “I bumped into some guys from the Identification Unit. They were already looking for anything suspicious.” The detectives from Ident would report:

  “The area under the bridge consists mostly of dirt and gravel with infrequent vegetation. It was noted that there was a myriad of broken glass, cigarette butts, and pop bottle caps indicating frequent use of the area, likely by teenagers. No evidence supporting any untoward activity was obvious to the writer. There were no clear foot impressions observed in the soil. The route from the underside of the bridge going up the stairs to the east of the bridge was examined for any forensic evidence with negative results. The writer searched underneath the bridge on the north side of the waterway. This search was negative in looking for any evidence of a struggle.”

  Recanvass is the term they use. Return to the area of the suspicious circumstances, return to the area where the victim was last seen. The same time, the same place, the same day. “You might come across a paperboy or a milkman,” Sergeant Bond explains. “You find people who have the same pattern of movement.”

  Th
e detectives set out for Shoreline Junior Secondary.

  Often he went undercover in these bars: the Carlton, the Tudor, the Esquimalt Inn. John Bond could grow a mustache, wear a leather jacket, but these were not the reasons he fit in. Quite simply, he just didn’t seem like a cop. Once he bumped into a convict he’d gone undercover on, living in the same cell, getting the guy to talk about his prostitution ring. Bond had bumped into him in the courthouse just before he was set to testify. He was even wearing a tie, and still the convict had no idea. “What are you doing here?” he asked Bond. “You get busted again?”

  But now he wasn’t going into a prison or a biker bar. He was going into the world of the youth of View Royal. He was, he knew, likely to be out of place.

  At 6:15, John Bond and Krista Hobday headed for the home of Maya Longet.

  “Maya acts tough,” Krista warned, “but she’s never lied to me. She wants to be liked by other kids, but you can just see underneath it all she’s a sweet person.”

  She asked Bond if he knew of Maya’s past, and he nodded grimly. Maya’s father had been brutally murdered ten years before, and six-year-old Maya had been in the house while her father was stomped on and knifed. A drifter named Bob Case and Maya’s mother had been arrested but never convicted. Maya had been adopted by her father’s sister, Belle Longet.

  The two officers parked in Maya’s driveway. “If anyone knows what’s going on, it will be Maya Longet,” Krista said as they walked toward the door.

  At Maya’s house, Kelly Ellard was in the kitchen. So were Willow and Eve, two other girls who’d been under the bridge. The girls were preparing for a Friday night dinner, and after dinner they planned to go down to Shoreline, just like they always did, just like everything was the same and ordinary.

  To Maya’s aunt, John Bond said: “Belle, there’s some talk about a teenage girl missing. We’re just trying to get it all together, and we think Maya might know something about it. Can we take her to the station and ask her some questions?”

  “Sure,” she said, and she wiped her damp hands on her denim apron. “Of course you can. That’s no problem at all.”

  “Who’s she with?”

  “Willow, Eve, Kelly….”

  “I’d like to bring in one of those girls,” he said.

  “Sure, take Kelly,” Belle replied, with a slight laugh. She found Kelly rude and unpleasant, and she had heard that Kelly once slapped her own mother for no reason at all.

  “I think we’ll take Eve,” Sergeant John Bond said.

  “That’s fine,” Eve said, but there was “a nervous laugh” from the girl.

  Kelly ran out the door as soon as the police left.

  “I just didn’t clue in,” Belle would later admit. “I had no idea what was going on.”

  When the phone rang, Belle’s home was empty of teenagers, and she expected and hoped John Bond would say she could come and pick Maya up. She hoped he would say Mayas been very helpful; the missing girl, she’s been found. But he said, his voice in the manner of apology, “Well, it looks like Maya’s a little more involved. You need to come down here.”

  Involved in what, she wondered, as she gathered her keys and went out to her car. Gray clouds moved over the white shadow of moon as she drove over the bridge. She thought, as she drove, about the murder of her brother long ago. She thought about the doctors saying, “It will probably hit Maya when she’s sixteen. That’s what usually happens with buried trauma.” Whenever Belle tried to talk to Maya about the murder, “She’d just get this look in her eyes, like she’d gone to some secret place,” Belle recalls. “She just shut down, but I did that too after my brother died. It was the only way I could survive.” Sometimes she’d wander into the basement and find her secret envelope of photos and the newspaper articles. One day, Maya would want to see these:

  Woman, 28, Accused of Murder

  Police Find Victim’s Daughter

  Pair Faces Murder Charge

  Almost a decade later, some cruel force seemed to be pulling her back into the places of tragedy.

  “The Saanich station was where I went when my brother was murdered,” Belle recalls, “so it was very, very hard for me to go back there.” Still, she went inside, past the trophy cases filled with antique rifles and handcuffs.

  • • •

  In the interview room, John Bond and Krista Hobday asked the sad-faced girl what she knew about a missing girl named Reena.

  “I know a Reena at my school,” Maya said. “She’s got blonde hair. She’s skinny with a weird last name.”

  “Do you know an East Indian girl named Reena?” Bond asked, and then showed her a photo of Reena Virk.

  “I’ve never seen her.”

  “So where were you last Friday night?”

  “I was in Gordon Head all night, at the teen center.”

  “Look,” Bond said, raising his voice, “our purpose here is to try to find this girl so we can notify her mom.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Maya insisted. (“Maya had this ‘kiss-my-ass’ look on her face,” Krista recalls, “and John’s giving it all he’s got.”)

  “Do you want to deal with me now, or do you want to go to court? Let’s hear the truth. This isn’t about somebody stealing a candy bar. It’s murder!”

  “She gave it up in bits and pieces,” Krista recalls. “She told us she was under the bridge. She admitted to hitting Reena. That’s when we chartered her and warned her.” Bond then went to look for Belle while Krista prepared to take Maya’s sworn statement.

  “What’s going on?” Belle said to John Bond, when he came out of the interview room, his face more worn and worried than when he’d shown up at her house.

  “Belle, we’ve read her her rights. She was more involved….” Something about a missing girl, she heard, something about Maya’s friends, and then she followed the detective into the cramped and airless room and saw Maya on the sofa. There was a slightly sullen look on her face, the kind of look she would throw at her mother when asked to do a particularly tedious chore, and she chewed on her lip. The small gesture of defiance bothered Belle, and she spoke to her daughter sternly: “Maya, if someone’s child is missing, you’re going to tell them everything you know. I don’t care if your friends are involved or not. This is someone’s life, someone’s child.”

  She said the word child with a force that seemed to rouse Maya, and she nodded; she agreed. “She told them everything she knew,” Belle says. “She told them all she knew.”

  “She laid it all out very clearly,” John Bond recalls. She told of the fight under the bridge.

  But Maya had seen something else that night.

  “Willow’s mom picked me and Willow up from the Mac’s just after 11:00, I guess it would have been, ’cause that’s Willow’s curfew. We got in the truck and I was by the window and Willow was in between. We drove over the bridge, toward the schoolhouse. And we saw two people on the bridge, like walking back, away from the schoolhouse. We waved, but they didn’t see us.”

  “Who was it?” John Bond asked.

  Maya told him, and he wrote down the names.

  Though she did not know this, Maya had just given the police their first real “break” in the case.

  “I shut down the interview,” Sergeant Bond remembers. “I went out and found Downie. I told him straight up, ‘We’ve got a homicide here.’ I gave him my notes. I said, ‘Here are the names of all the players.’”

  Eight names, eight players, eight teenagers.

  “We just carried on working through the night.” Calls were made to the undercovers with the names of the players. There were already detectives at the school, and now they were given permission to do more than investigate. Arrest all of them for murder, Bob Downie said. In this way, the teenagers on the field were now as Reena had been a week before. On the field, unaware of the forces about to descend on them on a Friday night.

  On the Field, the Field They Were Once On

  ON THAT FRIDAY EVENING as th
e detectives received their orders to arrest, Syreeta cashed out at Brady’s Fish and Chips. She touched the money, arranged the brightly colored bills in stacks, wrapping them with yellow rubber bands. Tara cleaned the bottles of vinegar; she gathered the shakers of salt and pepper, then picked the paper napkins off the chairs.

  There was a new mechanical aspect to their movements. They did not laugh about lecherous customers; all the joy of the week before was absent and yet not eradicated. It seemed to Syreeta as if their former happiness was being held somewhere, suspended, and she hoped the happiness would soon fall over them once more, elate them, so they could enjoy life as they had when they were carefree.

  “Are you going to the party?” Tara asked her, and Syreeta nodded. Yes, she would be picked up by her mother and go to Shoreline and meet up with Warren, Marissa, and Dimitri.

  After locking the door, the two friends stood in the parking lot. They leaned against the window of the sari shop. Lilac and amber cloth stood in rolls, thin fabric with threads of gold. There was no satellite in the sky, and the moon was not full, but together for some reason, both Syreeta and Tara looked up at the sky. For some reason, Tara took Syreeta’s hand, and both friends kept their eyes toward the sky not yet full of stars, and then Syreeta’s mother was driving up and they were getting into the car and they were going to the field, where they thought there would be a party.