Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  “And how about Syreeta?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “How about Syreeta?” Brown repeated.

  “I haven’t told her anything.”

  “You’re stalling for some reason here. And don’t be stalling just because you don’t want to give up a name. This is your life we’re talking about. There’s one person you told, Warren. I think you know the answer. You have to tell me. Show me you’re being truthful and honest.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone else as far as I remember.”

  “Syreeta has met with an officer. So this is your chance.”

  “I don’t remember, honestly.”

  “Do you think there’s anyone that actually saw you and Kelly that night?” Bond asked.

  “Saw us walk over the bridge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dimitri and Marissa.”

  “On a scale of ten, with respect to the death of Reena, how do you think you’re responsible? Like, is Kelly eight out of ten responsible and you’re two out of ten?”

  “Three and seven,” Warren said.

  “Three and seven?” Bond said, staring at Warren. “Okay.”

  “I know what I did was wrong.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know I’ll get punished for it.”

  “Hers is seven. Yours is three,” Bond said, returning to the fraction of responsibility. “What would your three consist of?”

  “Kicking, dragging her that ten feet, and being around.”

  “How about being in the water?”

  “I was never in the water. I never went in. I know I should have—I wish I had—stopped her. I should have left before any of this happened.”

  “Oh hey,” Bond said, hoarsely. “Hey, I would have loved it not to happen because I wouldn’t be here. I’d be home with my family. But that’s not the case. This has happened.” He sighed and looked down at his notepad. He could sense his partner’s desire to end the interview now that they had closed in and won.

  “How do you feel?” Bond asked Warren. “You feel okay talking to us?”

  “Yeah. I feel a lot better. It’s just—I know I’m going down for something that I didn’t have a major role in.”

  “You feel okay talking to us?” Bond asked again.

  “I’m being truthful.”

  “You are being truthful,” Bond agreed.

  “You guys are being honest with me,” Warren said.

  “Yeah, and hey, just between the three of us, and guy to guy, I think there’s absolutely no way you sexually assaulted her or intended to sexually assault her. That’s guy to guy. I also feel that you, as a rule, don’t go around hurting people. That’s not your style. And I think you want to deal with this situation. You think, ‘Hey, now that I’m talking to Bruce and John, I feel better.’ You feel better in the last ten minutes, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. It’s still eating me away, what happened.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Bond said. “It’s been eating me away too.”

  “I’m scared of everything,” Warren said, and his eyes returned to the surface of the table, as if he could will himself to be swallowed up by the dark and sturdy wood. His interrogators were quiet, containing their contempt, and he made a sudden request.

  “Can I phone my girlfriend?” Warren asked.

  “I think your girlfriend is being interviewed right now.”

  “She’s here?” Warren said, and he turned his head, as if looking for a nonexistent window.

  “I’m not sure.”

  The room was silent and airless, and Warren wondered suddenly if he could pass Syreeta in the hallway, just see her one last time. The two men seemed impatient now, and he worried that they no longer liked him. He thought of the police officer, years ago, who had sneered his name, Glowatski, as if to say, “Oh you’re one of them.”

  “I just really wanted to talk,” Warren said. “And tell you guys what happened.”

  “Do you want to speak to a lawyer?”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “It’s not too late now.”

  “I’ll speak to a lawyer later on, yes.” He seemed about to speak again, and looked down at the table, and then up at the two men to whom he now confessed.

  “I don’t have it in me to kill a person. I know what I did is wrong and I shouldn’t have done it and I should have phoned the cops as soon as it happened.”

  “So when you were by the white schoolhouse, were you thinking, ‘Hey, geez, I might have a problem if Reena rats on me’?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not gonna kill a person just ’cause I can get charged with assault.”

  “Did it enter your mind that you were deep into this and it would solve your problem if she died?”

  “No. It never ran in my mind that I’d kill a person.”

  “But how did you feel when you saw Kelly killing her? I mean, did you think ‘That’s the end of my problem as well’?”

  “No. I couldn’t handle watching her. I said, ‘Let’s go. Stop. Let’s go.’ I tried to stop her.”

  “Is this the truth?”

  “I swear on my grandpa’s grave.”

  “Your grandpas grave, eh?” Bruce Brown stood up now. His movement was decisive, final, hinting at his contempt. He felt exhausted, as he often did at the end of an interrogation. This too was an odd reward. He now had what he wanted, and yet what a terrible thing to have procured.

  Wanting to leave, he turned to the paperwork and told Warren to sign a form, and after Warren signed it, Bruce Brown said the words he was legally obligated to say, words that contained neither hostility nor sadness, though he felt both of these things, greatly and endlessly, then, on that Saturday afternoon. “Warren, you’ve signed this sheet, you understand the ramifications and the jeopardy that you’re in, right?”

  “I know I’m in jeopardy. I’m in deep shit. I’m in over my head.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Bond said, standing up, refusing to look in the eyes of the small boy. “There’s no question. I think that’s pretty evident today. But you’re in better shape than Reena is,” he said, and he turned off the tape recorder, and headed, directly and rapidly, toward the door.

  Right Out of Place

  THE VICTORIA YOUTH CUSTODY CENTRE, known as YCC, or more informally, as juvie, is located around the corner from a small corner store owned by Chinese immigrants, a purveyor of candy and lottery tickets. The detention center itself, an unremarkable slab of a building, stands somewhat camouflaged by the Department of Public Works office building. Despite its purpose, YCC has no barbed wire or electrical fence surrounding the property. In fact, the only sign of law and order is the daily arrival of a white sheriff’s van.

  On November 22, in the late afternoon, seven new residents would arrive.

  The guards were given special instructions in regard to the new girls: Maya, Willow, Laila, Eve, Dusty, Kelly, and Josephine. They were to be kept separate; they were not to speak to one another.

  The guards observed the new girls, the schoolgirls.

  “Most of the kids in here have been in and out of juvie since they were twelve,” a guard named Floyd explains. “They all know each other. They’re from the same milieu. But these new girls, you could just tell they had never been in trouble before. They probably grew up having barbecues together. And now they’re here. They were right out of place and they knew it.”

  • • •

  Newspapers and television news were banned suddenly. This censorship increased the interest in the arrival of the new girls, and it took only hours for rumors to move through the hallways and classrooms.

  “When I found out what they’d done, I just said ‘Holy Shit!’ It exhausted everybody’s brains,” Floyd, the guard, recalls.

  The kids in juvie found it “weird” when seven girls came in together, and soon began their own investigation into the crime since the newspapers were missing and the guards were unusually tense and silent. In juvie, days are divided into blocks and in those blo
cks of time the residents attend arts and crafts class or woodwork or gym. But at 1:30 and 3:15 and 5:30, they’re granted free time, and in these moments of free time, several girls discussed their findings.

  “Warren started the fight,” a girl named Sidra said. “That’s what I heard.”

  “No, Warren told Craig that he didn’t do anything,” insisted Annie.

  “I heard this!” a red-haired girl with a Chinese tattoo on her breast declared: “The girl who died was Warren’s girlfriend and she screwed around on him and Warren got pissed off. So, he got Kelly mad at the girl and then there was a fight and the other girls took off because they were scared.”

  “Why would they take off?” Sidra asked.

  “I don’t know. They all beat the girl up and they were scared they were going to get charged. They’re standing there, like, ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’ And Kelly goes, ‘Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it.’ And then Warren and Kelly followed her. They went over the bridge after her and they burned her with a cigarette and they drowned her. They kept it secret for a week. This all happened last Friday.”

  “No, I asked Dusty. I go, ‘What are you all in for?’ And she goes, ‘We beat the shit out a girl and then she died.’ Just like that. Exactly like that! She’s all proud of it.”

  Arianna, a girl with black roots and a sly smile, a girl who’d lived on the streets near Chinatown since she was twelve, was thoroughly disgusted by the revelation. “I was high as a kite when I did my assault,” she sneered. “These girls were stone-cold sober. But I like Laila,” Arianna said. “She’s cool. I talked to her in arts and crafts, and she said she doesn’t even know those girls. She just met them that night. She said she tried to stop the fight.”

  Lily spoke up now, “I heard Kelly ask the girl with the braids, Eve, she asks her, ‘Why’d you rat me out? My lawyer told me you gave a statement against me.’ And Eve goes, ‘I’m not going down for murder. You did it, not me.’”

  “Yeah, Kelly’s got a lot of attitude. I wouldn’t be acting like that if I was going down for murder,” Arianna said, and all the others nodded.

  “She’s sick,” Lily said. “They’re all sick. They killed a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “Yeah, at least I can change the things I did,” Arianna said.

  Lily, too, contemplated redemption and the consequences of murder. “I can go back and apologize to the people I’ve hurt, but once you kill somebody, that’s it. You can never change that. Kelly thinks she’s getting out of here too. She told me, ‘I’ve got a good lawyer. I’m getting out any day now.’”

  The girls laughed and wondered how long Kelly would last if she found herself cornered by eight others. How long would she last if she was the cornered one?

  “The blonde Josephine is a little princess. She looks like she should be doing ballet.”

  “What was the name of the girl they killed?” Annie asked softly.

  “Elly something,” Lily said. “That’s what I heard. I think her name was Elly McBride.”

  • • •

  Though they were forbidden to do so, Kelly and Josephine found a way to whisper.

  “Did you give a statement?” Kelly asked. The stud in her nose had been taken away.

  “Fuck, no. Of course, not.”

  “Well, don’t give a statement against me, and I won’t give one on you.”

  “Of course not, Kel,” Josephine said, truthfully. “I would never do that to you.”

  The girls hugged and held one another, and then Floyd, the guard with a brush cut and a wrestler’s physique, came and brought Kelly back to her cell.

  “Tell these girls in here to stop messing with me,” Kelly ordered, as if he was her personal bodyguard. “Tell them I know karate.”

  He held back a laugh and opened the door with a key attached to the chain on his hip. “Take a good look at the company you’re in,” he said to her, without sarcasm or irony.

  The Fireman’s Son

  JOHN BOND KNEW THE MAN who showed up at the station that Saturday evening. They’d both been volunteer firemen together for the View Royal Fire Department. Doug was a good man, Sergeant John Bond thought, still married to a nurse, and on the weekends he’d take tourists on fishing trips around the bays of the island. The fireman had brought in his son.

  The son seemed slightly hesitant. The young boy held his skateboard to his chest, as if it was a shield that could ward off dangers about to come his way.

  The fireman’s son was seventeen. When he was at Shoreline, he was one of the “cool” boys, who seemed effortlessly possessed of a certain and elusive charisma. Colin Jones thought the fireman’s son was “hilarious … he has an awesome sense of humor,” while even Warren would later admit, “I’ve got a lot of respect for that guy.”

  Billy, the fireman’s son, was now a senior at Spectrum School and thus had heard no rumors of the murder. He nonetheless arrived at the Saanich station soon after his father saw the commotion near the Gorge. Bond would later speak of Billy’s information as “the nugget.”

  “You get all these false leads, and all these kids giving you what I’d kindly call carefully calibrated versions of the truth, and then you get a kid like Billy who’s just totally forthcoming, and it’s an interview, not an interrogation.”

  Billy’s crewcut was bleached blonde, in the style later favored by Eminem. Dimples appeared in his cheek when he smiled, which, until this moment, had been quite often and constant. Like Syreeta, he was about to step away from the innocence of his youth in View Royal, all because of what occurred on the evening of the Russian satellite.

  Billy had not seen the satellite fall. He’d been at his friend Craig Smiths, watching a movie with his girlfriend, Annika. The movie was called The Relic, and later, he would remember how silly they’d all been, so goofy, just watching the monster in the horror movie and screaming and laughing.

  At eleven o’clock, Billy and Annika left because Annika had a curfew of 11:30, and Billy planned to walk to his place, get his dad’s black truck, and drive her home. Only something very unusual occurred as he crossed the Old Island Highway. He saw Kelly Ellard—he’d known her “for most of my life.” He was friends and classmates with her older brother; he knew her stepsister; she lived down the street from him and he’d been to her house a few times. He felt neither friendly nor hostile toward her; he felt largely indifferent. She was just a little sister, another girl from the neighborhood.

  And then that night, after watching the horror movie, he’d bumped into her and it was a little weird because her pants were wet up to the knees. It got even stranger, even creepier, even the strangest thing that had happened to Billy in his young and carefree life.

  Kelly had walked up to him, seeming “stressed out,” and had asked him for a cigarette. She then told him that she had just held a girl’s head under water in the Gorge waterway.

  “What should I do?” Kelly had asked him. “What should I do?”

  When he heard this, Billy thought she must be kidding around. “I just thought it was a complete joke,” he would later admit.

  Bond asked him if he had told anybody about the conversation with Kelly.

  Billy said yes, he had told his father when he got home that night. His father had also thought the story of Kelly drowning a girl in the Gorge couldn’t be true. It was only on this Saturday when he’d seen the divers in the Gorge and heard from other firemen that a young girl’s body had been discovered that he realized his son had important evidence.

  “My dad,” Billy would later say, “made me go to the police.”

  “Well, we appreciate you coming forward,” John Bond said. “That’s pretty significant information.”

  Billy nodded, and he pressed his skateboard back to his chest.

  • • •

  Erna Anderson greeted John Bond at the door of her apartment. She was a talkative woman, a cashier at Thrifty Foods supermarket “Well, I thought the coat was my friend�
�s grandson’s,” she said, chatting nervously. “And then at work today, my co-worker, well, he took the training test to be a police officer, and he told me on the news he’d heard about a girl found in the Gorge, and I told him, ‘Well, jeez, I found a coat down there last Saturday,’ and he says, ‘Erna, you got to call the police.’ Her apartment smelled like carnations and apple pie. John Bond smiled, and she kept chatting to him as she offered him some coffee. “And when I got the coat, it was covered in blood.”

  Hearing this, he asked to see the coat, which she had retrieved from her friend. He touched the cloth. The coat was large and ordinary, just a black and white Adidas jacket with a few cigarette burns in the sleeve.

  “The blood was there, and there,” Erna said, pointing at the clean cloth. “And I thought, well, whoever stole this from Robby must have got in some fight.” She shook her head.

  He saw no blood on the coat, and looked at her quizzically.

  “Oh,” she said, blushing. “I washed the coat.”

  She was still chatting away, for it was nice to have a visitor, especially someone like John Bond whom you just wanted to talk to for as long as possible. “You noticed the blood more on the white part,” she said, pointing at the stripe on the sleeve. “I put it in my car after we took it from the jogger and it was soaking wet and—”

  “Can I take a look at your car?”

  “Sure,” she said, and she led the detective outside, where her car was parked under the awning of a cherry blossom tree. The detective cut out part of the carpet on her car floor, leaving a dark and rough hole. He told her they would need to send the carpet to the lab. Even at this early stage, John Bond knew if there were to be convictions in this strange case, the detectives better hurry up and find some real and tangible evidence.

  A Morality Drama

  ON MONDAY morning, the public spectacle began.

  In Youth Court, all eight teenagers appeared and were formally charged before a judge. The atmosphere of the courtroom was charged and frenetic, for the hearing was attended by a large number of journalists, from countries as far away as Sweden and Japan. Never before had so many journalists crowded into a courtroom in the small and lovely town.