Under the Bridge (10 page)

Later, he couldn't even remember where he saw her and when. Of course, the police wanted to know all those facts, and Colin, “typical stoner,” was not a compendium of details. He knew only that around the first week in November, he saw Josephine.

“Why did you give that Rhea girl my number?” he asked.

Josephine stepped forward, and her face reddened, and her eyes blazed, and all the softness seemed to leave her skin. “That little bitch,” she said. “I'm gonna kick her face in.”

“She called me, like, every day,” he explained. “Ten, maybe twenty times.”

In the months he'd known her, when she'd corrupted Nevada, taken the cars of strangers, insulted Nevada, wrecked Tommy's party, dressed sleazy, and bothered him late in the evening, Josephine had never once apologized. Apology seemed a feat, like grace and kindness, that was never to be given by the girl. And yet now, she looked at him. Her eyes wide and genuine as her rage had been earlier, she said, “Colin, I'm really sorry. She stole my address book. She's been calling everybody I'm really,
really
sorry.”

He sighed. He suddenly felt indifferent to it all, and he just wanted to go home and listen to Metallica.

It was embarrassing and petty, a stolen address book and the secret crushes of girls.

He turned away, not before giving her a look of sincere disdain.

“Don't worry,” Josephine said, and he didn't really think much of it, until later, of course.

“Don't worry,” Josephine said. “You won't be hearing from her again.”

I
HAVE A BAD HEADACHE,”
Josephine said to her mother as she stood in her mother's doorway.

Elaine Bell stood in the doorway, unsure. (“Sometimes Josephine just came in through the window because she doesn't have a key”)

“I'm feeling sick,” Josephine pleaded, willing herself to look pale and faint, though her complexion was perfect, aided by her large stolen cache of Maybelline. Her cheeks were always pink, and her skin was even and a color called summer sand. She did not look sick at all.

“I'm really tired,” Josephine said, rubbing her eyes and yawning.

Her mother looked at her skeptically.

“I'm hungry,” Josephine said. At last her mother relented and opened the door. Josephine sashayed into the kitchen, elevated by her thick black stolen soles. “They don't feed me properly at Seven Oaks.”

“That's because you miss mealtimes,” Josephine's mother said.

“I don't want to go to school,” Josephine announced. “Can you call them and tell them I'm sick?”

She opened the cupboard, took down some cereal, and began to eat the cereal ravenously.

Perhaps under the spell of her daughter's seemingly innate, slightly regal, skill at issuing commands, perhaps feeling guilty, perhaps not up for a confrontation at 9:30 on a Wednesday morning, Elaine Bell followed her daughter's order. (“I called Shoreline. I told them she wouldn't be there that day and that she had a headache.”)

Josephine was soon lying on the sofa, talking loudly on the telephone.

The Conversation went on for quite some time. The Conversation would last almost two hours.

Josephine at first spoke of boys and clothes and parties. “The part when I started to pay attention,” her mother would later recall, “was when she started to talk about how to kill this person.”

Elaine Bell heard a name, Rea. (“It's an unusual name, so I was alert to it, I guess.”)

And she heard Josephine say: “We should go in the forest somewhere and dig a big hole in the earth and make it so that it's, you know, deep enough like a grave, and then put things on top of it to cover it up, and then walk with Rea to the forest and have her fall in and then start burying her alive.”

Elaine listened to her daughter discuss walking a girl to the forest, pushing her into a hidden grave, and burying her alive.

But it struck her that her daughter's tone was not a serious tone. Later she would recall the murder scheme was described as a “sort of what-if scenario.”

We should go in the forest somewhere. Dig a big hole in the earth. Make it so that it's deep enough. Like a grave. Put things on top of it. To cover it up. Cover it up. Then walk with Rea. To the forest. And have her fall in. Have her fall. In. And then. Then. Start. Start burying her alive.

Mrs. Bell was hearing only one side of the conversation, of course, so she was not hearing the plan of murder suggested by Josephine's friend, only her daughter's response.

Josephine laughed. She said, “Oh you! That's awful.”

Various ways of killing Rea were discussed, and to some suggested by her friend, Josephine would say, “I couldn't do that.” Josephine lay on the sofa, her heels over the curved end, reclining, a devious girl in repose. Her mind was full of so many possibilities. In the movies of the men she loved, she had seen so many ways for the nemesis to get whacked or iced. Bodies were stashed in trunks. There were execution-style killings, but Josephine and her friend, they did not have guns.

Elaine heard her daughter exclaim, “I couldn't do that,” draw in her breath, and then declare: “I could do this!”

Another plan was devised, a plan that Josephine could do. Her daughter discussed her plan to kill Rea for another hour or so while lying on the couch, her blonde hair like a gold fan across the embroidered mauve pillow.

So this is what Elaine heard: her daughter discussing digging a hole in the earth, covering the hole, pushing a girl into the secret grave, and covering up the grave with leaves so it would remain undiscovered—a grave, deep and secret and closed.

“There was definitely hostility there,” Elaine observed. “It wasn't clear to me what Rea had done to make Josephine so angry, but it was clear that there was hostility toward her, for sure. She was a ‘bitch' and deserving of some sort of punishment.”

When Josephine hung up the phone, Elaine asked her only this: “Who were you talking to?”

“Kelly,” Josephine said.

She then yawned and stood up, heading toward the mirror. Josephine applied some lipstick, and Elaine did not ask her daughter anymore about what she'd heard: Kelly and Josephine making plans to walk Rea to a grave and have her fall in.

A
T
S
HORELINE
S
CHOOL,
the foyer was by the trophy case and the pay phones. The foyer acted as a de facto platform, a selection process, a gated community. To be seen in the foyer, to sit in the foyer, this was similar to living in a mansion on the hill—exclusive, privileged, arrived. In the foyer, Josephine and Kelly discussed their plan to punish a girl.

Melanie was just sitting there when Kelly came over and sat down and started talking with Josephine. “They starting talking about this girl they didn't like,” Melanie recalls.

“This girl,” Kelly explained to Melanie. “We're going to beat her up. She's talking behind Josephine's back.”

Teachers walked by wearing red poppies. Melanie looked at the red felt petals pinned above their hearts. Tomorrow would be Remembrance Day, a day they would have an assembly and remember the soldiers who died in the war. They would read “In Flanders Fields” in English class, the poem they read every year, even though none of them had ever been to war, and were too young to even know a veteran. They would stand and chant and try to look tough, because it was really corny, but sometimes a few girls would cry.

So Melanie wasn't really listening when they talked about how they were going to beat this girl up, because she was waving at Tessa. Tessa was one of the girls who always cried when she said the words of Remembrance Day: “If ye break faith with us who die. We shall not sleep though poppies grow.” Melanie moved from the foyer. In the principal's office,
Syreeta and Marissa were handing in their donation boxes. Marissa had put the box of poppies on the counter at New York Fries. Syreeta had placed a box at Brady's. The proceeds went to veterans. The girls gave Mrs. Olsen all the donated coins.

Melanie was wondering how she found herself in this heavy body, which did not match the way she felt, so nomadic and weightless, like she should be winged and tiny. Marissa had that look to her—like an angel, the boys said, with her sweet laugh and tiny hands. Melanie forgot all about the idle chatter of Josephine and Kelly, because on that day, she had bigger concerns, like why she was drifting about, never in the same group, always feeling so lonely.

•   •   •

On the Songhees Reserve, the girls knew vaguely that they were inheritors of stolen lands and that their tribe was once called the Kosampson. More important, they knew the hour that the video channel played hip-hop videos, and they could lie in front of the TV and hope for a view of the bragging and ruthless American men. Once the principal at Shoreline asked Margie and Chantal to give a talk on Multicultural Day about the potlatch or the sweat lodge. They laughed in her face. They didn't even know what she was talking about. Multicultural Day at Shoreline, and the principal asked them to come in and tell everyone about their “native heritage.”

Chantal was over at Margie's on a Wednesday after school. Usually the friends would hang around and talk about guys and make some phone calls. Have dinner. Around 8:30 or so, while they were watching a half-naked American girl shimmy and “shake her booty” on Rap City, Josephine and Kelly called and asked Margie if she would help them beat up somebody.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Margie said.

The plan itself was quite vague. The invitation to the beating had no date or place or time. “They said they were supposed to beat up some girl,” Margie later told the police. “They didn't say when. They didn't say where. They didn't say what they were going to do.”

Yeah, sure, why not.

Margie didn't really think Josephine was serious. “I thought she was just kinda kidding around. 'Cause usually when we say that we're going to beat someone up, it never really happens.”

T
HE STAFF AT
S
EVEN
O
AKS
are required to keep notes of the comings and goings of their troubled residents. Josephine, and later Dusty, would find this surveillance an unbearable pain in the ass. And yet as events unfolded, they would be forever grateful for these records, which would provide a kind of redemption and, in more pragmatic terms, an alibi.

“Friday. November 14th. 1997. Dusty Noble arrived at Seven Oaks Receiving and Assessment at 3:30
P.M.

“Staff observed that ‘Dusty knows Josephine, and they buddy up immediately.'

“Between 3:30 and 7:20
P.M.
staff overheard a resident relay a message to Dusty that Reena had called her and left a message. Josephine and Dusty left at 7:21
PM.
They told staff they were ‘going to a park to party.'”

W
HEN THE TELEPHONE RANG,
Reena had not yet begun to write in her journal or play cards with Aman. She was still eating soup. (“I'm on a diet,” she'd told her mom.)

Josephine sounded excited and asked Reena to go to a party.

Reena was uncertain. “I think I'm going to stay home tonight,” she said.

Hearing Reena hesitate, Josephine handed the phone to Dusty, who was more persuasive and a better liar, though both girls were well practiced, perhaps even gifted, when it came to dishonesty.

“Come on, Reena, come and party. We're not mad at you anymore. Just come on.”

“I heard you want to rock my ass,” Reena said.

Perhaps she thought the two girls had both tried to shun her, and she had showed them that she wasn't so bad after all. She thought Dusty must have forgiven her for her dalliance with Jack Batley. She'd showed them. She'd proved. She could be just like them. She could kiss the same boys. She could be a troublemaker. She'd won their respect, it seemed, for they were
begging
her to go to this party.

“Yes, I'll meet you at the Wal-Mart and we'll go to the party.”

Aman looked so sad, his little pout, holding the pack of cards. “We'll play tomorrow,” she promised.

“I'll be home by 10:00,” Reena promised, grabbing her knapsack, which still held her pajamas and some perfume and her new diary, emblazoned with the tree of life.

Suman thought of warning her, but warnings, there'd been so many, and her daughter was strong-willed, and hopeful too. There was so much hope in her eyes as she set out to meet the girls she hoped were her friends now. The black knapsack was on her back as she set out down the street, lighting a cigarette. Jack's jacket filled with wind,
fluttered like a sail when the sky is against the cloth, and forward she moved, toward the Wal-Mart where she would meet the two girls who would bring her along to what she believed would be a Friday night party.

T
HE
G
ORGE
is a misleading name, with the suggestion of an abyss or funereal crevice. The waterway has always been a place for idylls. In 1861, Lady Jane Franklin, widow of the Arctic explorer, sailed up the Gorge in the course of an around-the-world voyage with her niece Sophia. Miss Goodie McKenzie, their Canadian host, arranged for the ladies to be picked up by canoes and brought to the banks of the Gorge, where they picnicked under the boughs of the oak tree. Goodie's cousin, Alice, a girl who'd come from England in 1857, recalled in her memoirs how “the roar of tumbling waters from the Gorge at low tide made a lullaby for me.”