The Guardians (14 page)

    Three
faces, facing me. Even in the near dark I could see their certainty, their
glitter-eyed excitement. The good news was we weren't alone. This was the
comfort I could see my friends offering to me. We were in danger, the holders
of terrible knowledge, but all could be borne if we stayed together. And we
would.

    "You're
right. He knows," I said, my conviction instantly as real as I tried to
make it sound. "And we're the only ones who know what he did."

    "So
what are we going to do?" Ben asked, though we could tell he knew the
answer already.

    Heather
Langham failed to show up for our music class on Tuesday, and we found her body
at the bottom of the Thurman house on Friday. But by the time the next Tuesday
arrived, and because there were no new developments to report, the story of her
continued missing status in that morning's edition of
The Grimshaw Beacon
moved off the front page for the first time. The town's speculation over
Heather Langham had already been replaced by the chances of the Guardians going
all the way to the provincial championships.

    Which
is not to say that people had stopped caring about the missing teacher, just
that her story had nowhere to go. She had no family in Grimshaw, no one to make
impatient urgings to the police or write letters to the editor. Despite the
appealing photo of her that appeared with each article and TV news clip we saw,
Heather Langham remained an outsider. There were no Langhams other than her in
the phone book, none listed on the granite war memorial that named the local
men who died overseas. She came from elsewhere, an unattached woman who lived
alone in a rented room. She offered little foundation to build a mystery on.

    Perhaps
it was for these reasons that most of us were forced to accept the dullest of
explanations: she had quit and left town. Besides, there were no lashings of
blood in Heather Langham's dormitory in the nurses' residence as was first
rumoured, no suicide note, no sign of an evil twin sister stirring up trouble.
Some concrete suggestion of foul play was required to get the town excited
about the Langham story after the first few days of nothing to report.

    Over
that first week, we—Ben, Carl, Randy and I—were kept busy perfecting our
"normal" act. You might think one of us would have cracked, blabbed,
broken into guilty sobs against our mother's breast. We had buried someone,
after all. We carried news of murder. Wouldn't this find its way to the surface?
Didn't we come from a world so cushioned and flat that the secret of what lay
in the Thurman cellar would be more than we could bear?

    The
answer was in the
us
of it. Alone, we would have run screaming from the
house and told all. But together we held it in. As
us,
we could believe
what was happening wasn't entirely, wakingly real.

    Sarah
wanted to go to the movies. I remember because it was a return engagement of
Flashdance,
which we'd both seen when it first came out months earlier, and
because I didn't really believe she was interested in seeing it again. She
wanted what I wanted, something that only a couple of hours in the back rows of
the Vogue could deliver: the two of us together in a warm place without any of
the talk that had become so troubled between us.

    The
house lights dimmed, and we were enveloped in shadow and Love's Baby Soft. As
Jennifer Beals tumbled and flew across the screen, Sarah and I drew close. We
weren't making out—there was no grappling with bra hooks or belts. Our hands
were communicating, skin on skin. And what did our touches say? Some
combination of
I'm sorry
and
Here I am
and
No one could ever
be closer to me than you.

    Then
the movie ended, and we were forced back out into the cold. We stopped a half a
block from her house, in the side lane next to Patterson's Candy & Milk
that was our goodnight-kiss spot. Not that we were kissing.

    "I'm
not going to ask you about it anymore," she said.

    "Ask
about what?"

    "You're
a terrible liar."

    Snow
fell in fat clumps over our heads. It made the night feel smaller, surrounding
us like the walls of an old barn, solid enough to keep out all outside sound
but not the cold.

    "You
think you're doing this for me," she said.

    "It's
not your problem."

    "Look
at me."

    It
was a hard stare to meet. Partly because her hurt was so much clearer than my
own. And because it made her even more beautiful.

    "I'm
looking," I said.

    "And
what do you see? Just another girl who can't handle the serious stuff."

    "That's
not it."

    "Does
Randy know what you're not telling me? Do Carl and Ben?"

    "They
know because they have to know."

    "Well,
maybe I do too."

    "Can't
you just let it go?"

    "You
think this is because I'm
curious?"

    "Aren't
you?"

    "I
would be if I thought it was just you screwing some other girl. But it's not
that. It's not something we can hide away."

    "Why
not?"

    "I
could if you could. But you can't. And it's killing you. You can't see that
yet, but it is."

    I started
away in anger, but Sarah grabbed me by the arm and spun me back to face her.

    "I
had a dream the other night with you in it. In fact, there was nobody
else," she said. "This old man walking along a beach wanting to say,
'Look at that sunset' or Those waves are coming in high' but never opening your
mouth because there is nobody there to say it to."

    I
thought she was about to cry. But it was me, already crying.

    "I
know you, Trevor."

    "Yeah."

    "Then
you have to trust me. And if not me, I hope you find someone else."

    I
watched her walk to the street, where she paused. It was an opportunity for me
to go to her. A held hand might have done it. Matched footsteps for the last
hundred yards to her house, where I could have told her I'd see her tomorrow.
But by the time I decided which of these felt more right she'd started off on
her own, and there was no way of following.

    We
lost the first game of the playoffs to Seaforth. For most in Grimshaw this was
a disappointment. A handful might even have found it an outrage. But for us, it
confirmed that the coach was Heather Langham's murderer.

    Most
of the other players wrote off the coach's screwed-up line changes and listless
pre-game talk as an off night. But we saw more than mere distraction in his
struggle to remember our names, the out-of-character insults at the ref for
making a tripping call on Dave Hurley (who was guiltily on his way to the
penalty box anyway).

    Even more
telling, he put Ben in net.

    Halfway
through the third period, our team behind 3-1 but still with enough time for a
chance to tie the game up, the coach summoned Vince Sproule to the bench and
tapped Ben on the shoulder.

    "You
want this?" he said.

    Not
You're
in
or
Shut 'em down
or
McAuliffe
!
Get in there
!
but
a question
.

    
You
want this
?

    Spoken
through the cage of Ben's mask so that he was the one player on the bench who
heard. A whisper that could be understood only as a warning or a challenge.

    Ben
played well, by Ben standards. But by then the team had been thrown off by
trailing a "bunch of dung- heeled inbreds" (as Carl called the
Seaforth squad) and the coach's odd decision of sending our backup goalie in to
finish the game, and we slowed, coughing up pucks, leaving Ben to fend for
himself. He let in another two before the buzzer.

    "That's
it. That's
it,"
I remember Ben muttering as he came off the ice to
the rare sound of boos echoing through the Grimshaw Arena. The others assumed
he was voicing his frustration at being hung out to dry by his teammates. But
we knew he'd come to a conclusion.

    There
was a new clarity in Ben's eyes I saw even as he skated out from his net, a
look he shot toward the bench that our fellow players saw as anger and we saw
as stern resolve, but that now, in hindsight, might have been the first hint of
madness.

    I've
been up for a couple of hours when there's a knock at my door.
Tap-slide,
tap-slide, tap-slide.
The way the boy might ask to come in.

    I'd
dreamed about him all last night—dreams of me wandering through the Thurman
house, sensing something just ahead or just behind, until a pair of cold hands
drape over my eyes and I can smell the rancid breath of his laugh before he
sinks his teeth into the back of my neck—and awakened to the threadbare sheets
of my Queen's Hotel bed glued to me with sweat. A shower of brownish water helped
remind me that these were only Grimshaw nightmares, and would retreat as soon
as I was able to leave. Yet when the three evenly spaced knocks at the door
come—
tap-slide, tap-slide, tap-slide
—all such comforting thoughts
skitter away. And in place of my own voice in my head, there is the boy's.

    
Can
Trev come out and play
?

    I go
to the door because he will never go away if I don't, and it is the only way
out. And because the answer to his question is yes. Trev has nothing better to
do. He can come out and play.

    The
doorknob is a ball of ice in my hand. This, I tell myself, is likely only
another quirky symptom of Parkinson's I've noticed of late, the exaggerated
hots and colds of things. Yet my fingers remain frozen to the brass, unwilling
to turn the knob, unable to pull away.

    
Open
up
, the boy says.

    The
door swings back. So unexpected its edge slices into my shoulder, knocking me
back a half-step.

    "Jesus,"
Randy says, slouching in the hall, his T-shirt and jeans crosshatched with wrinkles.
"You look worse than I feel."

    "I'm
fine."

    "Whatever
you say."

    "Is
that coffee?"

    Randy
looks down at the two paper cups screwed into the tray in his hand as though a
stranger had asked him to hold it and had yet to return.

    "It
appears it is," he says, then tries to look past my shoulder. "You
got company?"

    "No.
Why?"

    "You
look all blotchy and flustered, for one thing. And for another, you're not
letting me in."

    "I
thought there was someone else at the door."

    "Who?"

    "Nobody."

    "Funny.
I thought there was nobody knocking at my door this morning too."

    Randy
comes in, stands with his back to me as I take a seat at the desk, steadying my
hands by gripping its edge. "You up for some breakfast?"

    "I'll
just grab something on my way to the McAuliffes'."

    "Right.
Trevor the Executor."

    "Care
to join me?"

    "Me
and you folding Ben's underwear and filing his
Hustlers?
I'm good,
thanks."

    Randy
notices the Dictaphone I've left on the desktop.

    "What's
that?"

    "A
tape recorder," I say, slipping it into my jacket pocket. "Except it
doesn't use tapes. So I suppose it's not really a
tape
recorder. It's
digital."

    "I
know what it
is.
I'm wondering what you're using it for."

    Randy
stares at my hands, white knuckled and ridged, both returned to clutching the
edge of the desk.

    "I'm
keeping a kind of diary," I say.