The Guardians (17 page)

    "The
empty place on Caledonia," Carl said. "You don't know about it?"

    "Where
you guys go to smoke pot or whatever? Yes, I'm aware of it."

    "Have
you ever been inside?"

    "I
just told you."

    "So
you haven't?"

    "Hold
on here. I mean, seriously, what is this shit?"

    It
was an understandable question. One minute he's on his way home to his wife's spaghetti
casserole and the next he's being interrogated by three kids in a car. He had
every right to be impatient. But what all of us heard—what dismissed my earlier
impression that we'd got everything wrong—was his
shit.
It was the first
time any of us had heard him swear, to pop his seat forward to let the coach
out, and so did the coach, who gripped his hands to the back of the headrest,
ready to go. Instead, Carl rolled his window down. That's when I noticed Randy
out front of the Erie Burger.

    "Get
in," Carl said.

    Randy
bent down to see me and the coach in the back. If he was surprised he didn't
show it. When Carl leaned forward, Randy lined up to get into the back with us.

    "One
here, one there," Carl said.

    After
a second, Randy got it. He came around the other side so that the coach was
sandwiched between us.

    Carl
drove on, making sure to stay off the main streets. For a while nobody said
anything. There wasn't much room in the Ford now, and breathing was something
of an issue, particularly in the back seat.

    "Okay,
so what are we doing?" Randy asked earnestly.

    "We're
just talking," Carl said.

    "That's
not quite true, Randy," the coach said. "Your friends want to know if
I've had a hand in your music teacher's disappearance."

    Randy
shifted around like something was biting his bum. "No shit?"

    "None
at all," the coach said.

    "So
let's hear it, then," Ben said. "What do you know about what happened
to Heather?"

    "Happened?
What
has
happened to Heather?"

    "You
seem to know more than that."

    "This
isn't about me."

    "No?"
the coach said. "You're the ones who've seen things going on in empty
houses. You're driving around with your hockey coach and won't let him go,
which is a crime in itself. I'd say it's definitely about you, Benji."

    
Benji.
That was new too.

    "We're
just asking some questions," Ben said, less certain now.

    "Okay.
Here's an answer." He reached forward to tap Carl on the shoulder.
"Pull over."

    "Don't
think so," Carl said.

    "Give
me a break! You hairless nut sacks think you're the fucking Hardy Boys or
something?"

    "No
need to be insulting," Randy said.

    "Insulting?
This
is insulting. Kidnapping is insulting. Being forced to waste an hour
of my life with you pimply-faced cocksuckers is insulting."

    "Just
tell us where you were last Monday night."

    "That,
along with my whereabouts on any night for the last thirty-eight years, is none
of your business."

    "It's
our business now," Ben said. "And it would have been Heather's too.
But she can't speak for herself anymore, can she?"

    The
coach's brief show of anger slipped out of him with a sigh. Then he took a deep
breath and inhaled something new. A taste that seemed to make him sick but that
he swallowed anyway.

    "I'm
serious," he said. "You boys have to take me home now."

    "You
were with her that night, weren't you?"

    "Stop
the car, Carl."

    "Tell
us."

    "Stop
the car."

    "Tell
us the truth."

    That's
when the coach surprised us. Or surprised me, anyway, when he lifted his hand
from his lap, curled the fingers into a white ball and drove it into my face.

    A
white flash of pain. The car swung hard, left to right and back again. Knees
and elbows clashing as everyone seemed to be trying to trade seats all at once.
A voice that may or may not have been my own shouting
Sonofabitch!
over
and over.

    Eventually,
Randy folded one of the coach's arms behind his back and I got hold of the
other. Once settled, he faced me. Not with apology or accusation. He looked
like he wanted nothing more than to knock the teeth he'd loosened clean out of
my head.

    "You
know something?" Ben said. "I don't think any of us are making
practice tonight."

    Outside
the Ford's windows Grimshaw floated by, dull and frostbitten. The few
pedestrians scuffing over the sidewalks' skin of ice with heads down against
the wind.

    If
they had raised their eyes to watch our car rumble past, how many years would it
take them to guess that the conversation among its passengers concerned one of
them pounding a four-inch screw into the back of Heather Langham's skull? Had
they looked, could they even have seen the coach among his youngest players,
shaking his head in denial?

    I
remember seeing the streetlights come on, and wondering why they bothered.

    Ben
asked most of the questions. Trying to lead the coach through a narrative of
what happened the night Miss Langham died. Where did they meet? Had she been
subdued somehow? Was it always the plan to kill her in the Thurman house? Had
there been a plan at all, or, given the makeshift weapon involved, was it a
spontaneous attack? If so, what brought it on?

    Randy
was the only other one to add a query of his own. Always the same one, asked
through barely withheld tears.
Why?
The look on his face a contorted
version of the one he wore when an opposing team's goon elbowed him into the
glass.
Why'd
you
do it?

    The
coach answered none of them. He merely reminded us of how far out of our hands
the situation was. The trouble we'd be in if we took this any further.

    Carl
turned onto Caledonia Street. And there it was. Although we'd been circling the
blocks around it for the past half-hour, we had yet to pass it. Now we eased by
the Thurman house, slow as Heather Langham once did as she walked up the hill
to the nurses' residence. It was dark by then. The blue light of televisions
filling living rooms with ice water. Etchings of smoke rising from chimneys.

    All
of these houses, the ones that sheltered microwaves announcing dinner with a
beep, spousal debates, toddlers learning to use the potty while sitting in
front of
The A-Team
—houses with life within them—looked
inside
at
this hour. Everyone was home. There would be no going out again until morning,
the February night left to seethe through the leafless boughs.

    The
Thurman house alone looked out. Looked at us.

    The
Ford slid around the next corner and started down the laneway that ran between
the backyard fences between Caledonia and Church. Nothing to see by other than
the headlights that, a few yards along, Carl extinguished. For a moment we
drifted blind between the lopsided garages before stopping next to a wooden
fence that leaned against a row of maples. On the other side, the dim line of
the Thurman house's roof.

    "What's
going on here?" the coach asked.

    Nobody
answered. Maybe none of us knew.

    After
a time, Carl reached into his parka's inside pocket. This, along with the
expectant, open-mouthed expression he wore, made me think he was about to pull
out a Kleenex to capture a sneeze. But he didn't sneeze. And when his hand came
out of his parka it held a gun.

    His
dad's. All of us, including the coach, knew this without asking. It was Carl's
dad's revolver, just as it was his car, his apartment, his cartons of
cigarettes left in the crisper in the fridge. The gun was part of the
inheritance he left to his son after being chased out of town by debts,
warrants for arrest, demons of his own making found at the bottom of
President's Sherry bottles. Now Carl pointed his father's departing gift at the
coach's chest.

    "You
know something? I'm tired of you bullshitting us," he said, opening his
door and gesturing for Ben to do the same. "I don't want to hear any more
'You know what trouble you're in?'
You're
the one in trouble. And just
so there won't be any confusion later on"— Carl nodded at Ben, who
produced a handheld tape recorder from his jacket pocket—"we'll make sure
we know just who's doing the talking."

    Ben
and Carl opened their doors at the same time. They sat there, looking back at
us, oblivious to the subzero air that swirled into the car.

    The
only one I could look at was Ben. His head fixed upon his slender neck but its
features alive with half- blinks and flared sniffs. It was impossible to tell
if he'd known about Carl's gun or was just going with it, his formerly
zoned-out self replaced by this twitchy, miniature thug in a Maple Leafs tuque
his mother had knitted for him.

    We
waited for Ben to speak. And when he did, he used the coach's signature call
before opening the dressing-room door. Words that, only days ago, ushered us
out onto the ice to play a game.

    "Shall
we?"

    Randy
heard that Tracey Flanagan had failed to come home from work the night before
from the waitress who brought him his scrambled eggs in the coffee shop of the
Queen's Hotel earlier this morning. The waitress, apparently, is a neighbour of
Todd's, and was among those he called to ask if his daughter had been seen or
heard on their street the night before. The police were already involved, she
told Randy, treating the circumstances as suspicious on the grounds that Tracey
was not one to stay out without letting her dad know her whereabouts. Volunteer
search parties were being whipped together to spend the afternoon stomping
through the Old Grove and sloshing around the edge of the Dale Marsh. Randy
asked her why they chose those two places in particular. "Because they're
just
bad"
was her answer.

    "I
forgot how small a town this is," I tell Randy, the two of us now slumped
at the McAuliffe dining table.

    "Small?
It's like word got out through string tied between old soup cans. If this was
Toronto, and your twenty-two-year-old didn't show up from a bar last night,
they'd tell you to take a

    Xanax
and get in line."

    "I'd
worry too, if I were Todd."

    Randy
nods. "I guess she's about all the family he's got."

    "And
every cop in town knows him and Tracey. They're just pulling out all the
stops."

    "She's
probably already at home, wondering where everybody is, and they're all out in
the woods with bloodhounds."

    "They
check with the boyfriend?"

    "They're
still looking for him."

    "I
bet the two of them are under a sleeping bag in a parked car somewhere."

    "Maybe
they should look out by the walnut trees in Harmony."

    "That
where you used to go too?"

    "I
was talking about you."

    "Me
and Sarah."

    "Anybody
else I might know?"

    "How'd
you know we'd go out there?"

    "You
told
us," Randy says, shaking his head. "We told each other
pretty much everything back then."

    Randy
looks down the length of the table as though expecting to see others seated
around us.

    "Think
we should go see him?" I ask.

    "See
who?"

    "Todd."

    "Me
and you popping by after half a lifetime to say sorry for your missing only
child? I don't know, Trev. Let's just wait on that one."