The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  "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?"

  * * *

  [9]

  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."

  Randy moves to stand, but then his eyes catch on the hands I've planted on the tabletop. The hands still, but the elbows vibrating like a pair of idling engines.

  "Don't say it," Randy says.

  "Say what?"

  "What you're thinking."

  "You're a mind reader as well as an actor now?"

  "I don't need to read minds. Not about this. And not with you."

  "So tell me."

  "This missing girl. Heather. The house. How it feels the same all over again."

  "For the record, you were the first to say it out loud, not me."

  Randy draws his sleeve over his forehead as though to wipe away sweat, but his skin is dry, the cotton rasping.

  "How's the executor duties going?" he asks, both of us happy to change the subject.

  "I'm not sure actually."

  "You need some help?"

  "No. Thank you, though."

  "It must be kind of strange. Going through Ben's things."

  "He kept a diary."

  "Yeah? You read it?"

  "Enough to know he wasn't well."

  "I think we knew that."

  "He thought there was something in the house across the street. Something he believed was trying to get out, and would get out—"

  "If it wasn't for him."

  "That's right."

  "You said it. He wasn't well." Randy's not looking at my elbows now, but squinting severely right at me.

  "Or he was right," I say.

  "About what?"

  "That the Thurman place needed to have an eye kept on it."

  "Well, let's see," Randy says, lifting his hands to count off the points he makes on his fingers. "One, nobody lives there, so there was nobody to keep an eye on. Two, Ben was an anti-social shut-in with delusional tendencies—and that was him in grade eleven. Three, even if there was something in there that was trying to escape, how would staring at the front door stop it from getting out? Four, Ben was talking about ghosts. And people with full decks don't believe in ghosts."

  "You haven't used your thumb yet."

  "Okay, then. Five, you're grieving, whether you think you're immune to that particular emotion or not. And grief can make you stupid."

  "Aren't you grieving too?"

  "In my way. God knows I raised my glass to his memory enough times last night."

  We laugh at this. In part because we need to in order to move on to the next chance for normal to settle over us again. In part because Randy's mention of the word "ghost" feels like it invited one into the room.

  "What about some dinner tonight?" Randy says, rising.

  "Sounds good."

  "I was thinking the Old London."

  "Is it still there?"

  "Was when I walked past it last night."

  "Perfect."

  "I was going to hit the coin laundry this afternoon. Want me to grab some stuff from your room and throw it in too?"

  "I'll use the washer here if I need to. I'm staying here tonight anyway."

  Randy turns around on the porch. "Here? Overnight?"

  "Betty asked if I would. I think she needs the company."

  "Where you going to sleep?"

  "Ben's room."

  "That's fucked. Got to say"

  "I think it was your point number four, wasn't it?" I say, pushing the door closed. "People with full decks don't believe in ghosts."

  The next couple of hours are spent back up in Ben's room, fitting his belongings into boxes and stuffing the clothes from his closet into bags for the Salvation Army ("Take whatever you and your friends might want," Betty McAuliffe had invited me). I put aside a pair of ties, though I did it just to please her.

  They are activities that keep my fidgety hands occupied, but not my mind. Over and over I return to Tracey Flanagan. Odds are that she's fine, and that Randy was right: starting an official search after less than a day was nothing more than the over- reaction of small-town cops. Yet the news struck me as hard as it seemed to have struck Randy. Maybe it was the way she reminded us of Heather. Maybe it was Randy saying how, now that we'd let it see us, the Thurman house knew we were back.

  And then there's the house itself.

  By mid-afternoon the clouds had not quite lifted but thinned, so that, from time the time, the sun found a square to poke through. It would flash across the Thurman windows and reflect into Ben's room, beckoning me to turn and look. Each time I did I'd have to close my eyes against the light, and when I opened them again, the sun was gone, the glass dull. The effect was like a leering wink from a stranger, so swift and unexpected you couldn't be sure if it was a signal or just a twitch.

  It happens again. The sun, the blink of light.

  Except this time, as I'm returning to the pile of Ben's clothes at my feet, something changes. Not in what I can see in the house, but in my peripheral vision. Something in the room with me.

  I spin around to face it. And it is a face. Mrs. McAuliffe's, her head popping up another foot where she's come halfway up the stairs.

  "Phone for you," she says.

  "I'll take it up here, if that's okay."

  I start for the phone on Ben's bedside table, but Betty McAuliffe waves me over. Tugs on my pant leg until I bend down, my ear close to her lips.

  "It's a girl," she whispers.

  Once Mrs. McAuliffe has started back down I pick up. Wait to hear the click of the downstairs receiver.

  "Trevor?"

  It's Sarah. Sounding nervous, her voice slightly higher than yesterday. The way my own voice probably sounds.

  "Hey there."

  "I tried you at the Queen's," she says. "When you weren't there, I figured I'd see if you were at Ben's."

  "What was your next guess?"

  "A bar somewhere. Maybe the back row of the Vogue. The entertainment options haven't changed much around here."

  "I can tell you that folding up Ben's underwear isn't too entertaining either."

  "Want some company?"

  "Sorry?"

  "I've got the afternoon off. Just wondered if you thought it might be easier with an extra pair of hands."

  She wants to see you. A distinctly external voice, not the boy's. Mine.She's been thinking of you as much as you've been thinking of her.

  And then a different voice.

  Ask her over, the boy says. Take her across the street. We can all have a good time.

  "I'm fine. But thanks for offering," I say.

  "It was a dumb idea."

  "No. I'd like to see you, Sarah."

  "Really?"

  "What about dinner. Tomorrow?" There's a pause, and the foolishness of what I've done hits me square. "Listen to me. It's like I'm sixteen all over again, calling you up for the first time."

  "I called you."

  "Which I appreciate. And I'm sorry if I've made this awkward. You're probably married or have a boyfriend. I didn't even ask—"

  "What time?"

  "Time?"

  "When do you want to come over?"

  "You tell me."

  "There's a Guardians game tomorrow night. You could come by here first."

  "Sounds wonderful," I say, because it does.

  The Old London Steakhouse used to be—and likely still is— Grimshaw's one and only so-called fine dining restaurant. We would come here, my parents, brother and I, for special birthday dinners, squeezing ourselves into itchy dress shirts and affixing clip-on neckties for the occasion. When I find the place now and push open its door, I see that nothing has changed. Not even the lightbulbs, apparently: the place is impossibly underlit, not to create a mood (though this may have been the intention when it opened forty or so years ago), but to hide whatever crunches underfoot on the carpet.

  I have to wait something close to a full minute for my eyes to adjust to the near darkness. There is nobody to welcome me, so I must endure the muzak version of "The Pina Colada Song" alone.

  "You'll be
joining your friend?" a voice eventually asks, the low growl of a chain-smoker. And then the outline of a man in a shabby tux, backlit by a fake gaslamp.

  "I guess he's already here?"

  The maître d' has stepped close enough for me to see the grey cheeks in need of a shave, the bow tie pointing nearly straight up, like a propeller snagged on the bristle of his chin.

  "Your friend," he says with a sadness that seems connected to the ancient past, the suffering of ancestors in a lost war, "he is having a cocktail. A Manhattan."

  "I'm not one to rock the boat."

  He leads me into the dining room—or dining rooms, as the space is divided into a warren of nooks and private booths separated by hanging fishnets and "log cabin" walls with peekaboo windows. Other bits of maritime and frontier kitsch are scattered throughout, but aside from the framed print of the Houses of Parliament glowering over a moonlit Thames set above the stone fireplace, there is nothing "Old" or "London" about it. Not that this stops Randy from speaking in a particularly bad cockney accent through the first drink of the evening.

  "'Ello, gov!" he calls out, and there he is, waving me over to an enormous round table. "Set yourself down and warm your cockles!"

  "What's a cockle, anyway? I've always wondered."

  "I don't know," Randy answers thoughtfully, pushing his empty glass to the table's edge. "But mine are certainly warmer now than they were five minutes ago."

  The maître d' returns with our drinks in the time it takes me to pull out one of the throne-like chairs and sink into its overstuffed seat. Everything is slowed in this dark—every search for the men's room, every reach for water goblet or butter dish. It is like being able to breathe underwater.

  The Manhattans and joking at the expense of the escargot appetizers pass pleasantly enough, a testimony to how much, despite everything, we enjoy being together, particularly given that the initial conversation concerns updates on Tracey Flanagan's disappearance. No sign of the girl. Todd refusing to leave the house in case the phone rings or she comes home expecting him to be there. The boyfriend claiming he didn't see her after work last night, now taken in for questioning and described by police, in their first press conference, as a "person of interest." And to reconstruct a narrative of her evening, authorities are asking all patrons of Jake's last night to come forward to provide their accounts of the bar's comings and goings.