Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"I don't know. I'm standing there, and he stops and looks at me like I've grown a second head or something. Made me feel like a freak."

"Sounds like he was the one being freaky."

"It was just weird."

"He's a weird guy."

That's not true , I heard Sarah reply through her silence . He's the most not-weird grown-up we know .

I puled my pants on. The denim hard and unyielding as wet canvas left to freeze on the clothesline.

"We should get back."

"Back to what?" she asked, and we both laughed. What was funny was how only two days ago we both would have been certain of the answer, and today we weren't sure.

I can't recolect exactly what people said over twenty years ago, even if I repeat their words into this Dictaphone as though I can. These moments are memories, and shifty ones at that, so what I'm doing is the sort of half-made-up scenes we used to watch on those That's Incredible! TV specials, shows that "investigated" the existence of UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster using dramatizations of witness accounts. It wasn't the truth, but the truth as someone remembered it, and someone else wrote into a scene. So that's me. A That's Incredible! dramatizer.

One thing I do remember, however, was Sarah's description of the coach's gaze when she stopped him to say helo. I may have made up the "grown a second head" part, but I definitely remember her saying how his look made her feel like a freak, because it was precisely the same thought I had at practice after school that day, when the coach entered the dressing room and, in looking at us, his team, wore an expression of suppressed shock, as though he had opened the wrong door and been confronted with chattering sasquatches.

The moment passed so swiftly I don't think any of the older players noticed. They weren't looking to see if the few days since Heather Langham's disappearance had had any effect on the coach. But we were looking. And we believed we saw something in the way he had to work up an effort to scratch some plays on the blackboard, remind Chuck Hastings to stay high in the slot on the penalty kil and praise Carl for the blocked shots he took to the ribs in the season-ender against Wingham.

What was more, the coach seemed to notice our noticing. For the rest of practice I thought I caught him studying Ben or Carl or Randy or me, watching us in the same furtive way we watched him.

And then there was the coach's asking Ben how he was doing.

Was there anything odd in that? We didn't think so either. So when Ben told us that night, as we tossed twigs onto a smal fire we made in the woods behind the Old Grove, passing a flask of Randy's dad's gin between us, that there was evidence to be gleaned from the coach's inquiring after him, we shot him down.

"He caled me son," Ben said. "'Hey there, Ben. How're you doing, son?' It was fake. Like he was reading a line someone wrote for him."

"Are you saying he knows?" I asked.

"How would he know?" Ben answered. "Unless he was watching the place. Unless he was there."

"You think he was in the celar?"

"Didn't it feel like somebody was?"

This stopped me for a second. It stopped al of us.

"Al I'm saying," Ben said, "is if you'd done something wrong—something realy, realy wrong—and you didn't want that wrong thing to be found out, you might keep a pretty close eye on the business."

"Return to the scene of the crime," Randy said thoughtfuly, as though he'd just coined the phrase.

"That's right," Ben said. "And there was no better place to watch over Miss Langham than down there."

It was strange how over the period of less than a week Ben had gone from the dreamiest of our group to the voice that carried the greatest authority. Our overnight leader.

"If he knows it was us," Carl said, "then he knows we might talk."

"That would also folow if he was aware that I saw him from my window."

"Wait," I said. "Now al of a sudden you're sure it was him?"

But Carl didn't let Ben answer. "He sure looks aware of everything to me. And if we're right about that, he's not going to want us blabbing."

"No," Ben said.

"He might try to stop us."

"He might."

Randy unzips, pees into the fire. A wet sizzle that sends up smoke, momentarily enveloping us al in shadow. "The coach wouldn't fuck with us," he said.

"He fucked with Heather," Carl said.

"We stil don't know that," I said.

"We don't?" Ben asked, the flames returning to life as Randy finished his nervous dribbles. "You saw the coach today. Do you realy think somebody else did that to Miss Langham? Can you honestly say you think he doesn't know that we know?"

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 al 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 tel 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 al 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 dulest 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 al. 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 celar 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 al. 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 realy 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.