Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"Where is the freckly fuck?" was al Carl would say every few minutes, referring to Randy, who wasn't home when we caled.

"We can't do anything without him," I said. "We have to be together on it."

But Carl and Ben just kept looking at the houses. They made me feel like I was riding in a baby seat, watching the backs of their heads as though they were my parents.

"There he is," Carl said. He took his foot off the gas and the Ford roled on, gently as a canoe after taking the paddles in.

"Who?"

Because they could both see the answer to this on the street ahead, they ignored me. It forced me to slide over between them and peer out the windshield.

The coach. Walking along the sidewalk with his back to us, a stiffening of his stride that suggested he'd heard a car slow behind him. This was his street. A street we had driven up more than any other over the last half-hour. Carl and Ben had been hoping to come across the coach making his way home. And now that they had, they drew even with him and puled over to the curb.

He stopped. I don't know if he knew who it was before he turned to see, but it seemed there was a half second's pause as he gathered himself.

"What's up, guys?" he asked, glancing up the street toward his house a half block on.

"Need a ride?" Carl asked.

The coach squinted. We knew where he lived. Why would he need a ride? So: this was an invitation. And not necessarily a complicated one. Boys on the team came to him al the time. They told him things, sought advice. There were always Guardians wanting to hang out with him, asking if he needed a ride.

"You think I'm that out of shape?" he said.

"We're just driving around. Kiling time before practice."

"You want something to eat? My wife makes this baked spaghetti thing that's not half bad. I'l be eating it the rest of the week if I don't get some help."

"Thanks." Carl glanced around the car at Ben, back at me. "We're not too hungry, I guess."

The coach stood there. Unmoving except for his breath leaking out in feathery plumes.

"How about it?" Ben asked.

"I've got some time," the coach said, puling back the sleeve of his coat to show the watch on his wrist, though he didn't look at its face. "A little spin? Why not?"

Less than two hours before we had driven up to the coach on his walk home, we'd had another hot box meeting in the school's parking lot. It's hard to recal who said what, or the positions we started out defending (I think I changed my mind half a dozen times during each circling of Randy's joint). What was agreed on by al was that something had to be done. We alone knew Miss Langham was murdered, the where and how it was done. Maybe, if this was all we knew, we would have found a way to justify trying to forget about it. But the thing was this: along with the where and how she was kiled, we now felt sure we knew the who.

Why not go to the police? A good question. As good today as the afternoon we asked it in Carl's Ford, coughing it out through the blue haze. Why not ? There were some halfway reasonable answers to this, and we voiced them at the time:

The police would never accept our slim evidence of Ben's nighttime sighting.

We had found and moved and bled on and buried her body, which meant the odds were greater that we had done it than anyone else.

Pointing a finger the coach's way too early would only alow for his escape.

But the real reason was one none of us spoke aloud.

This was our test. Heather Langham's memory had been adopted as our responsibility.

It was Ben who was the last to speak. Last, because he used words almost as powerful as his reminder of friendship that had led us into a haunted house. Words that have, in different contexts, ushered soldiers onto kiling fields.

"We need to find the truth," he said. "We have to. For Heather. For justice."

Truth. Justice. These were the opened doors through which we saw a way to save Heather Langham in death as we had longed to save her in life.

We talked about hockey at first. Or the coach did, repeating the ways we would have to exploit the weak links on Seaforth's defence. He sat next to me in the back but spoke directly to the window, as if rehearsing a speech. He reminded me of a dog who didn't like cars: sitting straight and stil, but every muscle tense as he waited for the machine to stop and the doors to open so he could leap out.

"We saw you," Ben said.

This is how the conversation turned. Ben swiveling around in the passenger seat to face the coach. And it was "we."

"You did?" the coach said. He looked at me, at Carl in the rearview mirror, at the toothpaste stain around Ben's mouth.

"Last Monday. Going into the Thurman house."

"Monday?"

The coach looked as though he was trying to remember his mother-in-law's middle name or the capital of Bolivia.

"Just over a week ago. Monday night."

"Okay. Monday night. Why would I be going in there, Ben?"

"Why would you? Why would you?"

The coach continued to look at Ben for a moment, then turned to me. "What is this?"

"Answer the question," I said.

"I don't know what you're asking me."

"Have you been inside the Thurman house at any time in the last week?"

"No. Now you tel me. What the hel is a Thurman house? "

He chuckled at this, and I was sure we'd got everything wrong. The coach's awkwardness had come not from secret knowledge but from us. He had detected a worrying turn in his youngest players and was trying to guess what was wrong. We were acting weird, not him.

"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 al 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 roled 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 al," 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."