Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"You can stay here," she says. "For as long as you're in town. If you want."

"What about Kieran?"

"It's not his room."

"Would it be, I don't know, confusing for him or something?"

"You can't protect kids from reality. My one piece of wisdom from my time down here in Single Mom Land."

"I might be leaving tonight. I'm not sure."

"It's an invitation, that's al."

I consider this, my hand steadied by the firm line of her jaw. I thought this was the one advantage of Parkinson's, seling Retox, withdrawing from the world's excitements: no more desire, no more crests and troughs to unsettle the ride. And now this sensible, good-looking woman—Sarah, object of my high- school lust and daydreams of death-do-us-part—is inquiring after my wants as though I had a right to them.

"Thank you," I say.

"Don't panic. I'm not asking you to be my date to the prom or anything." She taps a finger against my temple. "We're just faling forwards for a day or two, that's al."

"Faling backwards, in our case."

"Backwards, forwards," she says, rising out of the sheets. "You're saying you can tel the difference?"

I want to outline her lips with a finger but I don't trust any of them, so I remain stil. As stil as I can manage.

"Sarah?"

"Yeah?"

"Why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"Being nice to me."

"Nice? This isn't about nice ."

"I just don't want you to be here because you think you're doing me some good."

"Like a charity case?"

"Something like that."

"Okay, let's get this straight. I'm here because I want to be here. Because what we did last night felt good. And because I've thought about you a lot for a long time, since you were a boy. I'm curious about the man that boy has grown into. That's al there is to it. I'm in this for me , understand?"

My request of the night before had been honoured. I had enjoyed ten solid hours of thoughts uninterrupted by Tracey Flanagan, or the shapes that the terrible hunger that has been awakened within the Thurman house has taken. But as I watch Sarah get dressed for work, the early sun through the window tels me that al bets are now off It's how Sarah's nakedness interchanges with Tracey's, the two bodies losing their particularity, veering close to becoming a lifeless composite. This, along with the mental stop-starts that throw me from desire to fear and back again in the time it takes a bare arm to slip through the sleeve of an undershirt.

"Are you al right?" she asks when her head pops up through the colar. "You've gone al white."

"I'm nothing without my morning coffee."

"You look like you've had a bad dream or something."

"Except I'm awake."

"Yeah. Except you're awake."

I rol out of bed and do my best to pul my pants on and button my shirt without asking for help, and Sarah knows enough about male pride not to offer it.

"I need to talk to Randy," I say.

"What about?"

"We were at Jake's the night Tracey Flanagan went missing.

She was our waitress. I spoke to the police about it yesterday." "You know something?"

"No. But that hasn't stopped it from freaking me out." "Heather Langham."

My fingers spasm open. The belt they were holding clatters to the hardwood. "I don't suppose I'm the only one who's thinking about her right now."

"You'd be surprised. Even in a town this smal, people forget, or half forget."

"Maybe I'm just not as good at forgetting." "It's not that. It's that you've been away." "It doesn't feel that way."

"That's sort of my point. You left after Grimshaw's last big tragedy, and now you're here for its latest one. It's like the time in between got squished together. It was another life. But for the rest of us, we've just got the one, and there's been twenty years in the same place to muddle through." "I've done my share of muddling."

"You told me. Preoccupations. But in your mind, Grimshaw is frozen in time. It's a museum."

"And I remember every inch of it."

"You feel it more than you remember it."

"Wait a second. How do you know al this better than I do?"

"I always knew it better than you did."

I bend to pick up my belt. Surprise myself by threading it through the loops on the first try.

Here's the problem. Here's why I walk through the wakening streets of Grimshaw hearing the birdsong as the nervous chatter of bad news: despite anything I might tel myself, there is a line that runs through the past, the secret history of Heather and the coach and the boy, right up to the more current events of Ben's death and Tracey Flanagan puled out of the world. I don't know where the line started, or where it might find its end, but it's there, understandable to itself, refusing to let common sense break its hold.

Stil, as I walk into the Queen's Hotel and struggle up the stairs to knock on Randy's door, I don't expect him to see this as I do. Indeed, part of me is hoping he doesn't.

"Look at you," he says, wearing only boxers and a threadbare Just Do It T-shirt. "Mr. I Got Lucky."

"You could at least make an attempt to hide your jealousy."

"Why bother?"

"Come to think of it, you always had a thing for Sarah, didn't you?"

"Of course. But I was the horniest teenager in Perth County. I had a thing for Minnie Mouse and Natalie from Facts of Life and the lady who did the weather on Channel 12."

Randy digs the sleep from his eyes. Steps closer.

"What's happened?"

"Nothing," I say.

"So what are you doing here when you should be bringing Sarah breakfast in bed?"

"Does the coffee machine in your room work?"

"It spits out brown stuff, if that's what you're asking."

A moment later I'm staring out the window, listening to the water hiss and dribble into the glass pot.

"I told you," Randy says behind me, and I turn to accept his congratulatory handshake. "I told you she was into you."

"You're acting like I just made out with somebody in a parked car."

"You did it in Sarah's car? "

"How old are you, Randy?"

"Hey now. Let's not be cruel."

Randy hands me a mug of coffee. "Did they find her?" he asks, slumping into the room's only chair. "That's it, isn't it? They found Tracey?"

"I haven't heard anything about that."

"But this has to do with her, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"So?"

"I think she's in the house."

Randy returns the pot to the warmer, where it sizzles off the coffee that had spiled when he puled it out. He watches it bubble for a moment as though recording the observations of a science experiment.

"What makes you say that, Trev?"

"A feeling. I've thought I've seen some things, too."

"Like what?"

"It doesn't matter."

"You're relying on your feeling, then."

"And the way there seems to be some kind of pattern. Heather and Tracey."

"Not realy much of a pattern. These things just happen. I wish they didn't, but they do."

"You're forgetting Ben. He believed his watching the house was keeping something bad inside of it. And then, after he's gone, something bad happens."

Randy sits down on the edge of the bed. "I thought you got the police to go in there already."

"I don't know how hard they looked."

"How hard would they have to look?"

"You can miss places."

"You mean a secret room you can get to only if you pul on a candlestick holder and the bookshelf spins around?"

"I mean a closet, under the floorboards. The celar."

Randy looks up at the ceiling, as though reading a message in the plaster's cracks.

"You want us to go in there," he says.

"I can't go to the police again. So that leaves us."

"Because you think Heather is inside."

"Tracey," I correct.