The Guardians

Her question, the first words spoken since I roled onto my back in defeat, so clearly matched the current of my thoughts I worried I might have been speaking them aloud.

'Ready?'

'The playoffs. First game's on Friday, right?'

'Seaforth. Sure.'

'Seaforth sucks.'

'Shouldn't be a problem.'

'I said hi to the coach today at school. It was strange.'

I propped myself up on an elbow. 'How do you mean?'

'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.