The Guardians

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 tel 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 cal before opening the dressing- room door. Words that, only days ago, ushered us out onto the ice to play a game.

'Shal 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 caled 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 smal a town this is,' I tel Randy, the two of us now slumped at the McAuliffe dining table.

'Smal? 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 tel you to take a

Xanax and get in line.'

'I'd worry too, if I were Todd.'

Randy nods. 'I guess she's about al the family he's got.'

'And every cop in town knows him and Tracey. They're just puling out al the stops.'

'She's probably already at home, wondering where everybody is, and they're al out in the woods with bloodhounds.'

'They check with the boyfriend?'

'They're stil 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 stil, 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 wel as an actor now?'

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

'So tel me.'

'This missing girl. Heather. The house. How it feels the same al 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 actualy.'

'You need some help?'