The Guardians

had to do was snuggle in, keep quiet, be good. And I was good. Then guess what? Heather Langham shows up.'

'So you decided you had to kil her?'

'Kil her?' Those teeth again. 'No. I decided I had to, I realy needed to . . . wel, let's not be crude. Let's just say that the first night after she introduces herself to al the dried mushrooms in the teachers' lounge, I'm dreaming of her. Bad, bad dreams.'

'Then what?'

'Then I play Harmless Married Guy. Share some of my favourite books with her, ask what brought her to the noble profession of teaching, et cetera. 'I'm a good listener,' said I. 'We have so much in common!' said she. I knew it was over when she told me al she needed to be happy in Grimshaw was a friend. Wel, that's al I needed too!'

'You brought her here.'

'My contribution was the flask of Jack Daniel's out in my car. Loosened things up considerably. 'Where do we go now?' says I. 'I know a place,' says she. A haunted house, she caled it. I just knew it as that derelict place where some of the guys on the team went to drink beer. Turns out she was more right than I was.'

I remember searching for something hurtful to say to him. Something as disemboweling as his mention of Ben's dad. A way of showing how furious I was at him for talking about Heather this way.

Show him, the boy said but didn't say. Wake him up.

Before I knew what I was doing, the toe of my boot met with the coach's mouth. And it did wake him up. Eyes aflutter with liquid blinks. Spitting out blood pinked with mucus.

'You can't blame a house for what you did!'

When he focused on me, he seemed pleased that I was here. That it had been my boot.

'It was you,' I said. 'Not a place, not a building. It was you.'

'You're right. Quite right, Trevor,' now the proper English teacher, patiently expanding on a student's rudimentary observation. 'Al this place gives us is a •licence to act. It's a stage, but a bare one. A theatre without sets, without a script. And most important, without an audience!'

He laughed. Not the coach's laugh. Not a living sound at al.

'You hurt her here because you could? Is that it?'

'Here? Here?' The coach swung his head around, peering into every corner. 'There's no here here!'

'What did you do?'

We'd asked him this perhaps a hundred times since he slipped into Carl's Ford half a block from his house. But now the coach looked up at me as though it was a fresh and intriguing query.

'What did I do?'

'Just tel us and it'l be over.'

'You don't get to decide that.'

'We'l let you go.'

'Every time you come down here, I leave when you go, piece by piece,' he said, his voice flattening. 'I'l get out whether you open the door for me or not.'

'Who are you?'

'I'm the coach.'

'You were him. Who are you now?'

'Whoever I need to be.'

'To do what?'

'Keep you here.'

I took the gun out of Ben's hand. I must have, because there it was, pointed at the coach's forehead.

'I'd like to know what you did to Heather. Right now.'

'I brought her here to do what al of you would have liked to do,' he said, the voice dead as a dial tone. 'To fuck her pretty pink behind.'

Pretty. The word my father had used. More than this, it was like he knew that it was.

'Where?'

'In the living room. Standing up, because she thought the carpet was too dirty.'

'Were you alone?'

'Alone as two people can be. Our coitus was interruptus, though. Something heavy faling onto the floor above us. And maybe a voice too. No ... a breath. Who cared what it was?'

'You didn't go upstairs to check?'

'I did. Nervous Heather asked me to make sure nothing was amiss. So up I went.