empty house. But something had gone wrong—the blows to Heather's skul showed that, along with her hasty burial. A day or two passed, long enough for the coach to be pushed al the way over the edge, and he returned to the scene to do himself in. Some version of a narrative like this happened al the time, if not in Grimshaw then in some other hicksvile they flashed the name of at the bottom of the screen on the supper- time news.
Two problems, though. One: the police had to see it this way. Two: if we were going to go in this direction, we had to start now.
That's when Randy mentioned the letter. He pointed out that, if we wanted it to look like a murder-and-then-a- later-suicide, a confession from the coach was the way to go. The trick was that it would have to appear as though it were composed when he was stil alive.
Ben puled out his walet and unfolded a piece of paper from its slot.
'We'l use this,' he said.
It was the paper the coach had signed but otherwise left blank. A confession he chalenged us to fil in ourselves. Which is what we did.
We went to Carl's apartment. There was an electric typewriter under his sofa that we plugged in, and we typed what we hoped would be taken as the coach's admission of guilt:
We folded it into thirds, deciding against an envelope. As an afterthought, Carl typed URGENT on the outside.
Our first idea was to drop it off at police headquarters. But Carl, who'd been inside the cop shop more than the rest of us, remembered they had security cameras at the front and back doors. We were stumped for a minute after that, until I suggested leaving it at the
This was how Ben (who nominated himself, and who somehow seemed right for the task) came to run the three blocks from Carl's to slip the folded paper into the mail slot next to the front doors of
When Ben met up with us again, he said, 'My mom's out shopping. Then she's getting her hair done.'
'So?' Randy said.
'So we can watch from my place.'
One of us probably should have pointed out that this was an unnecessary risk. Besides, spying on the authorities as they arrived at the Thurman house to push the soil off Heather Langham and elbow the bedroom door open to the coach's bloody spatters—it might make us feel even more guilty than we already did.
But we started over to Ben's house without discussion. The thing is, we wanted to see. To observe others go inside and come out changed.
We got away with it. The family-destroying trial, the humiliations of prison. There was none of that for any of us. We were free.
But getting away with the sort of thing we did can ruin a man. It can ruin four of them.
Here's another thing I know: there are people who have got away with things al around you. Mothers and fathers, the felow who helps lift your stroler onto the bus, the bal of rags you walk by when it asks for change. You might work with them, play beer-league bal with them, sleep with them. Good guys. And you'd never know they were one of us.
Few in town knew Heather Langham when alive, but in death, she was treated like a favourite daughter. After her body was returned to the aunt and uncle who had raised her, Grimshaw organized a memorial service in the Municipal Hal auditorium that ended up drawing a standing-room-only crowd of earnest snifflers and speech- makers. By the end, the framed photo of Heather they'd set on a chair at the front had been encircled by bouquets, wreaths, dols and teddy bears, as though the mourners were undecided whether to treat her as a falen soldier or a stolen child.
A couple of rows near the front had been reserved for her students, who were asked to play at the end of the service a piece of music she'd taught us. This was how Carl, Randy, Ben and I, along with a dozen other honkers and tooters, came to grind our way through 'The Maple Leaf Forever' before one of Grimshaw's largest-ever public audiences. Somehow, our ineptitude only magnified the moment's poignancy.
The coach's farewel couldn't have been more different. A patchy gathering at McCutcheon's Funeral Home that we al attended—the four of us, that is, not the whole team, though among the few other players who came I recal Todd Flanagan, apologizing for the baby-formula stains on his blazer. I don't remember who delivered the eulogy. Perhaps there wasn't one. There were no photos of the deceased, no open casket; the coach's ashes were colected in an urn that, as Randy whispered to me, looked a little like the Stanley Cup.
The only other attendee I specificaly recal was the coach's wife, Laura. Maybe it was the circumstances of her husband's death, or maybe she was too broken to manage the weight of the moment, but even she was dry-eyed. Locking and unlocking her fingers and checking her watch as though nervous about missing her train out of town, which perhaps she was, as none of us ever saw her in Grimshaw again.
After Miss Langham and the coach were found, it was impossible for even the most rabid fans to conceive of the Guardians continuing any further in the playoffs.
The league announced the team's withdrawal from what remained of the season, giving Seaforth a bye to the next round (where they were justly trounced by the elbowing, tobacco-farmer sons of the Woodstock Wolves).
Somewhere in there Sarah broke up with me. Or I broke up with her. I can't remember a definitive moment when we both walked away knowing it was over, perhaps because such a moment never happened.
Eventualy, she started seeing other guys. Roy Kimble, Dougie Craft, Larry Musselman. Likable guys I would have been happy to hang out with had I not known they were taking Sarah Mulgrave out to the Vogue or a bush party, which forced me to loathe them instead, see them as slippery smooth talkers who Sarah, being a girl, couldn't see as the preppie liars they were.
We stil talked from time to time. Painful exchanges in the school halways or out by Nicotine Corner, where she would stop to ask how I was doing as I chainsmoked before heading in, late, for class. She asked about my mom
