The Guardians

'Please. I'm eating.'

After dinner and several coffees, Randy and I start back toward Ben's house. It's night now, but a fog has darkened the air even further, rubbing out the details of Grimshaw's chimney stacks and the lights from its windows like a blindness. Cars nose through the slick streets. In the fog, Grimshaw feels at once familiar and altered, drained of some fundamental aspect that had previously marked it as a place for the living, so that I am left with the sensation of stroling into the afterlife.

At Caledonia, we don't immediately cross over to the McAuliffes' as we normaly would. Instead, we stop at the spot where I'd seen Gary Pulinger standing, hands in our pockets, studying the islands of concrete that were once the front walk, before taking in the house itself. Given the finality of the evening—the last night in Grimshaw by the last of the Guardians who have come for the last time to brave the scrutiny of its windowed eyes—I am expecting to feel something different about the house. But it appears emptier and less consequential tonight than it ever has, unfairly scorned, even pitiable. The fog that passes between us and its door seems to erase its particulars, sweeping it away into a past that wil soon claim what's left of it and leave an anonymous lot behind.

I can feel Randy wanting to say something along the lines of my own thoughts, a comment at how unbelievable it is that the four wals and buckling roof before us could be mistaken for a living thing. But I don't want the house to hear him.

'It's getting cold,' I say, elbowing him in the side. As best I can, I start back across the street.

Randy passes me in the front hal and is already halfway up the stairs when Mrs. McAuliffe steps out from the living room's shadows.

'There's lamb stew in the pot if you boys are hungry,' she says.

'Thanks, Mrs. A.,' Randy shouts down the stairs. 'Already ate.'

It leaves me alone with the old woman. In the hal, she appears more frail than she did this morning and, at the same time, seems to be fighting this frailty by way of a bulky knit sweater (Ben's?) and corduroy gardening pants.

'What are you two planning on tonight?' she asks, stepping closer. 'Painting the town red?'

'Nothing like that.'

'You're welcome to use the TV in the basement.'

'Thank you. But we're just, you know, hanging around.'

'Playing records.'

'Sorry?'

Betty giggles. 'It's what Ben would say to me when you were al boys, spending hours up in his room, and I would ask what you were up to,' she says. ''Playing records, Mom!' 'Nothing, Mom! We're just playing records!' But half the time I couldn't hear any music. Only you boys, talking and talking.'

'Did you hear what we were saying?'

'No,' she says, shaking her head. 'But that didn't stop me from understanding things some of the time.'

'A mother's intuition.'

'Intuition, yes. But that's not al.'

She knows. That is, she knows something, as we always suspected she did. How much she has guessed it's impossible to say, and I'm not about to ask. But what she is teling me now is that we were party to a crime of a most serious sort, and she has never shared this knowledge with another, not even her son.

Studying her now, I'm certain Betty McAuliffe was the only witness who watched us enter the Thurman house the evening we discovered Heather Langham in the celar. What connections had she made once the coach went missing and then, soon after, was wheeled out of the house across the street along with the woman—only a girl realy, rosy and unmarried and childless? It would have been impossible not to speculate. Not to conclude.

And yet, even with this knowledge, she had remained sweet Mrs. McAuliffe. Lonely Mrs. McAuliffe, baker of shortbread and pincher of cheeks and minder of her own business. This was love too.

'We'l be out of your way tomorrow,' I say. 'Randy's already checked out of the Queen's, so if it's al right by you, he'l be bunking on the pulout in Ben's room.'

'No trouble. You'l find extra sheets and—'

'The linen closet. I remember.'

She turns away, as if at the return of a TV program she had been engrossed in. 'I'm off to bed myself,' she says, beginning to turn off the lights one by one.

'See you in the morning, Betty.'

'The morning,' she repeats. Now in the dark, whispering it again, like a lover's remembered name. 'The morning.'

I find Randy stretched out on the bed, adjusting the dials on what looks at first to be an ancient cel phone, one of those banana-sized ones with the rubbery antennae that came out in the '80s.

'You gotta check out the picture on this thing,' he says. 'I rented a plasma screen to watch the finals last year and it wasn't any better than this.'

I sit next him to see that he's right. A square screen that shows a wide view of the Thurman house's earth- floored celar and, in the background, the bottom of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. An empty space except for a couple of crippled workbenches along the wals, random garbage baled up from where it was tossed down from the top of the stairs. The air greened by the night lens, so that the scene appears to be set on a cold lake bottom.

'They have these things for babies?' I say. 'What for? To count the kid's eyelashes as it sleeps?'