The Guardians

Two, Ben was an anti-social shut-in with delusional tendencies—and that was him in grade eleven. Three, even if there was something in there that was trying to escape, how would staring at the front door stop it from getting out? Four, Ben was talking about ghosts. And people with ful decks don't believe in ghosts."

"You haven't used your thumb yet."

"Okay, then. Five, you're grieving, whether you think you're immune to that particular emotion or not. And grief can make you stupid."

"Aren't you grieving too?"

"In my way. God knows I raised my glass to his memory enough times last night."

We laugh at this. In part because we need to in order to move on to the next chance for normal to settle over us again. In part because Randy's mention of the word

"ghost" feels like it invited one into the room.

"What about some dinner tonight?" Randy says, rising.

"Sounds good."

"I was thinking the Old London."

"Is it stil there?"

"Was when I walked past it last night."

"Perfect."

"I was going to hit the coin laundry this afternoon. Want me to grab some stuff from your room and throw it in too?"

"I'l use the washer here if I need to. I'm staying here tonight anyway."

Randy turns around on the porch. "Here? Overnight?"

"Betty asked if I would. I think she needs the company."

"Where you going to sleep?"

"Ben's room."

"That's fucked. Got to say"

"I think it was your point number four, wasn't it?" I say, pushing the door closed. "People with ful decks don't believe in ghosts."

The next couple of hours are spent back up in Ben's room, fitting his belongings into boxes and stuffing the clothes from his closet into bags for the Salvation Army ("Take whatever you and your friends might want," Betty McAuliffe had invited me). I put aside a pair of ties, though I did it just to please her.

They are activities that keep my fidgety hands occupied, but not my mind. Over and over I return to Tracey Flanagan. Odds are that she's fine, and that Randy was right: starting an official search after less than a day was nothing more than the over- reaction of smal-town cops. Yet the news struck me as hard as it seemed to have struck Randy. Maybe it was the way she reminded us of Heather. Maybe it was Randy saying how, now that we'd let it see us, the Thurman house knew we were back.

And then there's the house itself.

By mid-afternoon the clouds had not quite lifted but thinned, so that, from time the time, the sun found a square to poke through. It would flash across the Thurman windows and reflect into Ben's room, beckoning me to turn and look. Each time I did I'd have to close my eyes against the light, and when I opened them again, the sun was gone, the glass dul. The effect was like a leering wink from a stranger, so swift and unexpected you couldn't be sure if it was a signal or just a twitch.

It happens again. The sun, the blink of light.

Except this time, as I'm returning to the pile of Ben's clothes at my feet, something changes. Not in what I can see in the house, but in my peripheral vision.

Something in the room with me.

I spin around to face it. And it is a face. Mrs. McAuliffe's, her head popping up another foot where she's come halfway up the stairs.

"Phone for you," she says.

"I'l take it up here, if that's okay."

I start for the phone on Ben's bedside table, but Betty McAuliffe waves me over. Tugs on my pant leg until I bend down, my ear close to her lips.

"It's a girl," she whispers.

Once Mrs. McAuliffe has started back down I pick up. Wait to hear the click of the downstairs receiver.

"Trevor?"

It's Sarah. Sounding nervous, her voice slightly higher than yesterday. The way my own voice probably sounds.

"Hey there."

"I tried you at the Queen's," she says. "When you weren't there, I figured I'd see if you were at Ben's."

"What was your next guess?"

"A bar somewhere. Maybe the back row of the Vogue. The entertainment options haven't changed much around here."

"I can tel you that folding up Ben's underwear isn't too entertaining either."

"Want some company?"

"Sorry?"

"I've got the afternoon off. Just wondered if you thought it might be easier with an extra pair of hands."

She wants to see you. A distinctly external voice, not the boy's. Mine. She's been thinking of you as much as you've been thinking of her.

And then a different voice.

Ask her over, the boy says . Take her across the street. We can all have a good time.

"I'm fine. But thanks for offering," I say.

"It was a dumb idea."

"No. I'd like to see you, Sarah."

"Realy?"

"What about dinner. Tomorrow?" There's a pause, and the foolishness of what I've done hits me square. "Listen to me. It's like I'm sixteen al over again, caling you up for the first time."

"I caled you."

"Which I appreciate. And I'm sorry if I've made this awkward. You're probably married or have a boyfriend. I didn't even ask—"

"What time?"

"Time?"

"When do you want to come over?"

"You tel me."

"There's a Guardians game tomorrow night. You could come by here first."

"Sounds wonderful," I say, because it does.

The Old London Steakhouse used to be—and likely stil is— Grimshaw's one and only so-caled fine dining restaurant. We would come here, my parents, brother and I, for special birthday dinners, squeezing ourselves into itchy dress shirts and affixing clip-on neckties for the occasion. When I find the place now and push open its door, I see that nothing has changed. Not even the lightbulbs, apparently: the place is impossibly underlit, not to create a mood (though this may have been the intention when it opened forty or so years ago), but to hide whatever crunches underfoot on the carpet.

I have to wait something close to a ful minute for my eyes to adjust to the near darkness. There is nobody to welcome me, so I must endure the muzak version of

"The Pina Colada Song" alone.

"You'l be joining your friend?" a voice eventualy asks, the low growl of a chain-smoker. And then the outline of a man in a shabby tux, backlit by a fake gaslamp.

"I guess he's already here?"

The maître d' has stepped close enough for me to see the grey cheeks in need of a shave, the bow tie pointing nearly straight up, like a propeler snagged on the bristle of his chin.

"Your friend," he says with a sadness that seems connected to the ancient past, the suffering of ancestors in a lost war, "he is having a cocktail. A Manhattan."

"I'm not one to rock the boat."

He leads me into the dining room—or dining rooms, as the space is divided into a warren of nooks and private booths separated by hanging fishnets and "log cabin"

wals with peekaboo windows. Other bits of maritime and frontier kitsch are scattered throughout, but aside from the framed print of the Houses of Parliament glowering over a moonlit Thames set above the stone fireplace, there is nothing "Old" or "London" about it. Not that this stops Randy from speaking in a particularly bad cockney accent through the first drink of the evening.

"'Elo, gov!" he cals out, and there he is, waving me over to an enormous round table. "Set yourself down and warm your cockles!"

"What's a cockle, anyway? I've always wondered."

"I don't know," Randy answers thoughtfuly, pushing his empty glass to the table's edge. "But mine are certainly warmer now than they were five minutes ago."

The maître d' returns with our drinks in the time it takes me to pul out one of the throne-like chairs and sink into its overstuffed seat. Everything is slowed in this dark—every search for the men's room, every reach for water goblet or butter dish. It is like being able to breathe underwater.

The Manhattans and joking at the expense of the escargot appetizers pass pleasantly enough, a testimony to how much, despite everything, we enjoy being together, particularly given that the initial conversation concerns updates on Tracey Flanagan's disappearance. No sign of the girl. Todd refusing to leave the house in case the phone rings or she comes home expecting him to be there. The boyfriend claiming he didn't see her after work last night, now taken in for questioning and described by police, in their first press conference, as a "person of interest." And to reconstruct a narrative of her evening, authorities are asking al patrons of Jake's last night to come forward to provide their accounts of the bar's comings and goings.

"I guess we should go down there tomorrow," I say.

"I've already spoken to them," Randy answers. "They're expecting us at eleven."

"It does kind of remind you of Heather. Doesn't it?"

"So what if it does? People go missing sometimes. Even in smal towns," Randy reasons. "If it's two missing persons over thirty years, Grimshaw is probably below the per capita national average."

"Not just two missing persons. Two women, early twenties, look kind of similar. Fits a profile."

"Listen to you. 'Fits a profile.' You auditioning for some crime show?" He reaches for his wineglass. "Actualy, I auditioned for a crime show a few weeks ago."

"You get the part?"

"Are you trying to hurt my feelings?"

When the maître d’, who took our order, is also the one to pour the first bottle of "Ontario Bordeaux," it becomes clear that he is the only front-of-house staff on tonight—and that he is the only one needed, seeing as we're the only customers. This fact, combined with the Old London's velvety gloom, gives us the sense of cozy seclusion. Anything might be said here and it wil never pass beyond these stuccoed wals. It seems that Randy shares this impression, because soon he is turning the talk toward topics we would be better off avoiding, yet here, for the moment, feel are merely intriguing, the sort of thing you light upon in reading the back pages of the paper and harmlessly ponder over the morning coffee, protected by the knowledge that it has happened to someone else, not you.

"Don't you think it's weird?"

"This is Grimshaw, Randy," I answer, employing my ful concentration to guide a chunk of rib-eye past my lips. "It's all weird. And if you're talking about Tracey Flanagan and how—"

"I'm not talking about her. And I'm not talking about Grimshaw. I'm talking about how we've been here for almost two days now and we haven't even mentioned it."

"You're going to need to be—"

"The coach. The coach. The coach! "

I stop chewing. "There's good reason we haven't brought that up."

"But it's just the two of us, in the same place at the same time, for the first time in forever. Who knows when we'l be together again like this?"

"I get it." I swalow. "Seeing as we're sitting here enjoying ourselves, we might as wel bust out al the bad memories for the hel of it?"

"I'm not sure I deserve the sarcasm."

"I'm just trying to understand you, Randy."

"Understand me? Okay, here's a start: I'm scared. Haven't slept a good night's sleep since before I could shave. And it's only going to get worse now that I've seen that house again and know it's stil there."

"Do you want to talk about it? I mean, do you feel you need to?"

"Want to? No. Need to? Maybe. It's a lot to carry around al the time, al on your own, don't you think?"

"I've done my best to pretend it's not even there."

"And how has that worked for you?"

"Couldn't say. It's the only way I've ever known how to be."

"But that's not true," Randy says, lowering his fork to the table with an unexpected thud. "Once upon a time, you were yourself We al were. But since then, we're something else. We got so good at holding on to what we knew that even coming back here—even what Ben did to himself—won't let us bring it up."

Randy looks around to make sure no one is listening, though in the Old London's murk there could be a guy six feet away holding a boom mike over our table and we wouldn't be able to spot him.

"What we did was a crime," I say.

"You're the one blabbing about the past into a Dictaphone. So why are you talking to a machine about it and not me?"

"That's different."

"Realy? Haven't you ever wondered if we al would've been in better shape if we'd just shared what we were going through instead of trying to bury it?"

"I'm not sure sharing something that could send us to prison is great therapy. I'm wondering if you forgot that part."

"I haven't forgotten."

"Good. Let's not start forgetting it now. We're supposed to give a statement to the police tomorrow about being in the bar last night. Once that's done, and so long as Betty doesn't need more help in clearing up Ben's things, I plan to get the hel out of here."

"Isn't that tidy?"

"I happen to like tidy."

We busy ourselves with our steaks. Hoping for our tempers to even, for the bad wine to bring back its initial good feelings. We just chew and swalow. Or in my case, chew and spit a mouthful out into my napkin. It turns Randy's attention my way. And I am about to explain that with the Parkinson's, griled meat can sometimes be a chalenge to choke down. But instead I say, "I saw something."

Randy continues to look at me precisely as he had a moment ago, as though I have not said anything at al.

"Back then," I go on. "And then, just yesterday, I thought I saw it again. When I was looking at the house from Ben's window."

"What was it?"

"Me. I thought it was only a reflection in a mirror the first time. And then, I guessed it was only you, or Carl, or Ben, because he was a boy about our age, looked the way we looked. Except it wasn't one of us."

Randy blinks repeatedly over the vast distance of the tabletop.

"I saw him too," he says.

"So it wasn't just Carl and me."

"Carl?"

"After we found Heather. He told me he'd seen someone. Or was it that he'd only heard someone? Anyway, he was pretty messed up about it."

"Join the club."

"I mean he was even worse than I was."

"Worse?"

"He held my hand."

"You and Carl held hands?" Randy asks, as though this fact is more shocking than both of us confessing to having seen the living dead. "I'd pay a good chunk of change to have been around to see that."

"You had more money then."

"True. Maybe I should give up this acting thing and go back to dealing weed and mowing lawns."

We both want to go back to half an hour ago. I can see it in Randy's face just as he can see it in mine. But now that we've said what we've said, the implications are rushing to catch up, and they're too numerous, too wrigglingly alive to hold on to.

"What happened in there?" I find myself saying. "What happened to us?"

"Trev. C'mon," Randy says, reaching his hand toward me, but the table is too wide.

"Was there something wrong with that place? Or something wrong with us?"

A cleared throat.

The two of us look up to see the maître d’ standing there, hands clasped over his belt buckle. A vacant smile of blue bone.

"Something sweet, gentlemen?"

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 10

We must have thought it would be easy.

Force a man into the celar of an abandoned house, accuse him of murdering a female coleague in the very same location, then stick a tape recorder in his face and expect him to confess. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Except I'm not sure even this was true.

I know now that you can do terrible things without an idea. You can do them without feeling it's realy you doing them.

Looking back, I'm almost convinced it was someone else occupying my skin in the celar that night. Someone else whispering in my head, encouraging, taunting.

Teling me that it was okay, that none of this counted anyway.

You've come this far already, the boy said but didn't say . You don't want to miss all the fun, do you?

For the first hour or so, the coach didn't answer any of our questions. He just repeated a question of his own.

"How do you think this is going to end?"

We had no reply to this, only more questions. Like why he brought Miss Langham here. How she ended up dead.

"Maybe it was some kind of accident," Randy suggested.

"You're some kind of accident."

"I'm trying to help."

"Help? I need Handy Randy's help?" He turned to Carl. "Please. Shoot me now."

"We're looking for an explanation, that's al."

"Why do you think I owe you that? I mean, look at yourselves."

And we did. For the first time since we'd filed down the celar stairs and made the coach stand with his back to the wal, we let our gaze move off him and to each other. We looked at least five years younger than we pictured ourselves. Carl especialy. The biggest one of us reduced to a child who needed both hands to aim the revolver an inch higher than the toes of his boots.

"How do you think this is going to end?" the coach asked again.

I think now that if Ben hadn't taken a step away at that point, if he hadn't made us focus on his scuffling movement instead of lingering on the shrunken, stiled outlines of ourselves in the dark, we might stil have avoided the worst yet to come. Argued a defence based on the stupidity of teenage boys (at least we hadn't kiled ourselves by driving drunk into a tree, the more common end for the worst sort of Perth County misadventure). It was the conclusion of our grim, exhilarating ride. And now, facing the coach's question, we found we had run out of ways to fil the next moment, and this gap had let the awakening light of absurdity in.

But Ben plugged the hole up again by moving. By rustling through some orange crates piled up around the worktable and returning to stand within range of Carl's flashlight beam. A length of frayed extension cord in his hand.

"We can use this to tie him up," he said.

We puled the parka hood over the coach's head and swaddled him with rank blankets discovered in the main hal closet. (Carl wondered if we should gag him as wel, but the coach told us nobody could hear him down there no matter how loudly he screamed. "And how are you so sure of that?" Ben asked.) Then we made our way up to the kitchen.

After closing the celar door we felt the house seal shut, the air silty and stil. For a time we waited there, as though there was something more to be done but we'd forgotten what it was. Standing on individual squares of the checkered linoleum like chess pieces.

"We can't leave him down there forever," Randy said.

"It's up to him." Ben started toward the back door and pushed it open an inch. "We'l take turns visiting him tomorrow. I'l come first, and we can decide on a rotation at school. When he makes a statement we can use, he can go."

"What if he doesn't?"

"He has to," Ben said, and started out.

Randy folowed. I wanted nothing more than to be with them. Outside, breathing the cold-hardened air, sure of where I was. But I stayed. Not out of hesitation over leaving the coach behind. I stayed because the house wanted me to. It liked our being here, was warmed by the mischief being performed within it. I could feel the plaster ceilings and paneled wals closing toward me in a suffocating embrace, the too-long hug of a creepy uncle at the end of Thanksgiving dinner.

"Wait."

I spun around, expecting to see the unimaginable behind me. The boy.

"Fuck, man," I gasped. "We gotta go."

" Wait," Carl said.

He focused on me. A combined expression of fear and insane amusement, as though he was as likely to run crying into the night as stick his dad's gun into my mouth just to watch how my brains would slide down the wal.

"Can't you hear it?" he said, stepping closer.

"Hear what?"

" Don't lie."

And then he did raise the gun.

"Sure. I can hear it too."

"What is it?"

I surprised myself by answering instantly Honestly.

"A boy."

"What's he look like?"

"Like you. Like any of us."

"It would like you to think that."

"You've seen it?"

Carl appeared to search his memory. "Have you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Upstairs. The night we found Heather. But it was only me. Me, in the mirror on the bathroom door."

"It wasn't you," Carl said, his face looming closer. "And it's not like us."

"Maybe we should—"

"It's not\"

Carl backed away. He looked like he had just lost a long and exhausting argument with himself.

I took his hand. A weird thing to do. The kind of thing Carl in particular would have resisted, taken as an affront to his unshakeable Carlness. But once we were connected, he held my hand as much as I held his.

We let go only once the night opened wide around us outside. Thankful that the others had already headed home.

It should go without saying that I never mentioned the hand-holding part to anyone ever again. Until today.

[10]

By the time Randy and I walk to Ben's house from the Old London it's later than I'd thought, and my exhaustion from the evening's revelations, as wel as the wine, prevents me from asking myself the one question that should have been asked before Randy disappeared around the corner of Caledonia and Church, leaving me standing on the McAuliffes' front porch, key in hand: Where am I going to sleep?

Al day I'd meant to tel Mrs. McAuliffe that, while I appreciated her hospitality, I couldn't accept her invitation to stay overnight in her son's room. Her dead son's room. But whether I was distracted by my tasks as executor or couldn't bring myself to disappoint the poor woman, I hadn't gotten around to it. Now it would be plainly wrong to scuff after Randy and get my old room back at the Queen's. Betty would be expecting me for breakfast in the morning, had likely gone out earlier to buy the makings for her specialties—raisin bread French toast and fruit salad. Indeed, she may wel stil be awake in her darkened room, awaiting the sound of my steps up the stairs.

I open the door and swiftly close it again once I'm in. A silent oath made with myself: if I am actualy going to spend the night in this place, I cannot afford even the briefest glimpse of the house across the street. In fact, it might be a better idea to not go upstairs at al, and simply crumple onto the sofa in the living room. I'm on my way toward it, checking the chairs for a blanket, when I'm stopped by a sound that comes from the kitchen.

A scratch, or the rustle of plastic. The sort of thing that could be confused with a breath from one's own chest.

From the halway, I can see part of the kitchen. Nobody stands there, knife in hand, as I half expect. There is nothing but the play of moonlight over the cupboards, moving around the tree branches in the September photo on the calendar pinned to the wal.

I'm partway to the kitchen entrance when a chunk of shadow breaks away and tiptoes over the linoleum. A large mouse—or smal rat—that, upon spotting me, races behind the fridge, its tail audibly scratching across an edge of drywal.

For a second, the silence suggests we're both working through the same thought.

What the hell was that?

The sheets in Ben's bed have been freshly washed and made even since I sat on them earlier in the day. Betty wants me to feel welcome. And I do. Or at least, I'm grateful for being able to pul the covers up to my chin so that the boy-smels of Ben's room are partialy masked by fabric softener.

Sleep, I have found, is like a woman you'd like to speak to across a crowded room: the harder you wish it to come to you, the more often it turns away. So it is that I am left awake and wishing, staring up at something awful (the beam that Ben looped his rope over) in order to avoid looking at something even more awful (the Thurman house, whose roof would be clearly visible if I turned my head on the pilow). Did Ben fight this same fight himself these past years? Was he forced to consider every knot and crack in the wood that would eventualy hold him thrashing in mid-air?

It is these questions that lead me into sleep. Into a dream that carries me down the stairs and across Caledonia Street to lie on the cold ground beneath the hedgerow the runs along the Thurman property line. Staring up at the side windows of the house, the glass a blackboard with fuckt finger-drawn in its dust.

It starts with a woman.

Standing up from where she had been lying on the living- room floor out of sight below the sil. A woman who places her palms against the glass. And with this touch, I can see she is naked, and young, and not alone.

Another figure calmly approaches from behind her. Male, his identity concealed by the dark, though his form visible enough for me to see that he is naked as wel.

He stands there, appreciating the ful display of her body. For a moment, I feel sure he is about to eat her.

His hands cup her breasts as he enters her. With a jolt, her own hands flail against the window. Fingernail screeches.

They're real.

But they're not. This is a dream. And no matter how convincing, there remains a thread that tethers their performance to the imagination. It's this understanding that alows them to continue without my trying to get in the way, or desperately swimming up toward consciousness. It is a dream, and therefore harmless.

Yet the dark figure who works away at the long-haired woman seems more than capable of harm. Harm is al there is to him. It looks like sex, this thing he's doing, but it's not. There is no explicit violence, no shouted threats—it may wel be mutualy voluntary what the two of them do. But for him, it has nothing to do with wanting her, or even with the pleasure of her body. He wishes only to disgrace.

I'm expecting the male figure to reveal himself to me first, but instead it's the woman. Lifting her chin and throwing her hair aside.

Not Tina Uxbridge's face, or Heather Langham's. It's Tracey Flanagan's.

Her eyes emptied of the humour they conveyed in life. But otherwise unquestionably her. Mouth open in a soundless moan. Her breasts capped by nipples turned purple in the way of freezer-burned meat.

For some reason I assume it is the coach standing behind her. It is more than an assumption—the anticipation of him showing himself to me, the ta-dah! moment that is the waking trigger to every nightmare, is so certain I am already recaling his face from memory, so that when he appears, I won't be wholy surprised. It will be the coach. Released from the celar to carry out this perversity, this pairing of the apparently living with the probably dead.

But I am wrong in this too.

I am already scrabbling out from under the branches when the boy leans to the side to reveal his face over Tracey Flanagan's shoulder. Enflamed, gloating. He is more interested in me than whatever mark he means to leave on Tracey.

Hey there, old man. It's been a while.

The boy's lips don't move, but I can hear him nonetheless.

You want a piece of this? Come inside.

It's his voice that prompts me to move. To get up and run away. But I'm not sixteen, as I thought I was. This isn't the past but the present, and I am a man with a degenerative disease, fighting to get to my feet. Three times I try, and each time I am stricken with a seizure that brings me down. Al I manage to do is rol closer to the window, so that Tracey and the boy loom over me.

Look at you, the boy says as I claw at the house's brick, his voice free of sympathy, of any feeling at al . You're falling apart, brother. Ever think of just cashing out? Keep little Ben company?

My hand manages to grip a dead vine that has webbed itself up the wal. It alows me to get to my knees. Then, with a lunge, to my feet. Instead of waiting to see if I can maintain my balance, I try to run to the street, but the motion only crumples me onto the ground once more. Eyes fixed on the boy's.

Poor Trev. I'm not sure you could manage this if I pulled your fly down for you and pointed you in the right direction.

The boy laughs. Then he thrusts against Tracey a final time before holding himself inside her, his knuckles gripped white to her hips, his shoulders shuddering with the spite of his release.

I was right about breakfast.

By the time I make it downstairs, Mrs. McAuliffe is in the kitchen, bathrobed and slippered, eggy bread in the pan and a bowl of fruit on the table. At the sound of me entering (my fingernails dig into the doorframe for balance), the old woman lights up.

"Sleep wel?" she asks, returning her attention to the stove to flip the slices.

"It's a good mattress."

"Posturepedic. Ben had a bad back."

"I didn't know."

"It was al the sitting."

"That'l do it."

"I'm glad to see it's given somebody a good night's rest."

As I stagger to the kitchen table I wonder how I could possibly be mistaken for someone who's had a good night's rest. And then it comes to me that this is only Betty McAuliffe's wish: that I be comfortable and enjoy her cooking, that I use the things her son wil never use again, that I stay a little longer. She sees me as wel rested and affliction-free because her life with Ben had trained her in the art of seeing the sunny side, of pushing on as though their lives were as sane as their neighbours'. We have this in common, Betty and I. We've both had to work at our normal acts.

I'm bending my chin close to the bowl to deliver a wavering spoon of mango to my mouth when there's a knock at the door. As Betty goes to answer, I'm sure it's the police. They've finaly come for me. The charges may be related to the present or the past. They've come, and I am ready to go.

But it's not the police. It's Randy, now taking the seat across from mine and accepting Mrs. McAuliffe's offer of a coffee and shortbread.

"You look terrible," he says once Betty has excused herself to get dressed.

"Should have caled before dropping by. I would have made a point of putting my face on."

"Don't bother. I can see your inner beauty."

"Do lines like that actualy work on your dates?"

"Acting has taught me this much, Trev: it's not the line—it's how you sel it."

Randy crunches into his shortbread. Crumbs cascading down onto the doily Mrs. McAuliffe had placed before him.

"What are you doing here?" I ask.

"I'm your escort."

"To the police station? I think I know where it is, thanks."

"I'd like to stop somewhere else along the way. You've got to see something."

"What?"

"A website. There's an internet cafe on Downie Street. They've got terminals and little privacy wals between them so you—"

"What website?"

"You know, one of those places where boyfriends submit photos of their girlfriends."

"Jesus Christ, Randy. You're hauling me downtown so I can be your porn pal?"

"First of al, it's not really porn," Randy qualifies, popping the rest of the shortbread into his mouth. "And second, it's Tracey Flanagan."

If my memory's right, Insomnia Internet used to be Klaupper's Deli, the latter seling Polish sausages and German chocolates to the Grimshaw immigrants who couldn't shake their taste for home. Now there are racks of hyperviolent games where the meat counter used to be, and rows of computers where I recal walking the aisles with my mother, searching for the imported butterscotch candies Klaupper's sometimes carried. When Randy and I enter, I imagine there is stil a trace of fried schnitzel and Toblerone—and unexpectedly, my mother's Sunday- only spritz of Chanel No. 5—in the air. But then, on the next sniff, it is replaced by the fungoid aroma of teenage boys.

"Back here," Randy directs me, waving me to a terminal he's already secured in the rear corner.

I'm worried at first we'l be observed by the kids who machete and Uzi their way through the carnage on their screens. But as I pass, not one of them turns to look at the shaky old guy who makes his way to the back. And though some of them are apparently engaged in some communal game involving others in the room, they don't acknowledge their felow players in any way, aside from an occasional cry of "Backup! Need backup!" and " Why won't you die? "

"Have a seat," Randy says, puling over a wheeled chair from the next cubicle. I watch as he takes his walet out and, from within it, a slip of paper with a web address written on it.

"Who told you about this, anyway?" I ask.

"I went by the Moly Bloom for a nightcap on the way back to the hotel last night. Had one with Vince Sproule. Who tels me about this."

"This?"

"Mygirl.com. Where Tracey has her own page."

"How does Vince know about it?"

"The boyfriend, Gary Pulinger, let the cat out of the bag. Told one of his buddies that he uploaded some snaps, and then the friend told some other friends and .. .

wel, it's a smal town."

"Are the police aware of this?"

"It's part of why they're stil griling Gary so hard. They're trying to see if these pictures are part of a motive somehow."

"Motive for what?"

Randy types in the address and clicks Enter. Only then does he turn to look at me. "She's missing Trev. Odds are she's not coming back. And you always start with the boyfriend. Or the dad."

"They think Todd has something to do with this?"

"I don't think he's at the top of the list. The Pulinger kid holds that spot. But you never know. Do you?"

I'm searching for an answer to this when suddenly Tracey is there on the screen.

There are no toys, props, costumes. No leather or rubber or lace. Just a young woman without any clothes on. Standing in front of a cluttered bookcase or sitting on the edge of an unmade bed in a basement bedroom, a towel on the floor around her feet darkly wet from a recent shower. Her hair clinging to her shoulders, framing her breasts. Water dripping off the ends and leaving a map of streaks over her bely, fading sideroads al converging on the dark curls between her legs.

She is smiling in most of the shots. The same expression of welcome she offered us when we first wandered into Jake's Pool 'n' Sports. In a couple of pictures she attempts a pouty look of wanton invitation, but it is play-acting that fails to convince either the photographer or her, judging from the laughter that folows.

In al of the photos, even the siliest ones, she is beautiful. Beautiful in her nakedness, but equaly for the fun she is having, the goofing around that has as much to do with pretending at being a seductress as with the provocation of real desire. She is a young woman showing herself not to the camera's vacant lens but to the man behind it.

"Close it," I say.

"God. You've got to admit. She's something, isn't she?"

"Randy—"

"You wouldn't guess, under that dumb referee outfit they make them—"

"Turn it off."

Randy looks over his shoulder at me. "What's your problem? We're not peeping through her keyhole or anything. The whole world can find this if they want."

"I'm not talking to the whole world."

He presses his lips together in a combined expression of puzzlement and pain, as though he'd let his hand linger over an open flame but was unable to figure out how to pul it away.

"She's a kid," I say.

"Okay."

"She's our friend's kid."

"Okay"

Randy closes his eyes. Blindly, he slides the mouse over the pad. Clicks it—and Tracey disappears.

"Doesn't it rattle you at al?" I ask, leaning in close enough to whisper. "The way the whole Heather and Tracey things overlap?"

"Sure. I'd say it rattles me a fair bit."

"It's like someone is copycatting or something."

"That might be taking it a little far."

"Maybe. But on the same day we rol into town?" I shake my head. Part Parkinson's, part avoidance of this line of thought. "We'l be gone soon."

"I'l stay as long as you have to."

"I'm fine, realy."

"Oh yeah. You're just dandy."

"Nothing a decent night's sleep won't fix."

"And you're going to get that in Ben's bed?"

"Don't worry about me."

"What, me worry?" Randy smiles, looking very much like Alfred E. Neuman. "Al the same, I think I'l stick around so we can head out on the same train. How's that?"

"We Guardians stick together."

"Goddamn right." He pinches my cheek. Hard. "You are goddamn right there, brother."

From Insomnia, we make our way to the Grimshaw Community Services building, otherwise known as the cop shop. We present ourselves to the receptionist as patrons of Jake's Pool 'n' Sports a couple of nights ago, here to answer questions.

"Regarding Tracey Flanagan," Randy says when the woman doesn't seem to register either us or what we've just said.

"I know what it's regarding," she replies. "Have a seat."

When two officers finaly emerge, it's a Laurel and Hardy pair, a slim felow with jug ears and a short waddler heaving a basketbal around inside his shirt. The big one introduces himself to Randy and takes him down the hal to an interview room, leaving the tal one standing over me, nodding as though something in my appearance has just settled a wager and he'd won.

"Trevor," he says. And then, when this fails to remove the puzzled expression from my face, he taps the name tag pinned to his shirt. "It's Barry Tate."

"Barry. I think I remember."

"I was a year behind you. We even had a couple of classes together."

"Hairy Barry," I say, and then he's al there. The only kid in school with a handlebar moustache that, unbelievably, actualy suited him. "You played hockey too, right?"

"I took your number the season after . . . after you stopped playing."

"Did it bring you luck?"

"Eighteen goals."

"Not bad."

"Some goon broke my wrist in a game against Kitchener the next year, and that was it for me."

"Now you're one of Grimshaw's finest."

"Pension, dental, paid holidays. And you get to drive a car with lights on the roof."

Barry starts down the same halway, but I have a little trouble lifting myself out of my chair. It brings him back to grip my elbow and heave me up. "You okay?"

"Just a little stiff in the mornings."

He gives me a look that says he's not buying that for a second, but hey, a man's body is his own business. I'm expecting him to make a joke instead, something to brush away the awkwardness, but he just stands there with his hand on my arm.

"I'm sorry about Ben," he says.

"Me too."

"I used to see him up there in that window of his. Thought about caling on him, but never did."

"I'm not sure he would have come to the door."

"Even so. I feel lousy about it."

Barry guides me down to an interview room next to the one I can hear Randy giving his statement in (". . . delivery guy. Just a boyfriend giving his girl a kiss. Didn't see much more to it than that . . ."). Next door, we take our places on opposite sides of a metal table, Barry slapping a notepad onto its scratched surface.

"Okay, then," he sighs. "Tel me about your night at Jake's."

It takes only a minute. Me and Randy having drinks after Ben's funeral. Todd Flanagan and Vince Sproule there watching the game. And Tracey bringing us pitchers and whiskeys. Other than the pizza-delivery guy, who dropped by to say helo to the girl, nothing to report. And judging by the way Barry Tate flips the notepad closed when I'm finished, he didn't expect there would be.

"That's great, Trevor. We appreciate you stopping by."

He rises, extends a hand to be shaken, but I don't move.

"So unless you have any questions of your own . . ." Barry says, now puling his hand away and using it to open the door.

"It's not realy a question so much as a suggestion."

"Oh?"

"Maybe you guys should check out the Thurman house."

He looks like he might laugh, as if he's not sure if I'm being serious. "Why would we want to do that?"

"It's just a thought."

"Have you seen or heard something that makes you have such a thought?"

"Not realy. I just thought I spotted some movement in one of the windows last night."

"You happened to be walking by?"

"I'm staying with Ben's mother for a couple of days. I'm the executor of his estate. She's a little lonely, so I'm staying in his room."

"Which has a view of the Thurmans'."

"That's right."

"Where you saw . . . ?"

"A flash. Something passing behind the glass."

"Male? Female?"

"I don't know if it was even a person."

"Wel, I have to tel you, that's not going to be enough for a search warrant."

"You think you need one of those? Even if you got one, who would you serve it on? The place has been empty more or less since you and I were shooting spitbals in Mrs. Grover's French class."

Barry Tate crosses his arms over his chest. Considers me. Perhaps wondering whether the years have left old Trev as bonkers as Ben McAuliffe was.

"Hel of a business," he says finaly. "What they puled out of that place back when we were kids."

This is a surprise. It shouldn't be, but it is. Even though al of Grimshaw remembers the bad news of the winter of 1984, it feels as though it's private knowledge, something shared by me, Randy and Carl alone.

"No doubt about it."

"You think that's got something to do with you wanting us to take a look in there?"

"How do you mean?"

"The mind, the way it works sometimes. It can get roling along certain tracks and not want to stop," Barry says, touching his now neatly trimmed moustache as though it was helping him find words. "What happened to Ben, and now you're staying in his house and everything. Could be that you're just a little spooked."

"I'm spooked sily, to tel you the truth. For me, this whole town is crawling with ghosts. I'm forty years old, for Chrissakes."

"I hear that."

Barry coughs, though between men, it is a sound to be understood as a kind of muted laugh.

"Okay. I'l try to clear some time in the afternoon," Barry says, puls the door open a foot more.

"Thank you."

I get to my feet. It takes longer than I'd like.

"My dad had the Parkinson's too," Barry says.

"No kidding?"

"Sorry to mention it. It's just—"

"It's getting hard not to notice, I know. How's your dad doing?"

"He died four years ago."

I nod. We both do. Then I make my way down the hal to where Randy waits for me by the exit.

Once we're outside he says, "That was Hairy Barry Tate, wasn't it?"

"Certainly was."

"What were you two talking about in there?"

"Hockey. He played for the Guardians too. A Kitchener guy broke his wrist."

Randy shakes his fist skyward, raging at heaven in his not bad Charlton Heston voice. "Damn those Kitchener guys. Damn them to hell"

Randy walks me back to Ben's, offers to hang around as I "alphabetize his Archie and Jugheads or whatever you're doing up there." I tel him there's little point in both of us being bored senseless.

"Any plans for tonight?" he asks. "Sounds like you're pretty close to wrapping up. Could be our last evening in town to check out the culinary offerings."

"I'm grabbing something with Sarah, actualy."

Randy bugs his eyes out. "Are we talking date?"

"She mentioned we might go to the Guardians game."

"That's as close to 'Come up and see my etchings' as you get around here."

"She's just being nice."

"I could go for some of that kind of nice."

Up in Ben's room, I tape up some of the boxes I've been tossing stuff into, marking them "Books + Mags" and "Hockey" and "Misc." I'm not sure if there's much point to even this basic sorting—what is Betty going to do with it once I'm gone, other than let it rot in the basement or drop it off at the Salvation Army to be piled into their Pay What You Can bin?—but it gives me the idea that I'm helping, bringing some kind of expertise to the job. A job I'm nearly done now. The closet empty, the clothes bagged, the room emptied of knick-knacks and clutter. Randy was right: there's no reason we can't be on the train out of here tomorrow.

I pick Ben's diary off the bed. I've already decided this wil be the only keepsake I wil take with me. Not because I feel any special warmth from the thing—the Ben who authored it wasn't the Ben I knew—but because it can't be left behind.

I sit in his chair by the window and I've just opened it up when a Grimshaw Police cruiser rounds Church Street and eases to a stop. My first instinct is to hide. I slide off Ben's chair to kneel on the floor, nose pressed to the sil so that I'm able to peer down at the street.

Barry Tate and his roly-poly partner step out of the car and stand on the sidewalk. For a time they stare up at the Thurman house with their hands on their hips, speaking to each other in words I can't make out, though their tone seems doubtful, as if wondering aloud if they have come to the right address.

Barry makes his way to the front door first, tries the handle and, finding it locked, starts around toward the rear, his partner folowing. After five minutes, they have yet to reappear.

I slip down and let my back rest against the wal. Open Ben's diary again. For another dozen pages there is his continued notation of wasted hours and days. Over time, it becomes so repetitious I play the game of scanning for the flavours of soups he heats for his lunches. A prisoner's menu of split peas, minestrones and chicken noodles.

Among the banal details, there are occasional episodes of Ben making sure that none entered the house. Shouting down at kids making bets over who had the guts to open the front door and place both feet over the threshold. Threatening to phone their parents, pretending he knew their names. Another entry told of a "half-drunk girl" being led by her boyfriend around the side of the house at night. Ben rushed downstairs, ran across the street to the back door in time to haul the girl out of the kitchen, teling her she didn't know how bad a place it was, how much danger she was in just being there. She ran away crying, whereupon the boyfriend suckerpunched Ben in the mouth.

Sometimes, when older high-schoolers had slipped inside, Ben caled the cops. The diary would note how many trespassers were hustled out by the officers, who seemed to arrive later and later with each report Ben caled in; the police would have let the Thurman house go unmonitored were it not for the McAuliffe head case who was conducting a permanent stakeout on it. Not that Ben cared what they thought. His duty was to keep the empty house empty.

Then there's a longer entry. June 22, 2002. The date underlined in red ink.

Something today.

Just after noon the door handle turned. I have seen it rattle before. But this time it turned: a slow circle, like the person doing the turning was figuring out how it worked. Or didn't want to be seen doing it.

Then the door swung open. It was Heather.

Blinded by the daylight, terrified. Filthy. No clothes.

Then the door slammed shut again. Slammed. If anyone had been listening—anyone other than me—they would have heard the wood cracking the frame.

The click of the lock . . .

Voices from the street pul me from the page. It's Barry Tate and his partner, the former finishing up an anecdote that brings a chortle from the latter's chest. Before they reach the cruiser Barry looks up to the window. He doesn't seem surprised to see me here, my chin resting on the sil. In fact he waves. And I wave back.

"Nothing," he says, or at least shapes his mouth around the word without speaking it. Then he shrugs.

I watch the two of them take their time getting into the car, enjoying being out of the office. Even once the engine's started they linger, taking notes. Then, having run out of excuses to let the clock run on, Barry shifts into drive, rols up Caledonia and out of sight.

I'm watching the front door by coincidence. Or I'm watching it because I was directed to, just as Ben was on the twenty- second of June, 2002. Either way, within a heartbeat of Barry Tate's cruiser roling away, the doorknob turns.

The motion is tentative. And there is part of me even in this moment that recognizes that this is merely an echo of Ben's halucination, my own imagining of an earlier imagining. It's why I let the doorknob turn a ful circle without looking away.

A click.

And then, before I can turn away, the door swings open.

A young woman. Naked and shaking, her hair a nest of sweat- glued clumps. She tries to run, to attach the motion of puling the door to her first step of escape into the daylight, but her limbs are too unsteady, and she wavers dizzily on the threshold.

It isn't Heather. It's the woman from the photos Randy showed me, the one I tried not to let myself see, to memorize, though I was too late in that. Just as I am too late to close my eyes against the dirt-blackened hands that come down on Tracey's shoulders and pul her back into the house before the door slams shut.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 11

The morning after we left the coach overnight in the Thurman house, we waited for Ben at our table in the cafeteria, drinking the watery hot chocolate spat out of a machine that made even worse tea and chicken soup. There was little talk. We were boys of an age when sleep came easy, and were new to the emptiness that folowed a night spent troubled and awake.

When we saw Ben through the window making his way across the footbal field we knew that he had found no more sleep than the rest of us, and that his visit to the coach had not gone wel. He looked like he was reprising his role as one of Grimshaw's founding fathers in the annual school play: stooped, bent at the knees, arms rigid at his sides.

"You think he's dead?" Randy asked, and for a moment I thought the question concerned Ben himself. But of course Randy was asking about the coach. Whether he had survived the night's cold.

And then, as Ben entered the cafeteria and started our way, a second interpretation of Randy's question arrived. Had Ben going alone to see the coach had a purpose other than eliciting a confession? Was he now the coach's kiler, just as the coach had been Heather Langham's?

Ben sat, reached for my hot chocolate. As he swalowed, he raised his brow as though impressed by its wretchedness.

"We should bring the coach some of this," he said. "If he figures it's the only breakfast he's going to get, he'd say anything."

It took what felt like five ful minutes before any of us realized Ben had just told a joke.

Eventualy, Ben told us he'd gone into the house just before dawn. The coach was "okay, physicaly." He wasn't admitting to any crimes, though. In fact, the only things he was saying weren't making much sense at al.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"I don't know. It might be an act."

"Is he pissed off?"

"More like he's scared."

Ben noticed some other kids, a bunch of grade niners, looking our way. He directed a stare back at them so intense it made them scuttle off to mind their own business.

"He kept saying he'd had an interesting conversation last night. Then he's looking over his shoulder, like I'm not even there."

"What else?"

Ben thought for a moment. "He said we would have to be guardians."

"We are."

"I don't think he meant the team. He kind of switched personalities again—not a scared kid anymore, but himself, more or less. He got, I don't know, fatherly on me."

"What'd he say?"

"Some bulshit."

"What bulshit?"

'"You have to keep watch.'"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're asking me?"

"Sounds like he's losing it," Randy said.

"It's pretty cold in there," I said. "Maybe he's hypothermic."

"Or possessed," Randy said, and mock-barfed, Linda Blair-style.

Carl was the only one who laughed. A sharp snort that reminded us he was there.

"Don't you get it?" he said. "It's a warning."

"About what?"

Carl looked around the table. He's going to tel them, I thought. He's going to say there's a boy in the house who can talk inside your head if you give him half a chance.

"Us," he said. "He's saying we have to guard against ourselves."

Now it was Randy's turn to snort. "Ooooh. That's deep, Carl. You've just blown my mind."

Carl just kept grinning. Trying to look like he was stil able to kid around with Randy as he always had. Sitting there, aware of our eyes on him, we saw how our hockey brawler, our square-jawed tough who was alone among us in being able to fool liquor store clerks about his age, had lost twenty pounds overnight. Chiled and frail, hugging his arms across his chest like one of the wheelchaired ladies who lined the hals of Cedarfield Seniors Home.

I wondered if Todd Flanagan detected anything strange about us as he made his way over to our table. Todd was a Guardian too. I could only hope he was writing off our oddness to nerves about that night's game two against Seaforth.

"Morning, ladies," he said.

Todd was blue-eyed and dark-haired ("black Irish," as my father caled his family, though I never knew what this meant) and essentialy decent, though he fought hard to keep up his minimum obligations in the bulying and mockery departments. I always thought he'd rather have been our friend than his senior-year teammates', but such transgression between grades was unthinkable. What also set Todd apart was that he was a dad. An eighteen-year-old father to a daughter born at the beginning of the season. We envied him—not for this, but for his girlfriend, Tina. A tight-sweatered vixen whose brief career in boy-trading had been cut short with the arrival of Tracey, the drooling, howling bundle she sometimes brought to games.

"Anybody seen the coach?"

"No," Ben said, taking another gulp of my muddy hot chocolate. "Why?"

"Laura caled me this morning."

"Laura?"

"His wife dickwad. Said he didn't come home last night. Wondered if he was hanging out with somebody on the team."

"Al night?"

"I know. It's weird."

"He'l turn up," Carl said. "Has the coach ever missed a game?"

Todd shook his head. "Seaforth pussies," he said half-heartedly before backing away.

Over morning classes, news of Laura Evans spotted in the principal's office was circulated in different versions, from her showing up with a pair of cops to her bawling uncontrolably until the school nurse gave her a pil. We didn't believe any of these stories necessarily. But what we did know was that the coach's absence had now been officialy reported. Combined with Heather Langham's disappearance, it was a story that had nowhere to go but into wilder and wilder speculations. Primary among these was that Heather and the coach had run off together. The other theory concerned a more macabre take. A monster who had crept into Grimshaw to claim its teachers, one by one.

"I hope he takes Dandruff Degan next," I remember Vince Sproule saying. "Save me asking for an extension on my cartography assignment."

Among the Guardians there was an added concern about whether that night's game could go ahead without the coach. There was a critical, morale-sapping difference between the man behind the bench being reported missing and him coming down with the flu. Nothing actualy wrong was known to have happened. And yet the mystery about his absence, the foreign whiff of the uncanny that had drifted over Grimshaw's imagination, seemed to undermine the importance of a hockey game, even if it was the playoffs.

But without a coach to cal it off, and without any evidence of adultery or more serious wrongdoing to bring before league officials, the game was an at once unbelievable and unstoppable event shadowing our day. For us, the four Guardians who knew where the coach was, the idea of lacing up and charging around the ice in just a few hours made us almost as sick as thinking of how he had got there.

It wasn't until I saw Sarah waiting for me at my locker that I realized I'd been running from her al day. Taking different routes between classes, avoiding the cafeteria at lunch, pretending I didn't see her on the one occasion she waved over the heads of other students at the far end of the hal. But now there was no escape.

Nothing to do but try to work up a smile and taste her grape ChapStick with a kiss.

"You sick or something?" she asked. "Because you look a little on the pukey side, gotta say."

"Just nervous about tonight's game."

"Nope. Try again." She came in for another hug, which alowed her hand to cup my crotch. "So tel me," she whispered against my ear, "what's going on here?"

"There's nothing going on."

"You think I'm dumb?"

"You're the opposite of dumb."

"And what's that?"

"Smart?"

Sarah puled back a few inches so I could see her face.

"I love you, Trevor," she said. And though I tried to say it back, it wouldn't come.

I remember this exchange so clearly now for a reason I hadn't expected when I first summoned it to mind. It wasn't the worry I had that Sarah would figure out what we had done. It was a flash of knowledge.

What was happening in the Thurman house had already drawn a line between Sarah and me, and though it didn't stop me from loving her, it was draining the idea of forever from our love. There will be others, I thought for the very first time as I kicked my locker shut, spun the lock and started away, lying that I had to get to a team meeting. She is only a girl among girls. It was cruel, however private a thought it remained. Soon, a whole day will pass when you don't think of her once.

Thoughts whose meanness was al the harder to bear because their truth placed them out of reach, beyond forgiving.

My turn to visit the coach was scheduled to folow the last bel of the day, and I was late already. At that time of year, losing fifteen minutes can mean a lot when it comes to light, the after-school dusk easing ever closer to night. It made my walk to the Thurman house feel longer. And when it came into view, it was halfway to losing the vulnerable details—the bubbled paint, sagging porch—that in daylight denied it some of its power. The house preferred darkness for the same reason old whores do. It alowed for the possibility of seduction.

The between-class report from Randy, who'd gone in before me, told of a coach whose mental condition was deteriorating faster than his confinement alone should have given rise to. Ben had tried giving him a pen and piece of paper on which to write whatever he needed to say that he couldn't say aloud, and the coach had simply signed his name at the bottom and told Ben to fil in the rest any way he wanted. He hadn't eaten the food we delivered to him. He wasn't complaining of the cold, or of being falsely accused, or even of being lashed to a post in a sunless celar. What he kept saying was that he wasn't alone in there.

This was what kept me frozen on the sidewalk. I pretended that I was making sure nobody was looking before I crept along the hedgerow, but in fact I was wondering how much money I had left in my account from a summer of pool cleaning, and if it would be enough for a train ticket to Toronto.

He's not alone in there.

As if on cue, there was the sound of a distant train whistle, beckoning me. Folowed by a flash of movement in one of the side windows.

Pale skin. A blur of long, tossed hair from a head twisted from side to side. A blink of struggle.

It was the impulse to help, to save—it was a woman I'd seen—that crunched my feet onto the frozen grass. Sliding under cover of cheek-poking branches. When I drew square with the house I fel to my knees.

It was the same window where I'd noticed the hopeless fuckt the night we discovered Heather Langham's body. The word stil there, a legible blue against an interior of black.

Up the hil of Caledonia Street, the streetlights were flickering to life, one by one. That's what I'd seen. Not a woman but the bulb in the streetlight behind me popping to brightness.

Yet even with this mystery solved, I stayed where I was. The twilight, the dirty panes, the lightless interior: even if something was there, anything that could be observed through the window would be obscured if it showed itself again. It made me squint. There was the sense that, above al, the house wanted me to stick around, to witness. Better yet, to come inside.

Which I wouldn't do. What difference would it make? The coach wasn't going to tel me anything if he hadn't already told Randy or Ben. And they were coming by later for another visit anyway. It needn't be me going in there now, alone.

I crawled out from under the hedgerow. Rose to my feet, started sidestepping back toward the sidewalk.

That was the right thing to do. Here's the wrong:

I looked back at the window. And saw a woman's

face come to the glass.

I fel back against the branches. If the hedge hadn't been there I would have colapsed, but it held me up, pinned to its nettles like a plastic bag blown against a fence.

When I looked at the window again, there was only an orb of streetlight. And the fuckt. Though wasn't the t slightly smudged from the moment before?

I started toward the back of the house, adding details to the face I'd seen. A woman. That was al I had to start with. Along with the idea that she was in desperate fear. And that she was naked. That she wasn't alone.

Tina Uxbridge.

I'd been thinking of her ever since Todd had come by our table in the cafeteria. In the back of my mind I'd been flipping through my (partly made-up) mental snapshots of Tina hip-swinging down the school's halways, Tina breastfeeding, Tina and Todd and the different ways they might have gone about conceiving their daughter. The truth is, I'd pictured her, dweled on her, before. Because she was pretty and I was sixteen. Because I was a sixteen-year-old boy.

I opened the back door.

For a time I stood in the kitchen, listening. I think I half expected to hear the coach's voice, cackling my name from the celar or pleading for release. The house's quiet should have brought relief, but didn't. I was waiting and listening. Which meant something else was too.

And then it told me it was.

We're waiting.

The faintest whisper, no louder than a midge's wings.

I didn't go down to the celar to check on the coach. He might have escaped, might have been dead, I didn't care. His fate meant nothing to me as I shuffled down the hal and came to stand just inside the living room. It was the woman I needed to see.

There was the fuckt on the window. The smudged t.

The house had wanted me to watch. And al there was to see was the way the shadow of the backlit tree limbs tried to nudge a beer can over the rug. Yet I stayed.

Wishing for the woman or any other dead thing not to appear, and impatient for it at the same time.

Within what was probably less than three minutes, I slid from the heights of fear to boredom. This is what a haunted house was: a place where nothing happens, so you have to make something up. It's the same impulse that makes us tel lies to a stranger sitting next to us on a plane, or pushes the planchette over a Ouija board to make it spel your dead cousin's name.

Yet I stayed. I told myself this was foolishness, and knew that it was.

The light outside the back deck of the house next door flicked on. It barely added any ilumination to the room, but it was enough to change its chemistry, to hasten the draft that swirled through its space. Details— stray threads over the length of the sofa's piping, moisture stains seeping through the walpaper—found more particular focus. And the messages on the wals, stay with me. i walk with you. It was enough to bring the fear back.

Along with a formless shadow moving over the floor. One that, over the course of seconds, cohered into a human form lying on the rug. "Tina?"

The shadow rose to its feet. Went to the window I'd first seen her face in. Performed the same act of pressing close to the glass, looking out. Except this time she turned.

Her eyes a pair of glistening buttons. The glint of froth on her lips. Heather.

I must have turned away. I must have found the back door, shouldered out into the cold.

But even this was already a memory. I was past Ben's house and at the top of the Caledonia Street hil, breathless but stil running, before I could say I'd seen anything at al.

When I made it home my mother had two phone messages for me. One from Ben, the other from Sarah.

I returned Ben's cal first. He asked how my session with the coach went, if I remembered to turn on the tape recorder while talking with him, if he seemed any closer to confessing. It was a question I'd prepared an answer to.

On the rest of the walk home, part of me argued that I should tel Ben what I'd seen in the window, that what was going on was out of our control, that we had awakened some long-slumbering presence with what we'd done and it would win any fight we might attempt to wage on it. It might not kil us if we went into the Thurman house again, but we wouldn't come out wholy alive either. In the end, though, I merely lied. "The bastard's stil not saying anything." "Okay . . . okay. Okay," he said. "After the game. You and me."

I caled Sarah next. Faked a girl's voice and squeaked "Wrong number" when her dad answered.

Sarah sat in the stands in her usual spot opposite the teams' benches. Offered me a good-luck wave during the pre-game warm-up, though I didn't look her way.

Didn't wave back.

When I came out of the dressing room for the start of the first period, she was gone.

We lost. Coachless, tentative, winded. 5-1. Though even that makes it sound closer than it was.

I scored our only goal. A Trev classic: an in-the-crease flip over their falen goalie's shoulder, my stick a spatula tossing a rubber burger into the net. Not pretty, but it counted.

The rest of the game is out of memory's reach now. I must have looked down the bench and locked eyes with Carl, or Randy, or Ben, but whatever their faces revealed was something I failed to take with me. It felt only like the end of things.

Which, in a sense, it was. That night's loss turned out to be the final game of the Guardians' season. As for me, I never put skates on again.

[11]

It takes some time—a minute? a half-hour?—to fuly convince myself that I had not just seen a naked Tracey Flanagan attempting to escape out the front door of the Thurman house. So what had I seen? A reimagining of what I'd read in Ben's diary, surely, except for him it was Heather—a long-dead Heather Langham—who had been puled back into the dark. It was nothing more than the power of suggestion.

Stil, I had to remind myself that Officer Barry Tate and his partner had just searched the place and found nothing. That what Ben had claimed to see was an impossibility. That halucinations are on my Parkinson's symptom list ("Not long, but often quite weird," one doctor warned).

Working my way through these arguments prevents me from caling the police. I don't do anything but have a shower, get dressed and cal a taxi to take me over to Sarah's.

But that's not to say that I don't return every five minutes or so to the image of Tracey Flanagan opening the Thurman house's front door. Or that I don't alow myself to wonder: Whose hands puled her back?

Sarah lives in a boxy, aluminum-sided place out by the fairgrounds, a structure shaped much like the house tokens in Monopoly. When I give the cab driver the address he cals it "the new part of town," which is how it was regarded even when I was growing up, even though al the properties were built in a rush immediately after the war. Aside from a few stabs at additions—a blown-out kitchen here, a carport there—it's a neighbourhood that looks about the same now as it must have in the late '40s, and serving the same purpose too: entry-level homes for the blue-colared, the secretarial and, more recently, the refugees of divorce.

Sarah's is the nicest on its block. Perennials lining the front walkway, shutters freshly painted green, a vase of cut flowers displayed in the living-room window. I wonder, as I haul myself out of the cab, if they've been put there to welcome me. Me, as razor-burned and over-cologned as a teenager, and about as nervous too.

Is this, as Randy had asked, an actual date? I'm surprised, clearing my throat and knocking at the door, how much I want it to be. Some nostalgic simulation of courtship might be just the thing, sweet and reassuring and laced with the suspense that comes with wondering if there wil be a goodnight kiss at the end. I'm thinking the question wil be answered by Sarah's choice of wardrobe, and I am hoping, as the door opens, for some show of leg or colarbone. But instead I am met by a kid.

A boy I'd guess to be around eleven years old.

"Is your mommy home?"

"You mean my mom?"

"If they're the same person, then yes."

He stands there. Patiently absorbing my details, which at present include two fluttering hands at my sides that I attempt to subside by having one hold the other across my waist. If this trembly stranger at his door asking for his mother disturbs him in any way, he doesn't show it. In fact, he ends up standing aside and, with an introductory sweep of his arm, mumbles, "You want to come in?"

It smels good in here. It's the flowers in the window, but also recent baking and perfume.

"You're Trevor," the kid says, closing the door behind me.

"That's right."

"My mom's boyfriend."

"From a long, long time ago."

"That's just what she said. Except she had one more 'long.'"

A teenage girl wearing train-track braces emerges from the kitchen with a plate of oatmeal cookies.

"My babysitter," the kid says with a shrug, then takes a cookie. "These are good. You should try one, Trevor."

"Don't mind if I do."

"You want to see my room?"

"I think I'm supposed to take your mom—"

"She's stil getting ready. She said I was supposed to entertain you."

"Okay. Any suggestions?"

"I've got Transformers."

"Why didn't you say so?"

His name is Kieran. Sarah's only child. The father supposedly lives out east now, though nobody realy knows for sure. He doesn't show up even on the holidays he says he wil, and he never sends the money from the jobs he says he's going to get. I learn al of this on the walk up the half flight of stairs to the kid's room.

"Trevor?" Sarah cals out from behind the closed bathroom door. "I'l be out in three minutes."

"Take your time. Kieran's giving me the tour."

"Go easy on him, Kier."

"He ate a whole cookie almost as fast as I did!" Kieran shouts with the excitement that might accompany the witnessing of magic.

I sit on the edge of Kieran's bed and colect the toys and books he shows me, noting the cool sword of this warrior-mutant, the wicked bazooka of that marine. Our conversation is sprinkled with off-topic questions ("Did you have soldiers when you were a kid?" from him; "Do you have friends in the neighbourhood?" from me), through which we learn what we need to know of each other. He is nearly breathless with pleasure at showing me his stuff, which is of course not realy just stuff but entryways into a boy's world, his secret self.

The kid's hunger for this—the company of a grown-up man in the house, shooting the breeze—is so naked it shames me. Shames, because it is something I too wanted at his age, but only partly, occasionaly received. Though Kieran's case is worse than what I remember of my own. Companionship with a dad type has been missing so long in him he doesn't bother hiding it anymore. He isn't picky. Even I'l do.

He asks about my shaking only once. "What's wrong with you?" is how he phrases it.

"It's a disease."

"Does it get worse?"

"Yes."

"It's not so bad right now."

"No. It's bad. But what can you do?"

He nods just as Randy or Carl would have. Because al of us know it: What can you do? His unhandsome circle of a face confirms this. There are a good many things he can do nothing about too.

Sarah appears in the doorway. I am glad to see both colarbone and black-nyloned legs.

"You think I could borrow Trevor for a few hours?" she asks.

"Okay. But take this." Kieran drops a toy Ferrari, his favourite, into the palm of my hand. "You have to bring it back, though."

"I promise."

Kieran nods. Spins around to give his mother a kiss. As Sarah and I head downstairs and out the door he tels us to have a good time.

"What about dinner?" I ask Sarah as we slip into her car.

"They had pretty good hot dogs at the arena last time I was there," she says, pumping the gas until the Honda's engine coughs to life. "Mind you, that was over twenty years ago. Give or take."

"You just went for the hot dogs?"

"Course not. There was a cute boy who played right wing at the time."

"Bit of a hot dog himself, if I remember correctly."

"Nah. He was just a boy. And they're all hot dogs."

The Grimshaw Arena hasn't changed much since the days we charged around its sheet of ice, cheered on by parents and sweethearts and fans who saw good value in a night out that consisted of a four-dolar ticket and seventy-five-cent hot chocolates. The tickets are double that now, and the stands, when Sarah and I find our seats behind the penalty box, feel dinkier than in my day There is stil the cold of the place. A refrigerated air that huddles Sarah close to me for warmth.

For most of the first period we just watch the game—surprisingly exciting, though the players are smaler than I was expecting, just a bunch of cherry-cheeked kids trying to look tough behind their visors—and eat hot dogs that, as Sarah recaled, aren't half bad. It feels to me not just like an old- fashioned date but like an old-fashioned first date: no low lighting, no alcohol. The opposite kind of thing I'd do with the girlfriends I dated during my Retox days, if you could cal them dates. If you could cal them girlfriends.

At the intermission, we catch up on the last couple of decades of each other's lives in broad strokes. Sarah tels me about her "okay job" as assistant office manager of a contracting firm in town; the handful of women friends she goes out with once every other week to get hammered and "complain about our marriages, or how we wished we stil had one;" how she feels that while her life isn't necessarily great, she's not miserable either, like she's "floating on this black ocean without sinking into it, y'know?" I talk about the deals I hustled to rise from restaurant manager to hedge-fund pusher to owner of my very own nightclub, where I would hire and fire and in the evenings feel ten years younger (and in the headachey mornings feel ten years older). I speak of the Parkinson's indirectly, referring to it as "this disease thing of mine," as though it's a vaguely ridiculous side project I'd been asked to be a partner in and now can't get out of.

"Who's taking care of your nightclub while you're here?" Sarah asks.

"It's not mine anymore. I sold it."

"Why?"

"I figure I'l need the money later, when this disease thing of mine gets worse."

Sarah nods in precisely the same way that Kieran had earlier.

"Kieran strikes me as a fine young felow," I say.

"That he is."

"He tels me his dad hasn't realy been in the picture for a while."

"Kieran's father is a liar and third-rate criminal, among other things."

"It must be a drag. For both of you."

"Not for me. He's just gone. But Kieran doesn't fuly understand that yet. He doesn't get how some people are just rotten."

You mean me? I want to ask.

And then the image of Tracey Flanagan returns. Standing blind on the threshold of the Thurman house's front door.

"What about you?" Sarah asks.

"Me?"

"A family. Wife? Kids?"

"No wife. No kids, either. As far as I know."

"I suppose those were things you didn't want anyway."

"I was preoccupied. Wilfully preoccupied."

"Sounds kind of lonely," Sarah blurts, then rears back. "Oh my God. That came out wrong. I didn't mean to assume—"

"Yes. I think I've been lonely. And not terribly happy either, though I never let myself slow down long enough to realize I wasn't. Until recently, that is."

"Your ilness."

"That. And Ben. And coming back here. Seeing you."

This last bit isn't flirtatious, it just comes out in the uncrafted way of the truth.

The second period starts, and Grimshaw begins to pul away from the tough but unskiled Elmira boys, our forwards buzzing around their net but unable to put one away. It is the sort of game where things can go wrong: you're winning as far as the performance goes, but the scoreboard only shows the goals. It makes me think that this is what moving to the city from a smal town is al about. It's not about the quality of life you live, but about putting up the hard numbers for al to see.

"You ever feel like you missed out on something?" I ask. "Staying here?"

"Missed out?"

"The opportunities. Professional options."

"No, you didn't mean that. You think the people you left behind were just too scared to go where you did."

"I never saw it as leaving anybody behind."

"No?"

"Listen, I didn't—"

"You think I was avoiding life by staying," Sarah says, icy as the Grimshaw Arena's air. "Did you ever think you were doing the same thing by leaving?"

I'm thinking, for the minutes that folow, that this is pretty much it. We had both done our best to avoid the past, the vast body of unsaid thoughts between us, and now we had been shown to be fools. Sarah stil wanted the answers she'd sought the winter we were in grade eleven, and I stil couldn't give them to her. There was nothing now but to wait until the game's end—or earlier, if she decided to get up and leave—and return the buffering distance between us.

But then she surprises me. She holds my hand.

"Let me tel you what I know," she says, leaning close to my ear, so that I am filed by her voice. "Something happened to you when we were kids. Something awful.

You think you escaped it, but you never did. You see me as one of the casualties, the cost of running away to the circus. But I don't need to know. I'm grown up, just like you. Borderline old, if you judge a thing by how you feel most of the time. We can talk about the serious stuff if you want, or not. But we're both way too banged up to worry about scratching the paint. Know what I mean?"

Sarah leans away from me again, and the sounds of hockey return—the cut of skates, the thunder of armoured bodies against the boards—leaving me light in my seat. No tremors anywhere, no fight to remain stil. I watch the game, but al of my attention, every sense available to me, is concentrated on the woman in the seat next to mine.

"Close game," she says.

"It only looks that way."

After the game, Sarah drives us back to her house, where she relieves the babysitter of her duties and offers me a drink in the living room. She turns on the stereo and cranks up the song the CD had been paused at the start of. "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran.

"Remember this?" she says, passing me my scotch and dancing on her own in the middle of the room, the same cool, feline moves that stirred me as I watched her on the darkened gym floor at school dances. "It's terrible, isn't it?"

"I like it," I say, not lying. "Is it going to wake Kieran up, though?"

"Nothing wakes that kid up."

I watch Sarah dance. Make a private request of my brain to not show me any scary pictures of Heather or Tracey or the boy or anyone but Sarah until the song is over. Just give me this. Alow the next three and a half minutes to be ghost-free.

When she's finished she sits next to me on the sofa. Her skin pinkened, lips plumped. She is so different from the girl I remember. Yet those are the same freckles I once kissed.

"Poor Trevor," she says. "It must be hard, being a mystery."

"I'm not a mystery. There's just one thing I can't talk about."

"That's what makes it so hard."

She touches the back of my neck. Puls me in. Her mouth warm and tasting faintly of vanila.

"We're going to have sex now," she says. "Aren't we?"

"Lordy. Do you think we could?"

We go up to Sarah's room. She draws the curtains and lets me watch her take her clothes off. When my shaking hands struggle with my belt buckle, she helps. And then she proceeds to help me in other ways too.

It is a kindness. But maybe there is even some suggestion of a future in it—an unlikely, difficult, but not wholy impossible future. Something we both could live in, live through. I had assumed that, with my disease, there was nothing I could offer women anymore. But perhaps this was true only of those who saw me as I am now and could envision little more than the decline to come.

Sarah could see this too, but also other things. She could see a past.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 12

Funny what the memory holds and what it decides it can do without. Like a drunk fisherman, it guts some of the least edible fish and tosses its prize catches back into the deep.

For instance, I can distinctly remember the smel of the pay phone receiver I put to my lips in the mezzanine of the arena after our second and final playoff loss to Seaforth, but not why I said nothing when a voice at the other end told me I'd reached Grimshaw Police dispatch and asked, "What is the nature of your emergency?" I didn't speak, didn't move. Just breathed in the receiver's ingrained traces of mustard, Old Spice and whisky sweat.

Perhaps the question posed too great a chalenge. What was the nature of my emergency? A kidnapped coach? ("Who kidnapped him?" "We did.") A missing teacher's buried body? ("Who buried her?" "We did.")

But no matter which of these crimes I had rushed from the dressing-room showers to confess, it was over for me. And I was surprised. I thought it was more likely to be the clownish Randy, the volatile Carl or— before his recent transformation—the meditative Ben who would break first. In fact, I was counting on one of them to tel.

Here's the thing: I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. We were al good kids. And now it was time for our essential natures to take control again. So I got dressed before everyone else, puled a dime from the pocket of my jeans and dialed the cavalry.

I remember that perfectly wel. Just not why it didn't end there.

But the memory can lie too. Hide things away. Occasionaly, it can lie and hide even better than you.

Because there's Ben. Eyeing me through the crowd of disappointed fans lingering beside the trophy cases.

We can't, his look said . I want this to end too. But right now, you have to put the phone down.

I opened my mouth to speak to the dispatcher. To put words to the nature of my emergency.

They'll send us to jail. Ben started toward me, his face growing in detail as he approached . A grown-up biker-gang-and-rapist jail. We'll be their girlfriends in there. For years. And when we get out, we'll be fucked all over again.

I returned the receiver to its cradle.

"Sarah not home?" Ben said, lying for us both.

I remember dropping my equipment off after the game, teling my parents I was going over to Ben's house and walking along to the McAuliffes' with a bad feeling.

I'd had bad feelings about what was going on since our first hot-box meeting, when it was decided something had to be done. But that night, the ragged nerves took a turn into ful-blown ilness. Light-headed, tingly-toed. I had the idea that the Thurman house wasn't haunted as much as it carried contagion, and I was showing the first signs of infection.

This idea was folowed by another. A premonition of the life ahead that turned out to be largely true. Feeling sick, worrying about becoming sick, fighting and carrying sickness: this is what it meant to grow up, grow old.

By the look of Ben's blotched cheeks when I met him under the railway trelis, he'd caught the virus too.

"It has to happen tonight," he said.

When Ben opened the door to the celar, I couldn't tel if he heard the voices down there or if it was only me. A whispered conversation (too soft to make out any words) between the coach and someone else. No, not a conversation—it was too one-sided to be caled that. The coach murmuring with excitement, and his audience offering only a hissed Yes in response.

But how could I have heard al that within the few seconds between Ben's opening the celar door and placing his boot onto the first step, its protesting creak instantly silencing whoever was down there? Because I'd been hearing them before the door was opened. Whatever the coach was saying had been growing louder in my head from the moment we'd stepped onto the Thurman house's lot. A few seconds more and I might have clearly made out the words.

We turned on our flashlights and started down. There was a smel I hadn't detected on previous visits. A sweetness. It reminded me of the orange I had left in my lunch box over Christmas holidays, and it turned my stomach.

Our lights found the coach at the same time. His teeth, in particular. Bared in a comic exaggeration of mirth.

"Come closer," he said.

With his attention on Ben alone, I took the revolver out of the workbench drawer and came forward to aim it at the wal two feet off the coach's side. (It is harder than you'd ever guess to hold a gun steady on a man's chest. The snout keeps slipping off its target, resisting, like trying to press two magnets of the same charge together.) Now the coach watched me. Stil showing me those teeth of his, but with his head back, so a red throat glistened in my flashlight beam as wel.

Ben untied his hands. Offered the coach a ham sandwich, which he took but didn't eat. Instead, he stuffed it into the front pocket of his parka to join the last two sandwiches we'd brought him.

"You have to eat something," I told him.

"I've lost my taste for meat."

"We'l bring you something else, then."

"No, no, no," he said agreeably, in an I-don't-want- to-be-any-trouble voice. "This wil do fine."

That's when he bit Ben.

Launched forward without any change in expression or posture, not a twitch. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his wrists. Then he was on his knees, snarling, clamping down on Ben's knuckles.

Ben screamed. Someone else screamed too. Not me, I don't think.

The blood startled me. Quick and forceful. The rhythmic pulses, like jumping up and down on a hose. How the coach swalowed it without letting go.

" Don't!"

It took my voice for him to spit out Ben's hand. Then he leaned back against the post. Crossed his arms over his chest, his teeth outlined in crimson.

Ben was already wrapping his hand in a rag from the floor.

"Didn't your mother ever tel you to keep your fingers out of the monkey cage, Benji? Or maybe that was your daddy's department. Wait. Wait! Your daddy did himself in, didn't he?"

"Shut up," Ben whispered.

"Checked out early. Benji's dear old dad."

Shut up, Ben's lips said again.

"Can I ask you something? Nobody actualy believes he drove into a hydro pole doing a hundred by accident, do they? So what do you think his problem was?

Didn't have the stomach to see how useless his only son turned out to be?"

None of us ever mentioned Ben's father's suicide. I was surprised the coach even knew about it. But then it occurred to me: Ben was the one who had told him.

He'd confessed this to the coach in the same way we had confessed our own secrets, and for the same reason. We thought the coach was the only adult we could wholy trust.

Yet the coach wasn't the coach anymore. And it was impossible to know whether what he was saying came from him or the vile other that was halfway to claiming him.

"But I suppose something good came out of your dad hitting the gas instead of the brake," the coach said to Ben. "That cute little group hug you and your fairy-boy friends had upstairs."

Ben's eyes widened. "I didn't tel you about that."

"I didn't say you did."

"Then how do you know?"

The coach grinned in a way that changed his face. Stopped it from being his.

"No more," I told him.

"But I like this game," he said, turning to me. "Now, let's see, what about you? Oh yes. Peeping Trevor."

"What are you talking about?"

"Our moonlight chicken-choker. Our wanking voyeur."

"I don't—"

"Hiding behind trees on the hospital grounds to look into lovely Heather's window at night."

"That's bulshit!"

"It's only what you told me."

"I never told you that because it isn't true."

"No? What do you think, Benji? You think Trev here likes to get his rocks off watching ladies changing into their nighties before lights out?"

Ben looked at me.

"He's lying," I said.

"Am I?" The coach's voice was no longer his, but the boy's. "Isn't it true that Randy dreams of graduating from class clown to great actor? Has he told you that?

'Like Pacino in The Godfather.' Pathetic, isn't it? Poor Handy Randy."

"That's enough," Ben said.

"Or Carl? You want to know his big secret? Oh, it's good. It's a real surprise."

Ben held out his good hand for the gun. When I gave it to him he walked up to the coach and swung the side of the revolver against his cheek.

"I don't want to hear any more of that," Ben said. "I only want to hear what you did."

Ben clicked on the tape recorder in his pocket. Started reciting the same questions he'd been asking al along.

Tell us the truth.

The coach's eyes roled white. A line of blood making its way to his jaw. Then he was smiling again like the madman he was, or we'd made him into.

Ben stepped away to lean against the wal. Fatigue bloomed pale and puffy over his face, a weakness that puled down at his arms as though lead weights were stitched to his sleeves.

"Why Heather?" I asked.

It was the first time any of us had asked this. And for the first time, the coach was prepared to answer.

"Why Heather? Have you seen my wife?" he exclaimed, and it seemed he was about to folow with the punchline to some wel-worn joke, but instead, a second later, he was fighting tears.

"What about her?"

"Laura saved me."

"Saved you?"

"Before I came here, I'd done some things. But she stood by me. A beautiful woman. On the inside. Heather? She had it on the outside too." He threw us a conspiratorial leer. "I mean, that ass? I thought I was through wanting that. God was kind enough to give me a new start over here in old Grimshaw. Al I 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. Nobody there. But by the time I came back down, she was gone. I figured she'd changed her mind and left. On my way out, though, I noticed the door to the celar was open, and it definitely wasn't when we first came in. Down I go. And there's Heather. Had time to put her panties on, but that's about al."

The coach grinned fondly now, shook his head as though at an amusing turn in a practised anecdote.

"'Hey, dol,' I said. Never caled a woman that before. But she looked like a dol. Those big glass eyes staring at me but not seeing anything. I didn't want to touch her. She was soiled. I was having a good old time with pretty Heather, and now she disgusted me. Trembling lips, chin al folded up. So scared she was sickening.

These were the kind of thoughts I had. But they weren't my thoughts."

"Whose were they?"

The coach rubbed his chin in a stage gesture of deep thought.

"You're both men, give or take, right? You know those naughty little whispers that you hear al the time, but that you're able to hold down, hold in place? Wel, those naughty whispers became al I could hear."

"And they told you to bash her head in."

"They told me nothing realy counted. Not here."

"So?"

"There was a piece of wood on the ground. I didn't notice it before. A long piece of wood with a screw in it. I think Heather knew what I was going to do before I did."

"You hit her."

"Once. Maybe twice."

"It was enough to kil her."

"No, it wasn't. Because the next thing I knew—next thing I saw—the wood was on the ground and Heather was alive."

"How did you know?"

"Because she was speaking."

"What did she say?"

" I have to go home. I have to go home. I have to go home."

"Then?"

"I hit her again."

At that, the coach glanced over to the spot we'd buried her. It must have been a lucky guess, because you couldn't tel what we'd done just by looking. Unless you could hear her struggling to get out from beneath the soil. For a moment, maybe we al heard it.

"It's like I told Benji. You have to guard against places like this. Against people like me," he said, and turned away from Heather's grave to face us. He was, as far as I could tel, the real coach again. "That's what's realy dangerous, what'l surprise you. The things that have nothing inside."

A noise from upstairs. Heavy thuds, as though someone was kicking the mud off his shoes. I remember the coach closing his eyes, chin raised, as though in anticipation of the first strains of a musical performance.

It is impossible to describe what came next.

Not music. Music's opposite. A noise in which I could discern the slide of a heavy piece of furniture slamming up against a doorframe. An animal grunt. A child's howl of pain.

Then silence again. The celar's perfect, entombed darkness.

"Nobody knows we're here," I said.

The coach grinned. "Too late for that."

"Keep him quiet," I said to Ben. "I'l go up and see."

I started away, but Ben's flashlight spiled through my legs. When I turned, he was right behind me.

"Don't go."

"I'm not leaving you behind, Ben. I'm just going to see what's up there."

"Maybe we should leave."

"We wil."

"So let's do it now."

"Not yet."

"Why?"

And then I said something I don't remember thinking, though once it was past my lips it had the familiarity of a long-held belief.

"Because there might be something in here we can't let out."

I started up the celar stairs, the flashlight held at arm's length in front of me as though its beam was a rope I clung to, puling me higher. Ahead, the door I thought we'd closed was ajar, a half-foot band of moonlight running from the kitchen floor up the doorframe to the ceiling. It felt like it had taken me a ful minute—and maybe it had—to travel the thirty feet from where I'd stood with Ben to where I was now, partway up the narrow steps. I was being puled higher by the light, and then I wasn't.

This way, the voice said.

A darkness swept across the moonlit gap.

A blink of movement so swift it took shape as a human figure in my mind only after it was gone.

I leapt up the remaining steps in two strides, elbowed the door wide. The kitchen was empty. But there was the smel the boy left behind. Something mossy and fungal, like the first breath that came up from the wel behind my parents' cabin when we lifted its metal seal at the beginning of the season.

There was a scratching I assumed was the soles of my boots dragging over the floor. But I wasn't moving.

To my left was the main halway that led to the front door. And halfway along, the boy walked off, dragging his hand over the curled flaps of walpaper.

You can taste it already, can't you?

That's when I puked. An instant torrent splashing over the linoleum and burning a hole at the back of my throat.

Takes a while to find your sea legs. But you're gonna like it, Trev. Promise.

The boy reached the base of the main stairs. Paused to place a hand on the banister.

I went after him. But what was intended as a charge of attack ended up as an off-balance lunge, palms out to catch a doorframe or coat hook to keep me from faling. Speeding faster toward the boy even as I tried to pul myself to a stop.

I expected him to disappear, but he didn't. As the distance between us shortened he only became clearer, larger. He looks like me, I thought again. And then, distinctly, nonsensicaly: Me with all the hope drained out.

The streetlight that came through the stained glass over the front door coloured him in murky orange and blue. It shaded the dimples at the corners of his mouth and revealed the pimples on his forehead, each casting a tiny shadow that doubled the thickness of his skin, a leather hood fitted over the real face beneath it. A face that looked nothing like the one I swung my fist toward.

The briliant white flash of pain, flaring up my arm. My eyes open to the paint-peeled front door. My cheek against the wood I'd just delivered a punch to.

Come.

I swung around to face the boy, but he was already on his way up to the second floor, shrinking into the dark.

The party's upstairs.

Why did I folow? In a rush, dropping the flashlight as I went?

I wanted to hurt him, to kil him again and again until he stayed dead.

I wanted to see what he wanted me to see.

When the boy reached the landing I threw myself at his back, waiting to feel only the cold air of the halway, the not-thereness of the space he occupied. Instead, I felt him.

The wool of his shirt. The heat of his body. Fever sweat.

More than this was the shattering glimpse of his pain. Wordless, thoughtless, soundless. But it let me see something. An image I recognize now as a version of that Edvard Munch painting of the figure on a pier, mouth agape, the very landscape distorted by torment. Touching the boy was like touching the inside of a scream.

The boy spiled against the far wal. Hands clasped together in his lap in a schoolboy pose. Amused by the look of horror on my face. But when a door at the end of the hal squeaked open, the grin slid away. Now he mirrored me with a horror of his own.

The boy turned his head to see. So did I.

The bedroom door stood open. Beyond it, so did the bathroom door with the mirror on the inside. But now the mirror was in pieces over the floor, glinting fragments of light over the ceiling. This must have been what we heard in the celar. A draft that finaly nudged the mirror off its hook. The sound of a child's pain only shattered glass, the grunting animal only the mirror's frame clattering to the floor.

Silence. The too-quiet of having water in your ears. I looked back to the boy, expecting the same show of fear as before. But he was already facing me. And he was smiling.

I couldn't meet his eyes. So I looked at the open bedroom door.

Go on, the boy said.

I started down the hal. When I was just short of the doorframe, I stopped. Glanced back. The boy was gone.

I closed my eyes. Stepped forward into the room.

Look!

A chest of drawers against the wal. The only solid thing in an otherwise vacant room, except for a single bed in the far corner. A mattress black with mould. Painted flowers on the cracked headboard.

The rumble of a snowplow turning onto Caledonia Street. I remember the roar of the diesel engine as the driver built up speed to make it up the hil. The idea of someone behind the wheel of the plow—a city employee who probably came to my dad to complain about the deductions on his paycheque—opened my mouth. To cry out for him to stop, wait for me to run downstairs. To ask him to take me home.

Instead, I stood and watched as the blue rotating light atop the plow played over the bedroom ceiling. A false dawn that blinked through the windows to show that it wasn't empty anymore.

The boy was there. Standing over a naked body lying face down on the bed. A young woman. White buttocks glinting. On her skin, the wals, a snaking spray of blood.

The boy raised his head to look directly at me. He looked sad. No, that's not right: his face was composed in a "sad look," but an inch past this he was holow. He was nothing.

The boy started toward me. Two more of his long strides and I would choke on his breath. His hands squeezing the air, readying their grip.

The snowplow growled up the slope, and its blue light disappeared behind the neighbour's line of trees. It wiped away the boy, the body on the bed. Left me alone again.

I ran the length of the hal. Threw myself down the stairs, both hands riding the railings, pincushioned with slivers as I went.

Without the flashlight, I had to trust my memory of the darkness to make it down to the celar. I remember descending in flight, a visitor to the underworld who had been discovered and now sought only to colect the living and find his way back to the light.

And there was a light. Held by the coach, who shone it at Ben on his knees before him. In the coach's other hand was the gun.

"How was it?" the coach asked without looking my way.

"Don't hurt him."

"Never mind this," he said, dismissively waving the revolver at Ben. "What did he show you? I bet it was something good."

"Ben? It's going to be okay."

"Sure, Benji. You'l go home and Mommy wil tuck you in across the street from where you buried the pretty teacher, and she'l tel you how Daddy would've been proud."

"How do you know—?"

"Benji told me. Didn't you, Benji?" The coach steadied the revolver. Trained it six inches from the end of Ben's nose.

"What did you tel him, Ben?"

"Benji's not saying."

"Then you tel me."

"He pointed to that mound in the corner and said, 'That's where she is' and knelt down like a good little altar boy ready for his wafer. 'Forgive me,' he said! To me!

Can you believe that? Seriously. Can you believe it?"

The coach pressed the end of the gun into Ben's cheek. It pushed his head back. Alowed the flashlight to show the broad circle over the front of Ben's jeans where he'd pissed himself.

"Let him go and I'l stay here with you."

"Trevor the Brave."

"I'l tel you what I saw upstairs."

"Tel me now."

"Let Ben go first."

"Fine. I'l stick this up both your asses."

That's when I said what I must have thought before but never spoken, or thought of speaking.

"You've never realy had a friend, have you, David?"

The coach kept his eyes on me for a long time. Because the flashlight blinded me, I couldn't tel what he was thinking, if anything. But I felt that he wasn't realy considering me at al. He was listening.

The flashlight grew brighter as he approached. He was going to put the gun against my head and blow it off. Then he was going to turn around and do the same thing to Ben. And then he'd walk out of here with the boy whispering ideas in his head, and he'd do as he was told.

But what he actualy did was stop right in front of me. Press the handle of the revolver into my right hand, the flashlight into the left.

"I'm glad he chose you," the coach whispered.

I folowed him with the light. Watched him walk, hunched, to the post we'd shackled him to. Ben rose to his feet. Blinked at the coach, then back at me, before rushing up the celar stairs. It left me to keep the light on the coach as he slid his back down the post until he met the floor and stretched his arms back, offering his wrists to be tied.

"I'm tired," he said, his voice the coach's again. "Jesus H., am I tired."

There would be repeated questions among us about this later. And because Ben was already upstairs, waiting for me to join him, it was my memory that had to be counted on.

Before I left, I put the gun back in the workbench drawer. I made sure the coach didn't see me do it. Then I tied his hands tight to the post.

I swear it now as I swore it then. That's what I remember.

That's the truth.

[12]

The dawn is pink and smels of clean sheets and Play-Doh. The latter scent emanating from the human figures that Kieran had apparently made some time ago, and that his mother had refused to smush back into formless blobs. Smiling sculptures where the clock radio usualy sits.

"He cals it his family," Sarah says, stroking the hair off my forehead. "But there's six of them. Aside from his dad, and my mother before she died, he's never met a blood relative, so I'm not sure who he's thinking they are." "He wants to be part of a clan." "Too late to give him that." "He's got you. It's al he needs." "Realy?"

"One good person to look out for you? I'd take it." "But it doesn't stop him from wishing." "You can't stop anybody from that."

She kisses me. When my hand has trouble finding her cheek she places it against the soft skin it was aiming for.

"You can stay here," she says. "For as long as you're in town. If you want."

"What about Kieran?"

"It's not his room."

"Would it be, I don't know, confusing for him or something?"

"You can't protect kids from reality. My one piece of wisdom from my time down here in Single Mom Land."

"I might be leaving tonight. I'm not sure."

"It's an invitation, that's al."

I consider this, my hand steadied by the firm line of her jaw. I thought this was the one advantage of Parkinson's, seling Retox, withdrawing from the world's excitements: no more desire, no more crests and troughs to unsettle the ride. And now this sensible, good-looking woman—Sarah, object of my high- school lust and daydreams of death-do-us-part—is inquiring after my wants as though I had a right to them.

"Thank you," I say.

"Don't panic. I'm not asking you to be my date to the prom or anything." She taps a finger against my temple. "We're just faling forwards for a day or two, that's al."

"Faling backwards, in our case."

"Backwards, forwards," she says, rising out of the sheets. "You're saying you can tel the difference?"

I want to outline her lips with a finger but I don't trust any of them, so I remain stil. As stil as I can manage.

"Sarah?"

"Yeah?"

"Why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"Being nice to me."

"Nice? This isn't about nice."

"I just don't want you to be here because you think you're doing me some good."

"Like a charity case?"

"Something like that."

"Okay, let's get this straight. I'm here because I want to be here. Because what we did last night felt good. And because I've thought about you a lot for a long time, since you were a boy. I'm curious about the man that boy has grown into. That's al there is to it. I'm in this for me, understand?"

My request of the night before had been honoured. I had enjoyed ten solid hours of thoughts uninterrupted by Tracey Flanagan, or the shapes that the terrible hunger that has been awakened within the Thurman house has taken. But as I watch Sarah get dressed for work, the early sun through the window tels me that al bets are now off It's how Sarah's nakedness interchanges with Tracey's, the two bodies losing their particularity, veering close to becoming a lifeless composite. This, along with the mental stop-starts that throw me from desire to fear and back again in the time it takes a bare arm to slip through the sleeve of an undershirt.

"Are you al right?" she asks when her head pops up through the colar. "You've gone al white."

"I'm nothing without my morning coffee."

"You look like you've had a bad dream or something."

"Except I'm awake."

"Yeah. Except you're awake."

I rol out of bed and do my best to pul my pants on and button my shirt without asking for help, and Sarah knows enough about male pride not to offer it.

"I need to talk to Randy," I say.

"What about?"

"We were at Jake's the night Tracey Flanagan went missing.

She was our waitress. I spoke to the police about it yesterday." "You know something?"

"No. But that hasn't stopped it from freaking me out." "Heather Langham."

My fingers spasm open. The belt they were holding clatters to the hardwood. "I don't suppose I'm the only one who's thinking about her right now."

"You'd be surprised. Even in a town this smal, people forget, or half forget."

"Maybe I'm just not as good at forgetting." "It's not that. It's that you've been away." "It doesn't feel that way."

"That's sort of my point. You left after Grimshaw's last big tragedy, and now you're here for its latest one. It's like the time in between got squished together. It was another life. But for the rest of us, we've just got the one, and there's been twenty years in the same place to muddle through." "I've done my share of muddling."

"You told me. Preoccupations. But in your mind, Grimshaw is frozen in time. It's a museum."

"And I remember every inch of it."

"You feel it more than you remember it."

"Wait a second. How do you know al this better than I do?"

"I always knew it better than you did."

I bend to pick up my belt. Surprise myself by threading it through the loops on the first try.

Here's the problem. Here's why I walk through the wakening streets of Grimshaw hearing the birdsong as the nervous chatter of bad news: despite anything I might tel myself, there is a line that runs through the past, the secret history of Heather and the coach and the boy, right up to the more current events of Ben's death and Tracey Flanagan puled out of the world. I don't know where the line started, or where it might find its end, but it's there, understandable to itself, refusing to let common sense break its hold.

Stil, as I walk into the Queen's Hotel and struggle up the stairs to knock on Randy's door, I don't expect him to see this as I do. Indeed, part of me is hoping he doesn't.

"Look at you," he says, wearing only boxers and a threadbare Just Do It T-shirt. "Mr. I Got Lucky."

"You could at least make an attempt to hide your jealousy."

"Why bother?"

"Come to think of it, you always had a thing for Sarah, didn't you?"

"Of course. But I was the horniest teenager in Perth County. I had a thing for Minnie Mouse and Natalie from Facts of Life and the lady who did the weather on Channel 12."

Randy digs the sleep from his eyes. Steps closer.

"What's happened?"

"Nothing," I say.

"So what are you doing here when you should be bringing Sarah breakfast in bed?"

"Does the coffee machine in your room work?"

"It spits out brown stuff, if that's what you're asking."

A moment later I'm staring out the window, listening to the water hiss and dribble into the glass pot.

"I told you," Randy says behind me, and I turn to accept his congratulatory handshake. "I told you she was into you."

"You're acting like I just made out with somebody in a parked car."

"You did it in Sarah's car? "

"How old are you, Randy?"

"Hey now. Let's not be cruel."

Randy hands me a mug of coffee. "Did they find her?" he asks, slumping into the room's only chair. "That's it, isn't it? They found Tracey?"

"I haven't heard anything about that."

"But this has to do with her, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"So?"

"I think she's in the house."

Randy returns the pot to the warmer, where it sizzles off the coffee that had spiled when he puled it out. He watches it bubble for a moment as though recording the observations of a science experiment.

"What makes you say that, Trev?"

"A feeling. I've thought I've seen some things, too."

"Like what?"

"It doesn't matter."

"You're relying on your feeling, then."

"And the way there seems to be some kind of pattern. Heather and Tracey."

"Not realy much of a pattern. These things just happen. I wish they didn't, but they do."

"You're forgetting Ben. He believed his watching the house was keeping something bad inside of it. And then, after he's gone, something bad happens."

Randy sits down on the edge of the bed. "I thought you got the police to go in there already."

"I don't know how hard they looked."

"How hard would they have to look?"

"You can miss places."

"You mean a secret room you can get to only if you pul on a candlestick holder and the bookshelf spins around?"

"I mean a closet, under the floorboards. The celar."

Randy looks up at the ceiling, as though reading a message in the plaster's cracks.

"You want us to go in there," he says.

"I can't go to the police again. So that leaves us."

"Because you think Heather is inside."

"Tracey," I correct.

"Right," Randy says. "You think Tracey is in the Thurman house."

"I only know that I won't be able to live with myself if I guessed right that someone's in there and I didn't do anything about it."

My intention is to leave, but my legs aren't folowing orders. I'm standing by the window, arms crossed, waiting for my engine to start.

"You sound just like Ben," Randy says.

"You don't think I know that?"

"And we remember how that turned out."

"Yes. We remember," I say. "But was he wrong?"

Something in the force of these words lubricates my joints, and I'm launched toward the door. But Randy beats me to it.

"You figure Thiessen's Hardware is stil open out on King?" he says. "Because I'm guessing neither of us packed gloves and flashlights."

Randy suggested we wait to go in at midnight. Yet when I pointed out that it got dark at seven this time of year and asked what was to be gained by waiting around another five hours, he had no answer, other than "Isn't this the sort of stuff you do at midnight?"

We're up in Ben's room, passing around a mickey of Lamb's that Randy picked up on the way over. It helps. The rum's warmth lends some humour to the situation.

We are nothing more than a pair of grown men contemplating a harmless stunt. The hiring of a stag-party stripper or cocooning the groom's car in toilet paper.

"Did you like it?" Randy asks after a couple swalows. "The whole nightclub business. Was it what you wanted?"

"It was very profitable for a time."

"I'm not asking about that:"

"I know you're not." Randy passes the bottle and I take a swalow. "Okay. This is going to sound ridiculous."

"And what we're doing tonight isn't?"

"I think I worked so hard the past fifteen years to build something I could hide behind," I say. "People think anybody who runs a place like mine is in it for the girls or the dope or having people stop to look as you drive by in your Merc with the personalized Retox plates. But honestly, I didn't realy care about any of that."

"Doesn't sound too bad to me."

"It wasn't. It was neither good nor bad, nor anything. It was just this thoughtless, gleaming, perfect skin I could wear."

I hold the Lamb's out to Randy, who takes a glug. And then another.

"It's a funny thing," he says. "But I think I was trying to do the exact opposite."

"How's that?"

"Al this time I've been working to take my skin off Show what lies beneath. Which might sound like drama school crap, but I believed it."

"You didn't seem to take it too seriously."

"But I did. ," he says, passing the bottle back to me. '"Just act normal.' Remember?"

"Acting was more than just a job for you? That what you're saying?"

"It wasn't a job at al. In fact, it's the job part that I hate."

"Or not getting the job."

"Yes. That sucks too."

I try to screw the cap back onto the bottle, but my fingers aren't cooperating, so I take another drink instead and leave it open.

"I've never understood something about the whole drama thing," I say.

"What?"

"Are actors faking being someone else or opening up what they already are?"

"The lousy ones—the ones like me-—are just making faces and saying lines they memorized. The good ones become."

"Become what?"

"Something new out of something they've always been."

Randy appears reflective, and at first I suspect it is the beginning of a routine, a comic mask of seriousness he's put on to set a mood before delivering the punchline.

But when he speaks next, it doesn't sound anything like humour.

"You know what the worst part of getting old is?"

"Old?" I say. "We're only forty, Randy."

"Don't give me that 'only forty' bulshit. Because I know you know what I'm talking about."

"Okay, you got me. What's the worst part?"

"Realizing you haven't done a goddamn thing with your life."

"There's only so many Nobel Prizes to go around."

"It doesn't have to be that big. Nobody else even needs to know about it other than you. It just has to be, I don't know, remarkable."

"There's stil time."

"I don't think so," Randy says, and the lost look in his eyes is suddenly real, a joke-repelent sadness. "That's al I've wanted since I left this place. To do one smal, remarkable thing. It could have changed everything."

"Changed you, you mean?"

"Everything."

Outside, the wind blows night over the town. A grey sand that settles on the roof shingles and in the crooks of tree limbs. Randy is watching it come when he asks, for the first time out loud, a question I have asked myself a thousand times before.

"Who is he?" he says.

"I don't know."

"What do you think he wants?"

"I've got a theory on that one."

"Shoot."

"More."

"More what?"

"Whatever it is someone might be able to give him. More of themselves."

"The worst part of themselves."

"Exactly."

"It's like he pushes you."

"And he does it by pretending he knows you," I say. "He's almost sympathetic, you know? We're all flawed, all have impure thoughts, no big deal. So let's have some fun. He makes it feel like the two of you are best friends."

"Except he actualy hates you," Randy says. "He hates you, and he wants you to rot and hate in there with him."

It's night now. Dinnertime, though it could be any of the long hours between now and the reluctant October dawn. This, and our talk of the boy, has chiled the previous ilusion of good humour and left us stone-faced and cold, wishing for homes we haven't known for half a lifetime.

"This was my idea, so I guess I ought to lead the way," I announce finaly, working my way to the top of the attic stairs. For the time it takes me to reach the second-floor landing, I can't hear any steps behind me and figure Randy has decided to stay behind. Yet when I look back he is there.

"Night, Mrs. McAuliffe," I cal through her closed bedroom door as we pass.

"You boys try to stay out of trouble!"

"In Grimshaw?"

"Oh, you can find trouble just about anywhere if you're looking for it," the old woman says, and from under the door, the light from her bedside lamp retreats into shadow.

Just as we crossed Caledonia Street with the intention of entering the Thurman house when we were sixteen, we don't even try the front door, and instead prowl along the hedgerow to the back. On our way, I measure the side windows that look into the living room, half expecting to stil see the fuckt drawn into the dust. But there is no message there at al now except for the streaks of condensation that have left lines over the glass like tear stains.

The backyard is the same as I remember it, if smaler. The rusted swing set and see-saw built for dwarves, the fence around the lot that looks like even I could heave myself over it if I came at it with a little speed.

And then we look up at the back of the house, and it seems to have grown over the second we took our eyes off it. The brick arse of the place looming over where we stand, the windows unshuttered and lightless. The headless rooster weather vane spinning left, then right, then back again, as though trying to decide which way offers the best route for escape.

"It's just the same as every other place along this street," Randy whispers. "So why is it the only one that's so friggin' ugly?"

"Because it's not the same as every other place," I answer, and start toward the back door.

Start, then stop. Wait for Randy to take my arm for a few steps when my legs refuse to carry me any closer.

"You okay?" he asks, and with my nod, he goes in.

Which leaves me on my own. And I'm turning around. Ready to get as far from the bad smel that exhales from the open doorway as my feet are prepared to take me.

Hold on, Trev, the boy says . You don't want Handy Randy to see the show without you, do you?

No. I want to see the show too.

From the kitchen, Randy asks where I've got to. Then I'm in too. The sound of Randy's steps pacing over the curled linoleum. Along with the internal cold that signals the arrival of a virus. A sensation located more in the mind than the body. A degradation. The unshakeable idea that, in merely being here, I have shamed myself.

"How do you want to do this?" Randy asks once I feel my way to where he is.

I don't know. But let's stay together, I want to say, but instead say, "I'l take the celar. You look around on this floor and upstairs."

"Better you than me."

Then he's gone.

It could be courage that has me shuffle over to the celar door and push it open, staring down into the dark, but it doesn't feel like it. It is merely a surrender to the next moment.

What's suddenly clear is that it wasn't Tracey Flanagan who brought me here. I am here because the house was lonely for me. And in a way I can't possibly explain, I am lonely for it too.

I turn on the flashlight, and an orb of yelow plays over the stairwel's plaster wals.

But there is nothing to see. I'l have to go down there to find whatever might be found. And it's not something I am able to do without someone else going down first.

Or being pushed.

Pushed. The last time I stood here I'd wondered the same thing. Wondered if Carl, who stood behind me, was someone else entirely. Someone wearing a convincing Carl suit.

But it was Carl, only changed in the way al of us had been changed.

"It's different," he had said at the time, and I hadn't known what he'd meant. Though I do now.

I'm three steps down when I hear Randy's voice. Speaking my name from the other end of the hal. Careful not to shout, as though trying not to disturb another's sleep.

I backstep up the celar stairs and scuff to the hal. Randy is standing against the front door, so that at first I think he's trying to prevent it from opening. But as I get closer I see that his back isn't touching the door at al.

"Up there," he whispers.

Now the two of us stand at the bottom of the stairs. Nervous suitors waiting for our prom dates to come down.

But when someone appears at the top of the stairs it's not a girl in a chiffon dress. It isn't Tracey Flanagan, and it isn't the boy. It's one of us, unshaven and hunched.

Alive but with al the years of regret and negligence written over him like a useless map.

This is what frightens Randy and me, what we can see clearly for the first time:

There is the unreal.

And then there is the real, which can sometimes be the more surprising of the two.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 13

I didn't ask Ben how the coach had managed to get untied and take the gun from him. We walked out the back door together without talking of the boy, or the scene the blue light of the passing snowplow had revealed to me upstairs. Ben just crossed Caledonia Street and shuffled up the front steps of his house, kicked his boots against the wal to knock off the snow and slipped inside. I looked back at the Thurman house, half expecting some new display in one of its windows, but each pane of glass was a holow iris, taking in me, the street, the slumbering homes of Grimshaw, giving nothing in return.

I don't remember speaking to my parents when I came in (my father captaining the remote, my mother asleep sitting up on the sofa, a basket of half-folded laundry at her feet—their usual evening positions). It was strange how, after al that had happened in the house that night, I walked out and didn't speak a word to anyone until the next morning, when I caled Carl and, before he could say helo, blurted out "It's over" as if we'd been dating.

"I know."

"We have to let him go, Carl."

"I know."

"And last night, Ben and I were with him, and—"

"Not on the phone."

"You don't understand."

"Fuck you I don't."

"I saw something. There was—"

He hung up.

Ten minutes later we were walking over to the Thurman house together.

Why had I caled Carl and only Carl? There was no choice, realy. It could only have been him puffing steam out his nose, teling me to shut up every time I tried to explain what happened the night before, his eyes darting between the houses on either side of us, alert to witnessing stares.

It was early enough that there was little traffic on the streets. Stil, we approached the house by way of the back lane and slipped through the break in the fence.

As soon as we were through, we both stopped. The house looked different somehow, though it took a moment to figure out how.

"Did you leave the door open last night?" Carl said.

"No."

"Did Ben?"

"I was the last one out."

Carl started toward the back door. His gait— roling shoulders and old warrior's limp—suggested the weariness of a man charged with completing a serious task, but been thwarted at every turn by his forced partnership with children.

I folowed him in. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Carl was already heading down the celar stairs. Neither of us had brought flashlights, thinking (if we thought of it at al) that the morning's sunlight would be sufficient. But there were only two half-buried windows in the celar. It was barely enough for me to see Carl standing just a few feet from where I had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"Oh fuck," he said.

I went forward to put my shoulder against his, peered into the near darkness beyond.

Emptiness. No, not that. Not only that. The cords we'd used to tie the coach to the post now a loose coil on the ground.

"We'l find him," I said.

"He's probably at the cop shop right now."

"No. They would have come for us already."

"You think he just went home and asked his wife to fry him some eggs and not to worry about where he's been the last three days?"

"I don't think he ever planned to go home after this."

"Right, right," Carl said, his thoughts so rushed it seemed to be causing him pain. "So why bother looking for him? We were going to let him go anyway."

"We need to make sure he's okay."

"Why wouldn't he be?"

"Because he was in here alone."

Carl shuffled closer to the post. Bent to inspect the cords.

"These haven't been cut."

"I tied him."

"You sure?"

"I was here, Carl. You weren't."

"Maybe I should have been."

He stood. Put his hands in his pockets, took them out again.

I said, "I'm not arguing with you right now."

"Is there something you want to argue about?"

"I'm saying we should get out of here. Look for the coach. If we can find him, maybe we can—"

"How are we going to find him, Trev? Put up posters? 'LOST—Half-Starved English Teacher. Contents of Teenager's Piggy Bank Offered in Reward'?"

"At least I'm trying."

"You fucking should."

"What's that mean?"

"Just that the last time I was down here, the coach was tied to that post and my gun was in the workbench drawer."

Our brains were running at the same speed. They must have been, because it took both of us the same one second to turn to see the workbench drawer upside down on the earth floor.

We both went for it. Carl got there first. Kicked the drawer instead of turning it over with his hand, either to prevent leaving his fingerprints or because he needed to kick something if not me.

The revolver was gone.

"Shit," Carl said. "This is some seriously shitty shit."

"He wasn't even supposed to know it was there."

"Unless somebody showed him."

"You're blaming me for this too?"

"I said 'somebody.'"

"Who? Why would one of us do that?"

"Maybe it wasn't one of us."

Carl faced me. What I could read in the lips, suddenly gulping for his next mouthful of air, made it clear. He had seen something too.

Laughter. Coming from upstairs. The coach's, along with at least one other. Whinnying and cruel.

I can't remember if Carl started up the celar stairs first or if I did. But we were both running, clutching handfuls of the house's cold air and throwing it behind us.

The laughter was now impossibly loud, a chorus of false joy shrieking out from the cracks in the wals. Sound so dense it thickened the space we moved through, slowing us to the floating leaps of astronauts.

Carl rounded through the kitchen and down the main hal. The nylon of his parka squeaking through my fingers as I folowed a half-stride behind him. And then, in the next second, he was puling away. Because I made the mistake of glancing into the living room on the way past.

There was the boy. Standing behind a naked Heather Langham, his pants a coil of denim around his ankles.

The two of them framed by the tal side window, the fuckt stil there, Heather's fingers cutting lines around the letters. The boy slapping himself against her, oblivious to anything but his grip on her waist.

Then he spun his head around to face me. Except it wasn't the boy's face. It was mine.

"Trevor!"

Carl was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me quizzicaly, knowing I'd seen something.

I could have run past him, opened the front door (if it could be opened) and left Carl on his own to find out what the boy and the coach found so funny. There was no one left to save, after al. Whatever we'd done, and the reasons we'd first done it, didn't mean anything anymore.

Yet when Carl started up the stairs, I was right behind him. When I got to the landing, he was already halfway down the hal, led by the laughter that was coming from the one partly open door. The same doorway through which I'd seen the boy standing over a facedown female body on the bed.

Carl slowed. It wasn't cowardice that held me there, watching, but a command.

Carl's turn first.

He booted the door open.

Then a cowardly thought did enter my mind: I didn't need to know what Carl now knew. A second-hand report would be enough. And judging by the stricken look on Carl's face, what was to be seen belonged to a different level of awfulness altogether. It was the party the boy had invited us to.

But instead of doing what I meant to—turn around and start back down the stairs—I made my way along the halway to where Carl stood outside the boy's childhood bedroom.

Because that's what it was, wasn't it? A room that, in its past, had been caught in the uncomfortable in-between of smal-town sixteen, of the age and place I was myself.

"Carl?" My voice girlish in the empty halway.

He didn't answer, didn't move.

We're going to have quite a time.

The coach stood across the room, in the same place where the boy had stood over the body on the bed. In the dim light, his degradation was fuly visible: soiled pants, running nose, the beginnings of grey beard. And he was wearing lipstick. A smearing of rosy red extended beyond the lines of his thin lips, yet stil carefuly applied, a drawn mouth of female wantonness, al curves and pucker. It was the lipstick colour Heather wore—no, it was Heather's. Taken from her before she died, before the coach left her in the celar.

He looked terribly afraid.

Isn't he pretty? Go on. Give him a kiss.

"You have to go," the coach said, his voice raw from laughter. Laughter, I could see now, he'd been forced to perform.

"Not without you," Carl said.

"You'l die if you stay."

"Nobody's dying here."

"Too late." The coach showed his teeth again in that not-smile of his.

"Come with us," I said.

"I can't leave now."

"Why?"

"If you're here long enough—if you listen—he won't let you."

"There's nobody here but us. It's just an empty house."

"No such thing as an empty house."

That's when the coach raised the gun. It had been in his hand the whole time, but it hung so loose, aimed at nothing but the dust bunnies at his feet, that we hadn't noticed it. He brought it level to his waist. Aimed it at us.

"He told me to hurt you," he said.

The coach stuck the index finger of his left hand in his ear, as though blocking out the sound of a passing siren. And with his right hand he raised the revolver.

Screwed the end of its barrel into the other ear.

"But I'm not listening anymore."

Carl started toward him first. And though I couldn't see his regret, his wish to fix what he'd been a part in breaking, his already enveloping grief, I knew that it was in Carl as much as it was in me, and that the coach saw it in both of us. Because, right at the end, he was his real self again. Not the boy's taiking dummy, but our guardian.

Fighting off the voice so loud in his head we could hear it too— Wait! Not yet! You don't want to be alone in here, do you? Don't you want to keep your boys close? —to push the revolver's barrel a half-inch deeper into his skul and pul the trigger.

[13]

At first, what is even stranger than seeing that it is Carl descending the stairs of the Thurman house and passing between us is the way he simply turns the bolt lock on the front door, puls it open and steps out onto the porch.

"I never knew you could open that thing," Randy says. "I never knew you could just walk out."

Tracey tried to, I think. But the house wouldn't let her. From the threshold we peer out over a front lawn carpeted in leaves midway through their transformation from brittle yelows and oranges to black custard. And Carl squishing his boot prints into them as he walks to the sidewalk, where he faces us. Slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shudders at the night's chil.

"You faggots coming or not?" he says.

We folow him, equaling his brisk pace but not quite catching up. He stops at the railway tracks that cross Caledonia and starts left, crunching over the gravel that aprons the long, steel tongues. It is as it was before: Carl leading us into some nighttime adventure, a bit of badness we trusted him to guide us through, even if we knew it was not entirely safe. Driving too fast in his dad's LTD II with the headlights off Vandalism. Trespassing. Smoking homegrown possibly sprayed, he said, with angel dust or PCP or acid, evil-sounding supplements whose potential harms we had no clue of but did not ask about before inhaling.

In fact this was one of the places, hidden within the web of metal struts that buttress the tracks over our heads, the traffic of Erie Street passing in a tidal wash thirty feet below, where we would gather to smoke or pass one of Randy's father's Hustlers between ourselves. (I have just now the memory of a twelve- year-old Ben studying one of the centrefolds and, pointing at the complicated mechanics of the model's upturned hips, asking, "Does the pee come out there, or there, or there?"

and none of us certain of the answer.) What's different is that, unlike then, it is now something of a struggle—and not only for me—to crabwalk up the cement slope of the trestle and into the weeds that have pushed through the cracks. By the time the three of us have found positions where there is limited risk of our sliding down onto the pavement below, we are panting like dogs.

"I hope your feelings won't be hurt," Carl says eventualy, "if I say that you both look like hel."

"Funny thing to say. Coming from you," Randy says.

"But I'm the junkie, remember? I'm not even supposed to be alive."

"That's your excuse?"

"That and the fact I've gone three days without a shower."

"So we smeled."

If I didn't know better, I'd say Carl was the actor among us, not Randy. Of course Carl would be up for different parts: the mob hitman, the craggy roughneck, the retired boxer looking for one last bout to redeem himself There is the aura of brutal experience about Carl that would be useful to the camera. He is lean too, his face puled back over hard cheekbones and chin. The years, however harsh, have left him with a mournful handsomeness.

"That was you at the Old Grove, wasn't it?"

"Helo to you too, Trev."

"I saw you."

"You think I'd miss Ben's funeral?"

"That's what we were betting."

"Wel, I was there."

"But you were hiding."

Carl doesn't flinch at this. As though he hadn't heard it at al. "I came as soon as I heard."

"How did you hear?"

"You left a message. It went down the line of some people I know. And when I got it, I caled in some favours and got enough money to get a standby ticket."

"You took a flight?"

"From out west."

"Where out west?"

Carl grinds his teeth. "You sound like a cop."

"I just think it's strange, the way you've turned up."

"You mean me being in the house?"

"Yeah."

"You were there too, weren't you?"

I let this go for the moment. "Why did you run? When I saw you at the cemetery?"

"I didn't want you to see me."

"Why not?"

"I came for Ben. To say goodbye. That's al I had the strength for."

"And spending five minutes with me and Randy would have been too much for you? Saying helo might have tired you out?"

Carl scratches his ankles. He's not wearing socks, and the skin is blue from cold. "You sound angry, Trev."

Below us, another eighteen-wheeler hauling pigs to the slaughterhouse in Exeter wheels by, and I have to wait for the echoes of its shifting gears to dissipate before speaking again.

"Where's Tracey Flanagan?"

"I heard she's missing. That's it."

"Is she in the house?"

"What?"

"Did you see her?"

Did you hurt her? I want to ask . Were those your hands that pulled her back into the dark?

"I didn't see anybody."

"Because that's why we were in there. We were looking for her."

"Good for you."

"So you don't know anything about it?"

Carl places his hands on his knees. Shows us the dirty fingernails. The pale knuckles.

"If you want to accuse me of something, say it so I can walk over to where you're sitting and stick my fist down your throat," he says. "But if you're just a little worked up, if those shakes of yours have eaten away at your brain and twisted the wires in the part that tels you when it's time to calm the fuck down, then I'm ready to forgive you. Which is it?"

"It's Parkinson's. And if you talk about it again the way you just did, I'l be the one to take some of your teeth out the hard way Understand?"

Carl starts over toward me. But when he gets within range of my trembling, cross-legged self, instead of throwing a punch as I—and a stiffened Randy—expect, he places his hand against the side of my neck.

"Look at us," he says. "A pair of grey-haired geezers."

"I tried to fight it, then I tried to ignore it. Nothing worked."

"Me, I tried to end it," he says. "That didn't work either." He spits a thick gob and watches the white foam snake down the concrete away from our feet. Then he elbows me in the ribs.

"I'm stil waiting for you to tel us," Randy says directly to Carl.

"Tel you what?"

"Why you were in that house."

Carl climbs up onto one of the steel struts and sits on it, perched with his legs swinging beneath him.

"You own a nightclub or something, right, Trev?"

"Used to."

"Get a nice price?"

"My real estate agent is stil sending me flowers."

"There you go. Even Randy here has been working. I saw you in that Rug Rubber ad a few months back."

"You saw that?" Randy says, clearly touched.

"You were dressed up in fur or something?"

"A dust bunny."

"Yeah! And then this giant worm—"

"The Rug Rubber."

"It ate you."

"More like it sucked me."

"That's right! You were good, man."

"What's your point here?" I ask.

"My point is I don't have any money. And not just 'I'm a little short this month,' but nothing.' ' With the departure of his smile he grows instantly thinner. "My plan was to come into town, pay my respects to Ben and get out on the train that night. It was pretty much al I could afford to do anyway."

"But you didn't go."

"No."

"Why not?"

Carl is standing now. He'd like to pace, but the slope of the trestle makes it too difficult, and he is left bent over at the waist, shuffling under the girders.

"I haven't used in over six months," he says. "It's been hard. The hardest thing I've ever done. But I've been clean for longer than a week for the first time since I was thirteen years old, and it feels good. I'm actualy proud of myself, know what I mean? Then I come here. And as soon as I get off the train I can hear his voice. The boy's voice. Teling me to do things."

"Like what?"

"Give in. To go out and cop a rock, fuck myself up. He wanted to see me fail. No, not even that." Carl wipes the back of his hand under his nose. "What he realy wanted was to watch me die."

"It didn't work," Randy says.

"But it almost did. The first night I'm here and I'm caling up some guys I know, asking who's dealing in Grimshaw these days. Less than an hour after they put Ben down in the ground and I've got a loaded crack pipe in my hand, sitting on a bed out at the Swiss Cottage, where they've given me the off-season special, teling myself that if I smoke this shit, if I go back to that life, it'l kil me."

I don't want to ask this, but I do. "Did you light it?"

"I wanted to. The voice was telling me to. The boy was saying how my life was never worth much anyway, so why not enjoy myself a little before joining my old buddy Ben for a nice, long dirt nap. I came close about seven thousand times over the next day and a half. But no, I didn't."

"You could have come to us," Randy starts. "We would—"

"I know you would have helped, Randy. Or tried. I know you both would. That's why I came to look for you tonight."

"You looked for us in the Thurman house?" I ask.

"Over the nights I stayed at the Swiss Cottage, I'd go for walks around town. One way or another I'd always end up at the bottom of Caledonia Street, keeping away from the streetlights, looking at that fucking house. And then I saw Trev going into the McAuliffes'. Figured that's where you were staying. So that's where I headed first tonight, to see if you were there. But I didn't get as far as Mrs. A.'s door."

"What stopped you?"

"The house." Carl looks up through the slats at the slices of night sky overhead. "What I saw in the house."

Randy shoots me a look. One that says that he's not going to ask, so it's up to me.

"What did you see, Carl?"

"A girl in the window. One of the upstairs bedrooms. Remember, Trev?"

A picture of the boy returns to me: standing over the bed, over a girl's body, the pattern of blood on the wals. I have to squeeze my eyes shut and open them again to push it away. "I remember."

"She was looking down at me," Carl says. "Just a kid. A totaly scared-shitless kid. Trying to claw her way through the glass but at the same time not wanting anyone to hear her, y'know?

Because she wasn't alone in there."

"Was it Tracey Flanagan? Heather?"

"No. It was nobody I knew."

"Okay. So you went in."

"The truth? I wasn't looking to rescue anything other than my own ass tonight, but yeah. I ran in there and up the stairs and kicked that door open—al the very last things in the world I wanted to do—and nobody was there. Then, maybe a minute later, I heard sounds downstairs. Footsteps. I went to the top of the stairs and looked down and there was Randy. And then you too."

From far away there comes a low roar. At first I take it as the approach of a freight train that we can feel through the trestle's rails and ties—cattle cars and fuel tanks and Made in China whatnot that wil soon be passing over our heads. But the sound rols on a moment, growing in intensity, before abruptly receding. Thunder.

Unseen clouds that have stolen the few stars from the sky.

"We were talking yesterday. Me and Randy," I find myself saying when the air is stil again. "About what we saw in the house when we were kids."

"The real things? Or the other things?"

"You saw him too then, didn't you?"

Carl locks the fingers of his two hands together. A here's-the- church-and-here's-the-steeple fist. "Him?"

"The boy in the house."

"We were boys. And we were in the house."

"It wasn't us. You just said you heard him as soon as you got off the train."

"Heard. Not saw."

"C'mon, Carl. We al saw him."

"Then tel me. What did he look like?"

"Look like?"

"His appearance. If you both saw the same person—if I saw him too—we should be able to agree on the colour of his hair, his eyes, the length of his nose. Al that."

It's the damnedest thing. But no matter how many times I have returned to the boy in my mind, no matter how vivid his presence in my dreams, I cannot conjure him in the details Carl has just asked for.

"Randy," I say, "why don't you start?"

"I'm not sure I can."

"Why not?"

"It's like being asked to describe, I don't know, air or something. Or loss, or anger. You can't say what shape it takes, only what it does to you."

Carl claps his hands together. "If that's what you saw, then I've seen him too."

"I could say more than that about him," I say. "He looked a lot like me."

"Or like me," Randy says.

"Or me," Carl says.

A second rumble of thunder reaches us from an even greater distance than the first. Yet this time, it continues to widen its sound. Bearing down on Grimshaw with sustained fury.

Carl says something, or tries to but the noise is too great for us to hear him. It's just his mouth opening into a circle and clenching shut, over and over.

Pain! Pain!

Then the terrible clatter of the wheels roling over us. The trelis's steel crying under its weight.

"Train! Train!"

I wait for the black cars to pass, my arms around my knees.

Close my eyes against the glint of Carl's teeth.

It's only the train, I know. But something sounds as though it has joined us down here. Something that is screaming and wil never stop.

Over the time it takes to reach the Queen's and check Carl in with my credit card, I am wondering the same thing. I wonder it al the way to Caledonia Street, where I stop at the curb opposite the Thurman house.

Why don't we talk about it?

Why, after al these years, do we not even mention the elephant in the room—the elephant in our lives—that is what we did and saw in the winter of 1984? One reason is that we promised never to speak of it again. And none of us wished to be the first to break this promise.

But it's realy more simple than that. We are men. Defined by the bearing of terrible truths more than a fondness for sports, for sex, for the wish to be left alone. It is as men that we remain silent to our horror.

I totter up the stairs to Ben's room. Rol onto the bed and sit up against the headboard, planning to record another entry for my Memory Diary. But when I reach for the Dictaphone on the bedside table, it's gone. At first, I assume I put it down somewhere else. Twenty minutes of upturning pilows and cheek- to-the-hardwood scans of the floor prove that it's not here.

I look out Ben's window. Wonder if the boy took it, and is now listening to it over and over for his own pleasure.

Then I wonder something worse. What if it is now in the hands of someone who hears it for what it realy is, not a diary at al but the confession of a crime? What if Betty McAuliffe is holding it to her ear under the sheets of her bed? What if someone who knew it was here—Randy, or Carl, who would have seen me in the window

—came in and stole it? This last one being the worst possibility of al. Not because my friends might be thieves, but because from this point on I wil be unable to prevent myself from wondering if they are.

What I need is a little bedtime reading. Something to slow my mind from its restless thinking. Trouble is, the only thing I'm interested in is Ben's journal. This time, as I curl up in his bed, I don't have the patience to move forward from where I left off last time, and skip ahead to the final pages.

September 14, 2008

Woke up this morning feeling strange. Not something strange in me-, but something that had touched me in the night. A stranger in my room.

I sat up in bed and saw that I was right.

A message smudged onto the inside of the bedroom window:

i found him

After this, the diary returned to its record of soups Ben had for lunch for a few days. No sightings of the boy, no shooing visitors off the Thurman property. And then the final entry:

September 20, 2008 This just happened.

It is the end of things, I know. Forgive me. I have done my best but I am tired now, so tired it's almost impossible to write this, to push the pen over this paper. I am tired and alone and I want only to

be with him, to comfort him. It's funny. It's so stupid, but it's taken until now to realize how much I've missed my father.

Forgive me

+ + + + +

Another message on my window tonight.

I had been keeping watch on the house, and turned away only long enough to get the glass of water I'd left by the bed. But when I sat down again it was there:

daddy's waiting

I slid the window open. The night smelled of lilacs and carnations. Not a good smell, though. Flowers left too long in dry vases.

He was sitting on the front steps. Stooped, elbows propped on his knees. He had been waiting He looked even more tired than me. Like he'd been running and had just stopped and was trying to remember what he'd been running from.

My father stood when he saw me. I can't exactly say what expression he wore. It was defeat, among other things. And sadness. So lonely it made him look hollow.

He turned and walked into the house. Like he'd been called in for bed. Like it was the end of a long, long day.

Forgive me.

Later that same night, Randy caled to tel me Ben was gone.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 14

We watched them come.

A lone police cruiser at first. The officer's shirt straining against the bulge around his waist. When he came out he wasn't wearing his cap anymore.

We stood together. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of Ben's house, his mother out on a grocery run. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finaly emerged with the black bags laid out on gurneys—one, and then the smaler other—we held our breaths.

We remember al this, though stil not everything.

And some of the things we remember may not have happened at al.

The letter, amazingly, was Randy's idea.

We were sitting in the Ford before school, no more than twenty minutes after Carl and I had witnessed the coach blow the side of his head off. I suppose the two of us must have been exhibiting some symptoms of shock, but I can't recal any tears or stony stares into space. Maybe this was because everything, as they say, was happening so fast. And we had each other. The most horrific events remained an inch within the bounds of the manageable so long as there was at least one Guardian to share them with.

We quickly agreed that hoping it would al go away was no longer an option. Neighbours might have heard the firing of Carl's revolver. Or perhaps someone passing by saw the coach in one of the windows. Or maybe someone other than us—a junkie kicked out of his room at the Y, young lovers looking for a wal to screw against—had smeled the morgueish taint in the house's air and knew it to be more than a poisoned rat. In any case, Heather Langham and the coach would soon be found, if they hadn't been already. And the likelihood of their trails leading to us, one way or another, was high, unless we could prevent an investigation from starting in the first place. A story that made sense out of what we knew to be senseless.

They were both teachers, seen to be friendly, sharing books in the staff lounge. One night, a shared flask, an 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:

321 Caledonia

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 Beacon offices. No cameras there, and there was the possibility of someone in its sleepy newsroom coming across a piece of paper marked URGENT and going to the trouble of reading it.

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 The Grimshaw Beacon.

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 and dad, and I asked about hers. She told me she missed me, and I said it was for the best.

But al I remember thinking was You were mine once, over and over.

The next two and a half years of high school passed in a numbed procession of skipped classes and rec-room parties and daydreams of escape. We were perfecting our normal acts.

Every day we undertook another exercise in the impossible. We slouched, listened to the Clash and tried to pretend it never happened.

We did our best to fil the widening gaps within ourselves with distractions, building bridges that might find their way to the other side. For Carl, this meant drugs.

More of the pot he'd been duling himself with even before he first went into the Thurman house, but afterward supplemented with speed, acid, coke (even then finding its way into the hinterland). He soon assumed Randy's place as our dealer, serving half the student body as wel, a job that introduced him to out-of-town distributors and mules, legitimately dangerous men we'd sometimes meet sitting at his kitchen table. To us, he looked so young compared to them as he confirmed the weight of baggies on his scales, handing over rols of cash we knew to have been earned from other kids' driveway shoveling and part-time dishwashing. We worried about him.

But I think the same things that worried us frightened us as wel, and so we watched Carl's descent from an especialy great distance.

It was Randy who seemed the least damaged among us. He went about cementing his reputation as the school's goofbal, the floppy-eared puppy who enjoyed confounding success with the ladies. He even returned to playing hockey the folowing year, doodling around the net and getting rubbed into the boards as he had before. Randy was Randy. This is what you'd say when he fel onto somebody's glass coffee table at a party or accepted a dare to run bare-assed down Huron Street on a Friday night. Randy the jester, our fool.

As for me, I committed myself to perfecting the teenage-boy cloaking device: sulenness, distance, a refusal to articulate any preferences or plans. I fel out of any clubs or hobbies, and just scuffed around. Daydreaming about al the shiny disguises money could buy.

Ben was the first of us to break, and we noticed it within days of Heather Langham's memorial service.

Whenever we'd cal him or drive by in Carl's car to pick him up he'd say he had something he had to do, a chore or family engagement that required him to stay home. After a time, he abandoned these excuses altogether and simply said he didn't feel like going outside, though he welcomed us to hang out with him in his attic bedroom, which we increasingly had to do if we wanted to see him at al. Within weeks, it took al of Ben's strength to make it to school and home again three days out of five, the other two written off as sick days with signed letters from his mom.

"Somebody has to watch," he told me once. Ben was seated in what was now his spot, a wooden, colonial- style chair with curled armrests situated so that he could look directly out the window.

"Watch what, Ben?"

"The house."

"Have you seen something?"

"Once or twice. Something in there wants out, Trev. And we can't let it."

There was Ben's we again. The trouble was, this time, he was on his own.

More and more, Ben would spend his time sitting in his chair, staring out at the Thurman house. He told us it required his ful concentration to keep its windows shut, the doors closed.

"It's like what the coach said," he told us. "There's some things you have to guard against."

"Fine," Carl said. "So why's it have to be you?"

Ben looked at the three of us. For a second, the strange intensity that had become fixed over his features was relaxed, and he managed half a smile. There was love in it. Love and madness.

"Because you're al going to leave, and I'm going to stay," he said.

For what remained of our high-school days, Ben faded from the sweetly dreamy boy we had known into a silhouette, a shadow in an attic window backlit by the forty-watt bulb in the Ken Dryden lamp by his bed. Sometimes, when I missed him but didn't want to ring the doorbel and have Mrs. McAuliffe, shivery and lost, let me in, I would stand a half block from his house and watch him up there. He rarely moved. And then, al of a sudden, he would launch forward and grip his hands to the window frame, his eyes squinting at some imagined movement within the Thurman house. How many times had he repeated this useless cal to attention over the years between then and the day he looped a rope over the support beam in his ceiling, tied the other end around his neck and stepped off one of the folding chairs we'd used for epic coffee-fueled poker games in his basement?

Even then, I wondered what particular corner of hel would turn out to be mine.

[14]

I wake up before dawn, so that it feels as though I haven't slept at al. Which perhaps I haven't. My dreams—if they were dreams—were a confusion of questions.

Carl. Tracey Flanagan's whereabouts. The boy. The missing Dictaphone. Along with Sarah, who while a source of some comfort has been tainted in my mind by merely being so close to these other mysteries. It's like those nightmares where you, say, catch your brother in the middle of taking an axe to the neighbour's dog: you know it's not true, it's impossible, it never happened. And yet, the next time you look at your brother—or the neighbour's dog-—he's been altered. A piece of him puled into the world of night thoughts.

I work myself out of bed, fighting the colected hours of stiffness. Every muscle a hardened cord that must be warmed, then stretched, then retrained.

I'm finaly standing when I see it.

A word I recognize through the hand it is written in even before I read its letters. The same tight, furious, misspeled scrawl we'd al seen drawn into the Thurman house's living- room window over two decades ago.

fuckt

A fingernailed threat cut through the dust. And written not on the outside of the glass, but on the inside.

Sleepwalking. Is this another Parkinson's symptom, one of the rarer ones to be found near the bottom of the list? How about sleepwriting?

I shuffle over to the window and wipe away the boy's graffiti with a baled-up T-shirt. When I'm done, it leaves the house across the street in greater clarity. I don't watch it for long for fear of seeing the awakened thing I can feel moving through its rooms.

To avoid any direct view of the house, I return to sit on the edge of the bed. It's stil early. The house, the town outside, everything stil. There is time to kil before Mrs. McAuliffe gets up and I can get into the shower without disturbing her, so I have another go at Ben's journal. More pages of his take on nothing.

I turn another crinkly page and come across something so unexpected I wonder if I am in fact awake at al.

A Post-it Note. On it a message dated two months before Ben died.

TREVOR—

If you have read this far, you deserve to know.

Look behind the vent under the bed. Read only if you feel the need to.

Otherwise, burn it all and don't look back.

PS. Don't go in. No matter what. Don't go in.

The grile easily puls away on the first tug. I stick my hand in and feel around the duct, sliding under the bedframe far enough to slip my arm down al the way to the elbow. I pul out a soft bundle.

It's another diary. This one bound in pliant leather, slim and easily folded into a rol, bound tight by a strip of silver Christmas ribbon. I untie it and open the cover to find not more pages of Ben's handwriting, but clippings and smudgy photocopies. No notes, no accompanying explanation.

The first is a story cut from a tea-coloured page of The Grimshaw Beacon.

GRIMSHAW YOUTH VICTIM OF GRISLY ATTACK

ELIZABETH WORTH

Born January 27, 1933. Died November 12, 1949.

Tragedy visited the home of foster parents Paul Schantz and his wife, May, this past week when one of their charges, Elizabeth Worth, was found murdered in the home. Miss Worth was only sixteen years old.

"We loved her so much. She was a lovely child, so bright and kind. We have some difficult young people come through these doors from time to time, but Elizabeth wasn't one of them. It's heartbreaking to know she had the best of her life ahead of her," commented Mr. Schantz, who has been running the foster-care facility at 321 Caledonia for the past several years since purchasing the property from James Thurman in 1941. Prior to Miss Worth's passing, Mr. Schantz and his wife (who have no offspring of their own) had four children from four separate birth families under their care.

Mr. Schantz was not in Grimshaw at the time of the murder, and police have stressed that neither he nor his wife is a suspect in their investigations. As to alternative leads, authorities admit they are currently without clear directions.

Miss Worth's body was discovered by Mrs. Schantz in an upstairs bedroom early on the morning of November 12. While police are not publicly disclosing the details of the crime, the Beacon has learned that it was a brutal attack, the weapon being a wood plank bearing a nail or screw at its end. This weapon was used in fatally striking Miss Worth several times.

A memorial service for Elizabeth Worth is to be held at McCutcheon's Funeral Home on Thursday, November 17, 2 P.M. Any gifts of remembrance are asked to be made to the Perth County Family Services, which administers the guardianship of orphans such as Miss Worth.

Paul Schantz. The old man we'd visited in the Cedarfield Seniors Home. The one who'd warned me about the dead coming back.

Next, an inky carbon copy.

CORONER'S REPORT-SUMMARY STATEMENT

Perth County Coroner's Office

Dr. Philip Underhill, B.Sc., M.D.

Deceased: Elizabeth Worth

Age: 16

Report Release Date: Friday, November 18, 1949

Cause of Death: Brain hemorrhage from head trauma. Circumstances involved repeated strikes to the skull (numbering 8 to 12) by a wood board. A three-inch screw affixed to the board creating an open fracture in the cranium, likely in initial strike. Subsequent blows using same instrument cause of fatal cerebral injury.

Autopsy (Summary Remarks): Homicide (see above). Upon examination, deceased showed indications of recent sexual battery and physical struggle (likely the result of resistance to attack). Nature of injuries consistent with non-consensual intercourse.

A short piece in The Globe and Mail.

"Not Our Man," Police Say

Announcement Clears Foster Father of Suspicion in Case

of Grimshaw Girl's Rape and Murder

By David Huggins

Grimshaw—At first, the murder of a young girl in this agricultural community was received by local residents with understandable shock. However, since parts of a coroner's report were released to the public showing Elizabeth Worth, 16, was sexualy assaulted a short period prior to her death, this smal, southwestern Ontario town has been gripped by rampant speculation as wel as grief and fear.

Though community members have provided a "handful" of tips, police stil have no substantive evidence or suspects in the case.

For some, suspicion was primarily directed at the girl's foster parents, and particularly her male guardian, Paul Schantz, 47. Yesterday, however, police officialy cleared Mr. Schantz from any foul play when they announced that he was out of province visiting an il family member over the time of the girl's rape and murder.

"We are aware that cases of this kind bring hardship upon those living close to the events," Grimshaw Police Superintendent Robert James stated at a news conference. "One form of such hardship is the way people can muse about possible guilty parties. I am here today to tel you that Mr. Paul Schantz is not under investigation in this case."

Superintendent James's announcement was made in apparent response to harassing phone cals and anonymous letters the Schantzes have received folowing the release of the coroner's report.

The investigation has now turned to "other avenues," police said in response to questions from this newspaper.

Another newspaper clipping, from the Province-Wide News section of The Toronto Telegram.

SMALL TOWN REELING FROM TWO FOSTER

HOME LOSSES

First a Murder and Now Apparent Runaway

from 'Refuge for Lost Souls'

Grimshaw—A search is under way for Roy DeLisle, a 16-year-old foster child who went missing from his home in this sleepy community 150 miles west of Toronto. Mr. DeLisle's disappearance has left many residents of Grimshaw puzzled after the murder just last week of Elizabeth Worth, another child under the guardianship of Paul and May Schantz, the owners of the home where Worth and DeLisle lived.

While police are officialy treating Mr. DeLisle's file as a missing persons case, two sources within the force told the Telegram that they are "exploring connections"

between the young man's absence and the coroner's findings that Miss Worth was sexualy assaulted shortly before her death.

"I would say that Roy DeLisle could rightly be considered a suspect at this point, yes," the police source said. "We'd certainly like to talk to him."

Though just a teenager, Mr. DeLisle has already compiled a disturbing criminal record and history of violence. The Telegram has obtained court documents showing that, during three of his previous foster home stints, Mr. DeLisle was twice charged with assault (both times the complainants being women), along with one charge of public indecency.

Local police as wel as the O.P.P. are involved in the search, but their efforts have so far been frustrated by little information on the boy, whose parents died shortly after his birth, and who otherwise has no known family Further, no photographs of Mr. DeLisle have yet been made available to investigators. "It's like he was never here," commented one provincial police detective.

Finaly, another story in The Grimshaw Beacon, this one published on March 12, 1950, four months after Elizabeth Worth's death.

POLICE STILL FRUSTRATED IN SEARCH

FOR GRIMSHAW TEEN

Roy DeLisle Missing Since November

"Sometimes runaways just don't come back,"

says frustrated Police Chief

By Louis Weir

Beacon Staff Reporter

Grimshaw Police and Ontario Provincial Police conducting a coordinated search for a missing Grimshaw boy who is considered the prime suspect in the murder of his former foster sister, Elizabeth Worth, have announced they are scaling back the resources being applied to their search. Roy DeLisle, who would have recently turned 17, has been missing since Friday, November 18, of last year, when he apparently left home for school in the morning but never arrived.

"We've done everything we can for now," said Donald Poole, Chief of Grimshaw Police and overseer of the search efforts. "Roy is out there somewhere, and we are hopeful that a member of the public wil alert us to his whereabouts. We wil find him, but it likely won't be in Grimshaw or the Perth County area or Ontario.

Sometimes runaways just don't come back to where they ran from."

Paul Schantz, the foster parent who was acting as guardian of Mr. DeLisle for the four months prior to his disappearance, has previously aluded to the boy's

"restless ways," and in an interview with the Beacon, speculated that Roy may have had a "wandering spirit."

When asked to comment on Mr. DeLisle's previously disclosed criminal history and attacks on young women, as wel as his possible role in Miss Worth's death, Mr. Schantz would say only that such considerations are a matter for the police.

Mr. Schantz is stil recovering from the tragic loss of Miss Worth late last year. Elizabeth Worth, 16 at the time of her death, was found murdered in the Schantzes'

Caledonia Street home on November 12. Only two days after her memorial service, Mr. DeLisle was reported missing.

Though Chief Poole would not be drawn into open conjecture at his press conference, many have noted a connection between evidence that Miss Worth was raped before her death and Mr. DeLisle's missing status, not to mention the nature of his prior charges.

I finish reading lying on the floor. The first tendrils of dusty sunlight making their way toward me over the hardwood.

His name is Roy.

The boy was a real person once. A teenager the same age we were when we first entered the house to find Heather Langham in the celar.

He killed that girl.

Of course it's possible that someone other than Roy DeLisle, her foster brother, assaulted and then murdered Elizabeth Worth. It could have been another kid at school, a teacher, a stranger. But it wasn't. It was Roy's "restless ways" that invited him to the party, the same way he invited each of us decades later. He had done bad things in the homes he was dropped into before the Schantzes', and he had done another, even worse thing to Elizabeth Worth. And then he was gone.

But wherever Roy ran to, he's back in the Thurman house now. That's why Ben watched. Made sure the doors stayed closed. Prevented others from going in. Ben had made a prison for himself in this room, but he'd done it to keep the Thurman house a prison for Roy DeLisle.

I'm folding the clippings to slip them back inside the journal when something else fals out from its pages. A plain envelope.

I know what's inside before I open it. Not from the feel of its shape through the paper, not its surprising weight. I just know.

And then it's there, a coil of delicate chain and gold heart in the palm of my hand. Heather's locket. The one she was wearing when we buried her.

As though at the sound of someone coming up the stairs, I hastily tie the clippings with the same ribbon and, not knowing where else to put it, tuck the package back into the air vent under the bed. But not the locket. I slip its chain into my walet. Feel the gold heart press against my hip.

When I get to my feet again the dawn has finaly arrived, though the streets remain quiet. I take a seat at Ben's window and try not to think. About the clippings, about the locket. Discoveries that explain everything. Or nothing.

It's this effort to sit and simply breathe that at first prevents me from noticing the man standing on the sidewalk, directly in front of the Thurman house.

He has been there for some time, or at least as long as it has taken me to focus on the view below. His back to me. Canvas sneakers and lumberjack shirt and a John Deere bal cap turned backwards on his head.

I recognize Gary Pulinger, Tracey Flanagan's boyfriend, a split second before he turns. His eyes searching the houses on the McAuliffes' side of the street, alerted to a sound, or perhaps by the sense that he was being watched. He appears lost. It's as though he had thought he was in another, safer town al his life and only now recognized the depths of his error.

And then he spots me. I can read the swift consideration of options passing through his mind. In the end he simply starts up the slope toward the hospital at an intentionaly leisurely pace, an attempt to reinforce the ilusion that he didn't stop outside the house at al, but merely paused to inhale a breath of the sun- sweetened air before continuing on his way.

But he had been watching the house. Looking into its windows. Searching for something he both wanted and did not want to see.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 15

High school ended with a prom I didn't go to, a graduation ceremony I was asked to leave for shouting "Loser!" during the valedictorian's address and a footbal game Grimshaw lost, during which we gathered in Carl's Ford at halftime. As soon as the next day, we were heading in different directions. Randy to attend drama school at a community colege in Peterborough. Carl to hitchhike out to Winnipeg to see an uncle of his we'd never heard of. And Ben to stay in his attic bedroom, watching.

Though I'd applied to a handful of universities and had even been accepted to a couple, I decided to move to Toronto, find some work busing tables and try to become someone else. It was a plan that my parents only halfheartedly objected to. "Your room's always here," my father assured me, his face rounded in a show of generosity, as if he might have otherwise turned it into a massage parlour or dog kennel. He figured I'd be back. And while he wished me wel, I believe there was some part of him that would have liked me to stitch together a life in Grimshaw as he did, be more contentedly defeated like him.

"Get ready to have your skuls explode," Carl said, lighting up.

The smoke blotted out the sun, the school, even the sound of fans cheering another of the visiting team's touchdowns.

"I guess we should talk about it," I said.

"I don't think we have to," Carl said.

"I'm talking about not talking about it. With anyone. Ever."

"I think we're pretty clear on that," Randy said.

"I hope so. Because there's no statute of limitations on kidnapping."

This took a minute to sink in.

"Let's make a pact," Ben said.

Randy turned to him. "You mean we should drink each other's blood or something?"

"Just a promise."

"Okay. We promise."

"No, we have to say it," Ben clarified. "And we have to hear each other say it."

We al nodded at this.

"What do we have to say?" Randy asked.

"We're the Guardians," I said.

Nobody seemed to have heard me. Except Ben.

"Okay. On three," he said. "One, two—"

We al said it. Three words that cleared the smoke from our faces, and we could see who we were.

[15]

I rip through my walet to find Barry Tate's card and cal his number at the cop shop. Yet when his voice mail picks up, I'm frozen. Barry asks for "complete details"

to be left in the message, but what are those? I saw a missing girl's boyfriend looking at a house. No more than that.

"If this is urgent," Officer Tate goes on, "press zero and your cal wil be transferred to 911."

Is this urgent? My heart certainly thinks so, taking runs at my ribs.

"Hi, Barry. It's Trev. Trevor. Sorry to bother you—gosh, I don't think this should bother you—but there's something I'd like to report. I left my cel number with you, right? Okay, so see you around."

I hang up.

Trev? Gosh? See you around? What could Barry possibly think when he hears that? I know what . That poor guy with the shakes is losing his shit.

I get dressed and head downstairs. The house is quiet. A good thing, because I don't want Betty McAuliffe to catch me running out of here with my shoes in my hands.

"Coffee only takes a minute."

She's standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

"Gosh," I say for the second time in this new, going-downhil- fast morning, "I didn't know you were up."

"Heard you bumping around."

"Sorry to wake you."

"Didn't say you did."

The two of us wait. Or it's just me waiting, feeling for a way out the front door.

"I wanted to ask," I say. "Did you happen to see my Dictaphone around anywhere?"

"Dicta-who?"

"It's a little recording machine. Seem to have misplaced it."

"That's what you were doing up there. I thought you were on the phone for hours on end. But you were talking to yourself."

"I suppose it's a little strange, isn't it?"

"It sounded a lot like Ben to me."

"Wel, if you happen to see it . . ."

"So you can keep up your observations," she says with an unreadable smile.

"I wasn't making observations."

"No? That's what Ben told me he was doing."

Mrs. McAuliffe starts back into the kitchen, but I stop her by speaking a name.

"Roy DeLisle."

"Is that a question?"

"I suppose he is a question."

"The boy who ran away. Is that who you mean? Years and years ago. The way he disappeared after that terrible business with the orphan girl."

"Elizabeth Worth."

"My goodness. You know al the names."

"Ben passed along a little local history to me."

Betty rubs her hands together, as though lathering soap. "He went to the library sometimes. 'Research' is al he'd say when I asked what he was reading up on. I shouldn't be surprised it was that awful story."

"I guess that's why everyone cals the house across the street haunted."

"They do?" she asks, and though at first I take her disbelief as a joke, a lie so unbelievable it was never meant to be swalowed, her face tels me nothing either way.

"I grew up here," I go on eventualy. "We al did. But I never heard anything about it."

"Why would you have? Those were things that happened half a lifetime before you were born."

"Stil, you'd think someone would mention it. I mean, she was raped. She was murdered."

"That could only have come from your parents. And you were our children. It's our job to prevent you from hearing things like that for as long we're able."

"Until it just goes away."

"If you're lucky," she says, and shrugs. "Smal towns are good at forgetting. They have to be."

I consider walking over to Sarah's place and asking if I can stay. Not just for the night or two she has already offered, but for as long as she'l let me. I'l do the cooking and cleaning. And as much of the nighttime fooling around as she and the Big P alow.

But having Sarah say no to such a proposal might push me over the edge into ful-blown Benhood, and this worries me more than the idea of Roy DeLisle taking my hand as I walk.

"Trev! Over here!"

It's Randy, waving at me from the Queen's dining-room table he shares with Carl. Because they are who I've walked to, not Sarah. By the time I sink into the chair next to Carl, the waitress arrives to take their order.

"You hungry?" Carl asks me.

"I'l have what you're having."

"Steak and eggs?"

"Perfect."

"Hey, man, it's your credit card."

After my coffee cup is filed, I tel them about my discovery in Ben's room. The whole Roy DeLisle file. And how old Paul Schantz was the man looking after him when the bad things happened. I don't include any of my own thoughts about the commonalities between Elizabeth Worth and Heather Langham, Roy and the coach, how they al have been rooted to the Thurman house. They are thoughts I can read passing over their faces as I speak.

"He's got a name," Randy says when our food arrives. "Roy. I wish I didn't know that."

"It's like a lousy song that gets stuck in your head," I say.

"Worse," Carl says. "There's no music in it."

You've nailed it, Carl, the silence that folows seems to say . Whatever he is, the hoy is the opposite of music.

"There was this too," I say, puling out my walet and letting Heather's locket spil onto the table.

Carl and Randy stare at it. Less shocked than stiled by the anticipation of some further action to folow, as if the chain might rise up and snake around one of our throats, squeezing out our next breath.

"That's Heather's," Randy says.

"Ben had it."

"How'd he get it?" Carl asks.

"No idea."

"Wait. Just wait a second," Carl says. "When we piled the dirt on her she was wearing that thing."

"I know it."

"So somebody had to have gone down there to get it before the cops found her. Gone down there to dig her up."

"I don't see any other way."

"Who would fucking do that?"

"I can answer that," Randy says. "One of us. We were the only ones who knew where she was."

"And the coach," I say.

"But he was tied up," Randy says. "And he didn't know where we put her."

"Unless One of us told him," I say. "Unless he talked one of us into letting him go long enough to do it."

"You mean unless the boy talked one of us into it," Randy says.

Carl lurches back in his chair and straightens his back, the gesture of a man fighting a sudden attack of heartburn. "What are we saying here?"