The Guardians by Andrew Pyper Page B

that, so what I’m doing is the sort of half-made-up scenes we used to watch on those
That’s Incredible!
TV specials, shows that “investigated” the existence of UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster using dramatizations of witness accounts. It wasn’t the truth, but the truth as someone remembered it, and someone else wrote into a scene. So that’s me. A
That’s Incredible!
dramatizer.
    One thing I do remember, however, was Sarah’s description of the coach’s gaze when she stopped him to say hello. I may have made up the “grown a second head” part, but I definitely remember her saying how his look made her feel like a freak, because it was precisely the same thought I had at practice after school that day, when the coach entered the dressing room and, in looking at us, his team, wore an expression of suppressed shock, as though he had opened the wrong door and been confronted with chattering sasquatches.
    The moment passed so swiftly I don’t think any of the older players noticed. They weren’t looking to see if the few days since Heather Langham’s disappearance had had any effect on the coach. But
we
were looking. And we believed we saw something in the way he had to work up an effort to scratch some plays on the blackboard, remind Chuck Hastings to stay high in the slot on the penalty kill and praise Carl for the blocked shots he took to the ribs in the season-ender against Wingham.
    What was more, the coach seemed to notice our noticing. For the rest of practice I thought I caught him studying Ben or Carl or Randy or me, watching us in the same furtive way we watched him.
    And then there was the coach’s asking Ben how he was doing.
    Was there anything odd in that? We didn’t think so either. So when Ben told us that night, as we tossed twigs onto a small fire we made in the woods behind the Old Grove, passing a flask of Randy’s dad’s ginbetween us, that there was evidence to be gleaned from the coach’s inquiring after him, we shot him down.
    “He called me son,” Ben said. “ ‘Hey there, Ben. How’re you doing, son?’ It was fake. Like he was reading a line someone wrote for him.”
    “Are you saying he knows?” I asked.
    “How
would
he know?” Ben answered. “Unless he was watching the place. Unless he was there.”
    “You think he was in the cellar?”
    “Didn’t it feel like
somebody
was?”
    This stopped me for a second. It stopped all of us.
    “All I’m saying,” Ben said, “is if you’d done something wrong—something really, really wrong—and you didn’t want that wrong thing to be found out, you might keep a pretty close eye on the business.”
    “Return to the scene of the crime,” Randy said thoughtfully, as though he’d just coined the phrase.
    “That’s right,” Ben said. “And there was no better place to watch over Miss Langham than down there.”
    It was strange how over the period of less than a week Ben had gone from the dreamiest of our group to the voice that carried the greatest authority. Our overnight leader.
    “If he knows it was us,” Carl said, “then he knows we might talk.”
    “That would also follow if he was aware that I saw him from my window.”
    “Wait,” I said. “Now all of a sudden you’re
sure
it was him?”
    But Carl didn’t let Ben answer. “He sure looks aware of everything to me. And if we’re right about that, he’s not going to want us blabbing.”
    “No,” Ben said.
    “He might try to stop us.”
    “He might.”
    Randy unzips, pees into the fire. A wet sizzle that sends up smoke, momentarily enveloping us all in shadow. “The coach wouldn’t fuck with us,” he said.
    “He fucked with Heather,” Carl said.
    “We still don’t know that,” I said.
    “We don’t?” Ben asked, the flames returning to life as Randy finished his nervous dribbles. “You saw the coach today. Do you really think somebody else did that to Miss Langham? Can you honestly say you think he doesn’t know that we know?”
    Three