The Guardians - Andrew Pyper

Spoiler synopsis.
The story goes back and forth between present and 24-years ago. In the summer of 1984, the main character, Trevor, and his three best friends Ben, Carl, and Randy are 16 years old in their Jr year of high school.
The novel opens with the police taking the body out of a house across the street from the McAuliffe home.
Presently Trevor lives alone in an apartment after he sold a night club he owned for the money and to isolate himself due to a Parkinson's diagnosis. He is depressed over his failing health, especially because he's only 40. The novel begins with Trevor getting a call from Randy telling him Ben McAuliffe has committed suicide.

• "I had made a promise to never go back to Grimshaw, and Ben could never leave it. ... What connected Ben and me was a secret. A whole inbred family of secrets. Some of them so willfully forgotten they were unknown even to ourselves."
• Heather. The coach. The boy. The house.

The flashbacks to 1984 coincide with what is happening in the present day. We learn the four friends are from a small old farm town in Canada called Grimshaw. We also learn during their Jr year they played hockey for their school team, The Guardians.
Carl's father left when he was young. He has a short temper and is pretty to the point. He grew up to be an addict and a drifter.
Randy was one of five from an Irish Catholic family. He wanted to be an actor but is perpetually down on his luck but is ever the jester.
Ben's father committed suicide when they were 8. He grew to be "pretty" and like "a zen monk". The novel never outright states it but it seems like he might be psychic as he has dreams about things that happen.

• "Like every small town, Grimshaw has a haunted house. 321 Caledonia Street. Once the Thurman place...". Ben lived across the street from the Thurman house.

SO I'm going to cut to what happened. The book overly foreshadowed it and I had it figured out by chapter 3... of 17 anyway.
The boys had a music teacher, Heather Langham. Ben has a dream she is being carried to the Thurman house by a man or monster who they quickly realize is their hockey Coach and English teacher David Evans. They go into the Thurman house to see if they can find and help her only to discover a boy (a ghost) and her murdered body. Randy moves her, like an idiot, and the boys think they will be blamed for her murder so they bury her in the cellar.... LIKE IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!!
Then to get revenge for her they abduct the Coach and lock him in the cellar for three days and question him. He gets... possessed... by the boy. The Coach ends up breaking free and in a moment of clarity he avoids killing Carl, Ben, and Trevor as the boy wants and kills himself instead.
This is the murder we read about in the first chapter. A murder/suicide as it were.
The novel shows how the secret they held between them, of what they did, bled into their adult lives and essentially ruined them.

• "The obvious explanation for this would be the Thurman house. It messed all of us up in different ways. Addiction. Professional failure. Emotional amputations. For me, it was never being able to love or be loved by a woman again."

As I said Carl is an addict. Randy is a professional failure. Trevor is the emotional amputee who hasn't had a steady girl friend since his high school sweet heart Sarah (I'll skip to the end and mention he gets back together with her). Lastly, Ben stayed in his childhood home... literally he stopped leaving the house about two weeks after the events of the winter on 1984. He was the weird, agoraphobic dude who sat in the window of his attic room every day watching the Thurman house making sure the evil inside never got out. He was the town's guardian.
Ben had found out who the boy is. He found out that Paul and May Schwartz bought the Thurman house from James Thurman in 1941. They were foster parents. In 1948 their 16 year old foster son Roy DeLisle. raped and murdered their 16 year old foster daughter Elizabeth Worth. Them Paul murdered Roy and shoved his body in a crawlspace in the house leaving his spirit to haunt the house. Or, as Paul puts it, "sometimes the dead come back."
While Randy, Carl, and Trevor are in town for Ben's funeral the fit hits the shan. A young local waitress, Tracy, goes missing. Roy possesses Randy and forces him to abduct and take her to Thurman house then set fire to the home.
Trevor is able to get Tracy out of the house and Carl runs into the burning building to rescue him. Randy is killed. The house is destroyed.
I don't recommend this book. As I said I figured out the whole story by chapter three so it made for a very boring read.