Nish had barely announced the new time when another player began to come unstuck, this time the Vancouver Mountain’s competitor. The Vancouver team booed their own player – whereupon they, and everyone else in the room, began to laugh.
Travis turned, shaking his head – and then he saw that there was an eighth peewee hockey team in the ballroom.
The Hollywood Stars!
They had filed in so quietly no one had noticed them. But there was no mistaking them, not in their spectacular black-and-gold track suits with the sun exploding on the back.
Nor was there any mistaking Brody Prince, who stood with feet apart, his fists jabbed into jacket pockets, right in the middle of the group. Without his followers and his fancy track suit, Brody Prince would still have stood out from everyone else in the room. The long jet-black hair, the flashing green eyes, the look that said “Hollywood” even before you saw the gold letters across his back spelling it out. Behind the team stood two large men – bodyguards, Travis presumed, for the “star” of the Hollywood Stars. He shook his head, appalled.
Suddenly there was a huge ripping noise from the other direction. Travis spun around just as the Wheels’ player peeled off the wall and fell to thundering applause and cheers from his own teammates. The little player was laughing and taking it well.
“One minute!”
The Wheels player was barely down when the Vancouver player came away and plummeted, to wild boos and backslaps from his teammates.
Then a small girl from the Selects team tore away and fell, followed by a skinny kid from the Mini-Bruins.
There were only three players still sticking: a slim girl from the Toronto Towers, Jeremy Billings from the Panthers, and the Owls’ own Simon Milliken.
“One-fifteen!” Nish called out.
Simon’s left arm tore away, causing a loud groan of disappointment from the Owls.
“One-thirty!”
The girl’s head and shoulders came unstuck, the weight causing the rest of the tape to stretch dangerously close to breaking.
Jeremy Billings’s right arm and left leg pulled free, almost sending him into a spin.
There were no more groans, no more boos, no more cheers – it seemed not a breath was being taken by anyone in the room, particularly not by the three still sticking to the wall.
“One-forty-five!”
Simultaneously, Jeremy Billings and the girl from the Towers tumbled to the floor.
Simon’s other arm broke free, then his shoulders, and he sagged like a rag doll, his legs somehow still holding.
“Two minutes!”
A huge cheer went up from the Owls. Simon held another ten seconds, then fell happily into the arms of his teammates.
“Layyyyyyyy-dddddiessss ’n’ gennnnnull-mun,” Nish began. “Gold medal in the Fly on the Wall event – the Screech Owls! Silver medal – a tie! Toronto Towers and Portland Panthers!”
Andy and Derek had little Simon up on their shoulders and were walking him around in triumph. The entire room was cheering the three medal winners.
Nish, his face swollen with pride, walked around highfiving anyone who would raise a hand. He walked deliberately over to the Hollywood Stars, not one of whom had said a word or, for that matter, even smiled.
“If you guys would like to join in,” said Nish in a moment of unexpected generosity, “we’d be glad to have you in the Gross-Out Olympics. We’ve only done two events.”
He spoke directly to Brody Prince, who stared down at Nish as if he were some foreign object he’d just found in his soup.
“We’re here to win a tournament,” said Prince, “not make asses of ourselves.” And with that the entire Hollywood Stars team turned and began to file out of the room.
The ballroom was completely silent. No one spoke. Nish looked red enough to burst, his mouth moving helplessly in search of words.
Sam spoke for him.
“That’s funny,” she yelled after the closing door, “’cause you just did!”
5
They awoke in the arctic.
At least that’s the way it seemed. Fahd was the first to notice that ice had formed on the inside of the hotel windows. He got up, melted it off with the fleshy part of his hand, then used a towel to open up a porthole for the kids in room 323 to peer out onto Park City’s Main Street.
It was freezing. Snow had fallen earlier in the night, but then the real chill had arrived and it had turned, strange as it might sound, too cold to snow. Cars were grinding up the street, their tires frozen square where they had flattened as the car sat overnight. Other drivers, more frustrated, were trying to get their car engines just to turn over and start, the engines whining for a bit, then slowing to complete silence as the frozen batteries gave up. The street was filled with exhaust that could not rise in the cold, making it seem as if a huge grey cloud had wrapped the town tight against the mountains.
“I’m staying in bed,” Nish announced from under two comforters and three pillows, one of which he had stolen in the night from Travis.
“We’re going on that tour,” Fahd said.
“What tour?” Nish mumbled from beneath his pillows.
“Muck has signed us up to tour the town and see the old jail and the tunnels.”
“Wow!” Nish mumbled sarcastically from under his mound of covers. “Maybe tomorrow morning we can go somewhere and watch paint dry!”
“Get up,” Travis told his best friend. “It’ll be fun.”
Travis knew it would be. Muck was maybe a bit too much of a history buff at times, but his tours always turned out to be interesting. Muck knew better than to bore a group of twelve-year-olds with a military analysis of the Civil War, but he knew if he took them to a real Civil War battleground and let them loose around the cannons and monuments, the kids would all enjoy it. Even Nish.
They gathered in the lobby. Mr. Dillinger did his usual head count and then they all filed out into the bitter cold. Travis’s nose locked solid the second he tried to breathe through it. Thank heaven they weren’t having the Snot Shot outside on a day like this, he thought, smiling to himself. This was a day for breathing through the mouth. But even then the air was so frigid it stabbed into his lungs.
The Owls hurried to the tour centre a couple of blocks down the street. Several times Data’s wheelchair got stuck in the snow and the team had to lift him over banks and drifts. They were grateful when they reached the tour centre just to get back inside into some heat. Simon Milliken’s glasses fogged up the second the door closed behind them and he stood off in a corner wiping them clear with his scarf while the team waited for the tour to begin.
A very old man came in the door behind them, stomping his feet and coughing terribly from the cold. Travis wondered if he was going on the tour as well or had simply come in to warm up.
The old man began unbundling himself, first taking off a large fur hat, then unbuttoning an old coat that looked as if it weighed more than the man himself. He coughed a bit more, then cleared his throat, looked up and smiled.
“You must be the Screech Owls.”
The old man was Ebenezer Durk and he was the official tour guide. He must have been well into his eighties, thought Travis, certainly older than Travis’s grandfather back home in Tamarack. He had long, wispy white hair, had nicked himself shaving, and had a long white moustache that he’d waxed and twirled until it looked like a smile above the smile already on his old face.
If it was possible to look old and young at the same time, Ebenezer Durk had managed it. He seemed to creak as he moved. He was hunched and thin, and his clothes hung from him. His face was deeply creased and hollow, the skin white as the snow that lay piled along the sidewalks where it had been ploughed and pushed back from the street.
And yet his eyes danced with a childlike mischief when he looked at the Owls. His smile never faded, and his outlandish moustache seemed to signal a joke even before he spoke.
Travis liked him at once.
To Muck’s great delight, Ebene
zer Durk was one of those rare teachers who could bring history to life. When he told stories of Park City’s past – the saloons, the shootings, the rough life of the miners, the fires, the crazy characters – they seemed as real as if he were telling them about something that happened only last evening.
Ebenezer Durk had been born in Park City to a miner and his wife and had lived here all his life. He could remember when the theatre roof caved in after a terrible snowstorm. He could recall the time the mail plane crashed into the mountainside near town, and how the townsfolk had raced out into the storm and saved the pilot and then gathered up all the mail that had been scattered up and down the mountain.
And he knew, personally, people who had been thrown in the jail.
The jail fascinated Nish – perhaps because his teammates were always telling him he was going to end up in one. The Park City jail had been kept just as it had been in the 1920s, a dark dungeon-like hole beneath the sheriff’s office, with the prisoners’ scratchings still on the wall and the doors still capable of clanging shut as if they were cutting off the world forever.
“My daddy was here for six months,” Ebenezer Durk told them.
The Owls stared back in wonder. For what? Murder?
“I used to bring him his meals,” the old man continued. “The sheriff would let me come down and slip a tray of soup and bread under the door and I’d wait until he was finished. Then I’d hurry home to my mother.”
It was Fahd who finally asked. “Why was he here?”
The old man smiled, eyes sparkling. “I’ll show you.”
They crossed the street and walked up the other side until they came to an old building. Ebenezer Durk led them around to the back, where horses had once been stabled.
The heat of the old building had caused the snow to melt and flow down onto the roof of the stables, where it had dripped off the eaves and frozen into icicles so long they reached the ground.
“Neat!” said Sarah.
“They look like prison bars,” said Fahd.
“I’m gonna get a picture,” Data said.
They had to wait while Fahd helped Data get his camera out and take a shot of the spectacular icicles. Travis tried to make a snowball while he waited, but the snow wouldn’t pack. He headed back towards the side of the building that had melted the snow, figuring there might be packy snow along the walls, but it was still too soft and the snowballs broke in his hands.
He was facing back to the street just as two men turned the corner and came towards the stable. There were other people out on the street, all dressed in ski clothes and heading for the lifts, but these men seemed to be dressed for a business meeting. The two men wore long, dark, and very expensive-looking coats, and each had a large black tuque turned down to his eyes, with a dark scarf wrapped around his mouth and neck.
All Travis could see were the eyes. And yet he thought he recognized one of them. Something about a hotel lobby … Yes, the Summit Watch hotel lobby! One of them, for certain, was a bodyguard for the Princes. Travis had seen him again when the Hollywood Stars showed up for the duct-tape event.
A moment later, the two men turned away and retreated to the street. Travis went back to the rest of the Owls, thought about saying something, but decided there was no point. The two men had just taken a wrong turn. It was obvious from how quickly they’d turned around and left.
Fahd was putting away Data’s camera and the rest of the team was pushing towards the doors of the old stables.
Ebenezer Durk had opened a large padlock on a heavy black door, which Muck and Mr. Dillinger then helped him pry open.
“I don’t very often take anyone here,” said the old man, chuckling to himself.
He lit three lanterns, handing one to Muck, one to Mr. Dillinger, and taking one himself as he led the way down through a trapdoor to a ladder that seemed to lead to a black, bottomless pit.
“Are you sure … ?”Jeremy asked.
“I’M GONNA DIE!” Nish squealed in mock terror.
“We should be so lucky,” Sam shot back.
Ebenezer Durk stopped at the bottom of the ladder, the lantern casting an eerie glow about his white face as he turned to talk to the shivering Owls.
“There are secret tunnels that run all up and down Main Street,” he told them. “They’re dangerous, and most of them have been closed off, but I can show you where the bootleggers operated.”
“Bootleggers?” asked Fahd.
“People who sell alcohol illegally,” Muck explained.
“But there’s a liquor store just down the street,” Fahd protested.
Ebenezer Durk laughed so hard he began to choke. He caught his breath and smiled at Fahd.
“Alcohol was illegal in this state for most of my life,” he said. “But that didn’t mean you couldn’t get it. There was a lot more money to be made in bootlegging than in mining, let me tell you.”
“You sound like you’re talking from experience,” said Muck.
The old man’s eyes twinkled in the flickering light. “You bet I am, sir,” he said. “You guessed why my daddy spent that winter in jail.”
The tunnels, many of them blocked off entirely, a few of them still passable, had been built by the bootleggers. The tunnels allowed them to move about undetected by the police. They were also perfect for storing the illegal alcohol and, most importantly, provided the bootleggers with a variety of handy escape routes should the law-enforcement officers ever find their secret, hidden centre of operation.
Ebenezer Durk led them up a tunnel to a dark basement that Travis figured must be high on Main Street. Here he showed them where the still had been for the manufacture of “moonshine” whiskey, and he told them a long story of how the police knew the illegal still was somewhere around here and had set up a watch to make sure there would be no deliveries to the hotels farther down the street.
“My daddy had a brilliant idea, though,” Ebenezer told them. “He knew he couldn’t take it down by horse and wagon – the authorities would be sure to stop and search him – but he could still do it by wagon.”
“A wagon with no horses?” Sarah asked.
The old man chuckled. “Not exactly, my dear – a wagon and one very small boy.”
He waited a moment for it to sink in.
“I had my little red wagon,” he said, laughing, “and my daddy would plunk down a keg in it, wrap it in a burlap sack, and send me flying down the street. All the hotels would have a man ready to grab the delivery as soon as I got there. We fooled the police for more than a year. In the winter I’d run it down by sleigh.”
“And you never got caught?” Fahd asked.
The old man shook his head. “My daddy did, though. He made his own delivery one day when I was at school. Cost him six months.”
“Did he pay you for it?” Fahd asked.
The eyes twinkled again.
“Yes, sir, he did indeed.”
“What?”
“I got one candy bar for every successful delivery.”
Nish looked like he’d just met his soulmate.
6
“I DON’T BELIEVE IT!”
Muck was staring, open-mouthed, over the ice surface at the Park City rink.
The Portland Panthers were playing the Hollywood Stars. The Owls had come to take in the game – scout the opposition, Mr. Dillinger had joked – and they were sitting as a group opposite the two team benches.
The scoreboard had just changed again.
Hollywood Stars 4, Portland Panthers 0.
Travis Lindsay could not believe it either. He could not believe the score, and he could not believe the crowd. All the parents of the Hollywood Stars were sitting together, and all of them wore identical black-and-gold track suits with the sun exploding on the back and the name “Hollywood Stars” emblazoned on the shoulders. On the left arm, where the team players had their names, the parents had “Parent” or “Booster” stitched on.
Travis thought they looked ridiculous.
Brody Prince’s parents were watching the game with their arms around each other. They were both wearing sunglasses.
Sunglasses – in a hockey rink? Not even Nish had thought of that!
“This,” Muck said, “is absolutely unbelievable.”
The Hollywood Stars had three coaches on the bench, with the head coach wearing a headset and microphone that presumably allowed him to communicate directly with the video coach out in the trailer the Owls had noticed parked alongside the Hollywood Stars’ black-and-gold team bus. There were cameras set up about the rink, each one sweeping the action by remote control.
Travis wondered what Brody Prince’s parents kept staring down at, until he realized they had a monitor in front of them and that Troy Prince, Brody’s father, was also equipped with headphones. Troy Prince was talking into the small microphone. Travis looked at the Stars’ bench. The coach was nodding. He changed the players up, sending Brody Prince out on a new line.
“Tell me this isn’t happening,” Muck said to no one in particular.
So far, the Stars had used the neutral-zone trap to confuse the Panthers, refusing to forecheck and instead waiting until they could squeeze the puck carrier and force a pass that was gobbled up by the remaining four Stars players, who had formed a line at centre. It had worked brilliantly, causing several turnovers and giving the Stars a quick lead on two goals by Brody Prince and two others by his wingers.
But after the Stars had taken their 4-0 lead, the Panthers countered with their own trap, producing some rather dull hockey in which each team simply dumped the puck into the other end, chased it, and hoped for a turnover.
Now, however, the Stars changed strategy.
“They’re setting up the ‘torpedo’!” Muck roared with laughter.
Travis understood. The trap had become so effective in hockey in recent years that everyone had tried to break it. The best system had come out of Sweden, and Lars, of course, knew all about it. It was called the “torpedo,” and it needed four forwards, one as a playmaking centre and one back in the defensive position to fire long breakaway passes to the two torpedoes who simply raced through the other team’s trap.
The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5 Page 11