I poured more sugar and cream into my coffee and stirred.
“All right,” Cheryl finally said. She ripped the page out of her notebook. “You need to answer these questions for me.”
She read them out. “First, why would someone want you off the team? If you can’t answer that, then try to figure out how someone would gain if you were off the team.”
“Gain?”
“Whoever is doing it must have a reason. How will it help this person if you are gone?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe—”
“I want you to think about these questions all day. I want the answers down as a report.”
“Sure—”
She held up a hand to interrupt me again. “Plus, I’d like a list of all the people who are able to get into the players’ dressing room whenever they want. Someone might be able to sneak in once, maybe twice, but any more often is taking a big risk of getting caught. I’d say whoever is doing this is usually allowed in there.”
“They’d only have to get in twice,” I argued. “Once to put the cockroaches in Jason’s duffel bag and once to get at my skates.”
“The wallets,” she reminded me. “Three different wallets stolen at three different times. Plus the time those wallets were put into your duffel bag. And what about the goalie’s glove?”
I whistled in admiration. “Impressive. Why do I feel a lot better all of a sudden?”
“Just get the answers ready for me.”
“Should I call you at home later?”
She stared over my shoulder and tapped her front teeth as she thought. “No,” she said, “meet me here tonight around eight o’clock. Can you do that?”
“How about earlier?” I asked. Waiting around all day would kill me. “Maybe we could meet after school?”
“No, I have some of my own questions to answer.” She didn’t tell me more.
“Tonight at eight then.” I took a mouthful of coffee and swallowed. It was worse than medicine.
I watched Cheryl stir her coffee. She had long pretty fingers. As her spoon clanked against the cup, I realized it was still full. She hadn’t taken one sip of coffee—she just kept stirring it! I laughed.
She lifted her head quickly. Surprised.
“You laughed,” she said.
I thought about it. “Yes, I guess I did.”
“And you smiled. I didn’t know you could do those things.”
I tried another smile. It didn’t feel too bad.
“So, what was so funny?” she asked.
I grinned. “I hate coffee too.”
chapter fifteen
I didn’t have to go far from the restaurant to find a place to spend the rest of the day. I crossed Ross Street, walked across City Hall Park and entered the library, a white, square, two-story building.
On the second floor I found a chair at a window that overlooked the park. For the first hour I mainly stared at the park with its dead brown grass and piles of snow left to melt. In the summer, I thought, this would be a nice view, with green grass and the trees filled with leaves and the dirt beds blooming with flowers. But summer seemed so far away. I wondered if I would still be a hockey player then or if my hopes and dreams of playing in the NHL would be over.
It seemed stupid to think that answering the questions on Cheryl’s notepaper might get me back on the team. I let myself become depressed, until I told myself it was the only chance I had. So for the next couple of hours I concentrated hard on answering the questions as best I could.
I also made a list of people I thought could have hurt the team and the reasons why I suspected them. I underlined Assistant Coach Kimball. If he had done these things, it was very smart of him to be the one to first mention fiberglass as a possibility. Like being a thief and being the one to first discover a theft. No one would suspect you. But I suspected him. Of course, there were the stickboys, but why would they do this stuff? Or, for that matter, why would Kimball? I got a big headache trying to figure out who was doing this to our team.
After that, I still had too much time to kill.
I decided to stay in the library. It wasn’t likely that many of the Rebels players would hang out at the library. I would be safe here.
I read for the rest of the day.
“Hey!” Cheryl said when she stepped up to my table in the restaurant at eight o’clock sharp. “How are you doing?”
“Great,” I lied. I wasn’t hopeful this would help. Still, it felt better just to see her smile.
“Me too,” she said as she sat opposite me. “I’m glad for the chance to help you out, but I’m also discovering this detective work is plain fun. Count me in for as long as this takes.”
The waitress came by and we both ordered milkshakes. Not coffee.
“Fire away,” Cheryl said, still grinning. “What did you come up with?”
I unfolded the sheet of paper and read my messy writing. “I don’t know why someone would want me off the team,” I said. “I don’t have any enemies—or at least I didn’t until the wallet incident.”
“Who will gain if you’re gone?”
“Cheryl, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I suppose a couple of the second-or third-line defensemen might gain.”
“What do you mean?”
“With me gone, they’ll get extra ice time. A chance to play more.” I scratched my head. “But that won’t help them much if we don’t make the playoffs.”
Cheryl grinned. “And with you off the team, the Rebels probably won’t make the playoffs.”
“I’m not trying to say that—”
“Why not?” she said. “I asked my dad about you. He said you were brought to the team just to help them win. He said you are one of the best defensemen in the league. He said since you joined the team it has won eighty percent of its home games and sixty-five percent of its away games. He said—”
“Come on,” I said. My face was growing hot. I was happy the waitress stopped by at that moment with our milkshakes. Slurping on the straw gave me something to do besides squirm and stare at my fingernails.
Cheryl drank some of her milkshake, then spoke. “So maybe the question should be who will gain if the team doesn’t make the playoffs?”
“No one,” I said. “The guys on the team won’t. Coach Blair won’t—he might lose his job. Shoot, the Rebels might even get sold and moved to another town. The owners want us to make the playoffs so they can have good ticket sales.”
“Right.” Cheryl was grinning, as if I’d proved her point. But I didn’t know what point it was.
“Right?”
“Do you know what my dad does?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“He’s an insurance investigator, which means he checks out insurance claims. A lot of times people try different scams to rip off insurance companies. His job is to look for the scams. He’s almost like a detective.”
“A good person to go to with questions,” I said.
She agreed. “I asked Dad who would gain if the Rebels didn’t make the playoffs, and he said everything you did.”
“And?”
“And he also went one step farther. The less money the Rebels make as a team, the less expensive they would be to buy.”
I set my milkshake down so suddenly it clanked on the table. “That’s who would gain! The person buying the team!”
“Yes.” She was still grinning. “I asked my dad these questions at lunch today. He said he would help out. And he did.”
She pulled a file from her backpack and shoved it across the table at me. “Dad has a lot of business connections here in Red Deer. It didn’t take him long to find out who was trying to buy the team.”
I opened the folder. It had articles from various magazines. The first article included a picture of a bald man. He was dressed in a pinstriped suit and sat behind a huge desk, smoking a cigar and smiling into the camera. One of his front teeth was shiny gold.
“Jonathan Sullivan,” I
read from the headline. “Real estate millionaire.” I read farther into the article. “Lives in Fort McMurray, Alberta.”
“Yes,” Cheryl said. “It’s up north. Medium-sized city. He’s a big hockey booster and has been trying to get a Western Hockey League team up there for years.”
I set the article down.
“Go on,” she said. “There’s more.”
In the other articles I found out that Jonathan Sullivan had been taken to court on five different occasions—mainly for fraud charges. But nothing had ever been proven against him.
“Interesting,” I said.
“More than interesting. We now have someone who could gain from having you off the team. We also have someone who appears to be the type to play dirty.”
“One problem,” I said without thinking. “He can’t get into our dressing room.”
She rolled her eyeballs. “Craig, don’t you think he can pay someone?”
So much for being a computer-like hockey player.
“I knew that,” I said. “Really.”
“Sure.” She smiled at me. I could get used to those smiles. “Now, give me your list of people who can get into the dressing room.”
I passed it across the table.
She hummed to herself as she studied it. “We’ll need photographs of each of them.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Trust me on this.”
As if I had a choice.
“Well,” I said, “some of them have their photographs in the Rebels’ program. You know, the one they sell at games.”
“And the others?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Unless you’re going to walk up to them and ask them to say cheese—”
“Good plan.”
I tried to tell her I had meant it as a joke, but she kept talking and I didn’t have the chance.
“You’ll have to take me to tomorrow night’s game,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said. “Somebody will recognize me. I’m supposed to be in Winnipeg for urgent ‘personal reasons,’ remember?”
She smiled sweetly. “No problem. I’m in the drama club. I’ll dress you up in a great disguise.”
chapter sixteen
It felt strange to walk into the Centrium to watch a Rebels game rather than play one. It felt even stranger to wear a wig.
“This won’t work,” I told Cheryl, “not in a million years.”
She was in blue jeans and a nice blue jacket, and she carried a heavy black purse.
“Relax,” she said, “you look perfect.”
Perfect? Cheryl had glued a false mustache into place. My wig had a ponytail, and I was wearing a baseball cap. I wore greasy jeans with holes in the knees and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt beneath an unbuttoned red flannel hunting shirt. I had rolled the sleeves up to show the tattoos on my forearms. They were new tattoos, the kind you put on with water. In my shirt pocket I had a package of cigarettes.
“Try to walk more floppy,” she said.
“What?” I looked to see if anyone in the crowds around us had heard her. “Floppy?”
“You’re walking tight, like an athlete,” she said. “Headbanger rock-and-roll types don’t walk that way. Make your head and arms floppy, and walk with a slouch.”
“Like this?” I took a few goofy steps.
Cheryl giggled. “Exactly.”
We walked up the steps toward our seats. Halfway up we met a biker with a leather jacket and long greasy hair.
“Dude,” the biker said to me, “got a smoke?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t smoke. It’s bad for your health.”
“Cool joke, dude,” the guy said. “Like, major irony. Mock the athletes of this world.”
I didn’t think I had been trying to make a joke until Cheryl kicked my ankle. I remembered the cigarettes in my pocket.
“Hey, man,” I said as I grabbed the cigarettes, “help yourself.”
He took half a dozen cigarettes from the pack and stuck it back in my pocket. Cheryl and I continued up the stairs.
“See what I mean?” Cheryl said. “Perfect.”
We sat in section VV, row 22, across from the players’ bench. I soaked in the music and the smell of popcorn and the feeling of nervous excitement in the crowd. Cheryl kept turning her head to look in all directions.
“This might be fun,” she said. “I feel like a kid at a circus. Maybe I’ll come to some more games later.”
“Wonderful,” I said, not meaning it.
“Only if you’re playing.”
“That’s better.”
At the other end of the ice, the Saskatoon Blades were skating circles to warm up. The Blades were usually a powerhouse team, but for some reason they had not been playing well lately. We were expected to beat them easily tonight.
I watched the Rebels in our end. My chest tightened to see the guys. Mulridge. Shertzer. Mancini. Hog Burnell. And the rest of the team in the white, gray and black Rebel uniforms. I had missed hockey bad enough before, but I began to miss it ten times more now. It was killing me to just watch.
“Cheryl,” I whispered, “this has got to work. I’ll die if it doesn’t.”
She frowned at me. “Don’t be stupid. No matter how much fun hockey is, there are plenty of other things that are more important.”
I opened my mouth to defend myself, then changed my mind. She was giving me that kind of frown.
“The list,” I said to change the subject. She pulled it out of her purse. The list contained all the people who could get into the dressing room any time they wanted.
She had asked for everyone, and I had put down everyone, no matter how unlikely. Sam Radisson, the owner. Lucas Turner, the general manager. Kurt Doyle, the promotions manager. Coach Blair. Assistant Coach Kimball. Teddy, the trainer. The stickboys. All the press guys I could remember. I even put down the zamboni driver because he worked maintenance and had a key to all the rooms in the Centrium.
“Hmm,” she said as she reread the list. “Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“I had a chance to speak to Robbie Patterson today,” she told me. She was whispering, and I had to lean closer to hear. Her perfume smelled nice.
“Robbie? Our goalie?”
“Yes,” she said, “he’s in my biology class. I asked him to tell me as much as he could about the dressing room after the second period of the last game.”
“Because if someone did something to his glove, it would have been then, right? His glove broke in the third period.”
“Right,” she said.
I was glad I wasn’t so nervous around her anymore. It gave me the chance to think.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You asked him who, besides players, were in the dressing room.”
“Exactly.” She looked at the paper. “That means you can cross everyone off the list except for Kurt Doyle, Coach Blair, Assistant Coach Kimball, Teddy the trainer, and the stickboys.”
“Kurt Doyle’s photo is in the program. Same with Coach Blair and Kimball. So you won’t need to take their photos.”
“Stickboys and trainer,” she said. “Can you point them out from here?”
I could. I looked across the ice and described what Teddy was wearing. Then I told her what the stickboys were wearing.
“Good,” she answered. She patted her purse. “I’ve got my camera in here. I’ll wander over to the other side sometime during the game and take all the photos I need.”
“Why?” I asked. It had been hard to hold on to that question as long as I had. “What good will their photos do?”
“Cockroaches,” she answered. “If we can find out where the cockroaches came from, we might have our man.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will tomorrow when you go to Calgary.”
“What? Calgary?”
She patted my knee. “Just relax and watch the game. I’ll worry about getting the photos. In the meantime, maybe you can explain some of the rules t
o me.”
I did my best.
The game opened with the Rebels scoring two goals in the first two minutes. By the end of the first period we were ahead by five goals. By the end of the second we were only ahead by three goals. At the end of the game, we won by a single goal in a 10–9 battle that was not very defensive, and I had winced every time a defensive mistake in our end cost us a goal.
Still, it could have been worse. We could have lost. Now we had to win ten games with thirteen to go. And I was hoping I could get back on the ice before it was too late.
chapter seventeen
After the game, Cheryl and I went to the Dairy Queen downtown. A milkshake for me. Diet cola for her.
“All right,” I said as soon as we sat down, “how about finally telling me what the pictures are all about.”
“Find the person who put cockroaches in Jason’s equipment,” she said, “and you’ll find the person behind all of the strange things happening to the team.”
“Sure,” I agreed, “but how do we do that?”
“Go to Biology Supply Importers in Calgary. It’s the only company in the entire province of Alberta that sells cockroaches.”
Sells cockroaches?
She laughed at the look on my face. “Yes, they sell cockroaches. Alberta has cold winters—it isn’t like Mexico where you can find cockroaches anywhere. If you want cockroaches, you’ll have a much easier time buying them than trying to capture them. Lucky for us there’s only one place that sells them.”
“But why would anyone sell cockroaches?”
She dug into her purse and pulled out a small brochure.
“I hope this doesn’t spoil your appetite,” she said.
I moved my straw so that it wouldn’t get caught in my false mustache. I was worried some of the guys might stop by after the game, so I was still wearing my disguise. I took a good slurp of the milkshake, then read the brochure.
“What?” I said a few seconds later. “Preserved cats for ten dollars each?”
“Sounds gross, doesn’t it? My dad gave this brochure to me. He’s the one who suggested we try to track this down through the cockroaches.”
Cats weren’t the only animals in the brochure. There were frogs—sold by the dozen—snakes, earthworms, grasshoppers, squid, minnows and monkeys. Some were sold dead, others alive.
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