Rebel Glory (7 page)

“Craig? Craig?” she was asking. “Are you trying to be funny?”

“No!” I said. I sucked in some air.

“It has been a strange phone call,” she told me.

“I don’t always think too well when I’m in trouble,” I said.

“Trouble?” Her voice instantly sounded worried. To my surprise, I found I liked that.

“Not big, big trouble.” No, I told myself, only trouble that might mean the end of my hockey career. “Could you meet me tomorrow morning before school starts?”

“Sure,” she said. “At the main doors of the school?”

“No!” I took a breath. “I mean, would it be okay if we met somewhere else?”

The last thing I wanted was to risk running into one of the guys on the team.

“Where?” she asked.

I thought of one of the main streets in Red Deer. “Maybe a restaurant. Do you know the one on Ross Street down by City Hall Park?”

She waited a few seconds. I hoped the phone wouldn’t run out of time. I didn’t think I had any change left in the cushions of the truck.

“Sure,” she said. “Quarter after eight?”

“That would be great.” I found myself grinning into the darkness of the phone booth. “Thanks.”

She said good-bye and hung up.

I continued to drive back toward Red Deer and stopped in Innisfail, a small town just south of Red Deer. I found a motel there and spent a lonely night staring at the ceiling in the rented room. It didn’t help that I heard on the late news that the Rebels had lost again. We needed to win eleven games, and we only had fourteen games to do it.

chapter fourteen

“Why did you call me for help?” she asked.

We sat in the restaurant by the park. It was only half full. Our waitress dropped off our toast and coffee and then decided to ignore us.

I took a sip of my coffee. The stuff tasted awful. I tried not to make a face, because I wanted the coffee to make me look more mature.

“Good question,” I said as I looked across the table at her. Cheryl Holbrook was
definitely not old and fat and wrinkled. I had known that from the first time I saw her in class. But in class I’d always been afraid of getting caught staring at her.

Now, in the restaurant by the park, I had every excuse to look. Her eyes were light green, which was a nice contrast to her blond hair. Her nose had a few light freckles, and her cheeks had little dimples when she smiled.

However, she soon stopped smiling at me. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, and she watched me with a serious half-frown.

“Come on,” she said. “If it’s a good question, answer it. Why me?”

“Why you? Easy.”

Only it wasn’t easy. How could I explain I didn’t have any friends in Red Deer? How could I explain I hoped she would remember how I had argued with Mr. Palmer for her when I first got to the school?

“Easy,” I repeated. “It’s...um...because—”

“You think I’m a sucker for a pretty face,” she said.

I felt myself blush. I knew I didn’t have a pretty face.

She laughed. “Don’t sweat it. Why not tell me about your trouble and how I can help?”

I nodded and sipped more coffee. The taste hadn’t changed at all. I dumped three spoonfuls of sugar and some cream into it.

“My trouble is that someone has been doing things to make hockey real tough for me,” I said.

Her eyebrows lifted. “During the games?”

“During and after and before.”

“Oh,” she said. I noticed she wasn’t drinking her coffee. “How tough has it been?”

“You probably know I didn’t play last night,” I answered.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Please don’t take it personally, but I don’t follow hockey.”

I thought about that for a second. “Actually, I think I like that. Some girls chase anybody who plays junior hockey. At least if you help me, I’ll know it won’t be for that reason.”

Tiny circles of red appeared on her cheeks, and she quickly looked down at her coffee. She added some sugar to it.

“What kind of trouble?” she asked without looking up.

I took a breath. This was the hard part. I either trusted her completely and told her everything or I didn’t ask for her help at all.

I told her everything. The cockroaches, the skate rivets, the fiberglass in our long johns, the snapped glove, the phone call to the Henrys, and the way I had been blamed for stealing the wallets.

She watched me as I spoke. She listened carefully until I was finished.

“You are innocent.” She said it like a statement, not like a question.

“I didn’t take the wallets. I don’t even have a girlfriend.”

For some reason those tiny circles of red showed on her cheeks again, and she went back to looking at her coffee.

“How do you think I can help?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about hockey.” She stirred her coffee.

“I have two problems,” I said. “One is that I don’t know where to begin asking questions to find out who’s behind this. Two, even if I knew the questions, I couldn’t ask them. I’m supposed to be in Winnipeg.”

Cheryl took a notebook from the backpack she had dropped onto the chair beside her. She set the notebook on the table and got a pen ready.

“Repeat everything you told me,” she said.

I did. She made notes. Then, for about five minutes, she carefully studied what she had written.

The waitress stopped by to pour more coffee into our cups. It made me grumpy because that meant I’d have to start over trying to finish the horrible stuff.

Cheryl flipped to a different page of her notebook and began writing again.

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?”