But this game was special.
The big center rushed often, but with Travis staying back and Nish at the top of his game, they kept the big guy at bay, for the most part. And Sarah was on fire, skating as fast as or faster than any player on the ice.
The Owls were all playing their best. Fahd blocked shots. Simon Milliken put a beautiful check on the big Penguins’ center. Jesse Highboy, never known for carrying the puck, rushed end to end and put a shot off the Penguins’ goalpost. Jenny was superb in net, her glove hand lashing out like a cobra to bite off any shot that threatened to beat her.
Early in the third, the big center took a pass just over the red line and split Lars and Sam on defense. He came in hard on Jenny, dipped his shoulder to get her to make the first move, and then went backhand. But Jenny had refused to fall for the fake and was still standing there, the puck bouncing hard off her chest pad.
The puck bounced back, dropped, and skipped over Lars’s stick and onto the stick of the Penguins’ right winger, coming on fast in search of the rebound. He swung hard at the bouncing puck, coming in just under it, clipping it so it flew up, up, and over a helplessly falling Jenny.
The Mini-Penguins had the lead, 1–0.
Travis checked the clock. Twelve minutes left. The crowd, clearly many of them from Pittsburgh, were cheering hard for their heroes. Travis noticed a large number of waving American flags. No surprise. The Penguins were the American team, the Owls from Canada. And this was Boston, after all. Home of the Boston Tea Party, birthplace of the American Revolution. Patriotism here was huge.
“U.S.A.!” the crowd chanted.
“U.S.A.!”
“U.S.A.!”
Twelve minutes. Travis thought about it. More than enough time. But the clock seemed to be ticking faster and faster. Eleven. Ten. Less than ten minutes now …
Travis felt Muck’s hand touch his shoulder and looked up. If Muck was anxious, he wasn’t showing it. In fact, it struck Travis that Muck was loving this game, even if they were behind. And no doubt about it, it was a great game.
Travis leaped the boards as Derek came off. He checked the clock. Six minutes. Sarah had the puck in her own end and fed it off to Lars. Lars played a give-and-go with her, and Sarah broke over her own blue line, headed for center.
Dmitri was racing down the right side. Sarah put a perfect backhand pass off the boards and onto Dmitri’s stick just before he crossed the Penguins’ blue line.
Dmitri took the puck in and button-hooked it, pausing with it by the boards. As a defender came at him, he slipped the puck through the player’s feet and Sarah caught it with her skates and kicked it up to her stick.
Travis knew his play. He rushed to the left of the net. If he crashed into the goalie, so be it – the important thing was to get to the net.
Sarah floated the pass to him. Travis hit it down out of the air and instantly cranked a hard shot – off the crossbar, over the glass, and into the crowd.
As they skated back to the bench, he slammed his stick down hard. Sarah cuffed the back of his legs with her stick.
“Nice try. Next time, we’ll do it.”
Travis nodded and sagged in his seat, gulping for breath. He checked the clock. Two minutes left.
Two minutes!
Muck signaled to Jenny that he wanted her high, out by the slot so she could get off fast if he called her.
Muck touched the back of Travis’s neck. “Can you go again?”
Travis nodded, still gulping air.
The whistle blew, giving Travis a few more seconds of recovery time. Muck put out Nish and Lars together, the team’s top defensemen, and then sent out Jesse, who’d been having another good game, and Andy, who could hold off the big center of the Penguins if needed.
Before the puck dropped, Nish glided along the boards by the Owls’ bench.
He had something to whisper to Travis.
“Hail Mary!”
Travis nodded.
The Owls got the puck out and up over center, giving Muck the chance to wave Jenny to the bench and send Travis out as the extra attacker.
The crowd was bursting with excitement, every fan in the building rising to his or her feet.
The Mini-Penguins dumped the puck into the Owls’ end, but not deep enough for an icing call.
Nish was first back, and he picked up the puck and stood with it behind the empty Owls’ net. He looked calm as he surveyed the lie of the ice.
Travis knew what Nish was looking for. He spun hard and began skating down the left side, not even looking back to see what Nish would do next. He knew what Nish would do.
He was just about to reach the center ice line when he heard the crowd shout in surprise. He knew they were watching Nish’s special play, the high Hail Mary pass that had worked so brilliantly before.
Travis listened for the puck to land beside him, knowing he was clear.
But there was no slap of the puck on the ice. There was no puck!
Instead, there was the sharp sizzle of other skates, and then the chop of skates skating away from him in the other direction.
He turned just in time to see the big center drop the puck down onto his own stick. He had intercepted Nish’s Hail Mary!
Down the ice the big center flew, with Travis in pursuit. Only, Travis was now badly out of position. And Sarah, the only Owl fast enough to catch the center, was not on the ice to give chase.
It was all up to Lars and Nish. There was no goalie in the Owls’ net, Jenny having been yanked so that Travis could go on.
Lars and Nish both fell in the hope of blocking the big center’s shot, but the player held, danced the puck niftily between them, and very gently deposited the puck in the empty net.
Mini-Penguins 2, Owls 0.
The game was over, the championship lost.
21
In the dressing room, Travis was near tears. Had the big Mini-Penguin center not come over specially and tapped Travis on his pads, he might have openly wept. But he felt good about his game, and good about how far the Owls had come, for a team not used to summer hockey. You couldn’t win every tournament.
Travis looked about. Sarah was staring at her skate laces. Sam was staring at the ceiling, seemingly in another world. Nish was bent over, gasping for air, his face hidden.
Muck was walking around the room, reaching down to touch each of the Owls on their shoulder. He didn’t say a thing. He looked pleased rather than disappointed.
Mr. D came in, holding the door open behind him.
“Heck of a game, kids. Heck of a game. Travis, Sarah, Sam – you three get your stuff off and get outside. Someone wants to see you.”
Travis looked at Sam, then at Sarah. They were suddenly back in the drama of the aquarium.
Travis fumbled with his skate laces, terrified that they had somehow messed up. Maybe he hadn’t really seen the tattoo. Maybe it wasn’t Frances. Maybe they had raised a false alarm.
“We owe you three, big time,” the man was saying. He was the president of the New England Aquarium, but Travis wasn’t even sure if he’d caught his name.
The man explained to them what had happened. Frances Assisi – real name Isobel Twining – and her group had somehow managed to infiltrate the diving crew that had been assigned to do the census. They had arranged for four identical diving outfits to be there for them when they got into the building and had somehow dressed without being noticed. The census takers thought they were staff divers; the staff divers thought they’d been brought in to help with the census.
The plan was alarmingly simple. And it might have been astonishingly successful, but for the three Owls.
Assisi and her three accomplices, the man explained, had been caught setting small boxes containing radio receivers at various levels in the tank. Once the receivers were in place, a radio signal from outside would set off a series of vibrations. If all the devices were completely in synch with each other, the vibrations would build until they shattered the glass windows.
The group had apparently tested their equipment at an isolated location and it had worked brilliantly, shattering glass thicker than that used in the aquarium. The radio signal was to be sent after the doors of the New England Aquarium had closed to the public. The plotters planned to call the aquarium security office five minutes before it happened, allowing time for workers still inside to clear the building of people.
“The idea was to ‘flush’ the aquarium creatures out into the harbor,” the man told them. “When the glass shattered, it would send four stories of water – some two hundred thousand gallons – crashing down into the penguin display. Then that water, along with the tens of thousands of gallons of water in the penguin area, would burst through the opening in the wall at the construction site, sending the entire contents of the aquarium out into Boston Harbor.”
“Free the penguins,” Sam said under her breath. She sounded hurt. Hurt that she had ever been fooled into believing in whatever cause Frances thought they were fighting for.
Travis had a question. “Would all the creatures have escaped, then?”
The man shook his head. “Some would, of course, but most would have been killed by the collapsing tank. The entire penguin population would have been wiped out, for certain. They couldn’t survive such a blow.”
Travis nodded.
Free the penguins indeed.
22
The Screech Owls’ bus rumbled back over the Thousand Islands Bridge, well on its way home to Tamarack. Travis hadn’t slept yet on the long ride back, his mind churning again and again over the incredible events of their week in Boston.
He wasn’t thinking much about the hockey tournament. He was thinking about how close Frances had come to destroying the New England Aquarium and killing all the innocent penguins she had wanted to “free.” Perhaps the Owls had lost to the Mini-Penguins in the final, but the real penguins had won the game of their lives.
Travis and Sarah took great satisfaction from that, though Sam could not get it out of her head that she had fallen for Frances’s fancy talk of freedom when the reality would have been destruction. They told Sam that she was really the hero of this story. It was only because she’d showed them those strange text messages – messages she was never meant to see – that the three had been able to disrupt the plan.
They had been interviewed by the police, but no newspaper or television reporters had learned of their involvement. The police had announced to the public that they had responded to warnings from “a source” and left it at that. The city had praised the police for their quick action and for ensuring that no one had been hurt, including the much-loved Myrtle the turtle, whose photo was on the front page of the Boston Herald Muck was reading on the way home.
The three Screech Owls were glad it had been kept quiet. Unlike Nish, they weren’t interested in seeing their names in the papers unless it was about winning an Olympic medal someday – or the Stanley Cup.
Travis turned to look at his friend, who was sitting behind him, staring out the window, uncharacteristically quiet. What was Nish thinking? Muck had come by and told Nish to be ready to have a long talk with his mother when they got home. Mrs. Nishikawa was going to meet the bus. Nish was to tell her right away, Muck informed the troublesome young defenseman, that the postcard about quitting school was a bad joke and that Nish was looking forward more than ever to getting back to school in the fall.
Travis wondered how sincere Nish would be in saying that, but then he knew Nish could put on his choirboy face and look the picture of pure innocence. Nish would be at his acting best, he was sure.
As the bus rumbled on toward Nish’s showdown with his mother, Travis finally started to doze off. A few minutes later, he was sound asleep.
“I have a new idea.”
The quick breath tickling his ear woke Travis up as much as the words. He sat up straight, blinking. Nish’s face was right next to his ear.
“What’s up?” Travis asked.
“Data ’n’ me …”
“Data and I,” Travis corrected.
“You’re not involved. Data ’n’ me have been thinking more about Ben Franklin’s inventions. So many of them are completely obvious. He invented swim fins, did you know that? And the thing in your car that tells you how far you’ve gone …”
“They didn’t have cars then,” Travis protested sleepily.
“He had one on his carriage,” Nish said dismissively, as if he couldn’t believe Travis’s lack of intelligence.
Nish continued. “He invented a new stove, new eyeglasses, an arm extension for reaching things … sensible stuff that people needed.”
“You don’t know the meaning of sensible.”
Nish ignored him. “I’ve been thinking about something people really need but don’t have.”
“Which is?”
“Disposable underwear.”
“What?”
“You guys are always complaining about my gauchies in the dressing room. My mom says she hates washing my underwear and is always on my case to change it every day – which is ridiculous.”
“Not really.”
“Well, my idea is simple, like Ben Franklin would do. You see a simple need, you find something sensible to fix it, and you’re a genius.”
“Disposable underwear?” Travis said.
“That’s right – my latest invention. For hockey players like us.”
Travis shook the rest of the sleep off. He needed to know if he was dreaming or if this conversation was actually taking place.
“You’re too late,” he said finally. “Somebody already came up with that.”
“No way!”
“They’re called diapers.”
The last thing Travis heard before falling back to sleep was a persistent, hissing raspberry from the seat behind him.
CHECK OUT THE OTHER BOOKS IN THE SCREECH OWLS SERIES!
ROY MACGREGOR was named a media inductee to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2012, when he was given the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award for excellence in hockey journalism. He has been involved in hockey all his life, from playing all-star hockey in Huntsville, Ontario, against the likes of Bobby Orr from nearby Parry Sound, to coaching, and he is still playing old-timers hockey in Ottawa, where he lives with his wife, Ellen. They have four grown children. He was inspired to write The Highest Number in the World, illustrated by Geneviève Després, when his now grown-up daughter started playing hockey as a young girl. Roy is also the author of several classics in hockey literature. The Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature. Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada (written with Ken Dryden) was a bestseller, as were Road Games: A Year in the Life of the NHL, The Seven A.M. Practice, and his latest, Wayne Gretzky’s Ghost: And Other Tales from a Lifetime in Hockey. He wrote Mystery at Lake Placid, the first book in the bestselling, internationally successful Screech Owls series in 1995. In 2005, Roy was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.
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