The Ice Chips and the Haunted Hurricane Read online

  This dryer, however, had more than just one tiny scratch. It looked as though it had withstood an artillery barrage in a nasty war. It had been dented and dinged, as if someone had dropped it from the top of the CN Tower. Lucas’s dryer was bashed in, warped, and covered in black streaks . . . and it was legendary.

  It had once lived in the basement of the most gifted NHL scorer Lucas had ever seen touch steel to ice—the player he’d drawn, with a big friendly smile, on the very next page.

  Both the dryer and the smile belong to Sidney Crosby.

  Chapter 15

  “I guess we don’t have to worry about Sid being late for his big break!” Bond said. She’d just started playing hockey, but even she knew that Sidney Crosby had grown up to become one of the game’s greatest scorers.

  All day in the rain, they’d been training with the future captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins and of Canada’s gold medal Olympic team—and they hadn’t had a clue! Their new friend would soon be known around the hockey world as Sid the Kid—number 87. The Next One. The great Captain Canada!

  Edge’s eyes were wide. Mouth Guard’s mouth was hanging open. And Swift’s cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. “Oh, wow!” she exclaimed. “And you know that Taylor Crosby—that little baby!—grows up to be an awesome goalie, right?”

  Lucas laughed, but only because he was almost crying. Sidney—Sid, the guy who’d saved his life—had gone on to win almost every hockey trophy imaginable: the Art Ross Trophy, the Hart Memorial Trophy, the Stanley Cup (again and again!), and Olympic gold medals.

  “No wonder he was so good at everything!” Lucas said as he stuffed his journal back into his bag.

  “Unbelievable!” Edge muttered to himself as a gust of wind blew up against the restaurant, almost knocking the Ice Chips over.

  Someone, somewhere had door chimes that were clashing wildly in the wind. And a nearby tree, bent as far as it could, tipped over with a loud ripping noise and slammed down onto the road beside them.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here!” Swift cried.

  “There’s only one place I can think to go,” Edge said warily, pointing down the dark street ahead of them . . .

  The one that led down to the harbour.

  “Look for Brannen’s trawler!” Edge called to the group once they were near the pier.

  “Even if he’s not on it,” added Swift. “Maybe all we need is to get into the storage room on his boat. We won’t know until we get there.”

  Swift went left with Lucas and Bond. Edge went right with Mouth Guard.

  The two groups moved as quickly as they could, scanning the boats in the harbour.

  “Brannen’s not here,” Swift said, disappointed. Lucas agreed. It was as though the captain and his boat had just disappeared. “You don’t think his trawler sank after we—”

  “Guys, come here!” Edge called excitedly in their direction. He was out of breath. And he’d found something.

  “The boat!” Lucas cheered under his breath as Swift and Bond turned around and started running.

  But it wasn’t the boat—at least, not Brannen’s.

  Mouth Guard and Edge had found two fishermen in long, thick raincoats—one blue and one green—struggling to tie up a small old rowboat with peeling yellow paint.

  “They found it abandoned, floating out in the storm,” Mouth Guard said quietly as they approached the two friendly looking fishermen.

  “Like we said, it’s not ours. You can use it if you’re really that desperate to get out on the water,” said the fisherman in green.

  Are we desperate? Lucas wondered nervously. Should anyone be out in this weather?

  “But we wouldn’t recommend it,” added the man in blue. “That storm’s a mean one.”

  “Wait! You think we should take a boat out to go find Brannen?” Swift asked Edge, confused.

  “Not exactly,” he said, taking another step toward the fishermen. “Can you repeat what you said about the Five Fishermen, if you don’t mind?”

  “What, that it’s haunted?” the man in blue asked, grinning. He pulled his rope through its final loop, then grabbed another line. “That’s what yer out in this weather for? A ghost story?”

  “Got good seafood,” the man in green chimed in. “But there’s nothin’ at noon—like you asked about. The only ones who eat lunch at the Five Fishermen are the ghosts!”

  The man in green started moaning playfully, just as Sid had, while his friend shook with laughter.

  “Ghosts?” Bond mouthed, looking at Lucas, then Edge. “Again?!”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s part ’a history, isn’t it?” said the guy in green, once he’d finished with both his moaning and his knots. “The Five Fishermen used to be a funeral home. There’s supposed to be ghosts there from 1917—from the Halifax Explosion—and even some from the Titanic, the famous boat that sank in 1912.”

  “The people who survived the sinking of the Titanic were taken to New York,” said the man in blue. “But the ones who didn’t . . . they were brought here to Halifax.”

  When the fishermen finally started walking back to their own boat, still chuckling about their stories, Edge spun around to face his teammates.

  “There’s no lunch at the Five Fishermen—there’s no Brannen. They said they’d never met him.” His eyes were wide. He was completely freaked out. “The captain’s gotta be a ghost. That’s why we can’t find him!”

  “Are you serious? You believed them?” Bond asked, surprised.

  “Even if the captain is a ghost, this storm is real,” said Lucas, glancing nervously at the rising water.

  “Is the storm real?” asked Mouth Guard. He’d been staring at the beat-up boat and ignoring the ghost talk all together. “Or do you think we made it happen? I mean, could our leap have caused it somehow?”

  Bond scoffed at the idea, but Swift was following his train of thought. “You think the storm might be part of our leap—like, it could be . . . our portal?”

  Lucas’s mind was racing. For the past ten minutes, he’d been watching a wide, dark cloud inch its way across the water, almost like a moving blanket. And now it had sparks of lightning flaring inside it. The hurricane was rolling through, and he couldn’t help feeling that it was coming back to meet them.

  “Portal? Wait—you mean you do want to go out in that rowboat?” Bond was shocked. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’re not supposed to be on water in a lightning storm. You know that, right?”

  “We’ve got to try something,” Edge said as he tossed his bag and hockey stick into the boat. He climbed in, and Swift and Mouth Guard followed. “Hand me the compass,” he called to Lucas. “And pull out your brother’s night light—we’re going to need it.”

  “Are you going, too?” Bond asked Lucas, horrified. “But what if they’re wrong?”

  “It’s scary, I know,” said Swift, pulling a life jacket out from under her seat.

  There was a flash of lightning, then a loud boom, causing all of them to jump.

  “Just look on the side of the boat, guys,” Mouth Guard said, speaking more slowly and carefully than any of his teammates had ever heard him. “We’ll be fine.”

  Bond and Lucas both leaned sideways. Through the falling rain and peeling paint, they could barely make out the name, scratched into the side of the rowboat. But it was there, just where the others had seen it before they’d climbed in.

  The Ice Chip.

  “You’re the superstitious one,” Edge said, looking at Lucas with a gentle smirk. “Gotta be a sign from the hockey gods, don’t you think?”

  Chapter 16

  Riverton

  Out in the swirling grey of the storm, surrounded by white-capped waves, the Ice Chips paddled.

  They were getting closer to the thick, whirling winds when a flash suddenly lit up the dark sky.

  There was a cracking, splitting sound . . .

  Like the earth being forced open.

  And then . . .

 
; BOOM!

  The five Ice Chips were tumbling across the red line on their home ice, as though they’d just been tipped out of a boat.

  Lucas was gasping for air, afraid he’d be pulled under water again. Edge was lying on his stomach, still looking down at the compass in his hands, its needle now spinning and spinning. Bond was on her knees, blinking in the bright arena lights. And Swift had tripped and fallen over Mouth Guard’s legs . . .

  Wait—is Mouth Guard swimming?

  Lucas didn’t mean to, but he started to giggle.

  When Mouth Guard realized that he hadn’t actually fallen into the water, but instead was lying on the ice back home in Riverton, he stopped moving. A drawn-out “ooooh” escaped his lips, and everyone burst out laughing.

  Even Crunch, who was sitting in the stands filming everything with his tablet, thought it was funny.

  When the Chips had suddenly reappeared, Crunch was still finishing the sentence he’d started yelling at the time that they’d made their leap: “ . . . record everything!”

  The leaping Chips had heard the first part—the “Don’t forget to”—hours earlier: before the storm, before Sid, before the Citadel. But for Crunch, it had all come out in the same breath. For him, no time had passed at all.

  “Ugh, ow!” Edge yelled as he slipped on the water that was dripping off their equipment.

  “Are we . . . home?” This felt like their rink and smelled like their rink, but Mouth Guard could barely believe it.

  “Let me see the video!” Crunch was already running onto the ice in his boots, slipping excitedly and reaching for the backpack beside Lucas.

  “You don’t want to know if we’re okay?” Lucas asked, laughing as he handed over the pack. He’d been scared out on the water, pushing through those ferocious waves, but now that they were back where they’d started, it seemed as if it could all have been a dream.

  “You don’t want to know what happened to us?” Bond asked in shock. We’re soaking wet, we’ve been gone for hours, and all Crunch cares about is his silly camera?

  “Yes—uh, of course. But first . . . where in the world did you end up?” Crunch sputtered, eagerly opening the pack and checking the camera. “And more importantly . . . who did you meet?!”

  “No, I mean the player—not the puck!” Mouth Guard said, getting excited. “Sid told me that I should picture the player—the one I’m passing to—as a moving train.”

  “So he can try to predict where the player is going,” Swift explained. “And make sure that’s where the puck lands.”

  “Good advice,” Crunch said. He was impressed that they’d met Crosby, but he was only half paying attention. He was busy pushing buttons on his camera, trying to get the video sent to his tablet.

  “And guess what? I lifted a puck off the ground!” Bond said, beaming. “Sid said most kids get the puck too far out in front of them—but you need leverage. He showed me how to shoot from the back foot and then use the flex in my stick to lift it.”

  “Bond even hit Sid’s dryer!” said Lucas. He was giggling, but he was also slightly jealous.

  “I saw that dryer once. In a museum. I’ll just . . . oh, here we go.” Crunch took the tablet from Edge and tapped a few buttons on the screen.

  Edge had been reading online about Halifax Harbour. Apparently, there had been a Captain Horatio Brannen—only he’d died in the Halifax Explosion . . . on December 6, 1917.

  “Creepy!” Swift said when Edge told them what he’d confirmed: many people who’d died in the explosion really were taken to what is now the Five Fishermen restaurant.

  Bond gasped and looked at Lucas. A moment later, the video was playing.

  First, they saw white—the boards around their rink. Then their ice surface, which was bobbing along because Lucas was moving. Next they could hear Lucas, Swift, and Edge skating, and see Mouth Guard and Bond stepping onto the ice behind them . . .

  There was a bright flash—was it lightning? Then a loud buzzing as the screen switched to fuzz—pixels flitting across it like miniature snowflakes. The only sound was “Shhhhhhhh-zzzzzzzzzzz!”

  “It didn’t work?!” Crunch yelled in frustration, shaking his tablet as though that could bring the image back. “Wait—could the electromagnetic field somehow have interfered with the—”

  “It did work, kind of,” interrupted Mouth Guard. He was pointing at the video control bar at the bottom of the screen. “You’ve only got static—but you’ve got six hours of it.”

  “That proves we were somewhere,” Lucas said positively.

  “It’s gone, but at least we’ll remember our training,” Swift said, trying to sound upbeat. “That will really help our game this year.”

  “Yeah, this year . . .” Bond mumbled as she very quietly began to cry.

  Most of the kids were still watching the tablet, but Mouth Guard had seen her face change—and he knew why.

  “Wait!” he boomed. “You still haven’t told them you quit?”

  Chapter 17

  “You what?!” Edge couldn’t believe it.

  “How could you do that?” cried Swift.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Lucas, completely shocked.

  “That’s what we were coming to say when we stepped out onto the ice after you guys. Mouth was with me for moral support,” Bond explained apologetically. “I just . . . wanted to skate with my teammates one last time.”

  “She thought she was dragging down the team—we both were,” Mouth Guard said sympathetically. “So she asked her dad to talk to Coach Small at the parents’ dinner and tell him she was done with hockey for good.”

  Lucas shook his head. He’d never heard anything so bananas. Done with hockey? For good?

  “But now I don’t want to quit,” said Bond with tears in her eyes. “Not after training with Sid!”

  “Then don’t,” said Edge matter-of-factly.

  “But what if my dad’s already talked to Coach Small? I’m probably too late!” Bond sobbed.

  “You might be,” Crunch agreed, checking the time on his comm-band. “The party’s already started.”

  “It’s started, but it’s not over yet,” said Swift, suddenly determined.

  “We’d better hurry!” Lucas shouted as he grabbed Bond by the arm.

  “Where are we going? Where is the mayor’s house?” Bond yelled as the six Ice Chips burst through the front doors of the arena and took off running along the river.

  “Top of the hill over there,” Crunch said, pointing into the distance. He was breathing heavily and working hard to keep up with his teammates. Was it possible that they were in better shape already?

  “Are you sure we should crash the party?” Mouth Guard asked. He was nervous. Sneaking into the rink was one thing, but sneaking into the mayor’s house was a whole new level.

  “Of course we should!” shouted Swift, jumping over the curb and then a small shrub as if she were running hurdles.

  “It’s our mission, guys—we have to keep Bond on this team,” Lucas said as he pumped his legs even harder. Soon they turned a corner at Celian Street and were all racing up Riverton’s biggest hill.

  Standing in front of the heavy red door of the mayor’s house, Bond lifted her hand, curled it into a fist, and banged hard three times.

  Nothing.

  “Let me see!” Mouth Guard begged as he pushed her out of the way and crouched so he could look through the mail slot. He could see bodies moving—someone’s hand with a wedding ring walking by, and two people’s bellies laughing.

  “I still can’t see anything!” he said. “Knock again. Really bang!”

  “Why does the party have to be so loud?!” complained Swift. Climbing the hill to the mayor’s house had been brutal, but getting someone to answer the door was mission impossible. They’d rung the doorbell, yelled, stomped, and knocked, but it didn’t seem that anyone could hear them at all.

  “It’s too bad the mayor doesn’t have a dog,” said Mouth Guard, letting Bond back
in front of the mail slot again. “If there were a dog door, one of us could probably squeeze through it and get inside.”

  “If the mayor had a dog, Mouth Guard, it would probably chase us and bite our butts,” said Swift, rolling her eyes.

  The Chips had heard music playing and parents laughing, even before they’d seen the house. There were tons of cars parked along the curb; the party was packed. Once they’d figured out that no one could hear the doorbell, the Chips split up just as they had in the harbour: Edge had gone around the left to tap on windows, Crunch had gone to the right, and Lucas was trying the back door. But so far, they were all being ignored.

  Through the mail slot, Bond could now see Coach Small walking by with a breaded shrimp and a glass of punch in his hand . . . and her father, looking as deflated as a flat tire. Mr. Foster was right behind the coach, about to tap him on the shoulder!

  “He’s going to tell Coach Small! We’ve got to get in there! They’ll replace me!” Bond yelled, but still no one inside could hear her.

  “We need a loud noise! Something louder than our voices—louder than knocking!” Swift declared.

  “What if we all yell together?” asked Lucas, who was bounding back up the steps with the others.

  “Does anyone have a whistle?” asked Crunch.

  Most of the Chips shook their heads, but Edge knew what to do. “Mouth Guard,” he began, “do you think you could . . .”

  Grinning from ear to ear, Mouth Guard crouched down so his armpit was level with the mail slot. As Bond pushed the flap open, he slipped his hand through the neck of his shirt, ready to let one rip . . . just as the mayor, holding a cellphone up to her ear, opened the front door.

  PPPPFFFFWWWWHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET! PPPPPTHWETTTTTT!

  “What was that?” sputtered the mayor, taken by surprise—not only by Mouth Guard’s huge fart, but also by the fact that there were so many Ice Chips on her doorstep with tears in their eyes! She could barely tell who was laughing and who was crying. Behind her, Quiet Dave the Iceman, Coach Small, and Bond’s dad were laughing so hard they were clutching their sides.