Chasing AllieCat (11 page)

Sixteen

Finding Father

July 1

I must have fallen asleep reading because my light was still on when Joe woke me at eight fifteen. When I opened my eyes, he was leaning over my fold-out bed. “Sadie! You better get up if we’re meeting Allie at nine.”

“It’s morning? Oh, hi.”

Joe reached out his hand as if he wanted to touch my hair, but then pulled it back. “Meet you upstairs.”

We ate oatmeal and drank orange juice. I poured cereal for Josie and got Stacie set up with a pile of Cheerios on her highchair tray. Timmy, Stevie, and Megan were already eating in front of cartoons.

“Thanks,” Aunt Susan said. She looked frazzled already. “You riding
now
?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“We’re meeting Allie,” Joe said.

I felt as if I should ask if it was okay that we went, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to give her the option of saying
no.
I hadn’t asked for permission all summer, and if she said
no
now, I’d feel obligated to stay home and help her. Then what about Allie?

“As soon as we get back,” I said, “I’ll do whatever you need, okay? Make a list.” I smiled, hoping I looked helpful.

On the way out the door, Joe poked me with his elbow and muttered, “Brown-noser.”

I elbowed back.

Allie’s bike was parked by the front door of the Last Chance. She was waiting for us inside, sitting on the floor and rubbing Peapod.

“Be careful,” Scout said. “Have fun. Stick together, will ya?” He put an unlit cigar in his mouth and started sweeping the bar floor. “Those assholes make me more than a little nervous. And there are lots of trees down from the storm. So be careful.”

Allie, Joe, and I took off into the woods, bouncing our way over downed tree limbs and leaves.

That’s the morning Joe slid on the slick leaves and catapulted into the ravine. That’s when we found Father Malcolm, his body beaten to a barely breathing, bloody pulp in the woods.

When Allie rode off to call 911, all Joe and I could do was wait, sitting in the wet leaves beside this lost soul.

“Don’t we have to see if he’s breathing?” I asked. “The heart can pump even if the lungs aren’t working, right?”

“That means we’d have to roll him over,” Joe said. We swallowed in unison and scrambled to our feet.

“Are we not supposed to disturb him? I mean, isn’t this a crime scene?”

“But he’s
alive
,” Joe said. “You don’t move a dead body. But what if he can’t breathe, face-planted in the mud like this?”

So I peeled off my biking gloves, too. If I touched the man with them on, I’d have to throw them away. My hands, I could wash. I took the man’s left hip, Joe took his left shoulder. We lifted and pushed.

Dead weight, I thought. That was a bad metaphor. In English class, Mrs. Rosen said that metaphors compare unlike things. Father-whoever-it-was was not unlike a dead thing. Not unlike at all. I couldn’t believe I was thinking about metaphors when I was touching an almost-dead body for the first time in my life. But maybe that’s how the mind works—distract yourself from horror so you don’t freak out entirely.

His body was heavy and stuck. Pulling him loose made a sucking sound in the mud. When he flopped onto his back, I saw he was even bloodier in the front. Mud smeared his face. His nose was skewed at a crazy angle. A piece of broken tooth stuck in the mud and there was blood on his chest. But we could hear ragged breathing going in and out.

Below his chin, his white clerical collar was cloaked with mud and more blood. His crucifix had been wound around his neck. To choke him.

“Holy crap,” Joe said under his breath. He untwisted the crucifix chain a couple turns to make sure it wasn’t still cutting of the priest’s air supply. Then Joe touched his own forehead, chest, and shoulder to shoulder. The sign of the cross.

I felt my breakfast rising for real, and I stumbled into the woods before it came sailing out, spraying the weeds with orange-juice-tinged oatmeal. When I was done, I wiped my mouth on my forearm. I didn’t want to touch my face with the hand that had touched this half-dead man.

Finally, finally the cops came. The rescue truck and the ambulance wailed up the hill to the LeHillier junk woods and wound down the dirt roads as close as they could get to us.

While the rescue squad loaded the priest onto the stretcher and put him in the ambulance, two detectives asked us ten million questions. Officer Mick was a little overweight with red hair. He fit the stereotype, like he got his share of donuts. Officer Kate had a kind smile, a no-nonsense brown ponytail, and looked like she could bench press a Pontiac.

“Where’s Allie?” I asked.

“Who’s Allie?” Officer Kate said, while Mick snapped pictures.

“Allison Baker. She called 911. From the gas station.”

Officer Kate scribbled in her notebook. “Baker, huh?” She looked at Officer Mick and frowned.

We couldn’t answer any of their other questions about Allie. “That’s all we know,” Joe said. “We ride with her every day, but we don’t even have a phone number.”

Officer Kate frowned. “You know where she lives?”

I shook my head. “I met her out riding on the trails, and we just meet at Scout’s Last Chance every day to go for a ride.”

Joe said, “Somebody has to know. She’s won a bunch of mountain bike races.”

The rescue truck and ambulance wailed their flashing lights back toward Mankato, bearing the almost-dead priest.

Officer Kate wrote some more notes, helped Officer Mick put the blue tarp in a big plastic bag, taped off the whole ravine with yellow plastic crime-scene ribbon like on TV, and took a bunch of pictures. Then they both scrounged around for other evidence.

Joe and I kept watching the rim of the hills for Allie. The only movement we saw was a mangy German Shepherd watching us from the treeline. When he saw us looking at him, he slunk off into the woods like a wolf.

Still, no trace of Allie.

Seventeen

Alley Cats: Now You See Them; Now You Don’t

July 2

The next day,
the Mankato Free Press
ran this story on the front page, with pictures of Joe and me:

Local Priest Left for Dead,
Teens Credited with Saving His Life

A Mankato priest remains in a coma after a violent beating, and police say the Rev. Malcolm Dykstra would be dead if not for three teenagers who discovered his battered body while mountain biking Sunday morning.

Sadie Lester, 16, of Minnetonka, and Allison Baker, 16, of Mankato; along with Joe Montgomery, 17, of Phoenix, AZ, were riding bikes on trails along the Blue Earth River when Montgomery spotted what he thought were feet under a discarded tarp. When the teens looked closer and saw it was a body, they called 911.

The Rev. Dykstra is a rector at St. John’s Catholic Church. He remains in critical condition at Immanuel-St. Joseph’s Hospital. Police are investigating, but they suspect he was beaten and left in the woods during Saturday night’s storm.

“The kids are heroes,” Officer Kate Stevens said. “Their quick thinking saved his life. There’s no question—Father Malcolm Dykstra wouldn’t be alive if the kids hadn’t found him when they did.”

Montgomery said, “The hill was all wet and slippery. I fell and I slid right into the ravine. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have seen him at all.”

“We were scared to death,” Lester said. “When we first saw him, we thought he was dead. Then Allie (Baker) recognized him and we found a pulse. She took off to call an ambulance.”

Baker was not available for comment.

Det. Mike Rankin urged anyone with information pertaining to the case to come forward.

I wondered how Allie felt when she saw it.

I sent a copy of the paper to Mom and Dad in Egypt (but I only sent one so if they don’t get back together, they will have to fight over it), and one each to Sara at Interlochen and Erica in Minnetonka, so she could read it whenever she got back from Europe. I squirreled away five extra copies without telling anyone. I’ve never been on the front page before.

Joe’s picture made him look like a hoodlum. Reminded me of the first time I saw him, which is partly why I sent it to Erica and Sara.

Still, no sign of Allie. Obviously the whole incident freaked her out, but we had no idea if it was the whole bloody scene or something about Father Malcolm. My guess was, it was the priest. At any rate, I was sure the
Free Press
article didn’t help any.

Joe and I looked for her everywhere. No phone number, no idea where she lived. There was no Baker in the phone book with a LeHillier address. It was so strange to have spent a couple hours every day with someone and then, boom, have her drop off the face of the earth.

Joe and I rode up and down all the roads in LeHillier, all the residential streets (including Beaver Lane which made us laugh), past a house with no sign of electricity and an outhouse in back, and up and down the whole trailer court just in case we might see her or evidence of her. We got barked at by several hungry-looking dogs. I even called West High School to see if I could talk them into giving me her address or number, but of course, they wouldn’t give out such information. I thought the counselor might be interested in a missing member of the student body, but the secretary won’t let me get that far.

Ever since my bike got soaked in the rain it didn’t shift gears right, and Joe’s front wheel needed to be trued, since he’d crashed. That gave us an excuse to go to the bike shop.

We went to A-1 Bike to ask Mike, the owner, if he knew how to find Allie.

A-1 was an old storefront shop in the oldest part of downtown Mankato. The door clanged open and the wooden floor creaked when we wheeled our bikes in. The ceiling was made of pressed metal tiles, and the place smelled of new bikes, old grease, and sweat.

Mike called to us from the shop counter, “Hey, I recognize you two from the paper. Friends of Allie. She told me about you.” His grin lit the place up. “What can I do you local heroes for?”

Joe rolled his eyes. “We weren’t heroes,” he said. “It was all a stupid accident. If I hadn’t crashed, we wouldn’t have found the priest at all.”

“Very few accidents in the world, my friend. Some things are meant to be.” Mike was a big guy, not nearly as big as Scout or Thomas, but he was six feet tall and all muscle. His calves were chiseled and as big as Scout’s biceps. He had a black flat-top haircut, and he didn’t look like somebody you’d want as your enemy. Allie said he rode road bike, mountain bike, and BMX.

I didn’t want to think about anything relating to Father Malcolm as
meant to be,
so I said, “Well, for one thing, my bike isn’t shifting right.”

“Your bike get wet or something?” Mike asked. “Might need new cables.”

I told him about riding in the storm. “Speaking of the storm,” I said, “we can’t find Allie anywhere. Do you have a clue how we can find her?”

Mike’s face turned ever-so-slightly red, and he gave us a funny, tight-lipped little smile like he was biting the inside of his cheek. He put my bike in the shop stand and whipped the old cables out of the cable housing. “Yup. Getting rusty in there. Look. We’ll replace those for you. What makes you think
I’d
know how to find Allie?”

“Just, she has to register for races and stuff,” Joe said. “We figured you have her address somewhere.”

“We’re getting pretty worried about her,” I added.

“Funny you should ask.” Mike dribbled oil into the cable housing. “When she started racing a couple years ago, she asked me if she could use the bike shop address on all her registrations instead of her home address.” He threaded a new cable into the housing. “She picks up her race mail here. I guess she doesn’t
want anyone knowing where she lives.” He shrugged. “Sorry.” He dribbled another dab of oil into the housing and cut the new cable to the right length.

After replacing the other cable, Mike shifted my bike through the gears, turning the pedals while he did so. “Back wheel is out of true. Hang on while I adjust that.” He slid the back wheel out of the dropouts and chain and set it in a truing stand.

“Looking forward to the race?” he asked.

Joe and I looked at each other.

“Allie told me you were both going to race. You are, right?”

“I’m scared,” I said. “To death. Can’t believe it’s in two days. Might not do it if Allie doesn’t show up.”

Mike spun the wheel, stopped it, tightened a couple spokes with a spoke wrench, plucked the spokes like harp strings. “You’d better,” he said. “She’d kill you if you didn’t. She told me you guys are gonna rock.” He plucked at more spokes and adjusted them. “Did you know Allie’s seeded?”

“Seated? What’s that mean?”

“
Seeded
. Allie’s ranked. She’s seeded first for the Expert race, but she’s ranked third in the state. Overall.”

Joe said, “You mean, of all Expert mountain bike women in Minnesota, Allie’s ranked third?”

Mike nodded. “Yup.” He was concentrating on the wheel.

“She never told us that,” I said.

“Allie wouldn’t,” Mike said. “She’s not exactly the bragging type.” He lifted my wheel out of the stand and slid it back into position on my bike. “That should do it. So, that means if you’ve been chasing AllieCat all over the county and keeping up with her, you could do some serious damage at the Fourth of July race.”

I felt a little prickle up and down my spine. What if I could do okay, or more than okay? It was too much to think about. “All I’m hoping,” I said aloud, “is not to die of embarrassment.”

“I just want to finish,” Joe said.

Mike laughed. “This is for fun. Don’t forget. Racing is
so much fun
. And I think you might surprise yourselves, if what Allie says is true.” He lifted my wheel out of the stand. “You’re good to go, Sadie.”

I put it back on my bike. “Have you seen her?” I asked. “Allie?”

Mike lifted Joe’s wheel into the truing stand. His face flushed and he shook his head. “Oh, no, that’s not what I meant,” he said, way too fast. “I mean, she’s been telling me that all summer.”

Joe and I looked at each other. I could tell Joe was thinking the same thing I was. We watched Mike work.

The front door dinged open and a guy with curly gray hair rode right into the store on a road bike. “Mikey! I think you need to come suffer with us today.” He wheeled toward us, still balancing on his pedals.

Mike wiped his hands on his apron. “Meet Skarpohl. This is Sadie. Joe.”

“I’d shake your hands,” Skarpohl said, “but then I’d have to put my foot down. Nice to meet you. Mikey, you’re ridin’ today, aren’t you?”

“Not today.” Mike looked with longing at Skarpohl’s road bike, which read
Skarpohl
on its slender yellow downtube. “I want to. You know how much I love pain. But you know the deal. Business before pleasure.” He spun Joe’s wheel in the truing stand.

Then to Joe and me, Skarpohl said, “You should get road bikes. You could come suffer, too.”

“Thanks,” Joe said. “I think.”

“Hey,” Mike said without looking up from his work, “These two have been riding Allie Baker’s wheel all summer. I think they know what suffering means.”

“Oh ho!” Skarpohl laughed. “You know just what I’m talking about. Get yourself a road bike, girl. Then we can torture you, too.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

The crowd of roadies grew, and Mike introduced them all to us. TerryB, Grumpy Tom, Big Brian, Mini Brian, Mike’s brother Matt, Danny, Ryo, and the “Tri-guys” who qualified for the Hawaii Ironman this year: Dan, Dave, and Doc. The bikes were a rainbow of colors and brands: Treks, Orbeas, Fujis, LeMond, Specialized. They looked light and fast.