Chasing AllieCat Read online

  For Alexander

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Chasing AllieCat © 2011 by Rebecca Fjelland Davis.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2010

  E-book ISBN: 9780738728117

  Book design by Steffani Sawyer

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover image of cyclists © 2010 iStockphoto.com/Nazreen Essack

  forest © 2010 iStockphoto.com/Pawel Gaul

  Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Woodbury, MN 55125

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  In Gratitude …

  To all the guys who let me draft behind them for hundreds and hundreds of miles: the real Mike Busch of the real A-1 Bike, Skarpohl, TerryB, Grumpy Tom, Big Brian, Mini Brian, Dan the Ironman, Matt B, Rio, and Danny; and to all my other cycling friends: Bill, Heidi, Tim, Lisa, Steve, Rachael, David, Danielle, Daryl, Jeanne, Renee, John, Jann, Brian, Charlie, Brady, Jenna, Justin, and many more who make riding so much fun; and to John Anderson, who first made me believe I could be a serious cyclist.

  To George Nicholson, for believing in me through thick and thin, to Brian Farrey, Sandy, Courtney, Steve, and the wonderful Flux folk who believe in this story; to Steve Deger, who believed in Sadie and Allie and Joe when almost nobody else did; to the Tatas, Sisters in Ink, for reading and believing; and to Tom, for understanding tunnel vision.

  And most of all, to my kids, who always believe.

  Like dogs, bicycles are social catalysts

  that attract a superior category of people.

  —Chip Brown, A Bike and a Prayer

  PROLOGUE

  Finding Father

  July 1

  AllieCat disappeared the day we found Father Malcolm.

  Allie and Joe and I were charging our mountain bikes through the junk woods like we always did, bouncing over ruts and tree limbs and sand hills. The night before, a thunderstorm had blasted through Blue Earth County. Tree branches were down all over the place and wet leaves plastered the ground. We rode around the trailer park cemetery—where Mr. Turtle, the trailer court landlord, buries dead trailers, not people—and we slid up and down hills slick as ice with the wet green leaves. Allie headed down the big steep slope to the Blue Earth River, but behind her, Joe froze at the top of the hill.

  Joe does that on hills. At the top of the hill, he hit his brakes, which is what you don’t do when you’re riding a bike on a slippery surface, whether it’s snow or loose gravel or loose sand or wet leaves. You follow the flow of your front tire, but you don’t slam on your brakes.

  Joe slammed.

  “Stay off the brakes!” I yelled. “Go. Just ride through it. Let go and follow your front wheel.”

  Joe let go of his brakes and started down the incline.

  “Steer into the slide,” Allie hollered from down the hill, ahead of us. “Just feather your brakes!”

  But Joe couldn’t stay off the brakes.

  He made it about fifteen feet down the hill, fishtailing all over the place, and then went down. His shoulder smacked into the ground and he zipped downward in the wet leaves like he and his bike were sideways on a water slide.

  His handlebar hooked a cedar sapling beside the trail, and his bike swung around it like a yo-yo. Joe catapulted over the edge of the ravine and shot out into space, skimming scraggly treetops and yelling to beat the band, and then disappearing, trailing his “Aaaaahhhh … ” through the air behind him.

  “Pussy!” Allie screamed over her shoulder from the bottom of the hill. But she’d braked and looked back just in time to see Joe fly out of sight. That shut her up.

  I guided my front wheel down the hill about ten feet behind Joe. I tapped my brakes lightly to slow down some more, but my back tire slid out from under me anyway, and wet green rushed at me. I smacked down on my side and I felt my shoulder and my helmet bounce. I kicked like crazy and twisted my feet so my shoes unclipped from my pedals as I slid. I grabbed for dirt, mud, leaves, anything to stop sliding. My foot found a root and I stopped just before the edge of the ravine.

  Allie, stopped at the bottom of the hill, struggled to unclip from her pedals and yelled, “Sadie! Joe! You guys okay?”

  “Fine,” I yelled. I scrambled to my feet, brushed off wet leaves.

  “Holy crap!” Joe hollered from somewhere below us. “Holy crap! Get down here quick!”

  “What!?” I yelled, moving toward his voice. “You okay?”

  “Why don’t you just swear and get it over with,” Allie yelled. “I’m so sick of hearing you say holy crap.”

  “Just get down here, then!” Joe’s voice cracked. “Oh, crap! Hurry up!”

  “Are you hurt?” I moved over the edge of the ravine, working to keep my footing, and then approached Joe in leaps. He had landed against the only decent-sized tree trunk on the steep slope. He sat there, leaning on the scraggly fir tree that had kept him from falling the last twenty feet, and stared toward the bottom of the ravine.

  “Look,” he said.

  I looked.

  The first thing I saw was his bike, still in one piece, at the bottom of the hill. Next to it, a ripped blue plastic tarp was spread over the ground. Joe pointed. Two brown shoes, toes down, soles up, lay in the mud, sticking out from under the plastic sheet. There were feet in the shoes, attached to legs that disappeared under the tarp.

  “Holy crap,” Joe said again.

  “I am so sick,” said Allie, scrambling down to us, “of your ‘holy crap.’ I wish—” She saw the feet. “Oh, Christ!” We looked at each other and back at the feet. Then she almost managed a crooked grin. “Lost soles.”

  I tried to smile at her perverse joke, but my mouth wouldn’t bend that way. It was hard enough just to breathe, much less smile. It was harder to get air in my lungs just then than it was riding up Embolism Hill following Allie’s wheel.

  “Do you think,” Joe croaked, “he’s dead?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Allie said, picki
ng her way down to the tarp.

  “Think we should just leave him be and go call the cops?” Joe said, struggling to his feet.

  “Good idea.” I nodded and backed farther away from the tarp and the feet. I could feel my breakfast rising inside me.

  “Either way,” Joe said, “dead or alive, we’ve got to call the cops.” He glared at Allie’s back. “Wish I had my cell phone. But of course—”

  Allie cut him off with a shrug. “So we have to go call. I’ll go.”

  “If he’s alive … ” I croaked, my mouth sandpapery, realizing that my voice had to filter through my fingers because I couldn’t seem to peel my hand away from my mouth. “If he’s still alive, a few minutes can make a lot of difference. You know, CPR and all that … He could die while we’re getting help.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Allie said, “but I’m not doin’ CPR on that … ”

  “Too bad,” Joe said again, “that it’s such a crime to carry a cell phone.”

  Allie threw him a black look. It was easy to picture the day Joe had answered his phone while we were on a ride, and Allie had left him in the dust and said she wouldn’t ride with him if he brought it along anymore—“If you can’t go without civilization, stay home.”

  Allie stepped toward the tarp.

  This morning, Joe had remembered at the last minute, and I’d watched him fish his phone out of his jersey pocket and toss it on the driver’s seat of his car before we went to meet Allie.

  Allie leaned over the tarp. “We gotta see if he’s dead.”

  Joe and I crept behind her, as if the guy would jump up at us. Maybe it was a ploy; he had hidden under the tarp and he’d come roaring to life, brandishing a tree branch—or a gun. We all must have been thinking the same thing because Joe jerked a stick, bigger than a baseball bat, out of the wet leaves. “Here.” He handed it to me. “Hold this, just in case.”

  I nodded, grabbed the end of the stick, and moved into position as if I were stepping into the batter’s box—a space within hitting distance of the body.

  Allie nudged one leg with her foot. The leg didn’t budge. Joe lifted a corner of the tarp. No response. He lifted higher so we could see all the way to the body’s waist. The legs lay inside mud-smeared navy Dockers.

  A look of steel determination came over Allie’s face, like when she pumps up a hill on her bike. She took the opposite corner and flung it off the guy. His head, mostly nose-down in the mud, was turned toward Allie. She stepped closer and bent to look at the face.

  Then Allie sucked air so hard, it sounded like somebody punched her. She stumbled backwards and grabbed her stomach. “Oh my God! It’s Father Malcolm.”

  “Who?” I said, lowering my club.

  “Is … he … dead?” she whispered.

  He—the Father Whoever guy—wore a black priest’s shirt, still tucked into the navy Dockers in a few places. Otherwise, the shirt hung out. His arms lay skewed at awkward angles, one up and one down, bent in places where there were no joints. Mud caked his gray hair. There was blood everywhere, on his shoulders, dried on both sides of his head, crusted on the clerical shirt collar.

  “Who?” I asked again.

  “Father Malcolm.”

  “A priest?” I said. “This is the priest you know?”

  “You know this guy?” Joe asked. “How? Who is he?”

  “He’s a priest.” Allie stood, hugging her rib cage.

  “That much I figured,” Joe said.

  “Is he dead?” Allie asked again.

  Joe squatted down beside him, braver now that he knew the guy wasn’t a mugger. “He stinks.”

  “Yeah,” I said, tossing the stick into the weeds. I squatted beside Joe and clapped my hand back over my mouth and nose. “But he stinks like blood and piss. Not like a dead animal. Does he have a pulse?”

  Joe peeled the biking glove off his right hand and stuffed it in his jersey pocket.

  “Hurry up!” Allie said, squatting on the other side of him.

  Through my hand again, I said, “He could die while we’re staring at him.”

  “You wanna check his pulse?” Joe hissed at me. “Be my guest.”

  “I’ll shut up,” I said.

  Joe took a deep breath and extended his hand like he would to a poisonous snake.

  He picked up the wrist and the hand hung limp. The fingers and fingernails were full of mud. But there was no blood there. “He’s still warm,” Joe said. He put his fingers on the inside of the wrist. He shifted his grip, and shifted it again. His eyes were on the treetop, eyebrows scrunched in concentration while he searched for a pumping artery. “There! Yeah. He’s alive !” Joe grinned, triumphant, as if he’d saved him. “You wanna feel it?”

  “You outta your mind?” I shrank backward, slipped in the mud, and fell onto my butt.

  Allie leaned over. “Father Malcolm? Can you hear us?” She grabbed his shoulder and wiggled it. “Father Malcolm!” She straightened up, her face pale. Until that moment, I’d thought she was fearless. Guess I was wrong. “We gotta get an ambulance,” she said.

  “Cell phone,” Joe said.

  Allie whirled at him. “All right already,” she yelled into his face. “So I was wrong! So you should have brought it. I’ll go call 911 from the Clark Station down the hill.” She turned and sprinted back toward her bike before Joe or I could argue.

  “How do you know this priest?” I hollered at her backside.

  “I’m gone,” Allie shouted back. Out of sight, she added, “I’ll tell them where to find you.”

  “You’ll probably have to lead ’em here,” Joe yelled back. “Hurry up!”

  No answer.

  And that was the last we saw of AllieCat.

  One

  Cannonballs Fly

  May 28

  My summer had started with a bang. That was the day I met Allie.

  Mom and Dad are divorced, but sort of friends. Dad is an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota. He was spending his sabbatical year in Egypt, doing Nefertiti research. He called mom and told her she should come to Egypt for the summer, that she’d love it.

  At first she said, “Absolutely not. Are you crazy? Because that’s what a divorce means.”

  She didn’t know I was listening to her half of the conversation, and she asked Dad, “Sid, isn’t she in Amarna with you?”

  “Does Dad have a girlfriend?” I asked Mom later.

  “He did.”

  When he called me the next weekend, I asked him, “Dad, do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Not anymore, Sadie,” he said.

  “Who was she?” I asked. “How come I never met her?”

  “A Ph.D. student. She came with me to do research, but we drove each other nuts. We can’t work together. She went back to Minneapolis.”

  “So now you want Mom back?”

  “Sadie, don’t get your hopes up. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back together. But your mother and I work well together. And she’d love it here. She’d thrive.”

  Well, God forbid I should stand in the way of my own mother thriving. Talk about a guilt trip if I complained about getting ditched for the summer while my parents were in Africa. I did, anyway—complain, that is—but then I thought they might get back together, so I quit whining and packed for the summer at Uncle Scout’s.

  Mom had her ticket for Cairo in her bag when we showed up—mom, my eight-year-old brother Timmy, and me, suitcases and my mountain bike loading down her Subaru Forester, which she let me drive for once—for the traditional Memorial Day picnic at Scout and Susan’s house in LeHillier, Minnesota, a township within the city limits of Mankato. And let me tell you, LeHillier is the armpit of America.

  Mom’s whole extended family—Scout and Susan and thei
r four kids, Grandma, Mom’s other brother Thomas and his wife Janie and two kids—were all at Scout’s. They were waiting for us so they could start eating.

  For dessert, Mom passed around her famous peanut butter pie. “Can’t tell you thanks enough, Scout and Susan, for letting Sadie and Timmy stay here all summer.”

  Susan bit her lip and looked at Scout. Uncle Scout bellowed, “Absolutely dee-lighted to have them.” He winked at me.

  Susan looked at her lap. Finally she took a bite of pie and looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time. “Sadie, would you mind babysitting sometimes?”

  I looked at Mom. The truth was yes, I would mind. I’d mind a lot. But that would be an anti-mom-thriving kind of thing to say. I looked around at Stevie sitting next to Timmy, at Megan, at little Josie in her booster chair, and at Stacie crammed into her highchair, food all over the place. I breathed out. And I said, “I can babysit, but I have to get a job this summer. And I need to ride my bike every day.”

  Aunt Janie looked at Aunt Susan and said sideways to me, “You need to ride your bike? You may think you need a job, but riding your bike isn’t something a person needs—”

  “I want to start mountain-bike racing this year, so yeah. I need to.” I’d been too chicken to race so far. This year, I was determined to do it, and Mom knew it. I looked at her to back me up. I didn’t mind making her feel a little bit guilty about ditching us for the summer.

  Mom gave me that please work with me here look, and I shot back a look that said I hoped my thriving mattered to her a tiny little bit, too. She played the diplomat. “Seems like you’d have time for all three. And this is the perfect location to mountain bike.”

  I looked back at Aunt Susan and let out a sigh. On purpose. To be a bit dramatic. It wasn’t my fault we needed a place to stay, after all—it was Mom’s—but I was the one who had to pay. I also knew I could make it worse or I could cooperate, but I didn’t feel much like cooperating. “I can babysit. Some.” I looked down. “I mean, sure. Yes.”