The Mystery at Saratoga Read online

  “It’s not too late, Trixie,” her mother replied calmly. “I managed to leave setting the table and making some instant iced tea for you to take care of.” Seeing her daughter’s worried look, she asked, “What’s the matter, Trixie?”

  “Yeah, Trixie, what’s the matter?” piped Bobby Belden. Bobby made it a point to always be near the center of activity in the Belden household, and tonight he was making crayon squiggles in a coloring book while his mother bustled around the kitchen.

  Trixie almost blurted out the whole story, but she bit her lower lip to keep the words from tumbling out. It wouldn’t do to have Bobby find out that his friend Regan had disappeared—not now, when Trixie was still so upset that she might make the situation sound worse than it was. Instead, she paused a moment to catch her mother’s eye. “It’s nothing,” she said, tilting her head almost imperceptibly toward her younger brother.

  An equally subtle nod from her mother told Trixie that the subject would be dropped for now and brought up later, when Bobby was out of earshot.

  She had forgotten about the sixth sense that Bobby seemed to have for things he wasn’t supposed to know about. “Were you at the Manor House, Trixie?” he demanded. “Did you see Regan? Did he tell you to say hello to me, Trixie? He always tells you to say hello to me. Regan’s my very best friend in the whole world!”

  Trixie gathered her brother in her arms and hugged him. She felt as if putting her arms around him might somehow protect him from the truth— that his friend had disappeared, and no one knew where he had gone or why. “I wasn’t at the Manor House,” she said, “so I didn’t see Regan. But if I had, I’m sure he would have told me to say hello. He is a good friend, Bobby—to all of us.”

  Bobby wriggled out of Trixie’s arms and went happily back to his coloring book. Trixie hurried to the cupboard, took down the big glass pitcher, and began to make the iced tea. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother watching her closely, and she knew that Mrs. Belden had guessed that Trixie’s unhappiness was somehow tied to the Wheelers’ groom. I wish I could tell her all about it now, Trixie thought.

  With a sigh, Trixie busied herself with the last-minute preparations for dinner, trying to keep herself from thinking about Regan. That seemed to be impossible. Her thoughts kept returning to the handsome, red-haired man who had left the Manor House so abruptly.

  Trixie had to admit that, as well as she knew Regan, she knew very little about him. He’d lived above the garage ever since he moved to the Manor House with the Wheelers. He went out riding every day, exercising the horses. He probably knew the trails that wound through Mr. Wheeler’s game preserve better than anyone except Mr. Maypenny, who for years and years had owned a little pieshaped piece of land in the middle of what was now the preserve.

  But Regan almost never went into Sleepyside because he hated both driving and riding in automobiles. And as far as Trixie knew, he had only once gone farther away than that since he’d worked at the Manor House. That was when he brought Dan back from New York City, she thought. Maybe his leaving this time is related. She shook her head. If Regan had gone off on family business, surely he would have told Dan about it.

  Trixie searched her mind for some other clue to Regan’s disappearance. He loved sports, but he certainly wouldn’t have left such a mysterious note if he were just going to see a baseball game.

  It would take something really important to get Regan to leave those horses, Trixie thought. But what?

  In her mind, she suddenly heard Regan’s voice. There was something he’d said to her after he’d first seen Jim Frayne. Jim had been hiding from everyone except Honey and Trixie, afraid that the police would return him to his stepfather. Regan had immediately spotted Jim as a runaway, and Trixie and Honey had thought he’d demand that they tell their parents about Jim.

  He hadn’t, though. He hadn’t said why, not in so many words, but— What was it he did say? Trixie thought. She closed her eyes, trying to remember his exact words. Finally they came to her.

  “It wasn’t so very long ago that I was hiding out in barns myself, wondering where in the world the next meal was coming from.” That’s what he’d said. Why had Regan been hiding? It was only now that she realized she’d never asked.

  Bobby’s shrill voice shouting, “Daddy’s home!” interrupted Trixie’s thoughts, and she hurried to help her mother put the rest of the food on the table. “I’ll have to ask Dan if he knows,” she muttered to herself.

  Bobby Belden was very much present during dinner, so Trixie had to force herself to put Regan out of her mind and talk about other things with her family.

  Even so, the talk at the dinner table these days was a far cry from the boisterous, teasing chatter that took place when Mart and Brian were at home. When her brothers had left for camp two weeks earlier, Trixie had breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief. “No more teasing from Mart and no more ‘Now, Trix, be careful’ from Brian. Not for three whole weeks!” she’d rejoiced.

  Her joy had soon turned to loneliness and boredom. Trixie didn’t realize, when her brothers were at home, how dependent she was on their banter for amusement. Also, all the Bob-Whites relied on them to plan activities.

  With Mart, Brian, and Jim at camp, and Dan working for Mr. Maypenny, and Di Lynch visiting her uncle in Arizona, Honey and Trixie had been left on their own. Much as I love Honey, Trixie thought, it would be nice to have somebody else to visit. I’d even help Di baby-sit for her brothers and sisters.

  Di Lynch was the seventh Bob-White. She and her family—which included two young sets of twins, besides Di—had always lived in Sleepyside, but she and Trixie had not become friends until after Di’s father had made a fortune practically overnight and moved his family into the mansion on the other side of the Manor House.

  It's really partly my fault that Di’s gone, Trixie thought. If I hadn't discovered that her Uncle Monty was a phony uncle—I mean, that her phony Uncle Monty was a phony—and that her real Uncle Monty was her real uncle, then she wouldn't have had anyone to visit in Arizona this summer.

  Mrs. Belden’s voice broke through Trixie’s confused thoughts. “Time to clear the table, dear.” Trixie started, then stood up. Picking up a half-full bowl of mashed potatoes, she started for the kitchen. “There seems to be a perponderance of leftovers, as Mart would say.”

  “That’s probably what Mart would say,” her mother agreed. “But the word is preponderance. Still, I know what you mean. Mart loves food even more than he loves to use big words. When he and Brian are away, I can’t seem to scale down my recipes enough to avoid leftovers. However, these mashed potatoes can be turned into potato patties for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Yummy-yum!” Trixie exclaimed.-“You know how I love potato patties. Now I wish I hadn’t eaten that second helping of potatoes and gravy tonight, so there’d be more left over for tomorrow!”

  Mrs. Belden smiled indulgently. “There’ll be plenty.” Her face turned somber. “Now, Trixie, while your father is reading the evening funny papers to your brother, why don’t you tell me what’s happened to Regan?”

  Trixie sank into a chair and propped her elbows on the kitchen table. “We don’t know what’s happened to him, Moms. That’s just the problem.” Trixie repeated everything that she’d learned that afternoon at the clubhouse. “He’s just gone,” she concluded sadly.

  “I’m sure he’ll come back as soon as he can,” Mrs. Belden said consolingly. “Regan has always seemed to be very happy here in Sleepyside. Did Honey think that Mr. Wheeler would hold Regan’s job for him?”'

  Trixie nodded. “That’s the only good news in the whole thing. Miss Trask told Honey that Regan has loads of vacation and sick time coming. Why, the only time he’s ever taken off was when he went to get Dan. Miss Trask says there’ll be no question of trying to find a permanent replacement for Regan until that time is used up. Even then, she says, she’ll give him a leave of absence if he’s contacted her to let her know why he’s away.”

>   “Well, then,” Mrs. Belden said calmly, “I don’t think we have anything to be alarmed about yet. We’ll just tell Bobby, if he asks, that Regan has gone on a little vacation, and that he’ll probably be back soon. The last part won’t even be a white lie, because I really believe that he will.”

  Trixie nodded half-heartedly, but as she picked up a dish towel and began to dry the dishes her mother was washing, she realized that she, herself, didn’t really believe that Regan would be back.

  Why, oh, why do Mart and Brian and Jim have to be away? Honey and Trixie had found Jim when he ran away to upstate New York, and at the same time the two girls had solved the mystery of Mr. Lynch’s stolen trailer, the Robin. But ever since then, the boys had been just as much a part of the mysteries they’d been involved in as Honey and Trixie had. Will Honey and Dan and I be able to find Regan without their help? I guess all we can do is try.

  “The library it is,” she murmured aloud.

  A Shadow from the Past ● 3

  TRIXIE HAD FINISHED drying the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen, and she was waiting impatiently outside, pacing up and down the front walk, when Honey and Dan rode up the driveway.

  “I thought you’d never get here!” she exclaimed. “Now, Trixie,” Honey chided her, “it’s not very late at all. In fact, Miss Trask had the cook serve our dinner early, so that I could get away.”

  “Did you tell her where we were going, and why?” Trixie asked.

  Honey nodded. “She just sort of raised one eyebrow when I told her. Then she said, ‘I know how fond all of you are of Regan. But please, please, Honey, don’t become involved in another one of your mysteries!’ ”

  Trixie giggled at Honey’s perfect impersonation of Miss Trask’s low, well-modulated voice. “I just told Moms that we were going to the library. I didn’t tell her why, but I’d already told her about Regan’s disappearance. That’s probably why she gave me that same ‘here-we-go-again’ look that Miss Trask gave you.”

  “I can’t understand why they’d think that we were about to get involved in solving a mystery,” Dan Mangan said sarcastically. “I mean, it isn’t as though it’s ever happened before.”

  Trixie and Honey both laughed self-consciously. Ever since the two teen-age girls had met and had been involved with trying to help Jim Frayne find the fortune his uncle had left him, it seemed that they were constantly stumbling across mysteries. Their parents warned them against trying to solve them—and they often warned each other, too. Nevertheless, the Bob-Whites already had to their credit a long string of cases marked “closed.”

  “It isn’t really a laughing matter,” Dan said sternly, although there was still a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “You girls have got yourselves into a lot of trouble trying to solve these mysteries. If I were your parents, I’d be worried, too.”

  Trixie and Honey both turned serious as they remembered some of the narrow escapes they’d had in the course of their adventures.

  “I know you’re right, Dan,” Trixie confessed. “And I promise, I won’t ever let it happen again. When—if I ever again uncover another mystery, I promise I’ll run straight to the nearest police officer—”

  “Wait a minute, Dan!” Trixie interrupted herself, almost causing Dan to fall off his bike in his confusion. “Speaking of running reminded me of something I was going to ask you about—something Regan once said to Honey and me. It was about his having been a runaway himself, when he was just about Jim’s age. Do you know why he was running or what he was running from?”

  Dan shook his head. “We’ve never talked much about the past—his or mine. Those are unpleasant memories for both of us. But Regan was an orphan, just as I was. If you knew much about the kinds of places they let orphans live in, you wouldn’t have to ask why he ran away. Those places can be pretty depressing.”

  Sensitive Honey shuddered. “I remember reading Oliver Twist a few years ago. That was back before we moved to Sleepyside, when I was always away from my parents, at boarding school and summer camps, and before I had Jim for a brother. I had nightmares for weeks.

  “Finally Miss Trask, who was my math teacher back then, noticed how pale and tired I looked and asked me what was wrong. I burst into tears and told her that I was afraid something might happen to my parents while they were on one of their trips. Then I’d be an orphan, just like poor Oliver, I told her, and I’d have to go to one of those dreadful places.” Honey looked as though she might burst into tears again, remembering that long-ago incident.

  “Orphanages today aren’t like the ones that Dickens wrote about, Honey,” Dan told her. “You have plenty to eat and a warm bed to sleep in. What’s missing, I guess, is a feeling that you belong... that somebody loves you.

  “So, Trixie,” Dan concluded, “maybe Regan wasn’t running away from anything at all. Maybe he was running toward something—a home, like the one he found with the Wheelers.”

  “Then it makes even less sense that he would have left it so mysteriously, unless something really awful happened,” Trixie pointed out. Bending low over the handlebars of her bike, she began to pedal as hard and as fast as she could. “Come on!” she called back over her shoulder to Honey and Dan. “Let’s get to the library and try to find out what this is all about.”

  The effort that it took to keep up their fast pace made it impossible for the three Bob-Whites to talk. Trixie, left once again to her thoughts, found memories of another bike ride into Sleepyside returning to her mind. On that ride, all of the Bob-Whites had been together, leading the other riders back into Sleepyside at the conclusion of the bikeathon. The night before, Trixie had been captured by a gang of counterfeiters. Nick Roberts, the young artist whose need for art supplies had inspired the bikeathon, had helped her to escape.

  I wonder if this mystery will end as happily as that one did, Trixie mused.

  At the library, Trixie headed straight for the card catalog. Looking through the cards in the section marked “Horse Racing,” she copied down a few of the Dewey decimal numbers on a-piece of scratch paper and headed for the shelves where those books would be found.

  “It isn’t a very scientific way of doing research,” Trixie admitted, “but leafing through the books that are out on the shelves takes less patience than reading all the catalog descriptions.”

  “Just make sure you put the books back exactly where they were, Trixie,” Honey warned. “If you’re the least bit unsure, put them on one of the carts marked ‘To be shelved.’ Otherwise, you’ll make it harder for the next person to find the books he wants.”

  Dan Mangan nodded in agreement. “In some big-city libraries, the stacks are all closed to the public, because so many books have been stolen or misplaced. If you want a certain book, you have to ask a librarian to send for it. You can’t browse at all.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Trixie promised, pulling a book from a shelf. Turning to the index, she quickly scanned the columns for a mention of Worthington or Worthington Farms. “Nothing here,” she said, reshelving the book.

  Dan, Honey, and Trixie pulled book after book off the shelves. They tried to concentrate only on the task at hand, but the three horse-loving teenagers were continually distracted by interesting bits of information, which they shared with one another.

  “Did you know that Thoroughbreds have existed as a breed for over two hundred and forty years?” Honey asked.

  “I didn’t know that,” Trixie admitted. “I did know that Thoroughbreds are a breed of horses, though, which is more than some people do. Why, just the other day, I read an article in which someone mentioned a ‘Thoroughbred Arabian.’ What the writer meant was ‘purebred Arabian.’ ”

  “Listen to this!” Dan exclaimed. “When a horse is racing, his stride is twenty-six feet long!”

  Trixie whistled softly, while Honey, conscious of the Sleepyside librarian’s love of silence, rounded her lips in a silent “Oh!”

  “And,” Dan continued, “with every stride, the horse’s entire weight
of up to twelve hundred pounds is put on one ankle that’s only five inches in diameter. That’s narrower than some human beings’ ankles!”

  “It’s amazing that the legs don’t just snap,” Honey said.

  “Sometimes they do,” Trixie responded sadly, looking up from a passage she was reading. “I was just reading about Ruffian, the filly who had to be destroyed after she broke her leg during a match race.”

  “Here’s a picture of Native Dancer, who won twenty-one of his twenty-two major races, and only lost the Kentucky Derby when another horse bumped against him. Isn’t he beautiful?” Honey held the picture up for the others to see.

  “He is beautiful,” Trixie said, “but he’s not the clue to Regan’s disappearance. I’m beginning to doubt that we’ll find what we’re looking for.”

  “Well, let’s keep looking, anyway,” Honey said. “There are lots of books left. I had no idea that there were so many books on horses at the Sleepyside library!”

  “There are a lot of people in the area who own and raise horses, Honey—as you should know, since your own father is one of them,” Dan pointed out.

  “And there are probably just as many people who would love to be able to own and raise horses but can’t afford to—as I should know, since I used to be one of them. Of course,” Trixie added grandly, “that was before your dear father kindly bought the Manor House and provided me with more fine horses to keep exercised than I can possibly find time for.”

  Honey began to giggle uncontrollably at Trixie’s impression of a haughty society matron, incongruous as it was coming from a freckle-faced teen-ager in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans.

  Trixie began to giggle, too, and the librarian began to give the girls disapproving looks as Dan tried his best to shush them without making any more noise—and without breaking out into laughter himself.

  At last Trixie and Honey brought their giggling under control. But Trixie was still struggling to keep another peal of laughter from breaking through as she reached to the shelf and took down a book called Off the Track.