Read Online Bluegrass Peril by Virginia Smith - Free Book Online Page A

contents and piled them on the surface of the desk.
    Two hours later, Scott stepped into the office. “What’s all this?”
    Kneeling on the floor, Becky looked up. “A bunch of junk, mostly, from Neal’s desk. I started out trying to make a folder for everything, but there’s such a mishmash of stuff here I decided it would be easier to try to sort it into broader categories.” She gestured to the eight piles of papers, receipts and clippings spread over the floor.
    Scott dropped onto the only seat in the office besides the desk chairs, a dilapidated old wing chair donated by someone years ago. Becky avoided it, because it smelled like a musty attic.
    “What did he have in there?”
    “Everything.” Becky picked up the nearest pile. “There are hundreds of newspaper clippings. It’s like he saved every article he ever read that had anything to do with horses or racing.” She lifted the top one and held it up. “Here’s one about Japanese races earning graded status, whatever that means. There’s one on stud farms in Turkey and a bunch about individual horses. There’s even an article in here about horse cloning.” She put the clipping back with the others and reached for the next pile. “And there are dozens of letters from people who’ve been on the tour and wrote to thank him.” She shook her head. “Why would he keep those? Some of them are two years old.”
    “No idea.” Scott bent over and picked up a handful of register receipts from the pile nearest him. “Shouldn’t these be in a financial file somewhere?”
    “No, he was very good about filing financial records for the Pasture. Those are personal receipts, as far as I can tell.”
    Scott read from the top one. “Two pair of jeans and a men’s shirt from Wal-Mart.” He shuffled through the next few. “Shoes, groceries.” With a shrug, he put them back on the pile.
    “Here’s something interesting, though I have no idea what it is.” She crawled forward on her knees to reach the pile nearest the desk. “There are more than fifty notes in Neal’s handwriting that look like this.”
    She picked up the top one, a paper torn from a spiral notebook, a couple of ragged ribbons waving from the edge as she held it up for Scott’s inspection. Written on it were rows of numbers that made no sense at all.
    Scott took it from her. “2.5—#5w—BC3—8-1 Pd 20.” He read the numbers and letters on the first line slowly, then his gaze rose to catch hers. “This is the record for a bet. See here, up at the top, the date is November 4. That’s the day the Breeder’s Cup ran last year, so I’m guessing BC3 means the third race. The five is the number five horse in that race, the W means he bet it to win, and it went off at eight to one.” He studied it a moment longer. “Two point five must stand for two hundred fifty dollars, and this says the horse won, so it paid two thousand dollars.”
    Becky gasped. “Two thousand dollars? On one race?” Oh, what she could do with an extra two thousand dollars. There were a bunch of rows on that sheet in Scott’s hand. Neal must have bet on dozens of horses.
    “He got lucky on that one.” Scott’s eyes moved as he scanned the sheet. “Looks like he didn’t come out a winner at the end of the day, though. He was out close to eight thousand dollars.”
    “Eight thousand?” So much for winning two thousand in one race. Becky’s head swam at the thought of losing eight thousand dollars in a single day. She knew Neal liked to bet, because she overheard him talking on the phone quite a bit. But that was a lot of money! “Are you sure that’s what those numbers mean, Scott?”
    Scott shook his head slowly. “Not entirely. Every bettor has his own way of keeping tabs on his bets. We could check the track statistics for that day to be sure, maybe pull the racing forms over at the Keeneland Library.”
    “Oh!” Becky turned and picked up a pile of newspapers. The title on all of them was Daily