Read Online The Mystery at Saratoga by Julie Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

or month, and the prices told the girls that the rooms would not be like the clean, sunny one that they had just checked into. Here and there they saw a large plate glass window with the word Restaurant painted across it, and beyond the window, scratched wooden tables and rickety-looking chairs. Besides the cheap hotels and restaurants, many of the businesses in this neighborhood were pawnshops, their windows displaying a variety of objects that looked somehow abandoned, as though they knew that their original owners would never reclaim them.
    Honey slipped her arm through Trixie’s, and the girls stood close together. Looking at Honey, Trixie saw that her friend’s hazel eyes were glistening with tears. Poor Honey , she thought. She's so sensitive to other people's feelings. Just being here, in this run-down neighborhood, she's thinking about the people who have to live here and wishing she could do something to help them. Trixie squeezed her friend’s arm and made her own voice sound cheerful as she said, “It’s getting late. We should go back to the hotel, before your parents start to worry about us.”
    Honey nodded silently and turned back in the direction from which they had just come. Then she blurted, “I’m so glad I do have parents to worry about me. Think about all these poor people—people who had to pawn their most prized possessions because they had no one to turn to—” She broke off and swallowed hard.
    Not knowing what to say, Trixie squeezed Honey’s arm again, trying to remind her that she, at least, was not alone.
    “Daddy’s told me about this side of Saratoga, too,” Honey said quietly. “I—I guess I never really understood what he was talking about, though. He says that for some people, gambling becomes a disease. They can’t stop themselves. If they’re winning at the track, they tell themselves that they’re on a lucky streak. They convince themselves that they can win a fortune if they just keep gambling, placing bigger and bigger bets. Then when they start to lose, they still don’t stop gambling. They tell themselves that their luck is bound to change, and they just keep on until their winnings are all gone. Then—” She broke off again and gestured to the scene around them, with its cheap restaurants and pawnshops. “They’ll lose their jobs and leave their families without a penny, just to come here and bet everything they have on the horses.”
    “It’s hard to believe that people could be like that, isn’t it?” Trixie asked quietly.
    Honey nodded. “Daddy says that some of the worst cases are people who work at the track. They become so convinced that they know the horses and can pick winners that they gamble their whole salaries away. They never save up enough money to get ahead—sometimes they can’t even look for a better job, because they’ve borrowed so much money from their employers. Daddy says that sometimes people like that get so desperate that, after they pawn everything they own, they wind up falling in with bad characters who offer to give them money in return for helping them to fix a race. If they’re caught, they’re banned from the track, of course. But sometimes, they just take their money and disappear, probably to go off and do the same thing at some other track, Daddy says.”
    Trixie grabbed Honey’s arm and spun her around so that the two girls were face-to-face. The anger in Trixie’s eyes terrified her gentle friend. “What are you trying to say?” Trixie demanded.
    Realizing what Trixie was thinking, Honey gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, no, Trixie!” she wailed. “You don’t think that I—1 wasn’t even thinking about Regan when I said those things. Please believe me!” Tears again welled in Honey’s hazel eyes, and two spilled over and slid down her cheeks.
    Seeing how sincere her friend was in her denial, Trixie immediately felt ashamed of her suspicions. She put her arms around Honey and hugged her.