The Mystery at Saratoga

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