Detective and mystery stories; New Jersey -- Fiction; Telephone operators -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"In the garage there. _That’s_ why he wouldn’t rent the house; _that’s_
why he kept going down over Sunday all summer. The year he was in France
he’d done a lot of flying and was fascinated by it. Before he left there
he was an expert aviator, but his wife hated it and it was one of their
grounds of dissension. After she died he had a machine brought down in
sections, set it up himself, and kept it in the garage. Not a soul knew
it. He only flew at night for he wanted it kept a secret."
"Why—what for?"
"Because—here’s the best thing I’ve heard about him—he carried a heavy
life insurance policy secured to his children. Cokesbury’s not a rich
man, though he has a good business, and if he died his children would
have had to live on what their mother left them, which wasn’t much. If
it was known that he was aviating the policy would have been
invalidated, so he indulged his secret passion at night. The isolated
position of the house made it easy to escape detection and his machine
was equipped with a very silent muffler. No one had a glimmering of it,
not even Sylvia.
"The phone message you heard was sent from the station at Jersey City
and when he sent it he _did_ intend coming to Mapleshade in his motor.
When he got to Azalea and found the car unmended in the garage he flew
into a rage, as he thought his plans were blocked. Alone in the Lodge,
ravaged by jealousy, he lost all caution and decided to take out the
aeroplane.
"You remember that there was a moon that night, but that in the evening
the skies were clouded and the air breathless. The darkness and the
weather were on his side and he came down in a field about ten minutes
walk from the house, closing the cut-out as he descended. He was early
and hid himself among some trees where he could watch the front door. He
says it was while he was waiting there for her that the idea came to him
of frustrating an elopement by carrying her off.
"He was laying round in his mind how he would get the truth from her,
when he saw her come out and gave a low whistle. She heard it and came
toward him. It was not till she was close to him and he could see the
outlines of her figure through the dark, that he made out a bag in her
hand. _Then_ he knew for certain she was going and decided on his
course.
"In all his other dealings with her he had found her subtle and evasive.
Now, perhaps because for the first time in her life she had decided on a
positive action, she went straight to the point. Without any preamble
she told him what she was going to do and that within a half-hour Reddy
would be waiting for her in the Lane.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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