Detective and mystery stories; New Jersey -- Fiction; Telephone operators -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Oh, of course, young Reddy. I think it would be a good thing if she
married him. Everybody says he’s a fine fellow, and I tell you now,
Molly, with Sylvia so willful and the doctor so domineering and Mrs.
Fowler being pulled to pieces between them, things at Mapleshade can’t
go on long the way they are."
That was in May. At the end of June the Fowlers went to Bar Harbor with
all their outfit for the summer. After that Jack Reddy didn’t come into
Longwood much. I heard that he was spending a good deal of his time at
the bungalow at Hochalaga Lake, and I did see him a few times meeting
his company at the train—he had some week-end parties out there—and
bringing them back in the gray car.
At the end of September the Fowlers came home. It was great weather,
clear and crisp, with the feel of frost in the air. Most everybody was
out of doors and I saw Sylvia often, sometimes on horseback, sometimes
driving her motor. She was prettier than ever for the change and seemed
like she couldn’t stay in the house. I’d see her riding toward home in
the red light of the sunset, and as I walked back from work her car
often would flash past me, speeding through the early dark toward Maple
Lane.
Anne said they’d had a fairly peaceful summer and she hoped they were
going to get on better. There had only been one row—that was about a man
who was up at Bar Harbor and had met Sylvia and paid her a good deal of
attention. The Doctor had been very angry as he disapproved of the
man—Cokesbury was his name.
"Cokesbury!" I cut in surprised—we were in Anne’s room that
evening—"why, he belongs round here."
Anne had heard that and wanted to know what I knew about him, which I’ll
write down in this place as it seems to fit in and has to be told
somewhere.
When I first came to Longwood, Mr. and Mrs. Cokesbury were living on
their estate, Cokesbury Lodge, about twenty-five miles from us, near
Azalea. They had been in France for a year previous to that, then come
back and taken up their residence in Mr. Cokesbury’s country seat, and
it was shortly after that Mrs. Cokesbury died there, leaving three
children. For a while the widower stayed on with nurses and governesses
to look after the poor motherless kids. Then, the eldest boy taking sick
and nearly dying, he decided to send them to his wife’s parents, who had
wanted them since Mrs. Cokesbury’s death.
So the establishment at the Lodge was broken up and Mr. Cokesbury went
to live in town. There were rumors that the house was to be sold, but in
the spring Sands, the Pullman conductor, told me that Mr. Cokesbury had
been down several times, staying over Sunday and had said he had given
up the idea of selling the place. He told Sands he couldn’t get his
price for it and what was the sense of selling at a loss, especially
when he could come out there and get a breath of country air when he was
scorched up with the city heat?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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