Geraldine Bonner

“ It wasn't till the Mapleshade servants began to talk too much that we heard the Fowlers, especially the Doctor, didn't like it.
I hadn't known her long before I began to notice something that interested me. A telephone girl sees so many people and hears such a lot of confidential things on the wire, that she gets to know more than most about what I suppose you'd call human nature. It's a study that's always attracted me and in Miss Sylvia's case there was a double attraction—I was curious about her for myself and I was curious about her because of Jack Reddy. ”

“ Even if the man you love doesn't love you, you don't want to see him fooled. But I said nothing—I'm the close sort—and it wasn't till I came to be friends with Anne Hennessey that I heard the inside facts about the family at Mapleshade. ”

“ What I can say from my own experience is that I'd hardly got my grip unpacked when I began to hear of the folks at Mapleshade.
They lived in great style with a housekeeper, a butler and a French maid for the ladies. In the garage were three automobiles, Mrs. Fowler's limousine, the Doctor's car and a dandy little roadster that belonged to Miss Sylvia. Neither she nor the Doctor bothered much with the chauffeur. They left him to take Mrs. Fowler round and drove themselves, the joke going that if Miss Sylvia ever went broke she could qualify for a chauffeur's job. ”

“ He was a big, powerful chap, with a square, healthy looking face and wide shoulders on him like a prize fighter. He was dressed in a loose coat and knickerbockers and as he talked he had his hands spread out, one on each knee, great brown hands with hair on them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I don't like the situation up at Mapleshade."
I swung my feet on to the floor and sat up on the edge of the bed, nibbling at a chocolate almond.
"Here's where I get dumb," I said, sort of casual to encourage her.
"Sylvia Hesketh's a girl that needs a strong hand over her and there's no one has it. Her father's dead, her mother—poor Mrs. Fowler's only a grown-up baby ready to say black is white if her husband wants her to—and Dr. Fowler's trying to do it and he's going about it all wrong. ”

“ Fowler who was so rich but Miss Hesketh. The late Mr. Hesketh had only left his wife a small fortune, willing the rest—millions, it was said—to his daughter. She was a minor—nineteen—and the trustees of the estate allowed her a lot of money for her maintenance, thirty thousand a year they had it in Longwood.
In spite of the grand way they lived there wasn't much company at Mapleshade. Anne Hennessey, the housekeeper, told me Mrs. Fowler was so dead in love with her husband she didn't want the bother of entertaining people. And the Doctor liked a quiet life. ”

“ 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. ”