Produced by Darleen Dove, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries. THE GIRL AT CENTRAL BY GERALDINE BONNER Author of "The Emigrant Trail," "The Book of Evelyn," etc. ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1915 Copyright, 1915, by _D. Appleton and Company_ _Copyright, 1914, 1915, by The Curtis Publishing Company_ _Printed in the United States of America_ [Illustration: _'Mark my words, there’s going to be trouble at Mapleshade’"_] CONTENTS · LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS · I · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX · X · XI · XII · XIII · XIV · XV · XVI · XVII LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 'Mark my words, there’s going to be trouble at Mapleshade’ Sylvia was in her riding dress, looking a picture A day later he was arrested at Firehill and taken to Bloomington jail I came down to the parlor where Babbitts was waiting I Poor Sylvia Hesketh! Even now, after this long time, I can’t think of it without a shudder, without a comeback of the horror of those days after the murder. You remember it—the Hesketh mystery? And mystery it surely was, baffling, as it did, the police and the populace of the whole state. For who could guess why a girl like that, rich, beautiful, without a care or an enemy, should be done to death as she was. Think of it—at five o’clock sitting with her mother taking tea in the library at Mapleshade and that same night found dead—murdered—by the side of a lonesome country road, a hundred and eighteen miles away. It’s the story of this that I’m going to tell here, and as you’ll get a good deal of me before I’m through, I’d better, right now at the start, introduce myself. I’m Molly Morganthau, day operator in the telephone exchange at Longwood, New Jersey, twenty-three years old, dark, slim, and as for my looks—well, put them down as "medium" and let it go at that. My name’s Morganthau because my father was a Polish Jew—a piece worker on pants—but my two front names, Mary McKenna, are after my mother, who was from County Galway, Ireland. I was raised in an East Side tenement, but I went steady to the Grammar school and through the High and I’m not throwing bouquets at myself when I say I made a good record. That’s how I come to be nervy enough to write this story—but you’ll see for yourself. Only just keep in mind that I’m more at home in front of a switchboard than at a desk.