The Girl at Central

s after the murder. You remember it-the Hesketh mystery? And mystery it surely was, baffling, as it did, the police and the populace of t

e library at Mapleshade and that same night found dead-murdered-by t

nd as you'll get a good deal of me before I'm through

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

ars later. First I was in a department store and then in the Telephone Company. I haven't a relation in the countr

ntry round about. I've made a sort of diagram-it isn't drawn to scale but it gives the general effect, all right-and wi

country, taking in Azalea, twenty-five miles above us on the main line, and running its wires out in a big circle to the scattered houses and the crossroad settlements. It's on Main Street, opposite the station, and from my chair at the switchboard I can see the platform and the trains as they come down from Cherry Junction or up from New York. It's sixty miles

ss those miles and miles of country with a few lights dotted here and there, I felt like I was cast on a desert island. After a while I got used to it and that first spring when the woods began to get a faint greeni

it reaches Bloomington, a big town with hotels and factories and a jail. About twenty miles before it gets to Bloomington it crosses the branch line near Cresset's Farm. There's a little sort of station there-just an open shed-called Cresset's Cross

y, who was such an important figure in the Hesketh mystery and wh

a grove of maples on the top of a mound that in the autumn used to turn red and orange and look like the hillock was in a blaze. The name, they say, came from the Indian days and so did Hochalaga, though what that stands for I don't know. The Reddys had had lots of offers for the lake but never would sell it. They had a sort of little shack there and before Jack's time, when there were no a

y. Not that he ever gave me cause; he's not that kind and neither am I. And let me say right here that there's not a soul ever knew it, he least of all. I guess no one woul

and shirts you see in the back of the magazines-you know the ones. But it wasn't that that got me. It was his ways, always polite, never fresh. If he'd meet me in the street he'd raise his hat as if I was the Que

eard passed on him and that was that he had a violent temper. Casey, his chauffeur, told a story in the village of how one day, when they were passing a farm, they saw an Italian laborer prod a horse with a pitc

law for a living. But he must have had some, for he kept up the house, and had two motors, one just a common roadster a

as on my side-I began to see it oftener and oftener, slowing down as it came along Main Street, swinging round

in this long way so often?

'd see the gray car, they'd lo

ought any more about you than if you were the peg he hangs his hat on-

ay car speeding down Maple Lane-to Maple