Chapter 1

The Hanging

*The girl's body dangles from the tall, iron gates guarding the school's entrance. A closer examination shows the ends of a red silk tie peeking out like a cardinal on a winter branch, forcing her neck into a brutal angle. She wears her graduation robe and multi coloured stole as if knowing she'll never see the achievement. The last tendrils of dawn's fog laze about her legs, which are five feet from the ground. It rained overnight and the thin robe clings to her body, dew sparkling on the edges. There is no breeze, no birds singing or squirrels industriously gathering for the long winter ahead, no cars passing along the street, only the cool, misty morning air and the gentle metallic creaking of the gates under the weight of the dead girl. She is suspended in midair, her back to the street, her face hidden behind a curtain of dirty, wet hair, dark from the rains. Because of the damage to her face, it will take them some time to officially identify her. In the beginning, it isn't even clear she attends the school, despite wearing The Goode School robes.But she does The fingerprints will prove it. Of course, there are a few people who know exactly who is hanging from the school's gates. Know who, and know why. But they will never tell. As word spreads of the apparent suicide, The Goode School's all-female student body begin to gather, paying silent, terrified homage to their fallen compatriot. The gates are closed and locked — as they always are overnight — buttressed on either side by an ivy-covered, ten-foot-high, redbrick wall, but it tapers off into a knee-wall near the back entrance to the school parking lot, and so is escapable by foot. The girls of Goode silently filter out from the dorms, around the end of Old West Hall and Old East Hall to Front Street — the main street of March burg, the small Virginia town housing the elite prep school — and take up their positions in front of the gate in a wedge of crying, scared, worried young women who glance over shoulders looking for the one who is missing from their ranks. To reassure themselves this isn't their friend, their sister, their roommate.Another girl joins them, but no one notices she comes from the opposite direction, from town. She was not behind the redbrick wall.Whispers rise in the morning air, nothing loud enough to be overheard but forming a single question.Who is it? Who?A solitary siren pierces the morning air, the sound bleeding upward from the bottom of the hill, a rising crescendo.Someone has called the sheriff.Goode perches like a gargoyle above the city's small down‐town, huddles behind its ivy-covered brick wall. The campus is flanked by two blocks of restaurants, bars, and necessary shops.The buildings are tied together with trolleys — enclosed glass and wood bridges that make it easy for the girls to move from **building to building in climate-controlled comfort.*

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