Good Girls Lie Read online

  Goode girls don’t lie...

  Perched atop a hill in the tiny town of Marchburg, Virginia, The Goode School is a prestigious prep school known as a Silent Ivy. The boarding school of choice for daughters of the rich and influential, it accepts only the best and the brightest. Its elite status, long-held traditions and honor code are ideal for preparing exceptional young women for brilliant futures at Ivy League universities and beyond. But a stranger has come to Goode, and this ivy has turned poisonous.

  In a world where appearances are everything, as long as students pretend to follow the rules, no one questions the cruelties of the secret societies or the dubious behavior of the privileged young women who expect to get away with murder. But when a popular student is found dead, the truth cannot be ignored. Rumors suggest she was struggling with a secret that drove her to suicide.

  But look closely...because there are truths and there are lies, and then there is everything that really happened.

  J.T. ELLISON’s pulse-pounding new novel examines the tenuous bonds of friendship, the power of lies and the desperate lengths people will go to to protect their secrets.

  Praise for the novels of J.T. Ellison

  “Outstanding… Ellison is at the top of her game.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Tear Me Apart

  “A compelling story with a moving message.”

  —Booklist on Tear Me Apart

  “Well-paced and creative… An inventive thriller with a horrifying reveal and a happy ending.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Tear Me Apart

  “Exceptional… Ellison’s best work to date.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Lie to Me

  “Comparisons to Gone Girl due to the initial story structure are expected, but Ellison has crafted a much better story that will still echo long after the final page is turned.”

  —Associated Press on Lie to Me

  “Immensely readable…lush.”

  —Booklist on Lie to Me

  “Fans of Paula Hawkins, A.S.A. Harrison, Mary Kubica, and Karin Slaughter will want to add this to their reading list.”

  —Library Journal on Lie to Me

  “The domestic noir subgenre focuses on the truly horrible things people sometimes do to those they love, and J.T. Ellison’s latest, Lie to Me, is one of the best…an absolute must-read.”

  —Mystery Scene Magazine

  “Wonderful… A one-more-chapter, don’t-eat-dinner, stay-up-late sensation.”

  —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author, on Lie to Me

  Also by New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison

  TEAR ME APART

  LIE TO ME

  FIELD OF GRAVES

  WHAT LIES BEHIND

  WHEN SHADOWS FALL

  EDGE OF BLACK

  A DEEPER DARKNESS

  WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE

  SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH

  THE IMMORTALS

  THE COLD ROOM

  JUDAS KISS

  14

  ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS

  Look for J.T. Ellison’s next novel

  available soon from MIRA Books.

  J.T Ellison

  Good Girls Lie

  For all the girls out there seeking to better themselves through education,

  I salute you!

  Vita Abundantior.

  And, as always, for Randy.

  J.T. Ellison is an award-winning New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author with thrillers published in twenty-seven countries and fifteen languages. She is also the Emmy Award–winning cohost of A Word on Words, a literary interview television show. She lives in Nashville with her husband and two small gray minions, known as cats in some cultures. Visit www.jtellison.com or @thrillerchick for more.

  Contents

  Quote

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  August

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  June

  Chapter 14

  August

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  June

  Chapter 24

  Quote

  October

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Past

  Chapter 31

  October

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Quote

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Quote

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  July

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  October

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Epilogue

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  “And now I’m going to tell you about a scorpion. This scorpion wanted to cross a river, so he asked the frog to carry him. ‘No,’ said the frog, ‘no thank you. If I let you on my back, you may sting me and the sting of the scorpion is death.’ ‘Now, where,’ asked the scorpion, ‘is the logic in that? For scorpions always try to be logical. If I sting you, you will die. I will drown.’ So the frog was convinced and allowed the scorpion on his back. But just in the middle of the river, he felt a terrible pain and realized that, after all, the scorpion had stung him. ‘Logic!’ cried the dying frog as he started under, bearing the scorpion down with him. ‘There is no logic in this!’ ‘I know,’ said the scorpion, ‘but I can’t help it—it’s my character.’”

  —Orson Welles, Mr. Arkadin

  1

&
nbsp; 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 multicolored stole as if knowing she’ll never see the achievement. It rained overnight and the thin robe clings to her body, dew sparkling on the edges. The last tendrils of dawn’s fog laze about her legs, which are five feet from the ground.

  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 Marchburg, 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 from the small crowd, 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 downtown, huddles behind its ivy-covered brick wall. The campus is flanked by two blocks of restaurants, bars, and necessary shops. The school’s 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. It is quiet, dignified, isolated. As are the girls who attend the school; serious, studious. Good. Goode girls are always good. They go on to great things.

  The headmistress, or dean, as she prefers to call herself, Ford Julianne Westhaven, great-granddaughter several times removed from the founder of The Goode School, arrives in a flurry, her driver, Rumi, braking the family Bentley with a screech one hundred feet away from the gates. The crowd in the street blocks the car and, for a moment, the sight of the dangling girl. No one stops to think about why the dean might be off campus this early in the morning. Not yet, anyway.

  Dean Westhaven rushes out of the back of the dove-gray car and runs to the crowd, her face white, lips pressed firmly together, eyes roving. It is a look all the girls at Goode recognize and shrink from.

  The dean’s irritability is legendary, outweighed only by her kindness. It is said she alone approves every application to the school, that she chooses the Goode girls by hand for their intelligence, their character. Her say is final. Absolute. But for all her goodness, her compassion, her kindness, Dean Westhaven has a temper.

  She begins to gather the girls into groups, small knots of natural blondes and brunettes and redheads, no fantastical dye allowed. Some shiver in oversize school sweatshirts and running shorts, some are still in their pajamas. The dean is looking for the chick missing from her flock. She casts occasional glances over her shoulder at the grim scene behind her. She, too, is unsure of the identity of the body, or so it seems. Perhaps she simply doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth.

  The siren grows to an earsplitting shriek and dies midrange, a soprano newly castrated. The deputies from the sheriff’s office have arrived, the sheriff hot on their heels. Within moments, they cordon off the gates, move the students back, away, away. One approaches the body, cataloging; another begins taking discreet photographs, a macabre paparazzi.

  They speak to Dean Westhaven, who quietly, breathlessly, admits she hasn’t approached the body and has no idea who it might be.

  She is lying, though. She knows. Of course, she knows. It was inevitable.

  The sheriff, six sturdy feet of muscle and sinew, approaches the gate and takes a few shots with his iPhone. He reaches for the foot of the dead girl and slowly, slowly turns her around.

  The eerie morning silence is broken by the words, soft and gasping, murmurs moving sinuously through the crowd of girls, their feet shuffling in the morning chill, the fog’s tendrils disappearing from around the posts.

  They say her name, an unbroken chain of accusation and misery.

  Ash.

  Ash.

  Ash.

  2

  THE LIES

  There are truths, and there are lies, and then there is everything that really happened, which is where you and I will meet. My truth is your lie, and my lie is your truth, and there is a vast expanse between them.

  Take, for example, Ash Carlisle.

  Six feet tall, glowing skin, a sheaf of blond hair in a ponytail. She wears black jeans with rips in the knees and a loose green-and-white plaid button-down with white Adidas Stan Smiths; casual, efficient travel clothes. A waiter delivers a fresh cup of tea to her nest in the British Airways first-class lounge, and when she smiles her thanks, he nearly drops his tray—so pure and happy is that smile. The smile of an innocent.

  Or not so innocent? You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Soon.

  She’s perfected that smile, by the way. Practiced it. Stood in the dingy bathroom of the flat on Broad Street and watched herself in the mirror, lips pulling back from her teeth over and over and over again until it becomes natural, until her eyes sparkle and deep dimples appear in her cheeks. It is a full-toothed smile, her teeth straight and blindingly white, and when combined with the china-blue eyes and naturally streaked blond hair, it is devastating.

  Isn’t this what a sociopath does? Work on their camouflage? What better disguise is there than an open, thankful, gracious smile? It’s an exceptionally dangerous tool, in the right hands.

  And how does a young sociopath end up flying first class, you might ask? You’ll be assuming her family comes from money, naturally, but let me assure you, this isn’t the case. Not at all. Not really. Not anymore.

  No, the dean of the school sent the ticket.

  Why?

  Because Ash Carlisle leads a charmed life, and somehow managed to hoodwink the dean into not only paying her way but paying for her studies this first term, as well. A full scholarship, based on her exemplary intellect, prodigy piano playing, and sudden, extraordinary need. Such a shame she lost her parents so unexpectedly.

  Yes, Ash is smart. Smart and beautiful and talented, and capable of murder. Don’t think for a moment she’s not. Don’t let her fool you.

  Sipping the tea, she types and thinks, stops to chew on a nail, then reads it again. The essay she is obsessing over gained her access to the prestigious, elite school she is shipping off to. The challenges ahead—transferring to a new school, especially one as impossible to get into as The Goode School—frighten her,
excite her, make her more determined than ever to get away from Oxford, from her past.

  A new life. A new beginning. A new chapter for Ash.

  But can you ever escape your past?

  Ash sets down the tea, and I can tell she is worrying again about fitting in. Marchburg, Virginia—population five hundred on a normal summer day, which expands to seven hundred once the students arrive for term—is a long way from Oxford, England. She worries about fitting in with the daughters of the DC elite—daughters of senators and congressmen and ambassadors and reporters and the just plain filthy rich. She can rely on her looks—she knows how pretty she is, isn’t vain about it, exactly, but knows she’s more than acceptable on the looks scale—and on her intelligence, her exceptional smarts. Some would say cunning, but I think this is a disservice to her. She’s both book-smart and street-smart, the rarest of combinations. Despite her concerns, if she sticks to the story, she will fit in with no issues.

  The only strike against her, of course, is me, but no one knows about me.

  No one can ever know about me.

  AUGUST

  Marchburg, Virginia

  3

  THE SCHOOL

  “It’s hard to imagine a prettier place, isn’t it?”

  The driver, who has been trying to engage me in conversation for fifty miles now, isn’t wrong. The farther west we drive into Virginia, the more beautiful the scenery becomes. Wineries, horse farms, stone walls, and charming cottages dot the landscape. The ridge of mountains ahead looks like an ancient dragon curled up and went to sleep and the trees grew over its skeleton. I can see each bump of its spine, the ribs curving gently in the air, moss growing over the sharp tips, and the roots of the trees sprouting from its heart inside.

  It is a far cry from the noise and dirt of the DC airport, and even further from the world I’ve left behind. Good riddance.

  “Mmm-hmm. Pretty.”

  The car turns south, moving along the Blue Ridge, down I-81, and the scenery is breathtaking. I glance at the map stowed in my purse, a detailed topographical imaging of the area surrounding Goode, which is situated near Wintergreen. Another hour to go, at least.

 
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