Sound Carries

25.

Suicide. It was the word on everyone's lips, long before any official report had come out.

The pressure was too much. The stress of the program had gotten to her, and so she had jumped off the tower.

That was where they had found her body. She had been buried for three weeks under eight feet of snow, at the base of the tallest tower at the Conolly Institute, the same place where all seven of us had stood only four months earlier. Of course that was the conclusion they would come to. Suicide was the only option that made sense.

I think the worst part of that week was the sharp relief I felt that it was over. The waiting, at least, was over.

I had known that she was dead somehow, for long enough that the confirmation of it wasn't necessarily sad so much as weighty.

It had happened. The worst-case scenario had become reality, and now all that was left to do was move forward.

-

They found her body at eleven twenty-six am, and the rest of us were notified at two seventeen pm. I'm not certain why I remember these specific numbers so clearly, but those were the precise times. They are ingrained in my brain – if I close my eyes now I can still see the position of the hands on the clock that sat above the fireplace when they came to tell us.

We had been in the library, everyone except Audra, when Dr. Davis and Dr. Rutledge had both stepped into the room, their faces drawn.

I think we all knew before either of them spoke. I had been right in the middle of reading aloud a paragraph about the specific details of Vincenzo Bellini's life and death, and when I saw the movement in the corner of my eye and recognized Dr. Rutledge's cane, I stopped midsentence, suddenly unable to speak.

"Oh." It was the only word that came to mind, and it had left my mouth in a gust.

"There's no easy way to say this." Dr. Rutledge said, and then he went ahead and said it as though the words were, in fact, easy. "I have some troubling news. Earlier this morning, as you might know, there was a search of the grounds here at Conolly."

None of us could look at each other. It didn't matter that we didn't know, because the fact of it was staring us in the face.

"Hannah Frazier has been located."

It was completely silent in the room.

"Her body was taken into town for forensic evaluation, and Dr. Davis and I were called in for identification."

Audra let out a squeak and began to rock back and forth in her chair.

"What happened?" Cecily's voice had the slightest tremor.

Dr. Rutledge took a long minute to survey the room. His eyes betrayed nothing. When he spoke, his voice was clear. "She jumped."

It didn't feel like the truth, even then.

-

This time, we were called in to the police station in town, since the roads were accessible.

Cecily was irate. "What could they possibly want from us now?" She ripped a page from her leather-bound journal with such force that the book fell off of the bed and clattered onto the floor. "They've already drawn their conclusions, haven't they? They've decided what happened. Why do they need our opinions?"

Everybody was handling the news very differently, and Cecily's method of coping was through exceptional fury.

"It's just cruel, at this point." Her mouth was set in a grim line.