A Little Vicious

When Maude Calhoun disappeared, her town mourned her, and we forgot her. That is, until a girl is dead and one of us killed her-or so Maude claims.

She has sent out six tapes, polished and perfumed, with our names, singing soliloquies of her three sacred laws:

Rule No. 1: All must listen to the tapes together.

Rule No. 2:Each tape shall be safeguarded, its skeletons shared with none.

Rule No. 3: To transgress these laws or fail to find the next tape will invite the gravest of punishments.

Maude knows of the vicious secrets that we keep and the lies we choke on. But the more the line between sense and madness blurs as we play her game, the more we are forced to trust each other. We know none of us killed the girl. After all, perfect suspects rarely seek the truth-or do they just bury it first? But dead ends around every curve, it seems like the list is narrowing.

Someone killed a girl.

And who's to say that one of us isn't truly a little vicious?