Adelaide Foss, Maggie Borland, and Beatrice Alfred are known by their classmates at Widowsbury's Madame Gertrude's School for Girls as scary children. Unfairly targeted because of their peculiarities--Adelaide has an uncanny resemblance to a werewolf, Maggie is abnormally strong, and Beatrice claims to be able to see ghosts--the girls spend a good deal of time isolated in the school's inhospitable library facing detention. But when a number of people...