“It’s not really about the food, as you well know. Which reminds me-I’ve been doing some thinking about your problem.”

“My problem.” Because Tess was lying on the floor, her mug of tea balanced on her stomach, she couldn’t lift her head to look at Whitney. “What problem?”

“Your bulimic Jane Doe, remember? Did it occur to you that if she was far enough along to have significant tooth damage, she might have received treatment somewhere?”

“Sure.” Actually, it hadn’t. “But every hospital and psychiatric clinic in the country treats eating disorders now. It doesn’t exactly narrow the search.”

“True. But not every eating disorder clinic is known as the Sugar House.”

Tess removed her mug from her belly and sat up. “What are you talking about?”

“The Sugar House. Didn’t Jane Doe say that’s where she’d been?”

“How do you know that?”

“You mentioned that part to me. Besides, as I told you, I can read upside down. And you were in the bathroom quite a while that evening.”

Whitney preened, pleased with herself. She had removed the ridiculous tweed hat, but she still had on her ancient corduroys and a thick sweater with a border of flowers across the top. Flushed and fair, she could have been hugging a tree in one of those sorority girl composite photos.

“There’s a clinic called the Sugar House?”

“Actually, its alumnae tend to call it the Wedding Cake for some reason. But a Wedding Cake could be a Sugar House as well, right? It’s a small treatment facility on the Eastern Shore, very exclusive. The rates run $2,000 a day, and some girls stay there for up to a year.”

Tess did the math in her head, if adding three zeros to 365 and doubling the figure can be described as doing math. “That’s impossible. No one has $730,000 a year.”

“Oh, some people do,” Whitney assured her. “And I guess there are still some health plans out there that pay for such things, although I don’t know any. It’s for rich girls.”

“Jane Doe wasn’t a rich girl.”

“So you keep insisting. But do you have a better lead?”

She didn’t. But she also didn’t want to encourage Whitney to think of herself as Tess’s partner in this endeavor.

“How did you find this place, anyway?”

“I went through the licensing division of Health and Mental Hygiene and asked for a list of every residential treatment center that handled eating disorders. I noticed the one in Easton because it was near my parents’ place on the shore, and because it had such an odd name. Persephone’s Place. They were very secretive when I called, wouldn’t give out any information and said they took referrals from only a few select doctors. I asked for the doctors’ names, and the woman on the phone said it didn’t matter, they were full for the foreseeable future. According to the licensing information, they can take up to twenty patients. That’s almost $15 million a year, if the beds are staying full.”

Tess would have whistled at that figure, if she could whistle. “They should call it the Green House. But if the woman on the phone is so uncooperative, how did you find out it’s known as the Sugar House?”

“Talked to the competition, of course. You can’t make the kind of money Persephone’s Place is making without making other folks jealous. I found a slightly seedier place in Annapolis-it charges only $1,000 a day-and the director there was happy to tell me that Persephone’s Place was overpriced, overhyped, and poorly named.”

“Poorly named?”

“Would you name an eating disorder clinic after a girl who has to spend half the year in hell, just because she sucked on a few pomegranate seeds? The clinic may know how to treat eating disorders, but it sure doesn’t know its Greek mythology.”

“And you think our Jane Doe-” Tess winced; she didn’t want to get into the habit of using “our” and “we” when discussing her work with Whitney. “You think Jane Doe, wandering through Latrobe Park, is really some little rich girl who bolted from the Sugar House?”

“I think it’s something to check out,” Whitney said. “I’m free tomorrow. Want to drive over to the shore together? We can spend the night at my folks’ place, maybe even drive up to Chestertown, play at being returning alumnae.”

“I promised to spend the day with Crow. He wants to see the Christmas garden at the Wise Avenue firehouse.”

“Oh.” Whitney frowned into her glass. “Well, we can do both can’t we? Go to the stupid Christmas garden, and then head for the shore and find Persephone’s Place. All three of us? I like him, you know. I feel badly I ever twitted you about him. He’s the perfect postmodern boyfriend. Just try to keep the public displays of affection to a minimum.”

Whitney’s tone was light, as if the words she had spoken were of no consequence. But Tess knew her well enough to recognize an important concession. She liked Crow, she approved of him. And once Whitney liked someone, it was forever.

But all Tess said was: “You’re very understanding, for a camel.”

“Humph.” Whitney got up and went to a butler’s bar in a corner of the room, where she kept a collection of silver martini shakers and every kind of glass imaginable. Martini glasses; old-fashioned glasses; champagne flutes; wineglasses, white and red; gold-rimmed shot glasses. Tess had a feeling she was going to be spending the night on Whitney’s sofa. It was either there or Baltimore County ’s northwest precinct, on DWI charges.

Whitney selected the largest shaker and two martini glasses. “I wonder,” she said, heading for the kitchen, “if camels feel vaguely superior to those who need water all the time.”

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, TESS AND WHITNEY SAT at the end of a winding, two-lane road that dead-ended at a locked gate. There was no sign identifying the property and a thick grove of pines hid whatever lay between them and the bay. But there was no doubt in Tess’s mind that this must be Persephone’s Place.

“The chain-link fence seems to run the length of the property,” Whitney said. She was riding shotgun, as she had all day, while Crow and Esskay waited for them back at the Talbots’ summerhouse. “And there’s razor wire along the top, so it’s not just for show.”

“Is the fence for keeping people out, or keeping people in?”

“Both, I’d imagine.”

They sat in the idling car, studying the fence. It had been a long day, longer than they had anticipated when they had crossed the Bay Bridge a little after lunchtime. Time had seemed elastic-they had browsed through the local stores, stopped at a bar in Easton for a Wild Goose ale, along with some french fries and onion rings. Tess loved the Eastern Shore in the off season-the bleached marsh grasses, the pale sky that yellowed at the edges, like an old photograph. She had liked showing everything to Crow, who was, as usual, enchanted. It had been easy to lose sight of why they were here at all.

But she had forgotten how short December days were, and they were suddenly two hours away from darkness when they began making inquiries about Persephone’s Place, whose mailing address didn’t show up on any of the maps of the shore counties. Tess had assumed it was the kind of open secret that locals would know, just the way they knew how to point one toward the various millionaires’ mansions along the bay and its inlets.

But they were too clearly outsiders, and the Eastern Shore was not a place that embraced outsiders. It saw itself as separate from the rest of the state and still smarted from the time a sitting governor had referred to it as a shithouse. Four years at Washington College, on Tess’s part, and a summerhouse that had been in her family for three generations, on Whitney’s side of the ledger, didn’t make them locals or earn anyone’s trust.

The bartender, the hunters who lined the bar-they all looked through Tess when she tried to broach the topic. The hospital staff in Easton told Crow it would be a breach of confidentiality to discuss the clinic, which at least confirmed it was out there, somewhere. Finally, Whitney had thought of going to drugstores-not the quaint, old-fashioned family operations that could still be found in places like Easton and Chestertown, but the new twenty-four-hour CVS and Rite Aids that had opened in strip malls along Route 50.