Now a woman came running across the lawn. Tall, with a dancer’s posture, she managed to look elegant even in a chenille bathrobe and duck boots, her auburn hair flat from sleep.

“Is it-” she looked at Tess. “How did she come to be here?”

Tess remembered that clipped, mechanical voice from the night before. Funny, it sounded even less human in person.

“Boating accident,” one of Tess’s attendants said helpfully. Although they had grabbed her roughly at first, they were being gentle now, holding her firmly as if they believed her legs might go out from under her at any moment. Her limbs shook convulsively, Method acting at its finest.

Yet the woman evinced no sympathy for her.

“I suppose I’ll have to find her some dry clothes,” she said.

“Don’t you think you should have Dr. Blount look at her as well?”

The woman sighed, overwhelmed by the imposition of this uninvited guest, with all her needs. “That, too,” she said.

The two men helped Tess across the lawn, speaking over her head as if she were unconscious, or deaf.

“Funny, isn’t it?” said the one on her left. “I mean, she’s so heavy.”

That hurt a little, and Tess wanted to explain her clothes had taken on quite a lot of water. But she decided someone who had just been rescued from the sea would not have the energy to object to such a personal comment.

“You mean because she’s wet?” the other asked, puzzled.

“No, because she’s normal. I’m so used to those little bits of bone and flesh we have around here.”

“They’re not all skinny.” The two apparently were inveterate arguers, determined to disagree whenever possible. “Besides, she’s a lot older.”

“Some of the girls here look old.”

“But they’re not.”

“Yeah, but-”

There was a short flight of steps at the side of the house, which led to a small porch. The two men, bickering all the while, expertly flipped Tess into a horizontal position, grabbed her at the armpits and knees, and carried her into the house. The woman waited impatiently inside.

“Take her into one of the examining rooms,” she said. “I don’t want the girls to see her. You know how any deviation from the routine upsets everything around here. Besides, I don’t want them to think…” her voice trailed off as she led Tess’s carriers through a narrow hallway. They turned and bumped her head, hard, on the molding along the wall.

“Oops, sorry,” one said.

“Watch what you’re doing.”

“You know,” she said, feeling very stupid. “I can walk.”

No one seemed to hear her.

The examining room was not the kind of cold, clinical doctor’s office to which Tess was accustomed. In fact, it seemed to strive for a kind of accidental air, as if the paper-covered table and cart of gleaming instruments had been introduced on a whim into what was otherwise a small sitting room. The walls were painted a warm cream color and heavy linen curtains hung in the one window. The doctor’s chair was a wingback, the desk an old secretary. The patient’s chair was a Victorian lady’s chair, with a needlepoint back.

“I’ll bring you dry clothes,” the woman said. “I’d offer to wash yours, but I don’t want to keep you here too long.”

Don’t want you to be here too long, Tess amended in her head.

No more than five minutes passed, but Tess found she couldn’t stop shivering, and she wondered if she might have put herself at serious risk. Finally, the woman returned with a Henley shirt, sweat pants, and clean white socks. She made no move to leave and Tess, feeling uncharacteristically modest, found herself stripping beneath the woman’s gaze. Her flesh was gray-blue at the extremities, and everything continued to wobble.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to watch you,” the woman said. “Force of habit.”

This only served to make Tess feel considerably more nervous and exposed.

“I mean-” the woman had the grace to look mildly embarrassed. “I mean, I’m so used to checking the girls here.”

“Of course.” If Persephone’s Place treated girls with eating disorders, the staff probably would watch them as closely as possible, looking for signs of weight loss.

“Of course?”

Tess remembered just in time that she was a stranded boater who had no idea where she was.

“I’m sorry, I’m so cold, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Once she was dressed, the woman gave her a blanket to wrap around her legs. She then pulled out a blood pressure cuff and a thermometer, one of the horrible new ones that barely fit beneath the tongue. Tess hated having her blood pressure taken-she always felt as if her arm were going to explode-but she couldn’t object with the thermometer in her mouth. The woman wrote down her findings, then leaned against the closed door.

“Now,” she said, “where are you staying? I can have someone on staff take you there.”

Tess, Crow, and Whitney had planned for this contingency. Good thing, as Tess’s brain wasn’t working well enough to improvise. “I’m visiting friends down near Oxford. I can call them and get directions-” she leaped to her feet, as if planning to find a phone. Then she quickly glanced around the room, checking the position of all sharp objects and hard corners, and faked what she thought was quite a realistic little faint. She had experienced the real thing just once, and had only a vague memory of what it had been like. Still, she thought she did it rather well.

Pulling the cart down with her was not part of the original plan, but it helped to sell it.

“Christ,” the woman said impatiently, and fled from the room. Tess kept her eyes shut and counted to one hundred, then two hundred. Someone had come into the room and was watching her. She waited to feel hands at the pulse points on her wrists or neck, but nothing happened. She counted to three hundred. She could feel the heat of another body coming close to her, peering at her. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the Dr. Blount the woman had mentioned.

Instead, the face looming above hers was an odd little monkey-girl, a gaunt mask of flesh with fine hair covering the jawline.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, crawling backward, crablike, from the apparition. I’m supposed to be at a clinic, she thought, not on the fucking island of Dr. Moreau .

But now she saw the figure in front of her was a girl, a stick figure lost inside a billowing white nightgown. The girl from the window. Sister Anne, Sister Anne, what did you see?

“Lanugo,” the girl said.

“I’m Tess.”

The girl smiled at her, a smile so old and world-weary that some ancient relative must have left it to her in a will.

“Lanugo is why I have hair on my face. When you get thin enough, your body starts to grow hair, to keep you warm. You ought to see my back and arms.” She sounded enormously proud of herself. “My name is Sarah Whittaker.”

“Hi, Sarah,” Tess said. She was still lying on the floor.

“People have tried to get out of here before,” Sarah said, “but no one has ever worked so hard to get in.”

Shit, she had seen everything from her window. She could rat Tess out in a minute.

“I capsized,” Tess said tentatively, waiting to see if Sarah was going to contradict her. Footsteps were coming toward them, several pairs.

“Okay,” Sarah said, seating herself in the doctor’s chair and picking up a stethoscope from the mess of instruments on the floor, placing it on her own bony chest. “You capsized.”

The woman and the two orderlies came back through the door, accompanied by a man this time.

“Sarah-this room is off limits,” the woman said, taking her by the wrist and leading her away. The doctor leaned over Tess and she caught his breath, a sour blast that he had tried to coat with some peppermint flavor. The orderlies were going through the pockets of her damp clothes, but there was nothing to be found. Crow had remembered that detail.