“You’re fine,” the doctor said, although he had done no more than take her pulse and peer into her eyes. His voice was much too loud, given how close he was to her. “Just fine. Now why don’t you tell us where you need to be, and we’ll get you there.”

“I don’t know my way around the shore that well. Could I call my boyfriend, and you could give him directions to come get me here? We’re staying at his parents’ house.” This lie not only gave her more time at Persephone’s Place, it also established that she would be missed if she didn’t come home. Another one of Crow’s ideas, and Tess was suddenly glad for it. She did not feel safe here. “While I’m waiting, I could have a cup of coffee or tea, maybe warm up a little.”

The doctor grumbled, but handed her the phone from the wall, and let Tess punch in the numbers. Crow picked up at the other end, his voice almost bursting with excitement, now that his turn had arrived. Tess passed the receiver to the doctor for directions.

“You’re over near Oxford?” the doctor asked. “Well, it shouldn’t take you too long.”

Shouldn’t, but would. Crow wasn’t going to be in any hurry to get to Persephone’s Place. He was going to get lost, he was going to take wrong turns. He had it all mapped out. The woman led Tess to an empty dining room. After a few minutes, she brought her a cup of coffee.

“Do you have milk?” Tess asked. The woman looked blank. “For my coffee? Half-and-half would be better still.”

“Of course. Do you…do you want something to eat as well?”

“Please. Toast, an English muffin, a bagel. Anything bready to help my stomach settle down from all the bay water I swallowed.”

The two orderlies came into the dining room. They seemed proprietary of her somehow, like boys who had found a stray dog and were trying to convince their parents to allow them to keep it as a pet.

“Is this your home?” she asked.

The question made them smile and shake their heads, but they didn’t say anything.

“Then what is this place? A bed-and-breakfast?”

“Something like that.” It was the woman who answered, returning with a china cream pitcher and toasted raisin bread. Tess could tell just by looking in the pitcher that it was skim milk, not even two percent, much less half-and-half. Yet the butter appeared to be real butter. “More of a school. We offer individually developed curricula for young women who can’t thrive in more traditional settings, for various reasons.”

“How many students do you have? Or should I say patients?”

“Clients.” She was well-rehearsed. “Just twelve right now.”

“The girl I saw, when I regained consciousness-the one who said her name was Sarah-she told me she had something called lanugo. What’s that?”

The woman gave Tess her version of a warm, fond smile. She still wore her robe, but she had bedroom slippers on now and had found a chance to comb her hair back into a smooth knot. “You must have been hallucinating. Our girls sleep in on Sunday mornings. Would you like more coffee? Carl, Wally-aren’t you on duty?”

The orderlies, looking sheepish, left the dining room, as did the woman. Tess, left alone, wondered what to do next. She was clearly in the right place, but how did she segue to Jane Doe, without blowing her cover?

This was something she, Whitney, and Crow had not planned out in advance. They had focused their energies on getting her in, and keeping her there for as long as possible. Now inside, it was up to Tess to figure out how to get people to talk to her.

“Hey, where are my clothes?” she called out. No answer. Good, that was license to get them on her own. She walked back to the examining room, where she found her sodden clothes in a plastic bag, but little else. The room had been put back in order, the instruments taken away. Back in the hallway, she kept going in the other direction. A door was ajar, and she glanced inside, noting a bank of computers, almost gleaming with newness, their monitors blank. She kept walking until she came to the kitchen, a cold place full of metal appliances and surfaces, sterile as an operating room. There was a rear stairway here and she began to climb it, as quietly as possible. She peeked into the second floor, which looked like a fairly nice hotel hallway, with pale blue carpeting and matching floral wallpaper. Remembering Sarah’s face at the casement window, she kept going. The third floor was a converted attic, with sloping eaves and only two doors along its hallway. The bay would be to her left, Tess judged, and she knocked softly on that door, then opened it.

Sarah Whittaker, seated in a black Boston rocker, still in her white, high-necked gown, could have been an illustration from some nineteenth-century children’s book. Except for the hair on her face, of course.

“Where am I?” Tess asked her.

“Persephone’s Place.”

“Does it have another name?”

“I call it hell on earth, but I’ve heard other people call it lots of things.”

“The Wedding Cake, the Gingerbread House?”

“Yes.”

“The Sugar House?”

Her features puckered. Hers was such a small face, so shrunken and gaunt, her expressions were tiny, too. “That’s a new one. But I like it. The Sugar House.”

“Is it a school, as the woman told me, or a clinic?”

“Both.” Sarah hugged herself, not as if she were cold, but as if she were enjoying a private joke at someone’s expense. “And you’ve got everyone discombobulated. You’ve disrupted the schedule. Breakfast is at eight on Sundays, but they can’t bring us out of our rooms until you’re gone. They could bring us trays, but that’s antithetical to the treatment. We have to learn to eat like normal people, which means letting other people watch. The compulsives, especially. We have two of those right now. Bulimia. How tacky. You’d never catch me sticking my finger down my throat.”

“You’re anorexic.”

The girl wasn’t impressed by Tess’s insight. “That’s easy enough to see, isn’t it?”

“How long have you been here?”

“Three months.”

“I’m looking for a girl who might have been here over a year ago. Has anyone been here that long?”

“Doubtful. Three months is the average, in fact.” Sarah got out of the rocking chair and walked over to the window where she had been keeping vigil when Tess first saw her. “I’m considered quite pathological. Much worse than my cousin. She came home cured.” She permitted herself a tiny giggle. “Like bacon.”

“When was this?”

“Last summer.”

Which could be right, if Jane Doe was here in the months just before she died. A long shot, but it was all she had, all she was going to get.

“And your cousin’s name is-”

“Devon, Devon Whittaker.”

“Where’s your cousin now?”

Before she could answer, the auburn-haired housemother yanked open the door.

“This is not a public area, miss.” Her mechanical voice buzzed with anger. “I’m sorry, but you must not wander around the premises. It’s upsetting to our girls. Please come back downstairs until your friend arrives.”

“Miss Hollinger-” Miss Hollinger. The name was for Tess’s benefit, and she dutifully filed it away. Sarah kept her face toward the window, but her voice was sweet and plaintive. “It’s almost Christmas. Do you think I’ll be allowed to go home? The family is going to Guadeloupe soon, as we do every year. All the cousins, I mean, even Devon. She made the honor roll at Penn, did I tell you that? Everyone’s so proud of her.”

“Well, that depends on you, doesn’t it, Sarah? If you make the right choices, the kind of choices Devon made last year, you’ll have a lovely Christmas.”

Sarah did not turn around, did not acknowledge in any way the help she had given Tess, just stood in her window, looking across the bay. The light shown through her white gown, and Tess could see the dark hair along her arms and back. Lanugo. Sister Anne and Bluebeard, all rolled into one. She hoped this frail child would make the right choices, the ones that would allow her to leave this place in a stronger, sturdier body.