The implication was that there were so many other girls Devon could imagine dying.

“What else can you tell me about her?”

“Gwen?” Devon hesitated. “The first word you think of is beautiful. That sketch doesn’t capture it. Even sick, she was beautiful. Strong-willed, too. We all were, but she was the toughest by far. She didn’t like what money had done to her family. And it didn’t help that her mother was dead, and her dad had this trophy wife who hated her guts.”

“An evil stepmother.” Tess was remembering that it was a stepmother who left Hansel and Gretel in the woods, where they stumbled on their own version of the Sugar House. Some girls call it the cake, but to me, it’s the gingerbread house, and I just can’t get that witch in the oven, Gwen had told Sukey.

“Are there other girls who might remember her, who she might have tried to contact once she ran away?”

“Not really. Faye Maffley was there that year, and nowhere close to going home when I left. She was still telling doctors she had rearranged her DNA by spending two hours a day on the NordicTrack. Patrice Lewison was at the other end of the range, she’s probably been out almost as long as I have. But it’s not boarding school. You don’t go there to make friends. You go there to get out.”

“By getting better.”

“Or worse. If you get sick enough, if you get so thin your health is compromised, they’ll take you out by helicopter to one of the Baltimore hospitals. Didn’t you see the helicopter landing pad when you were there?”

No, Tess had missed that.

A key scraped the lock, and the door opened. A tall, broad-shouldered woman who looked vaguely Scandinavian crossed the threshold. She carried a bag of groceries in her sturdy arms.

“Devon-you have a friend?” It was a cautious question, deferential, asked in slightly stilted English.

“A friend of a friend.” Devon replied swiftly. Tess didn’t mind letting this woman know who she was, but she realized secrecy was a natural impulse for Devon. There was a furtiveness about the girl, an inevitable by-product of eating disorders.

“Is she staying for lunch?”

“No,” Devon said firmly.

“I just came to ask Devon if she knew where I could find an old friend. She helped me out quite a bit.”

“I see.” The woman went into the kitchen and began putting away the groceries. “What do you wish for lunch today, Devon?”

Devon put her fingers to her mouth, began chewing on her nails. “I ate on campus,” she began.

“Devon.” The woman’s voice was sharp, but friendly, as if this were all a great joke, a daily ritual.

“Soup?” Devon spoke as if this were a quiz and she might provide the right answer. “With crackers.”

“A soup with things in it, I think,” her roommate said. “Not tomato or broth, but chicken with noodles or beef with vegetables.”

“Okay.” She sighed. “Okay. Let me walk Miss Monaghan to the door, and I’ll come back and eat my soup.”

She accompanied Tess not just to the front door, but to the apartment’s entrance, and out to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry about Gwen. I really am. I probably should have cried or something, but nothing in my body works right anymore, not even my emotions. I’m too shocked to cry.”

“You didn’t know her that well,” Tess offered.

“No, but-I can’t believe she’s been dead so long, and I didn’t know it. That the world didn’t know it. You’d think it would be national news, Dick Schiller’s daughter being killed. You sure it was November sixteenth last year?”

“Positive,” Tess said.

“It seems like such a long time ago. Hilde upstairs, that woman you just met, she moved in with me a year ago. She’s another one of my conditions, you see. My parents didn’t want me to live on campus because college girls get so weird about food. But they didn’t trust me to be on my own. So they pay that Valkyrie to live with me, watch my food intake. Nineteen, with a governess. It’s quite a way to live, isn’t it?”

She sniffed the breeze, which carried the smell of frying onions and greasy meat and cheese. A wonderful smell in Tess’s opinion, but Devon recoiled a little bit, as if the aroma alone might enter her body somehow, sneak a calorie or two into her system.

“Devon, are you…better?”

“That’s a relative term, isn’t it? But yes, I’m better.”

“Are you well?”

She smiled, shook her head. “No, I’ve pretty much destroyed myself. I’ll never have children, I’ve shortened my lifespan, my organs are all fucked up. When I wake up in the morning, I can barely find my pulse. Sometimes, I think I’m dead. Then again, I all but died several times before I went to Persephone’s.”

“Did Persephone’s help you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I was in a lot of places, five in all. My cousin Sarah will beat that record before long. I liked some more than others, but they were pretty much all the same. A little therapy, a little medication, all kinds of behavior modification. None of it worked for me. At some point, I decided to get well. I happened to be at Persephone’s when that happened. Sometimes, I think the intersection of desire and treatment can’t be faked, or orchestrated. It’s a decision. You decide to live. Then you spend the rest of your life second-guessing that decision.”

There was a rapping on the window above. They looked up to see Devon’s “governess” waving happily, motioning for Devon to come in.

“Lunchtime,” Devon said. “Soup with things in it. Oh boy.”

Tess stopped at the cheesesteak cart before trying to find a taxi back to the train station. It was as good a version of the famed local dish as any other, she supposed. Famed local dishes were usually overrated, more about nostalgia and stereotype than real taste. The thing was, after spending even a short time with Devon Whittaker, eating was too fraught with significance. She couldn’t stop thinking about food, about the process. How odd it was to sink her teeth into something and tear away, ripping flesh, chewing it into ever-smaller pieces. One reason Tess had never smoked cigarettes was because the action seemed essentially ludicrous. Suddenly, eating seemed no less ridiculous. Halfway through the sandwich, she tossed it in the trash.

In the cab on the way to the train station, she looked at the sketch she had shown Devon. Gwen Schiller. It was a good name for her, old-fashioned in a way, capturing some timeless quality in that face. Gwen Schller. When she had been Jane Doe, it had made sense for her to die in someone’s cemented-over backyard in Locust Point. She had been a street kid, a huffer, someone who would never be missed. But Gwen Schiller, no matter how much she professed to loathe her father and stepmother, shouldn’t have been able to go missing for so long. Someone should have noticed she was gone.

Someone should have cared.

WITHIN A DAY, DENTAL RECORDS OBTAINED FROM A Silver Spring orthodontist made it official. The Dead Girl Formerly Known as Jane Doe was Gwen Schiller. Martin Tull was impressed, and generous enough not to hide it.

“I can’t believe how much you did with so little,” he kept saying to Tess. They were sitting in a sub shop near police headquarters. Tess was never really comfortable inside the stale air and unrepentantly macho culture of the city police department. Cops made her nervous. She couldn’t help thinking they knew her every misdeed-every red light run, every mile over the speed limit.

“I started with a lucky break and Whitney turned it into something concrete. She was the one who picked up on the significance of the decayed back teeth.”

“Beginner’s luck. You were the one who parlayed it into establishing the girl’s identity. How did you track down the friend?”

“I think this is one of those things that falls under our don’t ask-don’t tell policy.”