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.
“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.”