The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we abort. Besides, we won’t do anything until we’re close enough to see the place. You know the cover story.”

  “About that cover story—” Tess looked down at the gray water churning beneath them. She and Whitney had been out in this boat many times before, making fun of the mansions that the nouveau riche built along the bay’s shores. But that had been on sultry July and August days. She could almost smell those days—the sun, the water, the breeze, the suntan lotion—on the life jacket she had donned.

  There was no sun today, and the wind felt like tiny knives pricking at her face and neck.

  “The life jacket. It’s really just for show, right?”

  “More or less. I’m going to try to get you close enough to wade in, but you never know. You’re a strong swimmer, right?”

  “Pretty strong. But they have to have a doctor on the premises, right? And he’ll be bound by medical ethics to check me out for hypothermia.”

  “I hope so,” Whitney said. “Then again, it would give us some leverage, wouldn’t it? A licensed treatment center without a doctor on call. I’m sure that’s not legal.”

  Tess didn’t say anything, but she thought leverage was pretty inconsequential, once you were dead. She glanced at the sky. Overcast, yet Whitney swore there was no chance of rain. She wondered what would happen if she proposed switching places. But she could never find her way back to the Talbots’, and she wasn’t confident she could handle the boat alone, even under the best conditions.

  Almost forty-five minutes had passed before Whitney steered the boat into a narrow channel, cut the motor, and let it drift. “Does this look like the place we saw last night?”

  “We didn’t see anything but chain link and razor wire last night,” Tess said, squinting at the large white house sitting back from the shoreline. “But, yes, it could be the place.”

  It was a rambling white Victorian, with pink trim. Someone’s old summerhouse, enlarged over the years in a random fashion. It clearly was no longer a vacation home. Persephone’s Place, if this was it, had an antiseptic look, a marked indifference to its surroundings that bordered on hostility. There was no dock, for example, and the glassed-in porch at the rear of the house was small, curtains drawn against the winter light, as if no one there ever dared to watch a sunset. The grounds were bare and open, with the bald, raw look more common to a spanking-new development. Yet the tall, spindly pine trees at the property’s edge had to be decades old. Even as it shut the rest of the world out, Tess realized, Persephone’s Place denied privacy to its residents. There was no place to hide here, no spot where one would be out of view.

  “It does look like a wedding cake,” Whitney said. “Even the trim, all gingerbread and curlicues and rosettes. You feel you should be able to break off a piece and eat it. Just looking at it makes me vaguely nauseous, as if I’d been on a little binge.”

  “Hansel and Gretel,” Tess said, remembering a scrap of Sukey’s conversation with Jane Doe. “The Sugar House.”

  They were very close now, the boat passing under a tree whose branches bent so close to the water that they had to bow their heads. At the last minute, Whitney reached up and grabbed the branch, keeping the boat from drifting any closer to the fringe of sand and gravel that passed for a beach.

  “Here,” she said. “This is as close as I go. Remember I have to putt-putt out very slowly, so make sure I’m out of the inlet before you draw attention to yourself.”

  “Do I have to get all the way wet?” Tess asked. “Maybe if I just could climb out here, and walk along the shore—”

  “All the way wet,” Whitney said firmly. “You have to give the impression that you could keel over at any moment. It’s the only thing that’s going to keep them from sending you straight to the sheriff’s office for trespassing. I hope.”

  Tess sighed and kneeled on the starboard side of the boat. She tried to remember the jump she had learned as a lifeguard at Hunting Hills Swim Club years ago, with legs spread open, so the head didn’t submerge. At least, that had been the theory. She couldn’t recall if anyone had ever done it successfully.

  “Go,” Whitney hissed. Did she actually lean over and push her? Tess had no memory of jumping, just a sensation of cold unlike anything she had ever known. Gasping for breath, dog-paddling because of the cumbersome life jacket, she made her way for shore. Behind her, she heard the Hornswoggle II pulling away, but she didn’t look back. There was no going back. She’d rather crawl to shore than climb back into the boat and skim across the bay in her sodden clothes. She had dressed in thin layers, unwilling to sacrifice her suede jacket to this enterprise. In fact, she had raided Mr. Talbot’s closet, availing herself of the soft, old fishing clothes he had amassed over years of coming to the shore. But they were shockingly heavy when wet, and her feet and hands already felt as if they were encased in concrete.

  By the time Tess stumbled to the shore, she did not need particularly advanced acting skills to convey the fact that she was wet, chilled, and very glad to be alive.

  Too bad there was no one there to appreciate her arrival. For it was not yet 7:30, according to her watch, and the Sugar House was quiet. She crawled slowly up the hill, finally pulling herself to her feet, and staggered toward the house.

  It was only then that she noticed a girl looking at her from a small casement window on the third floor.

  “Sister Anne, Sister Anne,” Tess breathed, thinking of the Bluebeard legend. “What do you see? What did you see?”

  She studied the girl’s face, oddly dark and mottled, but that was probably a shadow from the lace curtain she had pushed aside. Her expression was curiously impassive, as if there were nothing unusual about a soaking wet woman weaving up the sloped lawn. Had she seen the boat enter the inlet, watched Whitney push her from the boat? When she caught Tess looking up at her, she quickly ducked out of sight.

  Or perhaps she had left the window because of the two men in white uniforms rushing across the lawn toward Tess.

  “What are you doing here?” one man asked her. “This is private property.”

  “I—capsized,” Tess gasped, her teeth chattering helpfully.

  “Where’s your boat?” the other asked.

  “Sank. G-g-g-gone,” she said, waving a hand toward the bay, trusting Whitney was long gone now, not even a speck on the horizon. “All gone. Lucky to be alive.”

  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 aroun
d 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.

  “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.