But it’s the people who really make my stomach whirl. Back at the other houses, everyone was winding down for the night, but the party’s only starting here. If this is a party at all. It seems more like a funeral. The women all dressed the same, in long billowing frocks, the cotton bleached white, their bare feet peeking out beneath hand-stitched hems. They huddle together in small groups, and they smile sometimes, and they laugh too, very suddenly, as if on cue from an unseen director, their whole lives a dress rehearsal for a performance that might never come.

I don’t spot a single guy in the whole place. Maybe they’re all out back on the patio. Or maybe they weren’t welcome for some reason.

Bee doesn’t notice any of it. She’s too busy asking everyone near the door about Jane. I go on ahead of her, drifting through the room. There’s no upstairs, probably no basement either, which should at least make this easy. If Jane’s here, we should find her quick enough.

The house is laid out in a boxy rectangle, one of those art deco numbers, only weirder, everything designed on sharp, indecent angles. Like Frank Lloyd Wright on acid.

A ceiling that cuts down sharply in the middle like a razor’s edge.

A fireplace, sullen and cold, in the dead center of the room, the brickwork around it in the shape of an obtuse triangle.

A slim hallway, stretching down to a vanishing point, the walls narrowing, as if devouring you whole. I hesitate at the mouth of it. There are heartbeats at the end of the corridor, soft but clear. I shouldn’t follow the sound, but I can’t help myself. The melody draws me nearer, so sweet it makes my teeth ache, and when I get to the last door, I quietly nudge it open.

Inside, three girls are sitting on a king-sized bed, not moving, not speaking, not even looking at one another. They’re the same as the other women in the house, arrayed in plain cotton dresses, their hair a mousy brown.

The ceiling’s vaulted over them, violet curtains cascading down the wall like a thunderstorm, and the girls look almost comically small in this giant room. I gape at them from the doorway, but they don’t seem to notice me. They don’t seem to notice anything.

“What are you doing in here?” I ask, and the sound of my own voice startles me.

One of the girls looks up, her face etched with sorrow. “Waiting,” she says.

“For what?”

“For him,” says the second girl, her jaw set, her lips barely moving when she speaks.

“And who exactly is he?”

The third girl, stock-still until now, turns and eyes me up, surveying me like a piece of property. Or a piece of meat.