In the middle of the room were benches and coat hooks. The windows were high and barred. It was a long, narrow room and quite a generous space for four hospital beds, Jean thought; Kitty at one end, nearest the door; then Brenda. Gretchen at the other end, with Martha’s bed a towel’s width away. When she closed her eyes, it was no struggle in the silence to imagine the secret sharing of tangerines; the whispering after lights out; the whooshing breath of the iron lung, and the soft tread of the nuns and perhaps that other stealthy visitor.

A doorway off the window end of the room led to the boys’ showers. This would have been the washroom the bedbound girls never got to use. Here, too, were high windows, latched on the inside but not barred. Not the easiest point of entry, Jean thought, but not impossible for someone agile, if the window had been carelessly left open.

She felt a shiver pass through her, as though surrounded by ghosts, and shook it off, annoyed with herself. She didn’t believe in the supernatural and, in any case, the girls whose presence she imagined were all still solidly, warmly alive.

In the office, Susan Trevor served tea from a brown china pot with a quilted cozy. It must have been stewing for some time, as it emerged toffee-colored and not especially hot. Jean drank it quickly, feeling the tannin coat her teeth, while Susan kept up a stream of indiscreet chatter about the eccentricities of schoolmasters; the school’s strained finances; the declining standards of discipline—chiefly lack of respect for authority, answering back, defiance—all those crimes of which age accuses youth.

If only Susan had been a ward orderly at St. Cecilia’s, Jean thought. Nothing would have escaped her ravenous curiosity and the mystery would have been solved overnight. Her attention kept wandering back to that long room of sleeping girls, until she heard the whispered word “cancer,” which always made her sit up, and realized that Susan had asked her a question.

“I was wondering if you were in touch with Alice Halfyard?” she repeated. “I was saying she’s apparently quite poorly. I heard it from a friend of Mother’s who shares the same cleaner.”

“No, I didn’t know,” Jean admitted. “I only met her that once, last time I was here in the summer. I was intending to visit her again today.”

“I hope she’s well enough to see you. Poor Alice; she’s had such a sad life—and now this.”

Recalling their first meeting, Jean acknowledged that yes, she had sensed an air of spinsterish melancholy about Alice, but it was one that she recognized and didn’t therefore trouble to investigate. And it had in any case been slightly overshadowed by those repellent dolls.

“She didn’t talk about herself much,” she said. But this was no excuse; she should have asked. “Why was it sad?”

“Her sister had a baby out of wedlock and then died of peritonitis when it was still quite young. Alice and her mother had to raise the child.”