The advantage of the servants’ entrance was that it had its own staircase. I walked up, shedding the ice that clung to my boots on the way. The house was quiet, as Gillian had said it would be in the late afternoon. I got to the second floor, which was dark and gloomy, in stark contrast with the airy, flower-filled atrium I’d seen on my first visit. Each resident’s name was on her door, and I found the one I was looking for. I knocked softly.

“Yes?” called a high-pitched voice.

I turned the knob and opened the door. The room was high-ceilinged and painted in stark white. In summer, this might have seemed airy but in winter, it felt barren and frigid. “Excuse me, are you Mavis Evans?”

The girl sitting cross-legged on the bed nodded at me. She was sprite-sized, with curly red hair and fair skin. She was wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants, but one leg was rolled up and she had a pair of tweezers in her left hand and a magnifying glass in her right, both suspended in midair as she stared at me. I wondered if this was what Gillian had meant about obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“I’m Claudia Moore’s sister,” I introduced myself, closing the door quietly behind me.

“You’re Lily!” Mavis grinned, as if meeting a celebrity. “I’ve heard all about you. Wow, you look a lot like Claudia. You’re a journalist, right?”

“Right,” I said, relieved that someone knew my sister. “I hope you don’t mind me barging in on you. I’m worried about Claudia. She seems to have vanished after she left Idylhaven in September.”

“September was a crazy, crazy time.” Mavis set the magnifying glass on the comforter but kept her tweezers in hand, at the ready. “It was chaos around here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doctor G—I mean, Doctor Gorevale—died around the end of September.” Mavis spoke in a rapid-fire way that was hard to follow. “Some of the girls were upset. I mean, really upset. They’d been at Idylhaven before, back when he—Dr. G, I mean—ran the place. Repeat offenders. I don’t know why, since he sounded like a creep. But I was sad about Brenda.”

“Who’s Brenda?” I asked, confused.

“Brenda Collins. She was the cleaning lady at Idylhaven. Sweet, sweet person, kind of mousy but she’d do favors for us. She died a day after we found out about Doctor G.”

The name was vaguely familiar; I must have seen it in the file. The pages hadn’t distinguished between patients and staff. “How did she die? Was there some connection with Gorevale?”

“Not that I know of,” said Mavis. “Brenda’s house burned down, and she died in the fire.”

I didn’t know Brenda, but I shuddered. “That’s terrible. You’re sure she had nothing to do with Gorevale?”