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rustle to my left. A girl sat on a bed in the dark corner. She came over and tucked another blanket around me. I was too weak and cold to even properly thank her and just muttered my gratitude.
    In the morning I discovered that each patient was rationed only one blanket. The girl spent a cold night so I could have her blanket.
    Her name was Josephine.
    She was a prostitute, but reminded me of a little mudlark. Seventeen years old, she’d left a hungry, abusive home at eleven and did the only work she could find—selling her body on the streets. Despite the unspeakable life she’d suffered, she still reached out to the underdog.
    This tarnished angel and I soon became as close as sisters.
    I couldn’t help but notice that nothing about her indicated she belonged in a mad house. “Why are you here?” I finally asked.
    “I was brought to the island suffering from a brain fever. I suppose I showed signs of insanity, but that left with the fever. Now I’m a prisoner. Few without family or friends ever leave this place.”
    I hated the thought that she believed she’d never get out, so I confided in her. “Very soon you’re going to be leaving the asylum with me. I can provide a home and help you get work. You won’t have to go back to the streets again. Life will be much kinder to you, I promise.”
    The poor dear thought I was mad! I wanted to tell her I was a reporter doing a story, but couldn’t chance my identity being revealed.
    Gossiping with inmates, I found out that the asylum’s darkest secret wasn’t the cruelty toward helpless women, a horrible crime in itself, but the mysterious disappearance of inmates. Four women had disappeared from the island in the previous five months and the staff never spoke of it.
    “They don’t care,” Josephine told me. “Women throw themselves into the river or drown trying to escape.”
    My interest was piqued by the fact all four women were prostitutes—an unusual coincidence being that street girls only made up a small portion of the inmates. I quietly probed to get more information and soon found out no one wanted to talk about it—the patients were frightened and the nurses wanted to avoid scandal.
    I was sitting on my cot making a mental list of the appalling things about the institution that I planned to write about when Josephine returned excited from a medical appointment.
    She sat down beside me and whispered, “I’ve found a way to get us off the island.”
    Her appointment had been with a staff doctor named Blum. He told her if she helped him with an experiment, he’d see that she gained her freedom. “I said I’d do it only if you were released, too.”
    “What kind of experiment?” My first instinct was that the doctor wanted sexual gratifiction.
    “I don’t know. It has to do with a scientific study. He has a lab with equipment in that shack on the old pier.”
    I realized I’d seen him on the hospital grounds. He wore baggy clothes and a box hat and had a heavy beard, long hair, and thick glasses. I overheard the nurses refer to him as “the German doctor” because of his thick Eastern European accent. He had a reputation for being a loner and secretive, which wasn’t surprising. Many ordinary doctors tinkered with scientific experiments, hoping to achieve the fame a few had managed by making important discoveries.
    “I heard nurses talking about him,” I said. “He’s an odd fellow who doesn’t say a word unless absolutely necessary. And he won’t let anyone near that shack of his. Nurse Grupe went out to deliver a package and he ran her off.”
    “He seems a gentleman to me,” Josephine said. “I’m sure it will all work out.” She nervously worked the ring on her index finger. A cheap copper band with a small heart, the ring had been given to her by a man she loved—and who abandoned her after he tired of exploiting her body.
    Seeing her so excited about getting off the island, I didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm. She was