Someone had lain here. Not Rebecca, Abigail thought, shocked—Rebecca would no more lie down on a made-up bed with her shoes on—and, it looked like, a rain-wet skirt—than she’d have run down Fish Street naked. Yet when she stepped closer, she saw the single hair on the pillow that looked indeed like her friend’s—dark, almost horsehair thick, with a springy curl to it that had been the despair of Rebecca’s maid back in the days when she had a maid. Abigail pursed her lips with vexation that she hadn’t brought her little ivory measuring tape with her, then turned to the sewing basket on the bedside table, heaped with its neat stacks of cut pieces of linen and calico: the unofficial corveé Mrs. Tillet demanded of her husband’s tenant. That sewing, reflected Abigail, and the understanding that Rebecca would attend three services every Sunday with the family at the New Brick Meetinghouse, where Mr. Tillet was a deacon, and help Queenie in the kitchen on those days when one or the other of the Tillet daughters would come to dine with their husband and babies—

In the eighteen months that Rebecca had rented this little house, Abigail had heard everything there was to hear about its landlord and his grasping wife.

There was a measuring tape tucked in at a corner of the basket, and the measure, from hair to the muddy smudges, marked the height of the woman who had lain there at something just over five feet. Rebecca’s height. And the dampness corresponded in extent to a woman’s skirt: not wet as if she’d been soaked, but she’d definitely been out in last night’s rain. As Abigail laid the tape-end to the pillow, she saw on the worn linen a red brown dot of blood.

Dense in its center, clouded at its edges as if diffused by hair. Damp in the center, dry at the edges, as if it soaked deep: an investigation of the pillow within the sham confirmed this.

A slow bleed, over a period of time.

How much time?

Abigail couldn’t imagine how she would calculate it, but it was clear Rebecca had lain in one position for a long while. Dazed? Unconscious?

Bound?

Cold inside and breathless as she had been when first she’d entered the kitchen downstairs, Abigail looked around the room again, slowly, seeking anything out of the ordinary.

A simple bureau. A single cane-backed chair. No candle on the bedside table—she had not come up for the night, then, when she’d been brought up here, laid upon her bed—whose linen, thankfully, showed no sign of violence or struggle. The faint smudges of dirtied water—as if Rebecca had stepped briefly on her own doorstep after the rain had begun—were barely an inch long, in one place only.