Trembling, Abigail made herself draw a deep breath, and focus her mind: a discipline learned in the course of a year of dealing with a strong-willed and unwilling five-year-old boy in church when she was trying to concentrate on the sermon. The candle hadn’t been brought up but the shutters had been closed and latched, probably when first the evening’s cold had settled in. Rebecca had left her sewing by the bed, gone back downstairs to the kitchen where it was warm.

Rebecca’s Sunday dress hung on its peg, her Sunday underskirt beside it. She had no shoes, but what she wore every day, and those, like her everyday dress, were missing. Abigail recalled the mustard yellow frock her friend had worn, trimmed and flounced in blue and edged with rich lace, when she’d appeared on Abigail’s doorstep that night in April of 1770: I have left him, I have left him, I won’t go back . . .

Too fine for a woman to wear to work about the house. Abigail had lent her her own second-best everyday bodice and skirt. Rebecca had sold the lace-trimmed dress, she remembered, and bought stockings and cloth for chemises with the money. Everything she had put on her body from that time had been castoffs, worn-out, turned, recut. Charles, Abigail recalled, had tried to sue Rebecca for the money he had spent on the dress.

The bed, the chair, the bureau were likewise castoffs, from friends, or members of Abigail’s wide-ranging merchant family. The rag rug had come from the Brattle Street Meeting-House’s parlor—

The rug. It had been thrust aside from its usual position between the bed and the door. Kneeling beside the door itself, Abigail saw three more blood droplets on the worn planks, just at the opening edge.

No trail of drips from the bed. The wound hadn’t been bleeding freely, then. She’d remained beside the door—doing what? What would she have been doing, that the drops had fallen onto the floor and not her shoulder?

The door opened inward, without bolt or latch. Only wooden handles.

Abigail stepped into the tiny hall again.

Last week, her daughter Nabby had imprisoned six-year-old Johnny in the bedroom they shared by running a length of light rope washing-line through the door handle on the outside and tying it to the stair rail. Such a rail was indeed visible at the top of the staircase. Johnny, who had John’s gunpowder temper, had wept himself almost sick with rage at his imprisonment, and the family had only the boy’s innate caution to thank that he hadn’t tried to liberate himself through the bedroom window.

Yes, Abigail thought, as the glint of metal caught her eye from a shadowed corner of the hall near the head of the stairs.

Scissors.

From the sewing basket by the bed.