He’d imprisoned her, then. Carried her up to the room, laid her on the bed—bound or unbound—and tied the door shut. She’d regained consciousness, gotten to the sewing basket, used the scissors to cut herself free, and managed to get the door open enough to get a hand through and saw with the blade at the rope. While downstairs—

Abigail shuddered. Whoever he is, I will see him hang.

She descended the stair to the parlor again, stopped on the threshold in fresh horror. “What are you doing?”

Dr. Warren straightened up from his knees, slopped the wad of pink-stained rags back into the bucket that stood on the floor at his side. In the dim gleam of light from the kitchen—the parlor shutters remained closed—the bare bricks glistened damply. “We trod in the blood,” said Sam, sitting at the desk wiping his boot soles with another handful of dripping rags. “You, me, Paul . . . all of us. Watch her head,” he added, as Revere came in from the kitchen, carrying the dead woman in his arms.

Abigail could only stare, openmouthed with outrage.

Acerbically, Sam added, “If the Tillets’ cook saw you in the yard, there has to be a reason you didn’t go to the Watch at once. It can only be that you didn’t see her, or anything amiss in the kitchen. She’s a little hard to miss.”

“You can’t—”

Abigail brushed past Revere and into the kitchen again, to see what the men had wrought in her absence. The floor was clean. The man’s tracks in dried blood were gone. The overset chair, replaced at the table; the fireplaces cleared of ash.

John would have an apoplexy.

And the killer, whoever he was, would go free.

In the parlor behind her she heard Revere say, “She’s starting to stiffen,” as he maneuvered the awkward body into the stairwell.

“I found these.” Sam came to her side, held out to her a handful of scribbled sheets. “She must have had them out last night. They aren’t ours.”

“Rebecca did other things for her living, besides write pamphlets for the Sons of Liberty.” Abigail took them: more scrawled sermons, virulent with descriptions of Hell’s fire and of devils clinging like leeches to the corner of your mouth, to catch the smallest whisper of ill words—O Sinner, do you feel the prick of their claws? “Orion Hazlitt is having her go over these, before he sets the type.”

“Would she have gone to Hazlitt?”

Abigail heard in his voice something more than speculation about Rebecca’s choice of refuge, and saw the glint of gossipy curiosity in his gray eye. She made her voice calmly flat. “’Tis a good ten minutes to Hanover Street. Farther than my house, which lies in the same direction.”