A dimple flicked into place beside the girl’s perfect mouth: vanished in a flexure of uneasy disgust. “This man wrote as if I’d truly come to him, while he was asleep and dreaming. As if that was truly me who’d said I loved him, who’d given herself to him, and not . . . not just a phantom out of his own head. And as if I—the real me—was held accountable for what his dream-me had said and done. But since I didn’t know even who he was I couldn’t tell him, Grow up. It’s just your dream. I thought then he might have been a young boy, you know how they get, when they’ve never had a woman . . .”

She caught herself again and glanced at Abigail’s face, as if worried she’d gone too far, but again Abigail nodded. “I know.” She remembered her brother William at fifteen, in poetical ecstasies over one of the local Weymouth belles. Like Romeo on the subject of Rosalind—a state that had ended abruptly when William’s good-for-nothing friends had taken him to one of the Boston brothels.

“And he’d write how he watched me, going about my business in the town. Not like Mr. Petrarch writing about his Laura, I saw you crossing the bridge today and my heart stood still . . . Specific things. The way Mrs. Fluckner handed you that basket of apples at the market . . . How, you look so beautiful in that yellow dress with the blue flowers. He was watching me, Mrs. Adams. I can’t tell you how that made me feel. And then he wrote that in his room the night before, I’d turned away from his mirror so that he guessed that I was a demon; that I was feeding on his love, and his love would damn him. But, he said, he loved me anyway, though I was the devil’s minion and his soul was in peril because—”

She stammered a little, and turned her eyes aside. Then she finished, “Because he enjoyed it when I raped him.”

Abigail said softly, “Oh.” And felt it to be true, in that instant, that whoever he was, he had indeed killed the others. And the awareness turned her sick with fear.