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“In the front room. She at first slept in the third story before she went into the country, but for the three weeks before her death, she slept in the back room in the second story.”

“Was it not next to Mr. Watkins’s bedroom?”

Caty didn’t know where Mr. Watkins’s bedroom was. When she visited with the neighbors, she tended to stay downstairs. She hadn’t Elma’s habit of visiting bedrooms. “It was next, I believe.”

“Did you ever ask Levi whether he was engaged to Elma?”

“Never till after her death.”

“Nor said a word about it to him,” General Hamilton pressed.

“No.” She knew how it looked, but she couldn’t help it.

General Hamilton’s voice rang out through the room. “Had you any reason to suspect that any other person but Levi had an improper intimacy with her?”

There was a ringing in Caty’s ears. She looked him right in the eye and lied. “No.”

She braced herself for the inevitable rejoinder, the direct question she couldn’t ignore. But instead he asked, “Do you know of what materials the wall between your house and Watkins’s is composed?”

Did he think she was a carpenter? “I don’t know.”

“No further questions,” said General Hamilton, smiling at her as though she had told him something he wanted to know.

What had she said?

Nothing. Nothing but what she and Mr. Colden had practiced. And they hadn’t asked her about Elias. The relief of it made her light-headed.

At the back of the room, she could see the doors opening, as Elias was readmitted. He jerked his head at her. Caty gave a little shake of her head. Their secret hadn’t come out.

Yet.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Here let us remark the collected composure of [the prisoner’s] manner, and the open expression of his countenance. His appearance interested us greatly in his favor. We waited with anxiety for the testimony—convinced that if his was not the expression of conscious innocence, he was indeed a man incapable of feeling.

—A Brief Narrative of the Trial for the Bloody and Mysterious Murder of the Unfortunate Young Woman in the Famous Manhattan Well, taken in shorthand by a gentleman of the bar

New York City

March 31, 1800

“For our next witness, the people call Miss Hope Sands.”

Hope rose from the bench, and walked with as much dignity as she could muster to the witness box, where Mr. Colden waited for her. She felt transformed by rage: against Levi, Levi’s lawyers, and most of all, with Elias, who didn’t have the common decency to let his wife testify in peace.

It was just like Elias, Hope thought furiously as she took her place at the stand. He was always throwing his weight around when it was least convenient and never there when Caty actually needed him. He kept bringing up fixing that door as though he’d built a palace in a day, as if Caty hadn’t been begging him for a year to do something about it.

Levi had offered to fix it, but Caty had demurred, saying she wasn’t going to burden one of her boarders; Elias would see to it. Eventually.

Now that squeaky door was a key piece of the evidence in condemning the man standing there in the dock. Levi Weeks.

Will you watch when they hang me?

Hope forced herself to look straight at Levi, really look at him, this man she had thought she loved, who she had never really known. He was a beast, she told herself, a beast masquerading as a man.

“Miss Sands,” said Mr. Colden. Hope could see him nervously fingering the fobs dangling from his watch chain. “When were you first made aware of the intimacy between Elma and the prisoner at the bar?”

“The first time I knew them to be together in private was about two weeks after I and Caty came back to town. I was in her bedroom with Elma when Levi came in, on which Elma gave me a hint. I immediately went out, he followed me to the door, shut it after me, and locked it.”