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blows to the head, as her murderer stood astride her body, it was the same. I was awed by history and the bare fact of standing where she was felled, but sensed nothing otherworldly or supernatural: That changed instantly and dramatically the moment I crossed the threshold and set foot in Lizzie's simple, elegant bedroom and I knew what I'd first sensed outside the house about its power was about to be verified:

I'm looking at pale green walls, a white ceiling, two white curtained windows and a very pretty antique bed; an air conditioner is humming softly. But as the guide talks and the other tour members shift and turn to look at Lizzie artifacts, I'm being assaulted with a kaleidoscope of impressions that make me completely disoriented. The ceiling seems to press down and I feel a terrible weight on my head and shoulders. The room is stifling hot; next I notice that I'm nauseated and my whole chest hurts. My heart hurts; and my stomach contracts in a painful knot. My legs go weak and feel leaden.

It's a terrible sensation: oppressive and deadening and sorrowful all at once. It's suddenly as if my physical vision has dimmed and I am seeing a haze or layer that is dark gray or brown. The room looks draped in dirty gray-brown gauze. I think to myself, "This is what you see when you look through layers of pain." It is my thought, but Lizzie's voice in my mind; but there's no sense of dislocation.

Lizzie's history clicks into place immediately: it has long been speculated that she was the victim of incest; and standing there, I know how a young girl would feel. I know how she felt: How the burden of her father's body weight seemed doubled or tripled as she lay trapped in the dark, horrified and repulsed all at once. How, even if she hated Andrew, she also loved him-so she cast more of the blame onto her stepmother: an overweight spinster Andrew had married when Lizzie was four. How when she was a little girl, she wished for intervention; but none came.

Five years before the murders, Lizzie had stopped calling Abby "mother" and begun calling her "Mrs. Borden." Lizzie's anger was aroused because her father had given Abby a small piece of property and put it into her name so that Abby's half-sister (who had not married well) could live there. Andrew tried to make it up and gave Lizzie property equal in value, but Lizzie's resentment of Abby never shifted. As time went on, it seems Lizzie worried more and more that Andrew, who was 70 when he was killed, would leave

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