There's a name that kept me up past two last week: Nance O'Neil. If you know Lizzie Borden, you know the outline. Fall River, August 1892, an axe, then a trial and acquittal in June 1893, and then thirty-odd years of a woman living in a big house on a hill with the door mostly closed. What the outline skips is who was inside the house with her. For a stretch of years it was O'Neil, a stage actress with a ferocious reputation and a life that ran on trains and hotel rooms, and the question of what exactly she and Lizzie were to each other has been argued quietly ever since.

The MSN feature on the pair walks through what we actually have, which is less than you'd hope and more than you'd expect. After the acquittal Lizzie, calling herself Lisbeth now, bought a large house on Fall River's fashionable French Street and named it Maplecroft. Respectable Fall River, by most accounts, kept its distance after the trial. Her sister Emma left in 1905 after a fight whose contents nobody recorded, which is one of those gaps historians stare into like a well. And into that isolation walked O'Neil, in town for theatrical work, and the two became close enough that people talked.

And people talked. There were parties at Maplecroft, which scandalized the neighbors all over again, the acquitted axe suspect hosting a bohemian actress and her theater friends. The gossip at the time and the speculation since have both leaned toward the relationship being romantic, and the word you keep running into in the literature is 'lesbian,' usually applied with a confidence the evidence doesn't quite earn. What survives is circumstantial: closeness, cohabitation, whispers. Nothing that closes the case, and everything that keeps it open.

O'Neil herself is worth the detour, because she's the kind of figure who deserves her own rabbit hole, and the documented trail is thinner than her legend. A tragic actress of the old thundering school, celebrated in her day, and then, on the subject of Lizzie Borden, essentially silent. That silence is the detail I can't put down. An actress, a woman who made her living being talked about, apparently spent the rest of her life not talking about the most talked-about woman she ever knew.

Per my standing rule, the boring explanation gets first chair here. Two isolated women, both cut off from respectable society for different reasons, found in each other the only company that didn't come with an invoice of judgment attached. Deep friendship in a hostile town can look, from the outside, like everything else. But the boring explanation has a flaw, and the flaw is Emma's departure. Sisters who survived what those two survived don't rupture over a casual houseguest. Something about O'Neil's presence was load-bearing in a way nobody wrote down.

So we're left with the shape of a thing and not the thing. Lizzie died in 1927. O'Neil went on with her life and took whatever the truth was with her. The questions are where it gets interesting, as always, and this one has a full set: what did Emma find out, what did the neighbors actually see, and what does it mean that the woman who knew Lizzie Borden best apparently chose silence about her?

I don't know. But I keep thinking about that silence, and about a house on a hill with the curtains drawn and two women inside, and how the loudest fact in the whole story is the one nobody ever said out loud.