Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting at the bottom. She put a motherly arm around my waist—seeing me upset helped her gain some composure.

“The dining room is the only other room Nancy really had fixed up. She was using the built-in cupboards as a little home office until she had the time and the money to fix up the study.”

I suggested that Mrs. Cleghorn continue to stay in the hall. If the marauders hadn’t found what they were looking for upstairs, I had an unwilling vision of what the cupboards might look like.

The reality was far worse than anything I had brought myself to imagine. Plates and tableware lay scattered on the floor. The seats had been ripped from the chairs. All the shelves in the walnut cupboards that formed the far wall of the room were splintered. And the papers that made up Nancy’s personal life were strewn about like ticker tape the day after a big parade.

I compressed my lips tightly, trying to hold my feelings in while I picked through the rubble. By and by Mrs. Cleghorn called to me from the doorway: I’d been away so long she’d gotten worried and braced herself to face the destruction. Together we culled bank statements, picked an address book from the heap, and took anything relating to mortgage or insurance for Mrs. Cleghorn to go through later.

Before leaving I poked around in the other rooms. Here and there a loose floorboard had been pried up. The fireplaces—there were six altogether—were missing their grates. The old-fashioned kitchen had come in for its share of damage. It probably hadn’t looked too good to begin with, its fixtures dating from the twenties, old sink, old icebox, and badly peeling walls. In typical vandal style the intruders had dumped flour and sugar on the floor and pulled all the food from the refrigerator. If the police ever caught up with them, I’d recommend a year spent fixing up the house as the first part of their sentence.

They’d come in through the back door. The lock had been jimmied and they hadn’t bothered to shut it properly behind them. The backyard was so overgrown, no one passing in the alley would be able to see that the place was open. Mrs. Cleghorn dug a hammer and nails out of the workshop Nancy had set up next to the pantry; I hammered a board across the back door to keep it shut. There seemed to be nothing further we could do to restore wholeness to the place. We left wordlessly.

Back at the house on Muskegon, I called Bobby to tell him what happened. He grunted and said he’d refer the matter to the Third District, but for me to stand by in case they wanted to ask me anything.

“Yeah, sure,” I muttered. “I’ll stick by the phone for the rest of the week if it’ll keep the police happy.” Perhaps it was just as well that Bobby had already hung up.