“Now don’t get mushy. Besides, here’s where you really need to go this afternoon,” he added, bringing a new flyer back to her. “Look, there’s a Kaffe Fasset exhibit just opened.”

“Who’s Kaffe Fasset?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Only one of the best needlework designers in the world. Needlepoint to cry for, knitting to die for. People who see the exhibit or read about it will be coming in to buy his patterns and it will help if you can talk intelligently about him.”

He put the flyer in her hands. The front flap had a color photo of a magnificent sweater, knit in a pattern of subtle, earth-toned stripes under an Oriental-looking pattern of flowers.

“Hmmm,” she said. “This is at the Minneapolis art museum. Yes, you’re right, I think I need to go see this.”

“Upstairs first. Go on, go right now.”

Because it had been Shelly who found the slash jacket and Irene who had noticed the T‘ang needlepoint horse missing, Betsy considered she, perhaps, was not the one to be looking for the sketchbook.

But she told herself sternly that since she obsessed about Margot’s murder, and was therefore the sleuth, however amateur, she had a responsibility to prove herself capable of sleuthing.

Unlike Betsy, Margot had been a neat and organized person. (Already the apartment shows that, Betsy thought, and sighed.) Presumably there was a place she kept such things as the notebook she used when designing pieces. Betsy had been living in the apartment long enough to know that if the notebook were kept outside Margot’s bedroom, she would have come across it by now. And she hadn’t.

Therefore (Betsy smiled to herself, this was rather like a syllogism, and she’d been rather good at syllogisms), the notebook was in Margot’s bedroom.

She stood a quiet moment inside the door, feeling suddenly that her sister was quite close, that this was an important moment. She stopped the shallow breaths she’d been taking and instead took a deep one, letting it out slowly.

If I were Margot, she thought, where would I keep a sketchpad on which I was designing a copy of the blue horse?

Filed away under T‘ang, came the prompt answer.

She went to the wooden file cabinet and slid open the bottom drawer, labeled M-Z. Under T, she found T‘ANG HORSE. The file folder was slender, containing only the handwritten note about the order for the copy Mrs. Lundgren had placed. No, wait; in the bottom of the folder were two sets of three slim packets of Madeira blue silk embroidery floss, each held together with a rubber band. They were numbers 1005, 1007, 1008, 1712, 1711, and 1710. One packet was dark, medium, and light shades of midnight blue; the other, silver blues.