Still. “I just can’t go down there, Jill.”

“Sure you can. I’ll come with you. Come on, let’s go right now and see how bad it is. Up, up, on your feet. Whoops, shoes first, want me to fetch them?”

Jill in this mode was like a bulldozer, and Betsy was too exhausted to resist.

The shop was even worse than Betsy remembered. The damp air seemed to have gotten into all the fibers, dimming their colors and making them sink down on themselves in hopeless tangles. Even turning on all the lights didn’t help; it only made the ruin clearer.

The long triple row of wooden stems on the wall that had held skeins of needlepoint wool was nearly empty, and some of the stems were broken. Most of the wool was in a crooked, broken drift along the floor, as if someone had scuffed his feet through it.

Pyramids of knitting yarn had been kicked apart, baskets crushed and broken, magazines torn. The burglar didn’t seem to have missed any opportunity to wreak havoc.

“What, was he angry at something?” wondered Betsy aloud.

“Some burglars get upset when there’s nothing of value to steal,” said Jill, squatting beside a heap of knitting wool and starting to untangle skeins from a webbing of loose yarn.

“Then why did he break in in the first place?” demanded Betsy. Goaded by Jill’s labors, she went to the wall where the drift of wool was and stooped to begin sorting by color. The skeins were not actually skeins, but working lengths gently knotted by color. Betsy remembered a customer who had bought a single strand of orange, all she needed to finish a project. The wool was soft in her fingers.

“Because he’s a burglar; that’s what they do.”

They worked in silence for perhaps ten minutes, then Betsy said, “Could it be he was looking for something?”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. But the way things are all pulled off the shelves and walls—it’s just odd, somehow. It would have to be something small, I guess.”

Jill said impatiently, “What could he have been looking for, small or big? Nothing in the store is hidden; all the stock is on display.” She had found a usable basket, dented on one side, and was putting intact balls of knitting yarn into it.

“Yeah, well, I wonder if anything’s missing.”

“You’ll have to take an inventory.”

“I suppose so.”

“We’ll help,” said Jill, apparently sensing her dauntedness.

“Who, you and the Monday ladies? I thought you said not to trust people who knew silk from wool.”

Jill did not reply to this, and after a moment’s reflection Betsy realized how insulting that sounded, but she did not take it back or say anything more.

They had made barely a dent in the mess by lunchtime, when, prodded by her conscience, Betsy took Jill upstairs and made a tuna salad to share with her.

While putting the plates in the sink, Betsy heard Jill say something and turned off the water to ask, “What was that?”