She turned away from Jill’s doubting look and walked toward the back. She paused by the big heap of yarn, floss, packets of thread wax, yarn organizers, scissors, magnets, and bead nabbers, leavened with counted cross-stitch graphs, needlework books and magazines, then turned to reach for the nearest upholstered chair and put it back on its feet facing the mess. She sat down and reached for a fistful.

“This is just terrible!” she continued in the same angry voice, lifting her arm high and wriggling it to shake a packet of soft thimbles off. Soft thimbles belonged on the other side of the back area, with the counted cross-stitch stuff. So things weren’t just tumbled off shelves, they were kicked or even carried around and dropped. “It must have taken the burglar hours to get things this tangled up!” she grumbled.

She looked again at the heap, dropped everything, and said in an entirely different voice, “Now, that’s really crazy.”

“What is?” Jill had come to turn the other chair over.

“All this stuff piled up here.” Betsy gestured at the mess in front of her. “If he was doing this for hours before Margot came in and stopped him, why didn’t she notice it when she came home? Because there would have been a light on. He couldn’t do this thorough a job in the dark.”

“Flashlight,” said Jill.

Betsy thought, then nodded. “Okay, flashlight. He sees her shape as she passes the window and turns it off. But how about this? When they brought me in to identify Margot, she was there.” Betsy pointed toward the back wall, where there was a dark stain on the carpet, which until now she had almost succeeded in not noticing. “And see the edge to the way this stuff is heaped up? It looked that night as if she’d been buried in it, and they had to uncover her.”

Jill nodded. “They did, Mike told me that. And?”

“So that would mean he kept on trashing the place after he killed her, dumping stuff on top of her. If he was angry there was nothing to steal, wouldn’t killing the owner be enough? I mean, doesn’t hitting someone over the head sort of take away anger and make you start to worry about going far away really fast?”

For the first time Jill really looked interested.

“No,” Betsy continued, “he was looking for something, that’s why he tore the place up. I think he came in here specifically looking for something. And he killed Margot and then kept on looking.”

“But what?” said Jill. “There isn’t anything secret or hidden in the store. Margot kept her valuables upstairs. Are you telling me she had some kind of secret?”

“If it was a secret, why would she tell me?”

Jill said, mildly exasperated, “If she did have a secret, she wouldn’t go hiding an important clue to it in her shop, where people come and go all the time.”

“Maybe she didn’t know it was a clue.”