Ruth returned to the laundrette carrying a single blue sock in a sandwich bag. Its partner had disappeared during Saturday’s wash, and she wanted to check behind the machines.
The attendant, Mo, let her look. They found two hairpins, a coin and a red button. No blue sock.
“Maybe it stayed in the dryer,” he suggested.
“I checked three times.”
“Then perhaps it went home inside a sleeve.”
“I checked every sleeve.”
“Pillowcase?”
“Both.”
“Trouser leg?”
“Unless it learned to button itself in, no.”
Mo wrote down her phone number and promised to call if a blue sock appeared in the lost-property basket. Ruth appreciated the promise, although the basket contained enough lonely socks to furnish a small football team.
Mo said that people often blamed the machines for things that had followed them home. Ruth said a machine that charged by the load ought to return the entire load.
On Sunday, she came back with her laundry basket. She had brought the shirt with the widest sleeves, the fitted sheet and the pillowcases, in case one of them held evidence. Mo helped shake them out. A paper receipt fluttered from the sheet. Still no sock.
“Are you sure there were two?” he asked.
“They were a pair before I came here.”
She showed him a phone photograph taken before the wash. Two blue socks lay beside a sweater on the kitchen table. Mo zoomed in and noticed that one had a little white stitch near the heel.
Ruth examined the sock in her sandwich bag. It had no white stitch.
“Then the stitched one is missing,” she said.
That afternoon Ruth questioned her husband, Frank. He had not seen it. He had, however, worn blue socks to the garden center. He raised one trouser leg. His sock had a white stitch near the heel.
“You took one from my washing pile.”
“I took two from the drawer.”
Ruth checked the other leg. That sock was navy, not blue. Frank had dressed in poor light and spent the day with mismatched feet.
“So that’s my missing sock,” she said.
“But you still have one in the bag.”
“The one I brought home from the wash.”
They compared both blue socks on the table. They were the same size, but the bagged one was a different shade. Ruth checked her photograph again. Sure enough, the darker sock on the kitchen table was Frank’s. The original pair had been mismatched before it ever reached the laundrette.
Ruth returned on Monday to apologize. Mo was sorting a basket of clothing left in the machines. She held up the two socks and explained the whole investigation.
“So you found the culprit,” he said.
“My husband.”
“And the missing sock?”
“There wasn’t one. We started with two different socks.”
Mo pointed to a small sign above the dryers: PLEASE CHECK YOUR POCKETS AND PAIRS.
“I thought the ‘pairs’ part was a joke,” Ruth said.
“It was,” Mo replied. “Then you came back three times to investigate a sock your husband was wearing.”