A wooden shoe, a ceramic vase made to look like a paper bag, and several other containers stood empty on the coffee table. Someone had dumped their contents into the basket.

"Is there something to drink?" Mrs. Drury asked plaintively.

"I'll get you a glass of water," Anna said, glad to have something to do.

"No," Mrs. Drury said. "To drink."

"Beer?"

"That would be all right."

Anna got two beers from the refrigerator. There was a six-pack under the counter. She put it in to cool. Later they might need it. Bringing the beers and one glass into the living room, she sat beside Sheila's mother on the couch.

They drank in silence, Anna from the can, Mrs. Drury pouring the beer into the glass half an inch at a time like a woman measuring out medicine.

"Why would somebody go through your daughter's pictures?" Anna asked finally.

"I don't know," Mrs. Drury said. "They weren't any good."

They finished the beers. Anna carried the cans into the kitchen, rinsed them, and crushed them into neat circles under her heavy boots. Beneath the sink, where she guessed it would be, was Sheila's recycle bag.

"Might Sheila have taken photographs of something someone didn't want her to see?" Anna hunched down to look under the cups and across the Formica counter that separated the kitchen from the living area.

Mrs. Drury was shaking her head. Her face sagged with confusion and fatigue. "I couldn't ever see why she took any of the pictures that she did. They weren't ever of anything. Just things you see every day. She might've, I suppose. Sheila took pictures of everything and she wasn't ever socially ept."