The photograph of herself in front of the Crab Shack restaurant was on the floor in its small broken frame. She bent down and retrieved it. Pieces of glass sprinkled to the carpet like jewels. She removed the photograph from the frame, but nothing was hidden behind it, and nothing was written on the back of the photo paper. It was a print he’d made at Walgreens. She examined the details in the photo, noting that this was the original, unlike the attachment he’d planned to send in his e-mail. The restaurant number was unaltered. So was the arrow on the roof.

She returned the photo to the frame and carefully picked away the remaining glass. She put it back on the little table in front of the window, the way Justin would have had it. He would have been able to stare it as he worked on his computer. She hoped that looking at her made him smile, but it wasn’t a particularly flattering picture, with that big goofy smile on her face, hair greasy and unwashed, arm high in the air with her thumb pointing behind her. She remembered telling Justin that all she needed were checkered overalls, and she could have been standing outside a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.

Peach got up and went to Justin’s laminate desk. The dismembered computer was unusable. So was the smashed monitor. She sat in his chair, which faced the window. If he’d left her something, it might have been small, like a flash drive, but she found nothing but dusty cables inside the desk drawers. She knew that whoever had been inside the house had stripped the place long before she got here.

The photo mocked her, as if she were laughing at herself. Then she noticed something unusual. In the photo, she was pointing backward with her thumb. The gesture highlighted the restaurant behind her, but as she stared at the photo from Justin’s desk, she realized that she was pointing out the window. Outside. Not inside the house.

Peach got up from the desk. Ignoring the flood of rain, she unlocked the window and threw it open. She jutted her face outside, squinting into the downpour. She saw a lake surrounding the house, rather than the grass and weeds of the yard. The thick, decades-old oak tree was on her left, sprouting huge limbs over the roof. On her right was an old propane tank. Scrub brush in the nearby vacant land grew right up to the edge of the chainlink fence.