Free The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

they keep talking about Mr.
     Shaw as a missing person who “may or may not be a suspect in the Verver girl disappearance.”
    On Channel 7, they mention lab testing of the cigarette butts, though “it remains a question if anything can be retrieved,
     given rain and exposure to the elements.” And, the lady newscaster adds, “According to his family and friends, Mr. Shaw was
     not a smoker.”
    “He gave it up years ago,” says a pinch-nosed woman identified as Mr. Shaw’s bookkeeper. “For his health.”
    “Sources close to the investigation,” the lady newscaster says, in closing, “say that no cigarettes were found during the
     alleged search of the Shaw house.”
    I feel my mother’s eyes on me, watching my reaction. I don’t give her anything, even as it hits me, spins me.
    I know they were his cigarettes in the Verver yard. I know it.
    “Maybe the police just missed them,” I say. “You can hide cigarettes anywhere.”
    “Maybe he stashes them on the patio,” Ted says, in that snide, prodding way he has with our mother. “Under a flowerpot.”
    But we are in such a serious space that my mother doesn’t even look up when he says it, doesn’t lose her focus for a split
     second.
    “We have to consider the possibility that these may be two unrelated disappearances,” the jowly chief of police says. The
     TV anchor nods with gravity, but in the chief’s eyes you can see it:
he knows it’s Mr. Shaw, we all know, don’t we?
    “Well, I just don’t understand this,” my mother is saying. “Do they really think, after all this, that…”
    But it is Mr. Shaw. I know it, soul deep. Somehow, it’s like I even knew before it happened. Must’ve felt it on some deeper
     level when I saw Mr. Shaw’s car licking past us that day. And didn’t Evie share it with me during that momentous second in
     her backyard, kneeling over cigarette stubs, a secret so perilous she could scarcely utter it?
    It is Mr. Shaw, even if Mr. Shaw might not be as they conjure him, this appalling monster in our midst. Even if he might be
     something else entirely.
    It becomes hard to sunder the believing from the knowing.
    And then there’s this:
    It must be Mr. Shaw. It has to be.
    Because if he didn’t take her, where is she?
    “ T hey didn’t find a-n-y-thing,” Tara explains the next day. There was no pornography, no murky snuff films, and nothing to link
     him to Evie at all.
    “He must’ve really cleaned house before he did the deed,” she says.
    Part of me was bracing for unimaginable horrors. Something worse than dirty pictures of brace-faced girls lifting their jumper
     over their head, worse even than muddy videos of dark deeds done to tousled children, eyes wide with terror. What could be
     worse than that?
    But mostly I realize that I never truly thought they’d find anything bad, anything ugly. There’s just that squinting part
     of me that feels sure Mr. Shaw, whatever he’s done, was driven not by private sickness but by the purest, most painful love.
     If I squint my eyes just so, if I push out all the dirty rumors, I can see him differently. I can see him as a yearning nighttime
     wanderer dreaming his way into Evie’s yard, her lighted window. Her face there.
    “He probably took all the dirty movies and magazines with him, up to Canada or wherever he’s got her,” Kelli, sucking on gum,
     says. “Took them with him so he could make her look at them. So she could see how to get him off.”
    We all faintly gasp at this. We all shift back, just slightly. There is someplace she has just taken us and all I can think
     is how dare she?
    Because then I do think of such things, of Mr. Shaw sitting next to Evie in his maroon car, the glossy peach of a centerfold
     laid open, across their laps. I picture it like the one buried under my brother’s baseball card collection, where the girls
     all seemed splayed like bent-back dolls, their mouths bright, enormous, their depthless eyes.
    “Maybe it’s not