Read Online The End of Everything by Megan Abbott - Free Book Online Page B

meant only that we all had to go to the morgue for Biology class. Now it means she is the keeper of all life-death
     knowledge and revelation.
    I am her most favored steward. She knows the police have talked to me, and therefore we two are part of a special category,
     an elite.
    We’re in the shower stalls, and she’s whispering to me through the curtain.
    “I heard my dad tell my mom,” she says. “They got the search warrant for Mr. Shaw’s house.”
    She tells me the police also got an anonymous tip that he had boxes of pornographic magazines and videos hidden in the garage.
    “Whoever called must’ve seen them,” she says. I can see the shadow of her mouth through the curtain as she talks. “He hid
     them under stacks of old newspapers or something. His wife probably never knew. He probably went out there at night.”
    I try not to picture it, not to see Mr. Shaw in a garage like our garage, with my dad’s old workbench and the transistor radio
     and the dozens of boxes labeled SHIMS , DOWELS , SCREWS , HINGES / PULLS . Mr. Shaw in his bathrobe, standing under an overhanging lightbulb, looking, looking, looking—
    “It’s called kiddie porn,” Tara is saying, and I touch my side of the rubber curtain, feeling the vibration of her voice against
     my fingers, telling myself she is lying.
    “I heard there was this one video,” she continues, “where they show this little girl and she’s a pure virgin because she’s,
     like, nine, and this long line of men, some of them, like, fat or old, they come along and rape her one by one and then they
     kill herand they really kill her because it’s called a snuff film. They snuff her out. My dad said that it’s just as well by that
     point because what’s gonna happen to a nine-year-old girl who’s been raped by, like, twenty guys in an hour?”
    Tara’s voice is clear and sharp, sliding through my brain like a hot needle. I want her to stop, but I can’t catch my breath
     or get my voice back.
    H ere’s the thing: Evie is gone, has been gone for six days, and no one can find her and it is not long, another day, before
     it starts to feel like no one really expects her to be found. It starts to feel like everyone is waiting to hear where the
     body was dumped and what was done to it.
    “ I f you can think of anything else, anything at all,” Mr. Verver says. “Day or night. You can come over, you can call.”
    This is what he says. We never had anything together like this. Now we do. We have this.
    “Sometimes, Lizzie,” he says, “we think we don’t remember things, and then suddenly we do. Like you with the car. Wasn’t that
     something, the way you were able to summon that up? And then sometimes we don’t connect things, but they
may be
connected. Like you did with the stubs. You’re smart as a whip, Lizzie, and you’ve been a lifesaver. Where would we be without
     your help? So I’m just saying, anything comes to you, anything at all, just come over. Find me. Or call, even if it’s the
     middle of the night. Okay?”
    Yes, Mr. Verver, yes, yes.
    J oannie and Tara and I are perched on our bike seats three doors down from the Shaw house, thick with cops. Tara has been passing
     tantalizers about the search warrant, so we skip fifth period and now hover madly from afar. It seems certain we’ll be caught,
     grisly truants, rubberneckers, ghouls. But we have to see.
    We don’t catch even a glimpse of Mrs. Shaw, or Pete, who still has not returned to school.
    We’re there only ten minutes before a patrolman spots us, follows us back to school, but before he does we got to see the
     detectives duck under the half-open garage door with flashlights, and Tara nodded so self-satisfiedly. We did not see them
     come out.
    I t’s on TV that night. My mother, head craned over her tea, listens intently, shushing my brother. The newscaster says police
     won’t confirm it, but that “inside sources” say that a search took place. On all three channels,