The End Of Everything Part 3

"It might not be anything," I blurt.

He stops, the water running over his hand.

"What?"

"It's justa"it's probably nothing," I stutter. I can see his face lifting and something swells in me.

"I know," he says. "But nothing is okay. It really is. Right now, nothing is more than we have."

We walk to the backyard, and I hope they're still there. My heart pit-pats and I worry that I dreamed those cigarettes into sputtering life.

Mr. Verver's hand is on my shoulder and I feel a weight on my chest.

Twenty paces walking to the k.n.o.bby pear tree, but it seems, now, so far. I feel, with each step, every twig, kicked-up dirt, curling leaf, the sharp cut of a rake thatch. Soon enough, I am nearly running.

My eye catches the white first, and I see them, still there from last night, matted fast into a root corner of the tree.

Mr. Verver is already crouched down, and it's no dream. They are there. Hands on his thighs, he doesn't touch them.

"You found these?"

"Evie did. She showed them to me. Or ones like them. About a month ago."

His eyebrows rise. His face is doing all kinds of things, calculations and divinations.

"What did she say about them?"

Sometimes, at night, he's out here. That's what Evie'd said.

"Nothing," I lie. I don't know why, but the lie comes so easy that I feel its rightness.

He rises and looks at me and I think he can see the lie on me.

I know he can.

I stare at the cigarette b.u.t.ts, flat and soggy, like a peel slipping from a hard center.

"Nothing," I say again, and look up at him, at those tangled eyes of his.

He says thank you, then, he does, he puts his hands on my shoulders as if to hug me and he nearly hugs me but instead slips his fingers around one braid and tugs it soft and smiles. His face is popping with light and I feel my neck flus.h.i.+ng, my face too, because I thought he might hug me, I did. Or throw me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes when we were little and underfoot and he would swing Evie and me to and fro with our pigtails swaying and our squeals so loud and Dusty sitting at the kitchen table doing long division and yelling at us to stop and she always hated it when Mr. Verver played with us. But soon enough he hoisted her too, hoisted us all, one by one, from kitchen to living room, and flung us onto the sofa, the laugher was loud, Mrs. Verver running down the stairs to see who was on firea Mr. Verver is talking with the detectives in the backyard. They're all circling the cigarette pile like it's a bonfire.

I'm watching through the kitchen window, the coffeepot chugging.

Sometimes, at night, he's out here.

That's what Evie had said.

When she said it, it was just a cold-spiny feeling, a bit of nighttime spookiness. But later, it snuck back into my thoughts, and I wondered about all the boys who trailed Dusty, who swarmed her in the school corridors, who wedged notes in her locker and buzzed around her. So many of them might flit around at night, like Bobby Thornhill, might conspire to watch for her, might end up, even, in the backyard, mistaking Evie's window for hers.

I thought, nastily, of their disappointment, catching a glimpse of Evie's post-rail frame, her barely bud b.r.e.a.s.t.s, lying on her bed, her stick legs crossed, rocking gently, her white socks with pom-poms jittering.

Mr. Verver walks into the kitchen, his whole body jumping with energy. "They think it could be something," he says. "They don't know, but they think it could be."

I feel a tingle on my tongue. I feel it because I think, Doesn't he see what this means? Isn't this scarier, a hundred times, the idea that wherever Evie is she might be with someone who watched her, for nights on end, from the dark sweep of a backyard tree, who watched, unhurried, unbothered, puffing and breathing and watching anda"

Something clicks and shutters in my head, and there it is, there it is, tumbling from my half-open mouth: "The car. Twice. I saw a car go by twice."

"What?" Mr. Verver says, cautiously, gently, his fingers touching the edge of the counter. "A car?"

"The maroon car. When we were waiting for my mom, it went by twice. At least twice." I feel very excited, bobbing slightly as I stand, sneakers tapping the linoleum.

"Do you know what kind of car, Lizzie?" he asks, and his eyes are suddenly so bright, so clear.

"I don't know." I can barely say it. "Buta but I know that car. I've seen that car."

I'm not even sure what I mean when I say it, but it's true.

The detectives, perched all around, show me pictures of cars from a big, fat binder. Pages and pages of cars. But it doesn't work because it's not how the remembering of it happened. I can't picture the car itself, it's the feeling when I saw it, the flicker of curiosity, the question dangling there, Why is it driving so slowly, isn't that the same cara"

A flicker, and then it was gone.

Someone's lost, Evie said. Didn't she say that?

And I can picture almost recognizing the car in that second, that fleeting second when she spoke, the recognition hovering just out of my reach, I had only to tug it down.

An hour or more pa.s.ses, Mr. Verver pacing, and Mrs. Verver sedated, and me not knowing what to do, going to the kitchen to fill my water gla.s.s two, then three times. Once, I walk past the staircase and hear Dusty sobbing in her room.

Finally, the phone rings and it's for Detective Thernstrom and he talks for a while and then comes back and asks me if I know the car because in fact I see it every day, every day on Cloverly Way, which is on the way to school, the same six blocks I walk every day, twice a day. Isn't that where I've seen it?

And I begin to feel thoughts plunking at me again, at some back corners in my head.

"It's a Skylark, isn't it? A Buick Skylark?" he says and points to a picture of a s.h.i.+ny black car that looks like any other car to me.

I start to say, "But it was maroon," but I stop myself because I know it sounds stupid.

I squint at the picture and press my finger on it. It's the car. It is.

That's when everything scatters into a thousand pieces and rea.s.sembles with pinpoint clarity. A picture in my head of the car, the man, the man in the car.

"Mr. Shaw," I say. "It's Mr. Shaw's car."

Five.

I have said the words, I have said his name and slapped my hand on the photo of the random Buick. I have said the words and everything springs to hectic life.

I'm not sure what's happening, but everyone seems to be moving, and one detective is on the phone again and Detective Thernstrom is talking to Mr. Verver in the corner and Mr. Verver is listening intently, his hands clenching and unclenching as he stares at the carpet. From the look on his face, I don't know whether, like in the fairy tale, I've found magic balm from the hollow center of a tree, or whether I've opened the ground beneath us all, and we're now plummeting fast into the dark earth.

"Shaw's wife called the station this morning," Detective Thernstrom is saying to Mr. Verver.

I'm at the dining room table, looking at pictures of cars. One of the deputies is talking to me, but I'm not listening. I'm listening to Detective Thernstrom's slow, calm voice, and to Mr. Verver's raspy uh-huhs.

"She said her husband was supposed to be at an insurance convention upstate. When she didn't hear from him, she started calling the hotel and the convention staff. They all say he never checked in. She hasn't seen him in two days."

"And we know that's his car?" asks Mr. Verver, a voice darty and hectic. "Harold Shaw. I've known hima"not well, but known hima"ten years. We know that's his Skylark?"

"That's his make and model. If that's the car she saw, well, this is a big break. We have two officers heading up to the convention hotel now. We put out the APB. We're interviewing everyone who knows the Shaws. All our resources are on thisa it's our number one priority."

Detective Thernstrom's voice lowers, and I strain to hear. I feel like Detective Thernstrom's talking about me now. Like he's saying, She might know more. She might know everything.

But that's when the deputy starts poking me with questions again. "How fast was the car going? You're sure you saw it twice? The same car?" And I can't think of anything at all, and sometimes their voices spike again, and I hear Mr. Verver say, "But what can I do here? What can I do?"

That sound, the creak at the center of his throat, it's something I've never heard from him, and it hums in me, powerfully.

Now, in my head, when I picture that Skylark going by, I can see Mr. Shaw behind the wheel. Though in my head, it's not even maroon anymore but black, like the one in the book they showed me, the picture lodging in my brain.

I can see Mr. Shaw behind the wheel.

Mr. Shaw carries a briefcase and wears brown loafers and tiepins. He's my mother's insurance agent, or was, and the Ververs' too. He's old in the sport-jackety way of math teachers and princ.i.p.als and doctors, older by decades, it seems, than Mr. Verver.

Mr. Shaw has the gla.s.s-front office on Cloverly Way, right where the street slopes down fast. When I picture him, he's there. I'm on my bike, riding past, coasting, sneakers kicking up, and I turn my head, glancing in, seeing him there, blue blazer, wispy brown hair, a pen in his hand, holding it like he's not sure what it is or how it got there. And then he's gone.

Or no, no, another time, walking by and seeing him standing, hands on hips, looking out the window as he talks soundlessly to someone, his mouth moving but the rest of his face still.

Or there, there, over on, what street is it? Huntington? Was.h.i.+ng that maroon car in his driveway, golf s.h.i.+rt spattered, his son, Pete, the one in Dusty's cla.s.s, twisting a big golden sponge, Walkman cord dangling, and Mr. Shaw, face so plain, arms pale, chin faintly shadowed.

"I've never talked to him," I tell the detectives. "I never saw Evie talk to him."

Why would Evie ever talk to him? It all seems so impossible. Like it's a big mistake, and somewhere up north Mr. Shaw is stiff-backed in some convention room chair, doing whatever people at conventions do, unaware of all the wretched scenarios spinning around him.

But elsewhere in my head, I seem to know something, or guess at it. The look I've been seeing on Evie's face, behind her eyes. But I don't talk about that. I don't tell them about Evie's face and what it carries because it's just a guess, a feeling, because I know Evie so blood-thick. I know her so well that I know when I no longer know everything.

And Evie, in showing me those cigarette stubs, was showing me something private, mysterious, a slippery secret, which is what we did. Mouth to ear, we shared everything. Until we didn't.

My mother sits me down at the kitchen table. She quit smoking after the divorce, when she started taking aerobics and got the lemony highlights in her hair. But there is a cigarette flaring in her hand now, slipped from that Benson & Hedges pack she keeps wedged under the leg of one of the lawn chairs on the back patio.

"Lizzie, how well do you know Mr. Shaw?"

It seems a funny way to ask it. I tell her I don't know him at all, which is true. I know him like I know anyone's dad. They're all dads.

She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. "It's so terrible. I don't know how Annie is managing. Either of them. I don't know at all."

"It's okay, Mom." I can't think of what else to say. This is not the way she usually talks to me and it seems like if I say the wrong thing, it will make her more nervous.

She looks at the cigarette in her hand, turning it like she doesn't recognize it.

"Do you think he's hurt her?" I finally ask. I don't think I've let the idea really cross my mind until that moment.

"No," my mother says, jerking up suddenly, face set, eyes on me. "No, honey. It's a mistake. It's all a crazy mistake."

Her lie is somehow meaningful and I can feel the weight of it.

No one is saying it, but everyone seems to be so sure. Why would Mr. Shaw take Evie if he didn't mean to touch her, to do things to her?

But no one's actually saying it, no adults can say the words aloud. And I fight the ideas in my head, shake them off. They're ugly things, and I don't even know where they've come from. They're like choppy collages, pieces pulled from cable movies caught late at night, hand-wringing school a.s.semblies, leering reenactments on news shows, and snapshotted Evie in her soccer jersey, clipped in, her face pasted on bodies nude and scandalized.

I go to my room, pull out a stack of old, gold-spined horse books, and read them for hours.

Six.

Mr. Shaw. He's the one. The way they talked at school, the way everyone had been talking, you'd think it had to be some lurching drifter, claw for a hand, living out of his truck.

But it's Mr. Shaw.

A hundred times, you would see him paying the newspaper boy, or filling his gas tank, and he was just a man, and now he's the one who took Evie in that Buick. He has taken her away and has maybe done things to her and done, done, done.

A hundred men like him in the five blocks on either side, and I never noticed one.

It's that night, the third night. It's after the emergency PTA meeting, my mother's on the phone all night with parents, the phone ringing all the time, and my brother is walled up in his room, TV on, stereo on, everything on, and the vibrations, when I press my hand to the door, thunder through me. It's like some booming, screeching spell struck across the threshold to keep me out.

So I walk from room to room. It's like I think I'll find Evie there, crouched under the window seat, twined in the shower curtain, and she'll be laughing, laughing that we all cared so much.

"Harold Shaw," my mother says, standing in the doorway of my room. "It doesn't seem possible. It really does not." She shakes her head.

I don't say anything, but I turn off the light on my bedside table and she drifts away down the hall.

There's a picture in my head of my mother at one of those Memorial Day picnics, stringing up fairy lights with Mr. Shaw, asking him to help her off a ladder. Did it really happen, and did she giggle girlishly when he lifted her and set her daintily on the ground? And that makes me think of all the parents at block parties when we were kids, the way they would huddle with one another's spouses, sneaking off for smokes like teenagers, dancing too close, dropping beer bottles and tripping across lawns. Like married people love to do. And they love to make their husbands, their wives, act the knuckle-rapping parents all day so they can play the wayward kid. Is being young so magical that they must conjure it up again, can't help themselves? I don't see any magic in it at all.

That night, in bed, I picture the way it was. Twice a day, five days a week, all school year long, Evie and I walking, running, biking past the big windows of the All-Risk office, with Mr. Shaw there. Mr. Shaw always there. Looking out with those gloomy eyes of his.

He looks so sad, Evie said once. Oh, the sudden remembering of it now brings on a s.h.i.+ver.

He's so sad, she said. We were looking at the sign in the window: LIFE INSURANCE, FIRE INSURANCE, FLOODS. He must hear sad stories all day long.