The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

might do.
    I creep around to the backyard. Did the police even look here?If he smokes in the Verver yard, isn’t it possible he smokes in his own?
    It’s too dark to see anything, and so I’m bending over, then kneeling, feeling for things, rolling my palms over clumps of
     grass, flagstones, the thick gnarl of an old tree stump. The more I clutch my hands over everything, the more I think there’s
     a kind of madness in it, scrounging, burrowing, on all fours on the Shaws’ nighttime grass, like I might throw my head back
     next, howl at the moon, scream bloody murder.
    I crawl on the Shaws’ lawn for a very long time, corner to corner, but I find nothing, not one stub, not even a stray, curling
     match.
    But I’m not done. Dirt under my nails, I feel bold and daring and walk freely along the driveway, up against the house itself,
     even laying my hands on it. The outer walls are cold to the touch, my fingers scuffing along the brick and stucco, the timber
     slats that, higher up, spoke through every gable.
    The garage looks horror-housey to me. The place people said he hid the porn and the snuff film and all manner of things that
     it turned out weren’t there at all. I press my face to one cloudy window, though all I see is my own face, a smeary negative,
     eyes wide and blinking.
    I think of it maybe as Mr. Shaw’s own private space, a space where he could sit or maybe even lie on cold concrete and smoke
     and imagine things.
    Just past the garage, I rest my hands on the house again. This time, my fingers touching something colder still, like metal,
     and I see it’s one of those two-way milk chutes from olden times, just like we have at our house, only ours has a broken hinge
     my dad never fixed. When we were younger Evie and I passed each other notes there and sometimes she’d still leave things—a
     paintedbarrette, a soccer ball key chain—there for me, and it’d take me months to find them, to think to look.
    The chute at our house is painted bright green, but this one is brown, and half covered with creeper ivy. You could miss it
     entirely. I wonder if the police missed it.
    Slipping my fingers under the spiny tendrils, I grab for the hinge, which is not broken and I don’t even have to pull hard
     and it opens.
    Not even stopping to think, I dart my hand inside. Whirling my fingers around, I don’t feel a thing but tickly ivy stems on
     my wrist.
    But then, as I start to pull my hand back out, I hear the faintest crackle of something just under my retreating knuckles.
    It’s something wedged in the lip of the chute.
    Grasping eagerly, I feel something plasticky and soft, and something else, too, something cool and nubby. Tugging now, I claw
     my hand over everything and topple it into both hands, running to the streetlamp to see if I have found what I think I have
     found.
    I have.
    A pack of Parliaments, five left. And, rubber-banded to it, a silver lighter with a flip top. It’s not like a drugstore lighter.
     It’s special and feels old and heavy in my hands. I press my finger against the engraving, a seal that looks like a Kennedy
     half-dollar, like the kind my grandfather collected in a tall green-glass canister on his desk when I was a kid.
    It’s the one. It is. I am right, I am right. I know everything.
    Don’t
you
know?
Dusty said.
You were always smart. I was sure
you
knew.
    I did know. I do. And somehow Dusty does too.
    It was Shaw. It was always Shaw. Shaw out there every night.
    And the police, what do they know? Missing this, missing everything.
    I run my finger around and around the lighter’s seal.
    I feel myself standing like Mr. Shaw did, dangling it between my fingers, standing beside Mr. Verver watching Evie turn cartwheels,
     one after another.
    The cigarettes, the lighter, seeing them, it is such redemption. I feel the pull of the thing, the full force of everything
     that’s happened. These objects, cool in my hot hands, give me a hard yank back to the center of