Page 156 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy stared at the paused image. Smoke still flowered from the revolver’s muzzle. She didn’t need to see the rest. The details of her father’s murder would live with her forever. She dragged the file to the trash. Hit permanent delete. She would buy a new phone tomorrow, submerge the old one in water until the circuitsdied. No one would ever see the video. No one but Emmy and Hannah would ever know what had actually happened.

A split second. A quick reaction. A fatal moment in time.

Losing a precious thing. Holding onto a bad marriage. Trying to protect a child.

Emmy knew exactly what that felt like.

She also knew that mistakes could be a reason to forgive.

TWELVE DAYS LATER

CHAPTER TWENTY

Jude sat at her mother’s bedside. The lights were out, but the lines of sun between the half-closed window blinds were slowly moving across the floor. Myrna had been asleep when Jude had walked in, which in every way was a gift. Forty-two years had passed since they’d last laid eyes on each other. Jude was nearly twenty years older now than Myrna had been on that long ago day. The shock of finding her mother so reduced was almost too much to bear. Jude remembered a towering, intimidating woman. Someone who would quote Nathaniel Hawthorne to describe your outfit or whip out a red pen to correct your Mother’s Day card.

That Myrna was not the old woman who was wasting away in a hospital bed. She looked so small, so vulnerable. Her skin was nearly translucent. Blue veins crisscrossed her eyelids. The color of her lips was reminiscent of the light pink hydrangeas that still grew in her front yard.

Thirteen days ago, Jude had fine-tuned a very good speech on the five-hour flight from San Francisco, during the three-hour-long drive to North Falls, while she’d walked the last few yards to Milo’s funeral home where her father lay dead. The speech was brief, because her mother had never been one for flowery soliloquies. Most of it was framed in a series of requests, because Jude had assumed that Myrna would, as always, control the balance of the power.

Will you let me see her? Will you let me talk to her? Will you let me bury my grief?

Years of therapy had helped Jude work through so many darkmoments in her life. The night that Adam Huntsinger had raped her. The fact that she’d started drinking excessively to numb the pain. Losing Henry to the Flint River. The days and days of waiting for his body to be found. Watching Gerald drink himself into a stupor. Seeing Myrna completely fall apart. Witnessing the final evolution of Tommy’s invisibility. The blame that Jude would always carry for her small part in her brother’s death.

It was a hell of a lot to work through, but none of those sessions had ever gotten Jude to the point where she could forgive herself for giving up her baby.

Forty-two years ago, Jude had been in the full throes of alcohol addiction. She had barely graduated high school. Myrna and Gerald had finally kicked her out of the house. No one had known Jude was pregnant. She had barely admitted it to herself. She was unstable, homeless, living out of the car that she’d stolen from Aunt Millie. Jude had driven to Memphis to start a music career that was never going to happen. She’d ignored the pregnancy until it was too late to do anything but go through with it.

Somehow, by some miracle, Jude was stone cold sober when she’d given birth. Unlike the majority of women, she remembered nearly every single detail from that cold November morning. Particularly the kind nurse who’d warned Jude that the police were on their way up to the maternity ward. They’d wanted to interview her about a hit-and-run where Millie’s car had been seen fleeing the scene.

The nurse had given Jude some diapers and formula in a plastic bag. Blood was still dripping down Jude’s legs when she’d sneaked out through the ambulance bay. The baby didn’t even have a name. No birth certificate. No registration. Just an alcoholic mother who had been living out of a stolen car for seven months.

Jude still didn’t know why she hadn’t abandoned her child at the hospital. She wasn’t delusional enough to believe that her heart had swelled with joy the first time she’d held her baby. That moment had come hours later. Jude had pulled over to the side of the road so she could sleep. The baby had started howling like a siren. Jude had tried everything: feeding, changing, begging,pleading. Then she’d turned on the radio, and Emmylou Harris was singing “Sweet Dreams”.

Back when Henry and Jude were children, Gerald would occasionally take them to the station for a few hours to give Myrna time alone in the house. He would spread crayons and coloring books out on his desk to distract them. Then he would put on a record so they wouldn’t hear him discussing cases with his deputies.

Emmylou Harris had been his favorite. Jude knew all the words of every album. On that cold, dark morning on the side of the road outside of Memphis, she had cradled Emmy Lou in her arms while she sang her the softest serenade. By the last line of the song, only Jude was crying. She couldn’t get over Emmy Lou’s delicate eyelashes. The clear, startling blue of her eyes. The precious curl of her lips. The sweet smell of her head. The insistent tap of her heartbeat against the palm of Jude’s hand.

When she’d sneaked out of the hospital, Jude’s only focus had been to get away from the police. That moment in the car with Emmy Lou had given her direction. Jude had started driving south. Started making plans. She would go to college. She would raise her child. She would become a teacher like her mother. She would earn back Gerald’s respect. By the time she’d crossed the Clifton County line, she had felt elated with possibilities.

All of that had changed when Gerald had opened the door. The weather had been brutally cold, but he wouldn’t let her come inside. Myrna had wordlessly taken Emmy Lou to keep her warm in the kitchen. Millie and Father Nate had been at the table for their weekly card game. Gerald had told Jude to wait on the porch, then closed the door in her face.

She had felt like a lost puppy as she’d looked through the window over the sink. No one would look back at her. Myrna had placed Emmy Lou on her shoulder. Her mother’s jaw had been clenched, the bone jutting out, as she’d stared at the refrigerator door. Jude hadn’t been able to hear what anyone was saying, but the conversation was brief. They had all nodded their heads in silent consensus. Then Gerald and Myrna had openedthe door and delivered their decision. They’d framed it as a choice, but it was really an ultimatum: Jude could leave with Emmy Lou, or Jude could go, and Emmy Lou could stay.

Looking back, Jude knew that they were never going to let her leave with the baby. She’d been an alcoholic single mother living out of a stolen car. But then Gerald had promised that he would stop drinking, and Myrna had promised that she would love Jude’s child.

And then Jude had promised her parents that she wouldn’t step foot back in Clifton County until they were both dead.

Sounds intruded from the hallway outside Myrna’s closed door. Two women talking, plates and silverware clattering. Myrna’s hand moved, but only to pull the sheet away from her neck. The sunlight had crept closer to the bed. Jude stood to adjust the blinds. Ended up staring at the parking lot through the slats. She thought about something Emmy had asked outside Carol Walker’s house: why had Jude devoted decades of her life to bringing lost children home to their parents when she’d never once brought herself home to Myrna and Gerald?

It was a good question, but it missed the true purpose of Jude’s twenty-seven-year career.

The twelve photos of murdered girls on the wall of her office, the tedious drives to and from Folsom Prison, the hours spent with Freddy Henley, the years of searching the Pinnacles. The hiking trails. Climbing routes. Nesting areas. Caverns and talus caves that served as home to at least thirteen different species of bats. The Resurrection Wall. Frog Canyon. Bear Gulch. Hawkins Peak. Machete rock formation. Tanya Butler, Natalie Daniels, Honora Rios, Wanda Trochek, Mary Kay Morris, Valerie Lydelle, Jennifer Wu, Mandy Crull, Johna Blackmon, Kayse Nguyen, Steph Haver, Darlene Talbot.

Jude had not found the girls and young women that Freddy Henley had murdered. She had found their bones. Their ashes. Their broken teeth. Her quest was never about reuniting a parent with a lost child. It was to give their parents something that Jude had never had: a place to bury their grief.

She turned away from the window. Myrna still slept. The commotion in the hallway had died down, but the door leverwas being throttled. Jude was about to open it when the door swung back.

“Millie Clifton!” Millie announced as she sucked up all the oxygen in Myrna’s room. The lights flipped on. She saw Jude and scowled. “You owe me 3,000 dollars for that car you stole.”

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