Page 39 of We Are All Guilty Here

She asked, “Why did you hide your laptop behind the filing cabinet?”

“It wasn’t hidden. I stored it there to keep it safe over the summer, but—” His eyes shifted as he desperately searched for an explanation. “Anyone could access it. I haven’t been here since post-planning. Any one of the janitors could’ve—”

“Could’ve what?” Emmy crowded into his space. “What files were you copying?”

“N-nothing, I—” Loudermilk’s hand went to his mouth. “Please, this is a misunderstanding. It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m a good man.”

“I’m in,” Celia said.

Emmy leaned down to look at the laptop. A progress bar showed on the middle of the screen. Nine hundred and sixty-eight files were being copied. Emmy opened the thumb drive, which was titled SHEET MUSIC. There were more folders than she could count. HYMNS. ORATORIOS. MAGNIFICATS. CANTATAS. PSALMS. CHRISTMAS.

“See?” Loudermilk pointed to the files. “I told you that I needed to print out some song sheets for—”

“Shut up.” Emmy toggled the dates to show the most recent folder. Sacred Concertos jumped to the top of the list. The contents must have been massive. The progress bar estimated the task would take forty-eight minutes.

She moved the cursor to the folder.

“Please don’t,” Loudermilk begged. “Just walk away. We can all just walk away.”

Emmy tapped open Sacred Concertos. It was like a Russian doll. More folders appeared, one for almost every letter of the alphabet. She started with the As. Thumbnails loaded for dozens of JPEGs. All of the file names followed the same pattern: a name, a dash, a number.

Abigail-10

Allyson-10

Andie-11

Angela-10

Anna-9

Emmy tasted bile in her mouth. She opened the B folder. Then the C. They were all the same. Alphabetized. Indexed. A name. A dash. A number. She didn’t open any of the photos. The thumbnails alone were nauseating.

“I can explain,” Loudermilk tried.

Emmy didn’t need an explanation.

Dale Loudermilk was a pedophile with easy access to both of the missing girls.

CHAPTER SIX

Emmy sat beside her father in the viewing room inside the sheriff’s station. The lights were off. There were two monitors on the table in front of them, both showing different angles of the interrogation room thirty feet away. One camera was focused on Dale Loudermilk, who was sitting ramrod straight in a chair, hands folded together in his lap. The other was on Lionel Faulkner, the lead FBI agent from Atlanta who’d spent the last three hours trying to get Dale to confess to the kidnapping and likely murder of Cheyenne Baker and Madison Dalrymple.

So far, all that he’d gotten were emphatic denials.

“Dale.” Lionel’s voice was gratingly calm through the cheap speaker between the monitors. “Where are the girls?”

Emmy watched Dale shake his head, the same as he’d done each time Lionel had asked him the question before. The man who’d panicked when she’d walked into the stage manager’s office was a distant memory. This version of Dale was the one Emmy remembered from school: smug and condescending, annoyed that you dared even speak to him. He clearly thought he was smart enough to talk his way out of trouble when the truth was, if he was really smart, he’d shut his mouth and get a lawyer.

“Agent Faulkner, I’ve told you this a million times,” Dale said. “My answer will not change. I have no idea where the girls are. I had nothing to do with their disappearance. I am wholly innocent.”

“Why do you keep lying to me?”

“I am not lying. I’m telling you something you don’t want tohear.” Dale sounded as if he was lecturing a student. “I am an educator. I would never harm a child. The very idea is anathema to my system of beliefs.”

“Let’s get into that.” Lionel sat back in his chair. He crossed his legs, acting as though he had all the time in the world. “What made you want to become a teacher?”

Emmy huffed out her frustration. She had picked up Lionel’s pattern early on. The agent would lean in, physically intruding into Dale’s personal space, as he aggressively questioned him about the missing girls, then pull back and ask an innocuous question about choral arrangements or what it was like to work at the rec center.

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