Page 59 of We Are All Guilty Here

Cole said, “Bad night.”

“Yep.”

Emmy headed across the driveway toward her father’s home office. She silently focused her thoughts on what her day would look like. There were assignments to be made and roll call to get through and all the other administrative duties, but Adam Huntsinger had to be dealt with first. Millie was right that the town was riled up. Emmy had read a lot of angry comments under theHeraldstory. She had found herself agreeing with some of the sentiments. The thought of Madison and Cheyenne’s killer being in North Falls again sent a familiar knot of stress twisting inside her stomach.

Fortunately, Adam was not completely free. He was technicallyon parole, which limited his rights considerably. He was living at his parents’ house in Elsinore Meadows. The green Chevy truck was still his registered vehicle. According to his terms of parole, he would have to find a job soon, submit to random searches, and comply with drug screening. But hoping and praying and waiting for Adam to violate one of those conditions so that he was sent back to prison was not going to make the town any safer.

Emmy’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She tapped open the notifications. The cousins had started to coalesce around a time and date for the baby shower. She scrolled down, only now admitting to herself that she had been secretly hoping for a text from Hannah. Not a mending of fences or an opening for reconciliation, but an opportunity for Emmy to be useful, to tell Hannah that she wasn’t giving up, that this wasn’t the end, that she would find a way to send Adam Huntsinger back to prison if it killed her.

But there was no text from Hannah and no way for Emmy to make the first move. She had stuck by Hannah’s wishes over the last twelve years. They hadn’t had a real conversation since that harrowing day that Emmy had found the girls in the water. They occasionally nodded if they saw each other out at a restaurant or the bar. Once, they both happened to be in the produce aisle at the grocery store, and Hannah had said, “Peaches are good this year.” Another time, Emmy had been waiting for a prescription at the Good Dollar and realized that both she and Hannah were humming along with the muzak version of “Complicated”. If Hannah was thinking of the hours they had spent trying to smudge their eyeliner like Avril Lavigne, she didn’t say.

“Mom, you sure you’re okay?” Cole asked. “No offense, but you look like shit.”

“That’s real sweet, baby. Why don’t you needlepoint that onto a pillow for me next Mother’s Day?” Emmy caught his grin when she bumped him with her hip. “Did you have a chance to look at that apartment complex over in Verona? Your uncle Penley said he’d give you a good deal.”

“It’s on my list.”

Emmy knew there was no list. She also knew that everything that irritated her about her son—his stubbornness, his dogged loyalty, his blind sense of duty—were things that irritated her about herself.

She reached for the door to Gerald’s office, telling him, “Button your collar.”

Her father looked up from his desk when they entered. He was writing on a sheet of lined notebook paper. Sunlight sliced through the narrow windows behind him. He’d converted the old equipment shed into an office when Emmy and Cole had moved in after the divorce. Filing cabinets lined one wall. Two framed photographs of his children were by the window, one of Emmy as a toddler holding a kitten, another of her nearly grown siblings standing at the bottom of the Falls three years before she’d been born. Two years before Henry had died. One year before Martha was gone. Tommy looked tall and lanky in his bathing trunks. He was a freshman in college. His hair had been nearly as long as Martha’s.

“Mornin’ boss,” Cole said.

“Deputy.” Gerald capped his pen, slid the paper into a folder. He looked up at Emmy. “How’s today?”

He was asking about Myrna. Gerald had walked the floors with her last night, too. There was a faint, red line across his cheek where Myrna’s fingernail had caught the skin when she’d slapped him.

This wasn’t the only visible mark of Myrna’s disease. If her mother had been aged by her diagnosis, her father had been dragged to the edge of hell. He was eighty-six now, but he looked ten years older than Millie. His face was gaunt. He’d lost too much weight too quickly. His uniform hung off his shoulders like a paper sack. In many ways, it was harder for Emmy to watch her father deteriorate than her mother.

“It’s an okay day,” she said, becauseokayandbadwere the only two options. “Millie will spend the morning with her, then Tommy will swing by at lunch, then the home health aid will come until you or I can leave the station.”

“I can help,” Cole said.

“No, you can’t.” Emmy looked at her father. “Run it down?”

Gerald nodded. “Okay.”

Emmy was relieved to move on to work. She pointed for Cole to sit down, then touched her own collar to remind him again to do the button.

“What do we know?” she started. “On the morning of the murders, Adam Huntsinger was seen talking to Madison at the pond around eleven o’clock. Cigarette butts at the scene matched Adam’s and Madison’s DNA. Adam’s fingerprints and DNA were on the inside of the Ziploc bag of pot that was found in Madison’s pocket, as well as on the bag of pot located in Cheyenne’s lockbox. His father’s Jetta had scuffs on the left front bumper consistent with hitting the bicycle tire. The charm from Cheyenne’s broken necklace was found outside his basement apartment with Adam’s fingerprints. There were guns in the house consistent with the gun used to murder Cheyenne. Impressions taken from the soccer pitch and from the backroad are consistent with the brand and type of tire that’s standard on the year and class of Walton Huntsinger’s Jetta. Prints from size eleven work boots were found on the backroad, the soccer pitch, and at the pond. Adam Huntsinger wore a size eleven boot.”

Emmy waited for Cole.

He said, “On that same night, Barbara Jericho was a twenty-two-year-old exotic dancer working in a club outside of Macon. She met a customer who offered to drive her to Savannah to watch the fireworks. Later the next morning, she was found by a Candler sheriff’s deputy, wandering the streets of Metter over a hundred miles away. She told him that she’d been sexually assaulted. She was driven to the hospital where a rape kit was performed. Fast forward to last year. Jericho was listening to theMisguided Angelpodcast. She started looking at photos online and recognized Adam Huntsinger as the man who’d attacked her. She contacted the Candler sheriff’s office and found out that the rape kit had never been processed. After some back and forth, they got the GBI to process the kit and the DNA was matched to Adam Huntsinger. The rape gave him an alibi for the night of the kidnapping and murder. He was freed from death row two days ago. He’s on bail pending trial on the rape charge.”

Emmy asked him, “What do wethinkwe know?”

Cole’s tongue darted out the same way it had when he was eight and thought he was being clever. “You guys still think that Adam Huntsinger is guilty.”

“Okay.” Emmy glanced at her father for support, but his expression was as stony as his silence. She told Cole, “Tap the weak spots.”

“I mean …” Cole shrugged, but he’d practically memorized every word of Jack’s podcast. “Adam said his fingerprints were on the necklace because Madison asked him to fix it for Cheyenne. She could’ve dropped the chain on the backroad on her way to buy pot from him at Millie’s pond. You never found the murder weapon. You never found Cheyenne’s flip phone with her initials scratched onto the case. There was no DNA matching the victims inside the Jetta. The plastic tarp the divers found at the bottom of the pond could’ve been used to line the trunk, but it didn’t have any DNA or fingerprints on it. What you just said about the tires and the boot prints and the scuff mark on the front bumper—there’s a lot ofconsistent withs and not a lot ofmatched exactlys.”

Emmy asked, “They teach you at the academy that every piece of evidence always comes up one hundred percent?”

“They taught me that DNA is the gold standard.”

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