Page 56 of We Are All Guilty Here

“Fuck you!” Hannah screamed. “Fuck you and your stupid promises! This is all your fault!”

The connection was severed. Emmy threw her phone across the car. Her eyes blurred with tears she didn’t deserve to cry. She let her foot off the gas. The cruiser started coasting. The whine of the V8 engine shifted down into a low purr. She slowed to a stop.

What was she doing?

She was injured. Bleeding. Probably concussed. She had ignored Madison at the park. She had ignored Millie’s calls all day. Her father didn’t need Emmy’s help at the bar in Clayville. He needed her to do as she’d been told. To go to the hospital. To be one less thing that he had to worry about. To stop trying to be the hero of this terrible, tragic story.

Emmy had criticized Lionel Faulkner’s interview technique, but the textbook assumed the suspect was guilty. Gerald would bring in the right man. Faulkner would eventually break Adam Huntsinger. The raping murderer would give a full confession. He would explain everything that had happened. And eventually, hopefully, for Hannah and Paul’s sake, for Ruth and Felix’s sanity, he would tell them where to find the bodies.

The river. A park. A ditch. An old logging road. Emmy had recited the statistics to Gerald a few hours ago. Most victimsare found within twenty miles of the abduction site in a place familiar to the perpetrator. The bodies are usually concealed in some way—covered with leaves, buried in a shallow grave, submerged in water, hidden in an abandoned building or shed, disarticulated and disposed of in a landfill.

Had Adam placed Cheyenne in a shallow grave? Had he taken Madison deep into the forest? Had she found herself underneath yet another tree? Had she looked up at the towering canopy, the latticework of leaves, and thought about what Emmy had told her? That sometimes, you miss the big picture because you’re too focused on the little stuff. Sometimes, you miss the forest for the trees.

Emmy’s foot slipped off the brake. The car started to roll. She felt a thought working its way through her brain in slow, lazy arcs, the same way that Emmy and Hannah used to coast their bikes down this same backroad. She gave herself one of her father’s prompts:

What are we missing?

A place that’s well known to the perpetrator. A place where he feels comfortable. A place that he can return to so he can relive his crimes. A place where he was seen smoking cigarettes with one of his victims at eleven o’clock on the morning of the kidnappings.

Aunt Millie’s pond.

The cruiser gave a violent lurch when Emmy punched the gas. The speedometer had inched up to sixty by the time she’d reached the end of Taybee’s fence. Barbed wire ringed the pasture behind Millie’s house. Emmy broke through, dragging a fence post with her. She could see the pond up ahead. Fed by an underground spring. Two hundred yards in circumference. Up to twenty feet deep in the middle.

Isolated, contained, accessible—the perfect place to submerge a body.

Emmy slid to a stop at the water’s edge. The sun had turned the surface into a mirror. She got out of the car, shielded her eyes. She ignored her sprained ankle as she ran around the edge of the retaining wall. Cigarette butts were everywhere. Adam had left his tools on the ground. Emmy could see somethingfloating in the middle of the pond. An interruption of light on the water. An unmoving ripple. A light blue cotton, the same light blue as the T-shirt Madison had been wearing at the park.

“No …” Emmy could only whisper the word. “No …”

She dove into the deep end of the pond, slicing under the surface like a knife. She came up for air about halfway to the center. Her feet dragged because of her boots. She pulled at the laces, kicked them off as she swam. Her arms made sweeping strokes, digging into the water, ignoring the burning sensation in her wounded ankle and hand.

She was so close.

She could see the dark letters on the back of the pale blue shirt. Madison was face-down, her blonde hair floating like strands of silk. Her right arm was out, her fingers waving with the ripples along the surface.

Emmy gave one last lunge, grabbing onto her hand, pulling herself to the body. She tilted up Madison’s head from the water. Her face was bloated, eyelids closed, lips as white as cotton. Hannah’s girl. Her most precious thing. Emmy could feel that the bones in the girl’s hand were crushed. She gently pressed it to her heart, kept the girl as close as she should’ve last night when Madison was alive and annoyed and worried and clearly in trouble and needing help if only Emmy had listened.

Now, she caressed Madison’s cheek, taking the weight of her head in the palm of her hand. Water lapped at Emmy’s mouth. She could hear the sound of waves slapping the retaining wall.

She whispered, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you.”

Emmy felt tears sting her eyes. There was no relief from speaking words, no lightening of the load, just the heavy burden of all that had been lost.

She carefully lowered Madison’s head back into the water. Emmy was physically exhausted, but she wasn’t going to abandon the girl again. She had to figure out how to get her to the edge. Something was anchoring her in place. Emmy let her hands travel along the torso. A heavy chain was wrapped around Madison’s waist. Emmy took a deep breath, then stuck her head back under the water to see what was weighing her down.

Another body. Another precious girl.

Shooting streaks of sunlight danced around Cheyenne Baker’s head. Her gold necklace had been replaced with a chain that bit like teeth into her neck. The violence she had suffered was still written on her face. Split lip. Broken nose. Gunshot wound puckering the center of her forehead. Cheyenne had seen the bullet coming. She had known that she was going to die. Emmy reached out, touching her cheek. Wanting to give some softness to the child whose last moments on earth had been filled with so much terror.

Emmy felt her breath running out. Every molecule in her brain was telling her to go up for air. She forced herself to swim deeper, following the length of chain to the bottom. It was looped around a large concrete block. The only thing holding the girls in place was the weight of the rock. Emmy wrenched loose the chain. She felt light-headed as she pushed herself back up to the surface.

“Emmy Lou Clifton!” Millie was standing on the retaining wall. “What are you doing?”

Emmy couldn’t waste her breath on an answer. She would either pull the girls out now or join them in their graves. She circled behind Madison, hooked her arm around the girl’s chest, then reached overhead with the other arm to start the arduous backstroke toward the edge.

As a deputy, Emmy had performed water rescues, but never with two bodies. Her form was choppy. Her left foot was useless. Cheyenne kept rolling to the side. Their combined weight grew heavier in the shallows. Emmy crawled out of the pond on her knees, dragging the bodies behind her. She could only manage to get them halfway onto the grass. She fell onto her back. Looked up at the sky. Her lungs shook. She coughed. She was surrounded by air but could barely breathe.

“Poor little things.” Millie was standing above them. She started to shake her head. “They look like two broken angels.”

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