Page 17 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy didn’t want to read too much into the kiss. At that age, she had constantly developed crushes on girls, but there was never a sexual component. It was more like she wanted tobethem rather than tobewiththem. To have Celia’s quick wit or Taybee’s unwavering certainty or Hannah’s dark sense of humor. To be anyone but herself.

It was so hard to be a fifteen-year-old girl.

She heard the hallway floorboards creak again. Emmy glanced into the mirror over the dresser. She could see Pamela peering around the doorjamb.

Emmy sat back on her heels. Again, she thought about Pamela’s furtive look in the street. At ten years of age, Pamela was old enough to understand something bad had happened to Cheyenne, but not old enough to grasp that she really needed to help. Any past promises or pinky swears or even bribes were inconsequential. Pamela needed to confess it all. Emmy tried to think of a way to convey this truth without pushing the girl too far. Cole was one year older, but probably half as mature. The only real power you had at that age was silence.

She took out her phone and carefully photographed everything she had found. Then she placed the photo strip back in the metal box. Then the bag of pot. Then she started counting the cash. Twenties, mostly. A few tens. Several fifties, which was surprising.Emmy had been wrong in her estimate. There was closer to five grand in the lockbox. The amount was staggering for a teenager to have hidden in her closet. And it wasn’t as if Cheyenne could go to an ATM. Who the hell had given dozens of crisp fifty-dollar bills to a fifteen-year-old girl?

Pamela’s shadow fell across the shoe collection. The girl squatted down beside Emmy. She was wearing a yellow dress that was stained down the front, likely from a red popsicle. Her knobby knees had cuts and scrapes. She had red clay under her fingernails from playing in the river basin. She smelled almost overwhelmingly sweaty, but in that way that children could stink but still smell sweet.

Emmy kept quiet as she started counting out the bills again, placing them in stacks like Monopoly money. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Pamela pressing the seeds in the baggie like she was popping bubble wrap. Emmy tidied the stacks of bills. She bit her tongue so that she didn’t ruin this moment. She had spent so many hours doing busy work in the kitchen or pretending to care about dusting books on the shelves or arranging PlayStation CDs while she waited for Cole to finally tell her what was bothering him. This should’ve been easy compared to that, but she was so desperate to find Madison and Cheyenne that her hands ached to grab Pamela by the arms and shake her.

Instead, she scooped up the fifties and started turning the faces on the bills in the same direction.

Pamela kept pressing her thumb into the seeds.

Emmy decided to take a risk. “I guess your dad doesn’t know about Cheyenne’s iPhone.”

Pamela stiffened.

“It’s not a big deal.” Emmy had seen Cheyenne with the iPhone on Hannah’s couch. The two girls had been sitting a foot away from each other and still texted rather than opening their mouths to speak. “I won’t tell anybody.”

Pamela went back to pressing the seeds. She had broken apart most of them. Emmy wondered if she knew what was in the baggie. Rather than ask, she picked up the twenties and started to face them all in the same direction.

“There’s more,” Pamela said.

“Money?” Emmy kept arranging.

“Yeah.”

Emmy waited until she had finished with the bills. “Where?”

Pamela didn’t answer. The guilt of revealing Cheyenne’s secret was obviously weighing heavy. Again, Emmy forced her mouth to stay closed, scooping up another stack of bills as her ears strained for any break in the silence.

Finally, Pamela tapped Emmy on the arm. She waited for her to look, then her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling in the closet.

The kid was a better investigator than Emmy. There was an attic access panel at the top of the closet.

Pamela stood up. She threw back the sheepskin rug and dragged the desk chair across the floor. That explained the gouge marks in the wood. Emmy was wondering how the kid managed to get to the panel when Pamela started piling books onto the seat, which was not only dangerous but unnecessary.

“I’ve got it, sweetheart.” Emmy stepped onto the chair. She reached up over her head and pushed away the panel. She felt blindly around the attic joists. Pink insulation rained down into her mouth and eyes. She coughed, using her arm to wipe grit from her eyes. She was about to ask Pamela for more guidance when her fingers touched the edge of a plastic bag. Ziploc. Gallon-sized. Thick enough for the freezer. She pulled down the bag through the opening. She blinked her eyes, but not from the insulation. Because she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Another giant wad of cash. A blister pack of birth control pills with four tablets missing. More pot. What looked like two eight balls of cocaine and ten tabs of Molly.

She looked down at Pamela. Emmy was done being careful. She asked, “Does Cheyenne have a boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” the girl said. “His name is Jack.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Yet again, Emmy sat beside her father as he drove her cruiser, this time to another house with another family that was about to have their lives turned upside down—though for very different reasons. The Jack that Pamela had named was the sixteen-year-old son of Dr. Carl Whitlock, a pediatrician whose patient list touched almost every person in North Falls, including Emmy, who’d seen him as a teenager, and Cole, who’d never known another doctor. Carl’s wife, Monica, had been nearly twenty years younger than him and had never taken to small town life. She’d remarried and moved to Atlanta a few years ago, but they’d kept Jack in North Falls so that he could finish high school.

Gerald asked, “She on your radar?”

He was asking about Cheyenne. Every cop had a list of potential criminals on their radar, the kind of people who’d been lucky or clever enough to avoid getting arrested. Emmy had never suspected anything other than teenage angst behind Cheyenne and Madison’s steely silences whenever she walked into the room. The stash of drugs and money had thrown her for a loop.

She told her father, “I knew the girls were getting high sometimes, but I had no idea Cheyenne was messed up in anything like this. If I had, I would’ve told Hannah to get Madison the hell away from her.”

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