Page 36 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy was running out of questions. They were back to circles again. “Madison tried to talk to me yesterday at the park. I blew her off. She was taken less than an hour later.”

“Shit, I’m sorry. But you can’t beat yourself up about it. Even if you’d talked to her, there’s no guarantee she would’ve been honest, and sure as hell no guarantee that she would’ve let you help.” Dylan looked down the hallway. “There’s Dr. Clifton.”

Tommy’s wife was tall and slender, usually given to flowing dresses and butterfly hairclips that kept her dark brown hair neatly pulled behind her head. Today, Celia was wearing jeans and a North Falls Cougars T-shirt. Her reading glasses were on top of her head. A large ring of keys circled her wrist. She held a two-way radio in her hand. Emmy could hear the low static as Celia listened out for trouble brewing in other parts of the building.

Dylan said, “I’ll leave you guys to it. Students are gonna be hitting the doors soon. Emmy, lemme know when you’re ready to talk to their teachers.”

She watched him take out his phone as he turned to go. A few seconds later, her own phone buzzed in her pocket. She knew that he had sent her the contact details for his divorce lawyer.

“I’ve got the master key on here somewhere. We can start with Cheyenne’s locker.” Celia had put on her reading glasses so she could go through the ring. “What a fucking shitshow. The county office is on my ass. Parents are screaming at me on the phone. Teachers are telling me they can’t come in.”

“Why?”

Celia cut her a look like she was slow. “They’re scared their kids are next.”

Emmywasslow. She’d only thought about the town coming together to search for the girls. She hadn’t considered that fear would make them tear each other apart. “How well did you know Cheyenne and Madison?”

“Should I read into your use of past tense?”

Emmy was surrounded by pedantic English teachers. “Cheyenne is probably gone.”

Celia froze as she let the news sink in. “And Madison?”

“She could be—” Emmy felt her hope draining away again. “It’s not looking good.”

“Shit.” Celia sighed out the word. “I’ve had both of them inmy office a couple-three times this summer. Cheyenne was usually the ringleader, but when Madison got into trouble, she could be sneaky as hell about it. It’s always the quiet ones who’ll shiv you in the shower.”

Emmy should’ve known that Celia was the one person in this school who would be brutally honest. “What were they doing?”

“Talking back. Not paying attention. Using their phones in class. The usual tedious bullshit that requires every bit of my PhD in twentieth-century American literature.” Celia’s tone was strident, but when she looked up from searching the keys, her expression suddenly softened. “Believe it or not, I actually liked them. Cheyenne was always pushing buttons, but she could be funny as hell. And Madison was so smart. Too smart. I always had to be on my toes with her. Don’t get me wrong, they ate up a lot of runway, but given time, they would’ve eventually found a soft landing.”

Emmy could hear the pain in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, when you catch the bastard, give me five minutes alone and I’ll make sure he never hurts anybody else ever again.”

Celia shoved a key into the locker. Emmy heard a click. The door swung open. She saw a textbook and a brown paper lunch bag before the odor of pot hit her like a sledgehammer.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Emmy had to clear her throat before she could ask Celia, “Can you step back?”

She used her flashlight to illuminate the locker’s interior. Six photos had been taped to the back. 4x6. Two across, three down. Madison and Cheyenne were posing for the camera: lips pursed, one hand on a hip, one knee bent, chests thrust out. In four of the photos, the girls were together. In the other two, they had taken turns sprawling alone across a king-sized mattress. They were wearing heavy make-up and the cheap costume jewelry they favored. Each girl was dressed in a barely-there lace bra and matching thong panties. Madison’s set was white. Cheyenne’s was black. Good versus evil. Angel versus vixen.

Emmy didn’t want to, but she leaned in to get a closer look. The mattress was on the ground. The concrete floor was unfinished. The wall behind the bed was painted white. No bookshelvesor artwork. No sheets. No identifying features. Just a king-sized mattress and two vulnerable children.

“Jesus,” Celia whispered. “I wish I hadn’t seen that.”

Emmy felt the same. There was something so painful about their expressions. They were smiling and laughing and pouting and teasing and they clearly thought that they were the ones who were in control, not the filthy man who’d persuaded them to contort their bodies into sexually aggressive positions for the camera.

“Let’s hope they were just playing around,” Celia said.

“Yep,” Emmy said, but the photos had to be on the internet. No one went to these lengths for a private collection. They did it to brag. To share. To humiliate. To exploit.

Emmy clipped the flashlight back on her belt. She used her phone to photograph what she’d found so far, then she slipped on a pair of gloves so she could examine the actual contents.

Cheyenne’s name was written in looping cursive on the front of the brown paper bag. Emmy guessed that Ruth Baker had packed her daughter’s lunch, though she doubted the woman had put the six bags of weed and four smaller packets of yellow pills inside. Emmy photographed them together. She’d have to get some evidence bags out of her cruiser.

“Deputy Alvarez.” Celia had the radio to her mouth. “Keep all staff and students out of the Arts Pod, please.”

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