45 pages • 1-hour read
We Are All Guilty Here
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions of graphic violence, illness, sexual content, child abuse, and substance use.
Chapter 1 Summary
On the Fourth of July in North Falls, Georgia, Madison Dalrymple waits at the park for her best friend Cheyenne Baker. They made plans to meet but Cheyenne is late. Madison’s stepmother Hannah’s best friend, Emmy Clifton-Lang, arrives. Emmy is a police deputy. She tries engaging Madison but she seems agitated; Emmy assumes this is her typical teenage behavior and goes to confront her husband Jonah Lang. They get into an argument about their 11-year-old son Cole’s care. Emmy is embarrassed that everyone in North Falls has seen their argument.
The fireworks start. Madison tries calling Cheyenne but can’t reach her. She sees a Jetta and assumes Cheyenne borrowed her dad’s car and has now arrived. She is scared, but eager to execute her and Cheyenne’s most recent, risky plan. Madison approaches the car, surprised to hear a whimper coming from inside the trunk. She drops her bike and looks inside to find a battered Cheyenne and her broken bike. Madison turns around and comes face-to-face with a man just before he knocks her unconscious.
Chapter 2 Summary
After the fireworks display, Emmy convenes with her colleague Brett Temple. She also speaks with his wife Vanna, her cousin Taybee, and her best friend Hannah and her husband Paul. She and Hannah joke around until Emmy’s dad, Gerald Clifton, approaches, looking upset. Emmy worries that he’s not okay. He’s been sick lately and her mother Myrna has Alzheimer’s. Emmy has a brother, Tommy, but he is of little support and many years older than her. Decades ago, after her twin siblings Henry and Martha died, Myrna and Gerald had Emmy, “a surprise baby” (19).
Emmy and Gerald convene about a bad feeling they have. Someone found a broken bike, tire treads, and boot prints in the field. They examine the scene, and find blood, too. Emmy identifies the bike as Cheyenne’s. Hannah approaches, insisting she can’t find Madison. Together, the cops decide that they’re dealing with a double kidnapping.
Chapter 3 Summary
Emmy and Gerald drive to Ruth and Felix Baker’s house to tell them about Cheyenne. Emmy is terrified that they won’t find Cheyenne or Madison alive if they don’t expedite their investigation.
On their way, their colleague Virgil Ingram calls to say he spoke with Felix, who has an alibi. At the house, the family lets the cops inside. A panicked Ruth blames Madison for everything, insisting Cheyenne was a good kid until she and Madison started hanging out. In Cheyenne’s room, Emmy talks to Cheyenne’s younger sister Pamela alone. Pamela informs her that Cheyenne may have a boyfriend named Jack Whitlock, as she often hung out with older boys. Emmy also finds a stash of cash, marijuana, and other drugs in Cheyenne’s things. Emmy wonders how a teenager secured so much money and why.
Chapter 4 Summary
Emmy visits 16-year-old Jack at his home. She confronts him about Cheyenne and Madison’s whereabouts. Jack insists he doesn’t know, but explains how much everyone disliked the girls. They also sold and used drugs, partied, and hung out with older men. It was well-known that the friends performed sexual favors for men for money, too. Jack used to be friends with Cheyenne but she started mistreating him when they were around their classmates. He also reveals that Cheyenne worked for another dealer in the area called Wesley (Woody) Woodrow, and that she and Madison spent time with The Perv, an older man who often attended high school parties.
Emmy heads over to Hannah’s house to update her. She reveals that she saw Madison before the fireworks. She suspected Madison needed to talk but was too distracted by Jonah to engage her. A furious Hannah blames Emmy for Madison’s disappearance and insists she never wants to see her again.
Chapter 5 Summary
Emmy returns home to her parents’ house. She can’t stop thinking about the missing girls and engages Myrna in conversation. Myrna reminds Emmy that suffering and blessings are intertwined. Emmy then calls Gerald about the case. He ends up apologizing for mistakes he made in the past. A confused Emmy forgives him.
Throughout the day, Emmy receives numerous calls from her aunt Millie. She ignores all of them. She meets up with Deputy Dylan Alvarez at the high school to continue investigating the kidnapping case. They end up chatting about marriage and divorce. When they reach the girls’ lockers, their conversation turns back to Cheyenne and Madison. Inside Cheyenne’s locker, they find playful, flirtatious photos of the friends. Then they find a nude photo of Cheyenne. All they find in Madison’s locker is a cut-up SIM card.
In the surveillance room, they notice the chorus teacher Dale Loudermilk open Cheyenne’s locker. He finds and studies the nude photo. He then goes to the auditorium, where he extracts a laptop from “behind a filing cabinet” (103). The cops race in and discover child sexual abuse material on the computer.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The opening chapters of We Are All Guilty Here introduce the narrative world of North Falls, Georgia. The first title in Slaughter’s North Falls Series, the novel introduces the primary characters, conflicts, and stakes of this insular Southern universe, in turn introducing the theme of The Fragile Veneer of Small-Town Life. The way “things [work] in North Falls,” the third person narrator establishes in Chapter 1, is that “everybody [is] up in your business” (7). The town is defined by its tight-knit, and often nosy community. Everyone living in North Falls is familiar with everyone else. This dynamic renders a character like the protagonist Emmy Clifton self-conscious when she argues with her husband Jonah Lang at the fireworks show. At the same time, the North Falls community has benefits, too. As soon as Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker disappear, everyone rushes to support their families, form search parties, and help the police.
As a result of the North Falls culture, Emmy assumes that the perpetrator of the teenagers’ kidnapping is an outsider. “North Falls had a particular distrust for anything that wasn’t born and bred within the 190-acre city limits” (16), which leads Emmy to immediately believe that Madison and Cheyenne’s fates were caused by a stranger. Her involvement in the kidnapping case is thus tinged by her North Falls community and identity. The decisions she makes as she first begins investigating the girls’ disappearances are led more by others’ expectations of her and emotional responses to the situation than by her instincts. The North Falls community threatens to blinker Emmy’s outlook, leading her away from considering a more local suspect.
The North Falls setting also creates a pseudo locked-room mystery effect. In such mystery or thriller novels, a limited number of characters are contained within a confined space when a crime is committed. Any one of the characters present could be the perpetrator. The trope is meant to heighten the narrative stakes and to engage the reader in solving the mystery along with the characters. These formal dynamics are present in We Are All Guilty Here, but Slaughter reimagines the trope. The characters aren’t trapped in a single house or room, but they are all confined within the insular parameters of their Georgian town.
Emmy, Gerald, and their colleagues are initially convinced that the perpetrator “ha[s] to be a stranger” because North Falls residents don’t trust outsiders (38). However, when they start delving into Cheyenne’s and Madison’s personal lives, the police investigators are compelled to face the hard truth: Someone in North Falls is responsible. Interactions with or references to Jack Whitlock, Dale Loudermilk, and The Perv challenge Emmy in particular to reassess her outlook on the case, while also alerting her to the reality that her small community is not nearly as innocent or idyllic as it may first seem. As a result, Emmy must interrogate the people she knows best and to disrupt her small-town illusions to find the truth.
Emmy’s involvement in the kidnapping case—later referred to as the Broken Angels Case—also conveys The Challenges of Coping with Grief and Guilt. Emmy is desperate to find Madison and Cheyenne because she cares about their lives. She is particularly concerned about Madison’s well-being because she is best friends with Madison’s stepmother Hannah. She watched Madison grow up and witnessed Hannah become a part of her life and fall in love with her. Part of her investment in solving the case thus stems from genuine love and sorrow. On the other hand, Emmy’s devotion to recovering Madison is inspired by guilt. Before her disappearance, Emmy saw Madison at the park but disregarded her to handle her own affairs. She “knew that [Madison] wanted to talk,” but “told her not now” (75). In light of Madison’s disappearance and possible death, Emmy is overcome by guilt. Hannah blames her, but Emmy also blames herself.
The way Emmy responds to the case is a symptom of her culpability. Emmy is determined to be a good police officer. However, she also wants to prove herself to her friends and townspeople. Everyone in town knows “the entire story of Emmy’s life, from being born to being stuck with her sad-sack older brother […] to getting married to her middle school sweetheart” (7). Emmy’s life is always on display. All of her mistakes, missteps, and hardships are visible to her community. She is caught in a cycle of disappointment, loss, and shame that she is desperate to escape. Emmy goes to Gerald, Myrna, and Dylan for support after Hannah pushes her away. She does not yet know how to face her grief and guilt, or to move through her emotions. These are the primary aspects of Emmy’s arc that she’ll have to overcome in the chapters that follow.
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