45 pages • 1-hour read
We Are All Guilty Here
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Chapters 11-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes sexual content and discussion of graphic violence, sexual violence, pregnancy loss, death, and substance use.
Chapter 11 Summary
Emmy, Tommy, and Jude talk about Jude’s return to North Falls, their family, and their relationships. Emmy and Tommy assume Jude is only back because Gerald died. Before leaving, she told the family she wouldn’t return until both of her parents were dead. However, Jude seems sad when she hears of Myrna’s condition. The conversation changes to the Paisley Walker case. Emmy reluctantly agrees to let her work with the police force.
From the funeral home, Emmy and Jude go to meet Special Agents Seth Alexander and Damien Reynolds to discuss what’s going on. They explain their interest in Elijah Walker, given his odd behavior towards Paisley. They also found photos of a penis and a vagina on his phone. Later, during Elijah’s interrogation, Elijah insists the photos aren’t his. Finally, he admits that he has been paying a woman he met online for sex. He insists he still loves his wife Carol. Afterwards, the agents confer and decide that they might be dealing with a sex-trafficking situation. Jude suggests that they visit Carol with more questions.
Chapter 12 Summary
Emmy watches Paul and Hannah on “the jail monitor” (237). Studying Hannah, she reflects on their relationship over the years. Cole enters and the two discuss Adam. Jonah recently gave Adam work at his bar. Then Emmy tells him about Jude. Cole reveals that Gerald told him and Tommy that she was alive the year prior. Emmy is surprised, but offers Cole the details. After Henry died, Jude was devastated and became reliant on alcohol. Her behavior was volatile and unpredictable. Due to her antics, everyone in town wanted Jude gone. According to Emmy’s understanding, Jude had died in an accident that killed another local boy. In reality, Gerald told people she had died in the accident but had pushed her out of town.
Jude enters, interrupting the conversation and updating Emmy on Elijah. She thinks she may be able to find the woman Elijah was sleeping with through the local hairdresser. Emmy, Jude, and Cole review the information they have on the case. They wonder if the perpetrator is in fact a trusted townsperson with “a history of pedophilia” (247). Afterwards, they head to the Walkers’.
Chapter 13 Summary
Emmy and Jude talk with Carol while Cole inspects Elijah’s things. Emmy asks Carol about Paisley and her relationship with Elijah. During the conversation, Emmy and Jude notice a photo of a young pregnant girl who resembles Paisley sitting on the lap of an older man. Carol reveals that the man is her brother Reggie and the girl is his 17-year-old wife. Reggie got her pregnant when she was 15. She lost the pregnancy and he recently got her pregnant again. Reggie barges in and Jude arrests him. Meanwhile, Emmy gets a call from Virgil, informing her of his work on the case and the information he discovered about the Walkers’ landscaper, Antonio Ramirez.
Afterwards, Jude questions Emmy about Virgil’s involvement in the case. He is a retired cop and Emmy is standing sheriff. Emmy insists they need him because of his experience and expertise on the Broken Angels Case. Jude urges her to take more control. Emmy gets a message that the hairdresser identified Belinda Pfeiffer, the woman Elijah was sleeping with.
Chapter 14 Summary
Back at the station, Emmy discusses the case with Brett and Jude. Rumors about Adam have been spreading through town. They bring in Belinda Pfeiffer to meet with Elijah. They discover the two were sleeping together, but guess that the penis photo doesn’t in fact belong to Elijah. They wonder if he was having yet another affair. Emmy has a revelation, guessing the penis photo belongs to Jack Whitlock. A few years ago, Jack made a podcast about the Broken Angels case, indicating his continued investment in what happened. Jack is gay and may have been doing sexual favors for pay to fund the podcast; she deduces that Elijah was one of his clients. Cole is upset; he and Jack dated for some time but Jack left Cole.
After work, Emmy heads to Dylan’s house. Dylan comforts her and runs her a bath. She expresses her sadness and frustration. When Dylan steps out, Emmy drifts into thought and finally lets herself sleep.
Chapter 15 Summary
Jude returns to her family home for the first time. She reunites with Taybee and Tommy’s wife Celia. Jude informs her family the only reason she’s back to work on the Paisley case. The conversation turns to the Bubba Rawley accident; Gerald used it to explain Jude’s death. Jude tells her family about the years she spent getting sober and finding work. They discuss the Broken Angels Case and the information Gerald might have missed. Emmy and Cole join, adding their thoughts about Jack, his podcast, and Adam. Jude decides to see Adam for more information.
Jude changes her styling before visiting Adam at the bar. Adam is shocked to see her, and immediately starts making lascivious remarks. Jude’s mind floods with memories of when Adam raped her as a teenager. She reminds him of his crimes and interrogates him about Madison, Cheyenne, and Paisley. Adam insists he wasn’t involved in the girls’ disappearances. On her way out, Jude notices a shotgun under the bar—a clear violation of Adam’s parole.
Chapter 16 Summary
After her bath, Emmy heads to the station. She speaks with Virgil about the Broken Angels case files. Virgil wonders if they should reopen the case, indicating that Gerald often made mistakes and had a difficult past. Emmy heads out of his office in Evidence, trusting he’ll review the files himself.
Emmy visits Hannah in her cell. They have a pleasant exchange. Afterwards, Jude confronts Emmy about getting involved. Since she talked to Hannah, they can’t use her as a suspect. They chat about Jude’s visit with Adam. She learned that Woody got Cheyenne to sell drugs in North Falls to expand his market. The way Jude talks about Adam’s history of violence unnerves Emmy. However, neither woman is sure that he’s guilty of hurting Madison, Cheyenne, or Paisley. They decide that if there is a single perpetrator, he would have kept trophies from his crimes. They plan to seek out the gun and hammer the perpetrator used in the Broken Angels Case.
Chapters 11-16 Analysis
In Chapters 11-16, Emmy and Jude’s continued work on the Paisley Walker and Broken Angels cases underscores The Fragile Veneer of Small-Town Life. Although Jude hasn’t been back to North Falls in over 20 years, her work on the open missing persons cases immediately re-submerses her in the dramas of her former hometown. Together, she and Emmy try to navigate their community’s often confusing cultural dynamics to unearth the truth about Madison’s, Cheyenne’s, and Paisley’s disappearances. Their investigative work gradually unveils unsettling discoveries about the town’s violent underbelly. Their interest in characters including Adam, Elijah, and Reggie makes them wonder if their fellow townspeople are in fact the people they thought they were. Their nominally idyllic hometown begins to appear less safe than they originally believed.
Traditional crime and thriller novels rely on elements of deception and unreliability to intensify the narrative mystery. In We Are All Guilty Here, Emmy and Jude are increasingly unsure who they can trust as they attempt to solve their open cases. For example, although Elijah Walker appears to be a family man on the surface, Emmy and Jude quickly discover that he has “clearly been waiting to explode” (231). The truths they uncover about his covert sexual activities compromise their perception of him. In turn, they have cause to question every other North Falls resident they thought they knew well.
This is even the case with a character like Adam. He appears to be the epitome of a pedophiliac criminal. Emmy and Jude especially suspect him of hurting Madison, Cheyenne, and Paisely because he has a history of sexual abuse. “Statistically,” Jude reminds Emmy, “men who rape don’t only rape one time, and generally, they don’t only have one victim” (326). Despite this evidence against Adam, neither Emmy nor Jude is “able to get a read on” (326) Adam’s actual culpability. The facts logically lead to Adam, but Emmy and Jude’s instincts challenge them to dig deeper. The truth isn’t what it seems, and neither are the North Falls townspeople the individuals Emmy and Jude thought they were. This tight-knit community is defined by secrets that Emmy and Jude are just starting to uncover.
Emmy and Jude’s work on the missing persons cases challenges them to face The Impact of the Past on the Present. For Jude, returning to North Falls complicates her ability “to ground herself in the present instead of letting herself get yanked into the past” (225). Her character regards North Falls as a physical manifestation of her fraught personal history. Physically returning to this location unearths her memories, trauma, and missteps from her life years prior. She is reluctant to confront these complex elements of her past—particularly from the era immediately following Henry’s death—because she fears that her grief and loss will inhibit her ability to perform solid police work. Her encounter with Adam Huntsinger is an example of how her past and present lives remain entangled despite her attempts to compartmentalize them. In the present she is trying to solve the open missing persons cases and must interact with Adam to find answers.
Their conversation at the bar unearths old hurts and traumas from Adam’s sexual violence against her. Jude must therefore ask herself if she is trying to implicate Adam because of what he did to her, or because of what he might have done to Madison, Cheyenne, and Paisley. Meanwhile, Emmy also faces reminders of her past embedded in her present. This is particularly true regarding the overlaps between Madison and Cheyenne’s and Paisley’s disappearances. Working on Paisley’s case reminds her of her work on the Broken Angels Case. She wants to believe she found the right answers 12 years prior, but in the present she begins to understand that her past mistakes might have caused history to repeat itself in North Falls.
Caught in the scandals, dramas, and secrets of how their pasts in North Falls have impacted their present circumstances, Emmy and Jude are also reminded of The Challenges of Coping with Grief and Guilt. For Jude, this means confronting how leaving her family has impacted her psyche in the present. For Emmy, this means “push[ing] aside [her] own grief” over her father’s recent passing to “search for a missing child” (231). She is still reeling from Gerald’s recent murder, but feels compelled to stave off her sorrow and direct her energy towards Paisley’s whereabouts.
Jude meanwhile tries to tamp down her own grief and guilt over abandoning her family decades prior in order to focus on her work. Although Emmy and Jude are doing their best to remain strong, their avoidant behaviors cause their grief and guilt to fester. They must face these difficult emotional experiences before they can truly pursue healing, peace, and truth.
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