45 pages • 1-hour read
We Are All Guilty Here
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Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, substance use, illness, sexual violence, child abuse, and graphic violence.
Chapter 6 Summary
In the station observation room, Emmy and Gerald watch while their colleague Lionel Faulkner interrogates Dale. Dale swears that the computer containing the child sexual abuse material wasn’t his, that he’s innocent, and that he had nothing to do with Cheyenne and Madison’s disappearance. Lionel reminds him he’ll be imprisoned either way. Dale still doesn’t budge.
Emmy feels frustrated by Lionel’s techniques but realizes that Dale might not be “the pedophile [who] kidnapped” the girls after all (121). She and Gerald discuss the case, guessing at Dale’s involvement. They review what they know before heading to Taybee’s land, which borders Millie’s property. Upon arrival, Emmy receives a call from her pharmacist friend Louise Good, who informs her that Madison was on birth control. Afterwards, Emmy deduces that Madison was giving the pills to Cheyenne; her parents are strict and wouldn’t have let her go on the pill.
Emmy is going over everything she knows and musing on the broken necklace she found at the crime scene when she gets to Millie’s house. Millie called so many times in recent days because she wanted to tell Emmy that she’d seen Madison on her property the night prior. Madison often hung out by the pond with Millie’s farmhand, Adam Huntsinger, whom Madison called The Perv.
Chapter 7 Summary
Emmy reviews Adam’s arrest record. He is 49 and has been arrested multiple times for driving without a license and smoking marijuana. After going over the files, Emmy and Gerald head to the Huntsingers’ home. They barge into Adam’s basement apartment, but don’t find him. Then they run into Adam’s father, Walton Huntsinger. He apologizes for whatever trouble Adam may have caused before calling his son. Meanwhile, Emmy is shocked to find a gold necklace with Cheyenne’s name on the ground. Afraid the girls are dead, she falls and injures herself. Gerald helps her recover but insists she go home and recover while he follows this lead.
Emmy answers a call from Hannah while walking across Millie’s property alone. Hannah is furious that Emmy still hasn’t found the girls. Distressed, Emmy wanders down to Millie’s pond, where she sees a shirt in the water. She dives in, discovering both Madison’s and Cheyenne’s mutilated bodies floating on the surface. Through tears, she drags them out of the pond. Millie appears and calls the girls “broken angels.”
Chapter 8 Summary
Twelve years later, Emmy reads the newspaper report of Adam Huntsinger’s release from prison. He was convicted in the Broken Angels Case for both teenagers’ murders. Later, police discovered he had an alibi and was allegedly out of town, where he was involved in a concurrent rape case.
Myrna finds Emmy crying at the table, and calls her “Martha.” Due to her Alzheimer’s, she has believed that Emmy is her late daughter for some time now. Then Gerald and Cole appear. Cole is now on the force, too. They discuss the news of Adam’s release, determined to use this as an opportunity to reopen the Broken Angels Case. They review all the facts from 12 years ago. Gerald then changes the subject to Myrna’s condition. He reveals that he’ll be putting her into the Azalea Place Memory Care Center.
A call from Brett interrupts the family’s conversation. Police found blood and a girl’s bicycle smashed on Millie’s property. Emmy, Gerald, and Cole race out, soon discovering that the bicycle belonged to a missing 14-year-old girl named Paisley Walker. They arrive at the Huntsingers’ house, where an angry mob has gathered. Emmy is immediately overwhelmed. She has a brief exchange with Hannah—from whom she’s been estranged for 12 years—and then sees Adam emerge.
The crowd quickly turns on Emmy and Gerald, blaming them for closing the Broken Angels Case and letting Adam go. Paul joins in the uproar, pointing a gun at Emmy. Gerald dives in between them and Hannah makes a sudden move, too. Shots ring out. Gerald falls and Emmy races to his side. He says his last words and dies.
Chapter 9 Summary
Jude Archer has been working on missing persons cases for the FBI in California for many years. Although she hasn’t always been successful, she takes pride in her work and the cases she has solved. One day, she hears about Paisley Walker’s disappearance, Gerald Clifton’s death, and Paul’s arrest. Jude decides to contact a fellow FBI agent in Atlanta to see if she can investigate these North Falls cases.
Chapter 10 Summary
The next day, Emmy interviews Paisley’s father Elijah Walker at the police station. Elijah explains what he saw surrounding Paisley’s disappearance. His remarks about his daughter’s appearance and defiance raise Emmy’s suspicions. He seems to blame Paisley for how the landscaper and other older men preyed on her.
After the interview, Emmy meets with a field agent about Gerald’s murder. She insists she didn’t see who shot him. Both Paul and Hannah are in police custody. In the station lot afterwards, she runs into Dylan. She and Dylan were seeing each other in the wake of Emmy and Jonah’s divorce, but Emmy broke up with him when Myrna’s condition worsened. Now she longs for his closeness and wonders if she made a mistake.
Emmy heads to the funeral home to see Gerald’s body. She is visiting with him when Jonah appears, stirring up an argument about Cole. After he leaves, Tommy arrives. Shortly thereafter, Special Agent Jude Archer shows up. Tommy and Emmy are stunned: Jude is their long-lost sister Martha.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
In Chapters 6-10, the author incorporates another series of thriller tropes to amplify the narrative tension and to intensify the narrative mood. These formulaic genre motifs include the disappearance, missing persons, isolated locale, incompetent police, plot twists, and history returns tropes. These genre staples both render the narrative world of North Falls familiar to thriller-lovers, while introducing the theme of The Impact of the Past on the Present.
Although Emmy, Gerald, and Virgil end up recovering Madison and Cheyenne’s bodies and closing the Broken Angels Case, North Falls is still in a tenuous state 12 years later. The community’s unrest is in large part inspired by Adam Huntsinger’s release from prison only a little over a decade after he was convicted for the teenagers’ kidnappings and murders. His reappearance in North Falls reignites the narrative tension and causes history to repeat itself. Time has not healed the town’s wounds because Madison’s and Cheyenne’s families haven’t received the closure they’ve desired. Adam’s freedom only intensifies their anger at the police force for failing to avenge their daughters. Further, Paisley Walker’s disappearance submerges the town in the same trauma they experienced years prior. The past is a specter that haunts the North Falls townspeople, threatening the primary characters’ ability to maintain personal, professional, and relational stability.
The new Paisley Walker case, Gerald’s murder, and Jude (Martha) Archer’s reappearance are plot twists that challenge Emmy’s character to reconcile her past and present experiences. Emmy becomes immediately invested in solving Paisley’s disappearance although her father has been “murdered less than twenty-four hours ago” (218). Her devotion to the case implies that she feels guilty for how she and Gerald handled the Broken Angels Case. Hannah’s, Paul’s, and the North Falls community’s intense responses to Adam’s prison release also imply that Emmy might not have done the solid police work she once believed she did. Worse, Adam’s acquittal might have led to another heinous crime.
The past is thus recurring in unthinkable ways for Emmy. If she doesn’t examine what happened 12 years prior, she might not be able to make sense of what is happening in the present. Martha’s seeming resurrection also throws Emmy’s entire reality into question. Now that her father is dead and her mother’s memory is gone, Emmy can’t go to her parents for answers. Jude’s character is a physical manifestation of the past, which raises questions about the entire Clifton family history. As a result, Emmy finds herself caught between competing versions of the truth—not only about herself, but about her career and her beloved late father.
Emmy’s brief interaction with Dylan Alvarez also stirs up emotional complexities for Emmy, which causes her to further interrogate how her past is impacting her life in the present: “She’d broken it off with Dylan six months ago when Myrna’s night terrors had started to get really bad. Emmy had told herself it was too difficult feeling stretched in two different directions, but in truth, it was too hard keeping herself together around Dylan” (210). The narrator employs a confessional tone in this passage, which mirrors Emmy’s vulnerable state of mind, hinting at her loneliness.
Emmy is privately admitting that she pulled away from Dylan due to her experiences with The Challenges of Coping with Grief and Guilt. However, their fleeting encounter in Chapter 10 reignites Emmy’s true feelings. She is in a vulnerable state due to recent events, in particular Gerald’s murder. Her vulnerability allows her to own her feelings: That she longs to “lie in bed” with Dylan “and feel the safety of his closeness” (210). Due to the decisions she made surrounding this relationship in the past—and her unwillingness to be open with her partner—she feels alone and unsupported in the present.
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