52 pages • 1 hour read
Karin SlaughterA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
After 17 and a half years of sobriety, Lydia considers using again upon learning of Paul’s death, remembering an incident where Paul propositioned her. Dee tells Lydia that her college plans have changed; she wants to be a veterinarian like her grandfather, Sam. Lydia takes advantage of the rare, vulnerable family moment and opens up about her missing sister Julia, who was studying journalism at the University of Georgia when she disappeared. After taking Dee to school, Lydia drives to Magnolia Hills Memorial Gardens and finds Paul’s grave. She drops her skirt to urinate on the grave in spite, but Claire interrupts. The two sisters are not close; Claire resents Lydia for her poor behavior while struggling with addiction, and Lydia resents Claire for not believing her about Paul’s attempted rape. The two women realize their childishness and talk about Ginny’s dementia and the missing Kilpatrick girl. Claire leaves abruptly, crying, although Lydia can sense Claire starting to doubt Paul’s perfect lies.
Sam Carroll returns to the narrative in another undated letter. He admits that he became enough of a nuisance to the police that he was arrested for stalking a man who bused tables the night Julia went missing. Though this clue led to a dead end, he mentions other leads he collected over the years, from evidence of a local Peeping Tom to a pedophile 7-Eleven manager. He describes how Helen held on to Julia’s memory, keeping Julia’s old nightlight on and walking the presumed path upon which she disappeared. Helen, riddled with sorrow, left him for another man who wasn’t hoarding an equally debilitating amount of sorrow. Sam understands this move, even though he still loves Helen and they occasionally spend nights together. He mentions that his other two daughters are getting older but admits he does not know how to impart knowledge or fatherly influence. His sole obsession is to figure out what happened to Julia because he feels so much guilt.
Claire takes out her rage and pain by smashing through her garage with multiple tennis rackets. She struggles to accept Paul’s preference in erotic movies, especially as her mind fills with all the innocent moments they shared. Wondering if the film is even real, she guesses Paul’s password and digs for more illicit files, finding other films in which girls are tortured and raped. Claire concludes that the masked man is not Paul because he does not have any of Paul’s characteristic back moles. She follows the wires exiting the computer and realizes Paul built the house with a special hidden space to store external hard drives filled with more violent movies.
Claire takes this evidence to the Dunwoody Station, where Mayhew and another detective, Harvey Falke, brush off her concerns, calling the snuff films obvious fakes. Mayhew surprises Claire by acknowledging she may be frightened because the girl on tape looks like Anna Kilpatrick, which Claire hadn’t even registered. He further patronizes her by alluding to memories of Julia’s disappearance that must be clouding her judgment. He mentions the Law of Truly Large Numbers, a theory Paul loved, and tells her to keep this all between them. After all, Anna is probably dead given the large amount of blood they found. Claire remains unconvinced, aware that Mayhew is lying. Before she leaves, Mayhew makes sure she has not made copies of the videos on other devices. She notices a note from Adam Quinn on her windshield asking again for Paul’s files, this time threateningly.
Lydia and Rick watch the evening news. Lydia thinks about Paul’s attempted rape and how her mother and sister didn’t let her tell the whole story before deciding they didn’t want to hear about it. Lydia tries describing Claire’s motivations to Rick, but he doesn’t really understand the complexities of growing up in a family split apart by trauma. Lydia receives an unknown text, and realizes it must be from Claire, so she leaves immediately to help her sister.
Claire stares at the menacing note from Adam, wondering if he is requesting architectural files or porn files with the ambiguity of his threat. While she ruminates, she takes Valium and Percocet with a swish of wine. Upon viewing all the films, Claire is convinced one of the young girls is Anna Kilpatrick. She remembers how her father, Sam Carroll, died by suicide just before the sixth anniversary of Julia’s disappearance. As a young child, Claire often found him sobbing in the bathroom or screaming during nightmares, and comforted him the best she could. With time, she distanced herself from her family. Claire is only aware of Dee because she found Paul’s anonymous contributions to Dee’s scholarship.
Looking through old files, Claire realizes Paul hired a slew of private investigators over the past 17 years to compile information about Lydia. She unearths color-coded reports of various women’s activities. She texts Lydia, feeling woozy, and collapses from the drugs and alcohol. In a show of sympathy, Lydia arrives to help her sister. While there, she finally recounts the full story of Paul’s attempted rape. Claire recognizes details about Paul from Lydia’s harrowing story and wonders if she was wrong to discount her sister so quickly.
FBI agent Fred Nolan shows up in the driveway, and Claire panics because she can’t have drugs in her system while on parole. Lydia takes initiative by coldly addressing Fred, but he insists on talking directly to Claire, slyly identifying Lydia as Claire’s sister. Fred antagonizes Claire, recognizing that she is inebriated and thus violating her parole. Fred tells her that Paul was embezzling money from the architecture firm, and that Adam knew about it and alerted the FBI. He teases Claire, insinuating she collected a hefty life insurance payment, before Lydia finally orders him to leave. While Claire washes up (she is still wearing the crusted funeral dress from days ago), Lydia cooks some food and says that she doesn’t forgive Claire yet, but she’s still her sister.
While Lydia makes Claire a dish from their childhood, Claire discusses the assault she committed against a bigoted woman in her tennis group named Allison Hendrickson. Lydia is horrified and impressed by how Claire broke the woman’s knee with a tennis racket, but most of all she recognizes the date: Claire was jailed the first week of March, the annual passing of Julia’s disappearance.
Lydia admits to Claire that the night Julia disappeared, she was passed out in an alleyway on drugs instead of practicing with her band in a friend’s garage. In turn, Claire says she wasn’t just studying but making out with a friend. Spurred on by these confessions, the women talk about Paul’s movies and the girl who looks like Anna. Claire puts Adam’s files onto a USB hidden in a key fob she once bought Paul. The women hack into Paul’s password-protected files. While Claire admits there are more paper files upstairs, she doesn’t alert Lydia to her own file.
Claire and Lydia’s relationship is clearly very fraught, and the rift can be traced back to the incident where neither Helen nor Claire believed Lydia’s story. When Lydia hears Claire’s story of breaking a bigoted woman’s knee during tennis, some of her anger toward Claire dissipates. This is because even though Claire has not yet fully apologized, and Lydia is not yet open to accepting an apology, this incident reveals that, somewhere deep down, Claire believes in justice. This reference to Claire’s deep yet hidden convictions lets Lydia know that she too can open up by sharing personal details and memories. Ironically, while Julia’s death split the family apart, the further trauma of Paul’s death brings the sisters closer together. As Claire and Lydia resolve to unveil the truth of Paul’s alleged crimes, they tap into a shared comfort that enables them to contemplate more memories.
Another notable factor at play is Claire’s reluctance to see the inconsistencies in the world around her. Why would Paul conceal dozens of snuff tapes in the house’s foundation if not because he was culpable in creating or distributing them? Why would a blameless married man pour money into dozens of private-eye reports on women who looked like Claire if not to satisfy some perverse fetish? Claire clings to every fact that is already in line with her picture-perfect beliefs. For example, she jumps on the idea that the masked man cannot be Paul because he doesn’t have distinctive moles, a small detail that can be explained by many factors, from video editing to makeup. Claire is clearly in denial of Paul’s crimes because she has trained herself not to make difficult decisions without others to guide her.
Another point of inconsistency in Claire’s attitude relates to Lydia. She hears Claire describe her assault not as an “assault” but as “disorderly conduct.” The ironic inconsistency is that Claire recognizes the subtle disparities in her assault charge but refuses to acknowledge the same subtle disparities in Paul’s attempted rape of Lydia. This contrast shows that Claire’s biases are often nonanalytical and completely based on fear of having to act. Lydia is unwilling to apologize for their estrangement until Claire apologizes for and admits her wrongdoing in discounting Lydia’s experience.
Where Claire falters, Lydia is there to catch her despite the bad blood between them. Evidence of this sisterly bond appears in the unlabeled text Claire sent to Lydia’s phone. Lydia shared all sorts of brutal, unflattering realizations of Claire’s character with Rick, yet as soon as she senses that her sister needs her, Lydia is off like a bullet in the direction of Claire’s house. Due to this action, Lydia may be more willing to forgive past wrongs than she realizes.
The sisters’ bond strengthening through the tragedy of Paul’s funeral is juxtaposed against their family’s fracturing after Julia’s disappearance. This time, tragedy will not push the two sisters apart. A key takeaway from this section is that the sisters find strength and motivation in their relationship with each other, and their dynamic becomes the main driving force in exposing the truth about Paul and about their family secrets.
By Karin Slaughter