57 pages • 1 hour read
Jess LoureyThe Quarry Girls: A Thriller
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 25-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Heather’s mother stands in the kitchen making donuts. Heather is anxious because her mother’s good moods don’t last, and she’s waiting for the moment it will sour. Junie, Heather, and Constance talk about Maureen, and Heather reflects on the other diary entries she has read. Most are about the outfits Maureen wears, but some are about the money she has made performing sexual acts with various men. Junie asks Heather whether she thinks she ran away, and Heather tells her mother and sister that Maureen had no reason to leave.
When their father enters the room, Heather asks if he’s made any progress in Maureen’s case. He tells her they’re all still looking into it and that he will ask Sheriff Nillson about it when he goes to his house for dinner. When Constance asks if she can also join, Gary decides to bring the whole family. Heather plans to see if she can take a look in his basement and find out if that’s where Maureen was that night—and whether she might still be there.
Chapter 26 Summary
When the Cash family arrives at Sheriff Nillson’s house, Heather feels certain this is the house they saw Maureen in. Constance, who didn’t expect a party, is caught off-guard by the prospect of multiple guests, and Heather worries that she can’t handle it. She agrees to go in anyway, but once they get into Sheriff Nillson’s house and he tells Gary who else to expect, Constance begins to change—something only Heather and Junie notice. Heather realizes she can’t leave Junie alone with Constance, but before anything else happens, the sound of sirens fills the room. A police officer arrives at Sheriff Nillson’s and informs him they found Maureen at the quarry.
Chapter 27 Summary
Once the Cash family arrives back home, Gary heads to the quarries—as does Heather. First, she drops Junie off at Claude’s and stops at Brenda’s to tell her what’s going on. Brenda is dressed up for a date and doesn’t tell Heather with whom, but she agrees to come with Heather to the quarries. Once they get there, they see an ambulance, and Heather hopes this is a good sign. It isn’t, though, and Heather and Brenda watch as the paramedics pull Maureen’s bloated corpse from the water.
Chapter 28 Summary
Brenda screams, and Gary races over to his daughter. Heather thinks back to when her mother set her on fire and remembers that her father rode with her in the ambulance, apologizing profusely, which she didn’t understand. He tells Heather that Sheriff Nillson thinks Maureen died by suicide, and when Heather disagrees, her father turns cold. He tells her there’s no evidence suggesting anything else.
Chapter 29 Summary
Heather goes to work the next day. While she works her shift, Gloria appears, speaking erratically. When Heather offers to call her father, Gloria adamantly refuses, and Heather decides to walk her home instead. While there, Heather learns that Sheriff Nillson sent a deputy to the Hansen home to search for a suicide note. Once again, Gloria and Heather both disagree with Sheriff Nillson’s assumptions about Maureen, and Heather suspects Nillson could be covering up his part in her death. She realizes that if she is going to protect herself and solve Maureen’s death, she has to tell her father everything she knows. She resolves to do so.
Chapter 30 Summary
Brenda calls Heather, and Heather tells her she’s going to tell her dad about Maureen. Heather bikes to the courthouse, and once she does, she feels relief knowing her dad will handle it. He takes notes while she describes what she saw, and she doesn’t mention that it was Brenda who saw Sheriff Nillson’s face—not her. He asks whether she trusts him to handle it. As Heather leaves, she realizes she never mentioned Maureen’s diary nor the copper ID bracelet she saw on the man who was holding Maureen’s head.
Chapter 31 Summary
When Heather’s father returns home that night, he tells her that Sheriff Nillson denies Maureen ever being in his basement. Heather is shocked that he asked him outright, and she tells him about the note she found in Maureen’s diary. Gary is adamant that the autopsy ruled her death a suicide and yells at Heather to quit pushing the issue, which surprises her. He then reveals that Theodoro Godo, who goes by Ed or Eddie, could be responsible, and he tells Heather that he and his team are working on running Ed out of town. Heather doesn’t understand this response and feels alone after this discussion. She decides to continue her plan to investigate Sheriff Nillson’s basement.
Interlude 10 Summary: “Beth”
Beth, suffering from fatigue and starvation, thinks about eating the dirt she’s been digging up. The idea makes her laugh, and she feels like her laugh is still hers. She plans to kill Ed with whatever she is digging up so that she can escape.
Chapter 32 Summary
Though she is scared, Heather makes her way through the tunnels toward the door they opened so many nights ago. She tries the key and it works. As she scans the basement, she sees a portrait of Sheriff Jerome Nillson, which verifies that, as she suspected, it’s his basement.
Chapter 33 Summary
As Heather explores Sheriff Nillson’s basement, she finds a file on Ed, verifying everything she’s heard: he spent time in the military in Georgia, and the police suspect he murdered the waitress they found in St. Paul. Underneath his file, she finds a manila envelope with Polaroids depicting very young women in varying stages of undress. She recognizes Sheriff Nillson’s carpeting in the background. She hears a car door slam and quickly runs out of the basement, taking the Polaroids with her.
Chapters 25-33 Analysis
Heather’s reaction to Maureen’s death and Gloria’s erratic behavior are initially learned behaviors from the adults who raised her. This highlights The Impact of Violence and Misogyny on Coming-of-Age. When Gloria turns up at Zayres, Heather leads her home, and though she doesn’t know what to do, she thinks, “[W]e kept our secrets in Pantown. If she didn’t want me calling my dad, she didn’t want me calling anyone” (173). Heather keeps Gloria’s apparent crisis a secret, as she’s seen so many others do, even though she realizes that she needs help. After she begins to face the gravity of her situation and her friend’s death, she thinks, “It was the Pantown way to go it alone, but alone didn’t have to mean without your parents” (175). Heather believes she can rely on her dad, whom she trusts, to help her seek justice for Maureen and make sure Sheriff Nillson’s possible involvement is figured out. Heather does not realize, of course, that her father is part of the mystery she is trying to unravel, and his defensive reaction to her insistence that Nillson is a predator foreshadows this reveal. Heather is beginning to learn that she cannot rely on anyone except herself and her most trusted friends, especially not male authority figures who prop up misogynistic violence.
As the mysteries of Pantown begin to unravel, so does Heather’s allegiance to its rules. Heather begins to realize the truth of her surroundings, first with the way her family treats Junie. While Heather pleads with her father to do something about Maureen’s death, they silence and pacify Junie. Heather realizes, “[I]n that moment I heard it, the way we all treated her like a baby, or worse, a doll, talking down to her, protecting her” (186). Though Junie is oversexualized in the novel by older men, her immediate family conditions her to remain helpless, and the language here simultaneously dehumanizes and infantilizes her. Junie is a character through whom Lourey charts the complicated, dangerous, and oversexualized journey from child to woman in Pantown—and the US at large—in the 1970s. Heather, now seeing these systems at work, begins to see how they work in other areas of her life.
Her father, someone she believes she can trust, lets her down when he takes Sheriff Nillson’s side about Maureen’s death and yells at Heather. Afterward, Heather explains, “My dad was pleading for me to believe him. So I nodded, feeling alone inside myself” (187). Heather realizes that she can’t rely on her father the way she hoped she could, even while she’s not yet aware of his true involvement in Maureen’s molestation. She turns inward, feeling alone before resolving to investigate Sheriff Nillson’s basement, even if her father won’t. When she finds the Polaroids, she sees herself in the many young women photographed, thinking, “Those poor girls, three dozen Maureens, talked into—forced into?—doing something they didn’t want to do. Like me taking off my blouse for Ant because I didn’t have a choice, not really, not if I didn’t want to be left behind” (195). Heather begins to see the way women are exploited for the benefit of men, something she understands through her own experiences. The blending of her experience with that of Maureen and these other girls reflects the generalized threat women face in a sexist society. Heather is forced to face the revelation of Sheriff Nillson’s abuse of multiple women in Pantown. This revelation propels Heather to continue unburdening Pantown of its secrets, no matter what she discovers in the process.
Heather’s resolve to find justice for Maureen also demonstrates Resilience and the Ambiguities of Justice and Power. Heather notes this reality when she questions the justice system’s plan to “run Ed out of town” to protect the people of Pantown rather than arrest him (186). She asks her dad if that means he’ll just get away with it, and her father’s answer is vague, revealing the utter failure of the justice system in Pantown to protect its people. This is because the men who work in the justice system—Sheriff Nillson and Gary Cash—are using the system to conceal their own crimes. Sheriff Nillson, for example, suspects Maureen’s death is a murder, but if he can cover it up as death by suicide, he lessens the risk that his molestation of her and other women will be found out. Though Heather doesn’t understand exactly why he might do this, she is aware that Sheriff Nillson is bending the principle of justice to his will instead of actually trying to help Maureen. She is, therefore, also aware that if she hopes to protect herself and her loved ones and bring Maureen’s killer to justice, she must find her own way to do so, particularly once she realizes her father doesn’t believe her.
