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.
Prologue-Interlude 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This novel and guide discuss rape, child abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional), domestic violence, murder, kidnapping, torture, and death by suicide.
The prologue opens in the summer of 1977 in Pantown, Minnesota. Heather Cash, the narrator and protagonist, details the terror and fear of growing from a girl into a woman—a harrowing experience with no guidelines and a steep learning curve. Heather notes that the race to adulthood stopped short for three teenage girls in Pantown, who were murdered before they could grow up. She states that everything starts in the tunnels underneath Pantown.
Interlude 1 Summary: “Beth”
Elizabeth “Beth” McCain, a waitress at the Northside Diner in St. Cloud, isn’t sure whether she’ll go to Jerry Taft’s party at the quarries outside of town. She decides that since she’s leaving to attend college at UC Berkeley in only three short weeks, going to the party might liven up her dying relationship with her boyfriend, Mark.
As she leaves the diner, a man (who the reader later learns is Ed) asks if she’d like a ride. She recognizes him but feels anxious and declines. He grabs her by the arm before strangling her. As she loses consciousness, she finds it strange that he remains calm as she falls to the ground.
Chapter 1 Summary
Heather, Maureen, and Brenda play rock music in Maureen’s garage while their friend, Claude, and Heather’s little sister, Junie, watch. Heather plays drums, Maureen plays the bass, and Brenda is on vocals and guitar. Together, they are “The Girls.” While they play ballads like “Hooked on a Feeling,” Heather thinks about how much she treasures their practices and friendship. Maureen and Heather have been best friends since they were children, and their moms were best friends, too—until they weren’t. Heather notes that although they’re still very good friends, something changed once Maureen went through puberty, even if Maureen is still fierce and Brenda is their grounding force. Just as Heather is about to play out a drum solo, she sees Maureen smiling at someone coming in through the garage door.
Chapter 2 Summary
Heinrich “Ricky” and Anton “Ant” walk into the garage, interrupting their practice and ruining Heather’s drum solo. Maureen flirts with Ricky, which revolts Heather, and Ricky tells her that he got a gig for The Girls at the upcoming county fair. Ant corrects him, telling Maureen that it was actually Ed, a newcomer to Pantown—a place where everyone knows everyone.
Although it’s no secret, Heather covers her burned ear out of habit. The injury is the result of an accident. After some deliberation, the band decides they’ll play the show. To Heather and Junie’s chagrin, practice ends once Maureen leaves with Ricky. Ant shyly tells Heather goodbye, which she finds unnerving, and the remaining crew shut down the garage. As they leave, Heather notices a strange man parked down the street, watching them.
Interlude 2 Summary: “Beth”
Beth fades in and out of consciousness in the back seat of her kidnapper’s car. The man quietly chokes her every time she wakes up. When she awakes fully, she is alone in a pitch-black room—so small that when she tries to run, she runs directly into a wall. She screams and checks her underwear and vulva to see if she has been raped. She discovers that for now, she hasn’t been.
Chapter 3 Summary
Heather describes the tunnel system underneath Pantown, which was built alongside the neighborhood’s 58 bungalow-style homes by Samuel Pandolfo in 1917. The tunnels can be accessed through a door in each basement. Pandolfo built them to ensure that the employees at his car manufacturing plant could make it to work regardless of the weather. Though Pandolfo’s factory went out of business after only two years, the neighborhood and its tunnels remained. Heather’s house, which is also her father’s childhood home, is connected to this tunnel system and is on the same street as Claude, Brenda, and Maureen’s houses.
Heather’s father, the District Attorney for St. Cloud, isn’t home when they arrive this evening, signaling to Junie that she should go to her room until Heather determines whether it’s safe. Constance Cash, their mother, has a mental condition that causes her to behave unpredictably, and the girls never know what to expect when their father is gone. Heather goes to her mother’s door and knocks. She hears nothing and worries they might have to go to the hospital again.
Chapter 4 Summary
To Heather’s relief, her mother is just sleeping. Constance is beautiful but withdrawn, resigned most days to her bedroom. She asks Heather how practice was. Heather tells her they landed a gig at the fair, and though Heather knows Constance won’t make it, she promises she will be there. As Heather leaves, she asks her mother what she’d like for dinner. Her mother critiques her offer for spaghetti and ridicules her for being forgetful since she made the same meal only two days ago. Used to this kind of treatment, Heather agrees before putting her mother’s cigarette out for her. She tells her she loves her but gets no reply.
While Heather heats frozen meals for everyone, the phone rings. Because Pantown is on a “party line,” or switchboard system, Heather waits to see if the rings indicate the call is for her. It is, and when she answers, it’s Brenda. She invites Heather to a party Ricky is hosting on Friday. Heather doesn’t want to go but agrees anyway. Brenda asks whether Heather has heard about Beth McCain, the girl who went missing. Heather brushes it off and invites Brenda to play TV tag (a mix between freeze tag and hide-and-seek) down in the tunnels. Brenda tells Heather to rally the gang and plans to meet her in the tunnels.
Chapter 5 Summary
Gary Cash, Heather’s father, comes home, and he and his daughters sit down for dinner. Constance does not join them. As they eat, Gary tells Heather about Theodoro Godo, a “real bad guy” who is rumored to be on his way to St. Cloud. Sheriff Jerome Nillson, Gary, and an out-of-town Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) agent named Ryan Gulliver are tracking his movements and preparing for his impending arrival. Gary asks Heather whether he knows Beth McCain and, when she replies that she knows who she is, he tells her she’s been missing almost three days.
A knock interrupts their meal, and Ryan Gulliver appears at the door. He tells Gary that the police have found the body of a waitress—not Beth—before he heads to Sheriff Nillson’s house.
Interlude 3 Summary: “Beth”
Beth is surrounded by blackness with nothing else around her. She hears footsteps above her. Terrified, she backs up against the corner. Ed enters, bringing with him two pots and a kerosene lamp. When he lights it, Beth thinks about all the times he sat in her section and how often he made her uncomfortable, something she ignored. He tells her not to burn the lamp too long as he unbuttons his pants, threatening to kill her if she screams.
Chapter 6 Summary
Heather and her friends discovered over time that each basement door in the tunnel system uses the same key. Many of the doors are also numbered, matching the addresses of the houses to which they belong, but not all of them. The doors are thin, giving audible access into people’s personal lives while they run around the tunnels. Once, Heather and her friends listened in while Ant’s father screamed at him about his mother.
Junie and Heather head to Claude’s house to play in the tunnels. When Brenda arrives, Heather asks about Maureen, and Brenda tells her she isn’t coming. Together, they race into the tunnels through Claude’s basement.
Chapter 7 Summary
Once in the tunnels, Brenda lends Heather her brother’s army jacket with “Taft” spelled across the breast. Heather closes her eyes, feeling mildly uncomfortable in the darkness of the tunnels even though she knows them well. Claude, Junie, and Brenda run off to hide. While she closes her eyes and counts, Heather thinks about a time they found an unhoused man in the “haunted” part of the tunnels, something that was hard to explain since the only way in or out is through someone’s basement. She opens her eyes, switches on her flashlight, and runs after her friends.
Chapter 8 Summary
Heather runs around the tunnels, thinking about Maureen and guessing she’s probably partying with Ricky and “Ed,” who Maureen keeps saying is “sexy as hell” (11). She thinks she hears something, but when she shines her flashlight in the direction of the sound, no one is there. When she hears it again, she realizes it’s coming from the “haunted” end of the tunnels and heads in that direction. She realizes she’s hearing music because someone’s having a party, and as she nears the source, someone grabs her wrist.
Chapter 9 Summary
Heather is pulled into an alcove by her friends, who also stop at the sound of music. Though Brenda, Claude, and Heather know something is wrong, Junie does not and tries a door handle. While Elvis plays in the background, Heather sees three men standing in a line under strobe lights while Maureen, whom she recognizes by her hair, performs oral sex on the man in the middle. Heather recognizes only the copper bracelet on the man’s wrist. Brenda screams at Junie to close the door, and Heather doesn’t have a chance to see anyone’s face. They run through the tunnels to the nearest exit, which is Heather and Junie’s basement door.
Chapter 10 Summary
Claude and Junie both ask Heather what she saw, but she can only think about a time when some boys dared her to jump off the high dive. Heather agreed before she realized what she had done, and Maureen told her she would jump first. Heather’s head reels with this memory of Maureen contrasted with what she just saw in the basement. She asks Brenda if she’s okay, and they both agree to pretend nothing happened to protect Maureen’s reputation.
Interlude 4 Summary: “Beth”
Beth, who has now been repeatedly raped, thinks about her life outside the cinderblock cell—her boyfriend Mark and her upcoming journey to Berkeley to attend college and, against her parent’s wishes, become a teacher.
It occurs to her that Ed goes to all this trouble just to have sex, and he doesn’t realize that love is the best part of sex. She begins to laugh uncontrollably at him. Ed responds with a threat, promising that next time. she won’t be laughing. This moment of strength inspires Beth to find a way out.
Chapter 11 Summary
Heather rides her bike to her job at the deli in Zayre Shoppers City, a local social center where she works with Claude and Ricky. When she gets there, Ricky is smoking a cigarette by the entrance. She thinks back to right after her accident, when Ricky was the only person who came and visited her regularly.
During their shift, Ricky asks Heather whether she’s coming to his party at the quarries. Heather says probably, and when Claude asks to go, Ed approaches the counter and tells him single men aren’t allowed. Heather is finally introduced to him, and she wonders why he’s hanging out with high school students since he seems so much older. Ricky and Ed exchange curt talk, poking fun at Claude. Heather thinks that she better go to Ricky’s party; after what she saw Maureen doing the night before, she thinks she has more catching up to do than she realized on her way to being a woman. Before Ed leaves, he asks for a soda to take with his Anacin. When he reaches over the counter to grab the soda, Heather looks for a copper bracelet, but he isn’t wearing one.
Interlude 5 Summary: “Beth”
Beth plots her escape. She crouches behind the door and waits for Ed to enter. She plans to swing the kerosene lamp at him and run until she can’t anymore.
Prologue-Interlude 5 Analysis
The prologue introduces the novel’s setting and immediately builds tension. Using foreshadowing and referencing sociohistorical circumstances, Heather frames the oncoming conflict as a result of gendered expectations of women and men, and the violence and secrecy that results from misogyny. Heather uses a metaphor of being air-dropped into an unknown land to situate the coming-of-age experience in Pantown, Minnesota, in 1977 to represent how wildly unprepared she and her friends feel for adulthood. They have to figure it out to survive because young men are landing, too, and Heather says, “Girls who land broken are easy prey” (1). This metaphor positions women as prey, noting that women who may not come from stable homes or otherwise carry trauma or instability are easier “targets” than the rest. She critiques the patriotism and idealism of the United States in 1976 during its bicentennial, noting its celebration of a heroic post-World War II America and the nuclear family. Lourey writes that “not only was anything possible, we were told, but our country had already done it” (2). The fantasy of an ideal country that ignores the realities of violence and oppression is a consistent theme throughout the novel. The Quarry Girls explores The Role of Suppression in Perpetuating Violence; here, the nation pretends that progress has already been completed, that Pantown—and the country as a whole—has no problems, and society is complacent and docile.
No woman is safe from the very real threat of misogynistic violence, though, as Heather identifies and as the narrative immediately reveals. When Beth is abducted by Ed in the parking lot, she suppresses her discomfort to appease him, even though she knows she is in danger. When she tries to get away from him, she feigns an excuse but tells Ed she’ll be back and thinks “She didn’t know why she’d tacked on that last part, where the impulse to soothe him had come from” (5). Despite her intuition that something is going to happen to her, she still feels she needs to assuage Ed. Beth is one of many women throughout the narrative who makes herself smaller for the comfort of men; Heather frequently takes her father’s side, Constance stays with him and works to please him even though he has multiple affairs, and Brenda and Maureen respond to violent gestures from Ricky and Ed with deference and flirtation.
The Quarry Girls, therefore, also explores The Impact of Violence and Misogyny on Coming-of-Age for both men and women. Though Gary does not physically abuse Constance in the novel, her dependence upon him because of the power he holds over her impacts Heather and Junie’s own understandings of marriage and womanhood. Heather reflects on a lesson Constance imparted to her once while she was younger: “A woman’s job is to keep a happy house” (22). When Heather and Junie are seated at the dinner table, for example, Heather assumes the maternal role of a parent in Constance’s absence. Heather reflects, “I winked at [Junie], like I imagined a mom would” to comfort her, and she engages her father over their meal, thinking, “I knew I’d need to change the subject to keep him entertained” (33). Heather embodies her mother’s message, assuming caretaking responsibilities in her place. Heather never questions this even though she is still a child, and this dynamic demonstrates how patriarchal societies groom girls for submission from a very young age.
These initial chapters examine how all of the young women are forced to age far sooner than they should; Heather notices it first in Junie before the scene in which Maureen is raped by three men. Heather begins to notice Junie’s transition despite her still apparent innocence, noting that when Agent Ryan appears at their door, Junie’s glance is “foxlike, not submissive” (37). This element of femininity, one Heather is only barely starting to understand, is a learned behavior in response to men throughout the novel. Heather witnesses it in her sister and her friends, and it is especially jarring given her sister’s youth.
Maureen is an example of this reality; women are trained to be deferential to men despite their inappropriate advances and must survive brutal instances of rape and humiliation because of it. Beth is the most extreme example of this theme throughout the narrative. When Ed refuses to sit anywhere else but her section in the diner, Beth finds it sort of flattering, but something about him and his persistence makes her uncomfortable. However, because of social expectations for women in the 1970s, Beth feels like she must keep this to herself. She thinks about her discomfort: “But who do you mention that to? Who would listen without telling you to appreciate the attention? Be happy. The guy likes you” (40). Beth feels forced to be grateful for Ed’s advances, even while she feels they’re inappropriate. The correctness of her feelings and his danger are emphasized when his advances result in her abduction, rape, and attempted murder. The Quarry Girls critiques the deference women must learn to dissuade men from violating them, noting that at best it causes discomfort, and at worst it doesn’t prevent harm at all.
When Beth laughs at Ed and realizes his efforts to control her are absurd, she begins to flip the power dynamic, which can only be maintained by her submission. Her laughter drives Ed to threaten her, but she notices how much it unnerves him. “The lighting turned his eyes into sockets, but his shaking hands told the whole story” (63). In this moment, Beth plots her escape and, even though she is still trapped, she is hopeful that she can win. The opening chapters of The Quarry Girls, therefore, examine themes of suppression, violence, and misogyny, but in turn, reveal the resilience of the women who are expected to bend to them but don’t.
