53 pages • 1 hour read
In the Woods
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Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
Over the weekend, Rob goes to his parents’ house for dinner. They share a distantly polite dynamic in which nobody talks about Knocknaree. When his mother realizes he’s working on the Devlin case, she mentions some incidents from his childhood that contradict his own memories. These discrepancies disturb Rob:
I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. (280)
Later, he receives a message from Cassie reminding him of their court appearance the following day. Rob is upset because he’d completely forgotten about it. Other than his childhood amnesia, his memory is usually retentive. He becomes completely unnerved when he even draws a blank on the details of the case.
The next morning on the witness stand, Rob stumbles through his testimony and makes a fool of himself. He leaves Cassie to repair the damage when she takes the stand. Rob heads to a nearby pub. He feels he’s falling apart: “All my instincts were shrieking at me to get off this horrible, treacherous case, get as far away from it as possible” (288).
Back at headquarters, Rob pleads a migraine to explain his strange behavior. Cassie and Sam believe him. Sam gives them an update on his motorway investigation. He’s pinpointed four individuals behind the land deals. The detectives discuss who is most likely to be Devlin’s anonymous caller. Three suspects are eliminated, leaving only Terence Andrews, a local businessman in financial trouble.
That evening, Rob thinks about the crime photos related to his court case. The victim’s posture shakes loose a childhood memory. He remembers seeing three bikers in the woods raping a girl named Sandra. One of bikers was Katy’s father, Jonathan. When Rob calls Cassie to tell her the news, she suggests they should track down Sandra the next day.
Chapter 12 Summary
Cassie and Rob have no luck tracing Sandra through census or election records, so they visit one of Knocknaree’s oldest residents. Mrs. Fitzgerald is the estate busybody and gives them all the local gossip. Over the course of a casual conversation, the detectives learn that the person they seek is called Sandra Scully, and she still lives in the rough end of the estate.
They find Sandra at home. Rob waits in the car while Cassie questions her. She returns with the news that Sandra wasn’t raped. “They made me do it” is her excuse (308). She identifies the three bikers as Cathal Mills, Jonathan Devlin, and Shane Waters.
At the time, Sandra was dating Cathal and voluntarily had sex with Jonathan a few times. Shane felt left out. Because the three bikers were close-knit, Cathal and Jonathan decided to help Shane have sex with Sandra by holding her down. Afterward, Sandra never pressed charges and now considers it a simple misunderstanding.
Right after the episode occurred, Sandra recalls hearing a sound in the woods like an enormous bird flapping its wings. It sounded big, at least the size of a human. All four teens were terrified, and they immediately ran home.
Cassie speculates that some otherworldly creature lurks in the woods. It may have been responsible for the disappearance of Peter and Jamie. Rob dismisses her theory. He decides to confront Jonathan while Cassie pays another visit to the Foley house.
Chapter 13 Summary
When Rob arrives at the Devlin house, no one is home but Jonathan. Rob questions him, but Jonathan denies sexually abusing his daughters. He tries to explain the Sandra incident by talking about how close-knit he and his friends were. They were lost boys with no education, unhappy family lives, and no future prospects. All they had was one another.
When Shane found out that his mates had both slept with Sandra, he felt betrayed. Johnathan remembers that “Cathal got it into his head that since it was Sandra had come between us, it would have to be Sandra brought us together again” (321).
Jonathan recalls hearing something in the woods immediately after they attacked Sandra. It sounded to him like a man laughing. He didn’t think it was the three kids that the bikers sometimes saw. The sound frightened them all, and they left.
Rob now believes someone might have lurked around the woods on a regular basis. That same person might have abducted Peter and Jamie.
Next, the two detectives follow up with Shane and Cathal about the incident. Shane Waters says nothing. Cathal Miller brushes it off but says that Jonathan was always a coward. He doesn’t have the nerve to plan Katy’s murder, much less carry it out.
That evening, Rob tells Cassie that he still thinks Jonathan might be the killer. He’s worried about Rosalind’s safety. Cassie tells him his fears are groundless. She also thinks Cathal is a psychopathic liar. When Rob challenges her on this point, Cassie finally reveals her own encounter with that sort of deranged mind.
She confides that she quit school because of a charming sociopath. When she rejected him, he played the victim card and got all Cassie’s friends to believe she’d spread lies about him.
Cassie says that two good things came out of that unnerving experience. She decided to become a cop and now has good sociopath sensors. She says, “It’s like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you’re supersensitized” (341-42).
Rob asks what her schoolmate’s name was. When Cassie meets his eyes, he’s “shaken by [her] concentrated, diamond-hard hatred. ‘Legion,’ she said” (343).
Chapters 11-13 Analysis
These chapters show the toll Rob’s work is taking on him. Once again, the motif of elusive memories is foregrounded. In a conversation with his mother, Rob realizes that even the simpler memories he retains from childhood might be faulty. It isn’t simply the half-glimpsed wisps of memory related to his friends’ disappearance. He also has difficulty remembering how he behaved in relation to a neighbor boy. His mother recalls a much different version of the event than he does.
Rob’s memory is even more unreliable when it comes to a current case he’s working on. He completely forgets his court date as well as the details of the case itself. His downward spiral may be a subconscious indicator that, no matter what he says to the contrary, he really doesn’t want to remember all the things he’s being asked to dredge up.
Rob’s conversation with Jonathan about the group of bikers draws attention to another trio of comrades. Rob’s own sense of belonging with Jamie and Peter is paralleled by Jonathan’s relationship with Cathal and Shane. No matter how perverse their behavior was, the three bikers felt a sense of belonging together that they never experienced apart from one another. This echoes Rob’s own experience of friendship and loss.
The most important theme in these chapters is an examination of evil hiding in plain sight. When Cassie talks about the sociopath she encountered at school, she’s setting the stage for a proper interpretation of Rosalind’s behavior.
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