54 pages • 1 hour read
Matt RichtelA Deadly Wandering
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Reggie”
Reggie and his mom drive home. Reggie expresses fear about the possibility of going to jail. He lies in his room and prays as his phone rings, because word of the accident is spreading. He asserts he truly doesn’t remember anything before walking toward Kaiserman’s car after the wreck.
ATK Launch Systems, where Keith and Jim worked, is a company that designs rocket boosters and motors for NASA and private space companies. Tom Higgs, a manager at ATK, was one of Keith’s best friends. When he and rest of the ATK team learn that their friends are dead, they react with shock and disbelief.
A student asks Van Park, the basketball coach at Reggie’s former high school, if Park has heard about the accident. Everyone knows everyone in Tremonton: It’s a tight-knit community, so word has gotten around. Reggie was well liked at his high school by most of the teachers and coaches. Van Park recalls a time when he was “almost as broke as you’d see with someone who lost a loved one” (44) after a loss in the state tournament.
Reggie’s parents both went to high school in Tremonton. Reggie’s father, Ed, had a troubled childhood: His father drank and his mother had a stroke when Ed was 11 years old. Ed was determined to be a better father to Reggie, and he and Reggie’s mother Mary Jane have never missed one of Reggie’s basketball games.
The night after the accident, Reggie’s parents talk. Ed almost tears up and says he’s determined to never let Reggie spend a night in jail.
Jackie Furfaro, Jim’s widow, picks up her four-year-old daughter from school and tells her of her father’s death. They go home, where Jackie fields phone calls from reporters.
In Logan, Terryl Warner, a victims’ advocate who has a reputation for pushing for justice, picks up her daughter from gymnastics. Terryl’s daughter tells her that the dad of one of the other kids’ has just died in a car accident. Terryl realizes that she has met Jim before.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Terryl”
Back in 1980, Terryl awoke to her father, a drunk who built drive shafts at the local garage, waving a gun around and threatening to shoot her mother.
Terryl has many such memories: Waking up to find her mother with a bloody nose, or tasting orange juice left out on the counter to deduce if it was one of her father’s screwdrivers. Her family moved a lot and Terryl was instructed not to answer the phone. In her diary, she wrote about one incident where her drunk dad played the saxophone all night, keeping her awake.
Her brother Michael had substance abuse issues. She often went to school without lunch and has to ask the other kids for food. One night, she had a physical altercation with her father.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Toll”
The night after the wreck, Rindlisbacher sits down with his 17-year-old daughter and tells her to always drive safely.
After the accident, Rindlisbacher goes back to the sheriff’s office to take stock. He looks at the gory pictures of the victims: “‘If he’d said he was tired, I might have left it at that,’ Rindlisbacher says, looking back. ‘He could’ve lied to me and I’d have had nothing to refute it’” (56).
Keith’s widow Leila O’Dell meets with the mortician the day after the wreck. She picks out Keith’s casket and decides on the funeral date, which will be the same day as Jim’s. She wants to see the body, but they don’t let her because Jim “was broken beyond anything imaginable” (56).
Leila and Keith’s daughter Megan had a good relationship with her dad until high school, when she felt that her parents didn’t sufficiently support her after she reported being raped by a boy who lived by the church. However, the relationship was on the mend: When Megan and her boyfriend got engaged on the night of her graduation, although her mother disapproved, “[her] dad kind of went with it” (57).
Jim Furfaro’s wife Jackie sees the body of her husband at the mortuary and says goodbye to him.
Chapters 3-6 Analysis
The theme of victims’ rights emerges in these chapters.
The book addresses first the straightforward grief waiting for loved ones: Jackie sees the body of her dead husband in the morgue and must face having to tell her very young daughter about her father’s death. Leila, meanwhile, doesn’t even get to see her husband Keith’s body because Keith was injured so badly in the wreck. This perhaps foreshadows Leila’s resistance to forgive: She doesn’t get to say a proper goodbye to her husband like Jackie does and she ends up holding onto her anger at Reggie Shaw for longer because of this.
Because both Jim and Keith had children, the second aspect of what is owed to victims has to do with the way death will affect the future. Readers can’t help but project forward in time to see that Jim’s daughter will grow up without a father; we also feel the loss that Megan and Keith will never get the chance to fully heal their relationship.
The third aspect of victims’ right is more oblique as the book pivots to the life of victim’s rights advocate Terryl. In Chapter 5, we get a glimpse of her traumatic childhood with her alcoholic and emotionally abusive father. Although Terryl has used her trauma as a platform for her work with other victims, it is clear that the tragedies of her past have left a lifelong and inescapable impression.
Meanwhile, the frame around the accident widens even more to include Reggie’s former teachers and the co-workers of the victims. An element of the continuing mystery emerges with the revelation that Reggie doesn’t remember what happened during or immediately after the wreck—a piece of information that goes against his claims that his SUV hydroplaned.
