59 pages • 1 hour read
Chris WhitakerAll the Colors of the Dark
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Cops & Robbers: 1982” - Part 6: “The Hunt: 1983”
Part 5, Chapters 98-105 Summary
Saint is now working for Nix on the Monta Clare police force. Tooms is in prison for the murder of Callie Montrose, though he pled not guilty. The blood in Tooms’s house matched Callie’s blood, and some of his hair was found in Eli Aaron’s house. The assumption is that he supplied Aaron with the pills to subdue the girls. He was sentenced to death.
Saint and Nix discuss the case over lunch. She has painstakingly researched Tooms’s life and is unsure how he met Aaron or what his motive could be. Patch left town to look for Grace since his mother died a few years before.
Patch roams over the US, following leads on missing girls and hoping one might be Grace. He meets with the families, learns about the girls’ lives, and then paints their portraits. When he runs out of money, Sammy tells him he hasn’t sold any paintings recently and doesn’t have any to give him. Patch uses an unloaded gun to rob a bank and sends most of the money to a missing persons charity, using the little left for traveling expenses.
He meets a father called Walter Strike, who says he is glad to speak to someone who understands the loss. Strike also has a son, Cooper. His sister’s disappearance derailed Cooper’s life. Patch continues to rob banks and leave rambling messages on Saint’s answering machine late at night, detailing all he can remember about Grace. He has a close call at a bank when a guard empties his gun and narrowly misses Patch.
Saint is dating Jimmy, much to her grandmother’s delight. Norma disapproves of Saint’s career and hopes she will reconsider being a cop. Jimmy works at the zoo and is studying to be a veterinarian. Though they have a cordial relationship, Saint’s main passion is the Aaron/Tooms case.
A young sex worker from St. Louis calls Saint and says she saw a girl who looked like a woman on a missing person’s poster. Saint can get local police to rescue the missing girl, who was forced into sex work against her will. She credits Patch with saving the missing girl through his paintings.
Part 5, Chapters 106-113 Summary
Patch and Sammy meet at a fancy restaurant in Washington, DC, where Sammy tells him about the new paintings that sold and exhorts him to sell his house in Monta Clare and take some profit from the paintings. Instead, Patch insists that any money is sent to the families and a missing persons charity. Sammy fills him in on local gossip, telling him that Saint and Jimmy are dating and Misty is at Harvard, though her parents are angry that she is also tending bar there. Patch asks Sammy how he got started, and he tells him he bought a Rothko before people knew what it was worth. In actuality, he bought the Rothko with money from Franklin Meyer and Mary’s father, who paid him off to break up with Mary.
Patch spends time in New England, working on lobster boats and enjoying the sea, though he saves his earnings so that he can continue looking for Grace. One night, his crew drags him into a bar, and he sees a rich college kid harassing a woman. He punches the man and catches the girl as she trips. He realizes she is Misty.
He and Misty share a romantic evening walking through Boston. She tells him about her studies at Harvard and her passion for politics, and he is amazed at how beautiful and smart she is. He tells her she is better off without him, and the two of them share a brief night of passion. Patch sneaks away in the morning, only leaving behind a quick pencil sketch of Misty sleeping.
Norma urges Saint to marry Jimmy, telling her that he is a good man and that love is less important than respect and stability. She eventually agrees, though the morning of the wedding, she is nervous. She sits at the piano, playing the song “Rainbow Connection” and looking at Patch’s painting, wishing she could see him again. She is surprised to see Patch on the balcony at the church, and she sneaks away from Jimmy to speak to him. He tells her he’s happy for her, and the two say goodbye.
Part 5, Chapters 114-116 Summary
Saint and Nix meet a few days after the wedding, though Nix scolds her and says it could have waited until she was back for her honeymoon. She explains that they didn’t take a honeymoon, and he asks her if she is happy and loves Jimmy. She tells him love isn’t important, and he gently disagrees. He tells her that the FBI has called, and they want her to come work with them in Kansas City.
Jimmy is angry and tells her not to take the job. When she leaves in the morning, he refuses to speak to her. Himes, the FBI agent, offers her an assignment with them. He shows her a new body that was found of a young girl buried with rosary beads. He tells her they can help her track down Aaron if she helps him find a bank robber. He uses an unusual antique flintlock pistol to rob banks, and she recognizes Patch in the photograph immediately.
Part 6, Chapters 117-124 Summary
Saint is working for the FBI during the week and returning home on the weekends. While she finds purpose in her job, Jimmy fails his veterinary exams and spends his days drinking on the couch. He blames Saint’s absence for his failure and is angry with her.
Patch calls her, and the two speak briefly. He tells her that he is a pirate, and she is a lawman, so they can no longer meet each other. She continues to chase him fruitlessly and eventually returns home for Thanksgiving. Her grandmother chides her for hurting Jimmy’s ego and tells her to be kinder to him. After he falls asleep, the two go to see Patch’s paintings at Sammy’s galley. Sammy tells her he doesn’t know where Patch is and tells her she should focus on finding the missing girls instead. She and Norma go into the church, and she prays not to find Patch. She tells her grandmother that she’s pregnant.
Part 6, Chapters 125-132 Summary
Saint visits an abortion clinic 200 miles away from home. As she waits, she notices a photograph from the clinic’s opening. Tooms stands to the side in the picture. The office calls her name, and she enters for her appointment. Though the author does not reveal this until later, Saint does not go through with the procedure and instead gives the child up for adoption.
When she returns home, the house is a mess. Jimmy leaves it for her to clean up on her weekend visits. She starts to tell him that she became pregnant and visited a clinic, but he doesn’t let her finish once he hears the word “clinic.” He physically attacks her as she curls into a ball, crying.
She returns to Kansas City and makes excuses to her grandmother, not wanting Norma to see her bruises or loose teeth. She stays in her apartment for a few weeks, and then has an epiphany about the case—Patch is visiting places Grace described to him, which he has, in turn, described in his late-night voicemails.
She catches up to Patch in Arizona, and the two talk briefly. He is angry when he sees her bruises and hears that Jimmy hurt her, but she shrugs it off. She begs him not to flee and force her hand, but he takes off at a run. Saint fires her gun. Though the author does not yet reveal it, she hits him in the thigh, non-lethally.
Parts 5-6 Analysis
Saint struggles to reconcile her desire for a career and a purpose with expectations about womanhood. Her arc represents the theme of Women’s Struggle for Autonomy. When she is dating Jimmy, she thinks that he will expect a wife to wait on him as his mother has over the years. Norma is dismissive of her worries and tells her, “There isn’t another kind of man” (270). She urges Saint to marry Jimmy and settle down, telling her that “love is merely a visitor over a lifetime” (272). Though Norma loves her granddaughter, she pressures her in ways that compromise her autonomy because she believes marriage and a family are the best ways for Saint to have safety and security.
Nix offers a counter to Norma’s advice, counseling Saint as she pursues The Search for Identity professionally. He understands her desire to become a police officer and right the wrongs of the past. He tells her that “a single life is made up of a dozen or more roles and responsibilities. I can count the versions of myself like friend and foe” (287). His mentorship emphasizes that Saint does not have to be just one thing—a wife—and that there is room for her to have both a career and love, should she desire it.
Saint also experiences trauma at the hands of her husband, who viciously physically abuses her when he thinks she terminated her pregnancy. Though Saint ultimately leaves him, she decides not to raise the child on her own and gives him to a family to adopt. She endures The Lasting Effects of Trauma from Jimmy’s abuse and her son’s adoption. She later struggles to sleep and to move on from this trauma. Though most of the town, including Norma, believes Jimmy is a good man, his kind facade hides someone capable of monstrous things. He serves as a narrative contrast to Aaron, whom everyone sees as a monster. However, the text shows that Aaron and Jimmy are two points on a spectrum of misogyny, both motivated by their belief that they have the right to control women and their bodies, inflicting violence toward them.
Meanwhile, Patch’s quest for Grace has led him to become completely unmoored from his old life in Monta Clare. Instead, he roams the country, painting missing girls and robbing banks to fuel his lifestyle—demonstrating how The Lasting Effects of Trauma he experiences influence The Search for Identity. He is amused when a little boy asks him if he is a pirate, telling him with a smile, “I was” (252). Despite the past tense, he seems to still think of himself as a kind of romantic outlaw, exemplified by his frequent phone calls to Saint, where he tells her, “They say I’m a pirate. And you’re a lawman” (304). The use of the misgendered “lawman” to refer to Saint echoes old movies, particularly Westerns. It’s fitting, then, that Saint finally confronts and stops Patch in Arizona. Their confrontation takes on shades of the mythic West, with Saint trying to reason with her old friend and Patch instead clinging to his noble but fruitless quest. However, their shootout doesn’t end with a death, but with Saint purposely hitting Patch in the leg, hoping that he might still go on and live the life he deserves after their confrontation.
