62 pages • 2 hours read
Jason RekulakHidden Pictures
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A 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 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
On weekends, Mallory usually stays behind as the Maxwells go on family outings. She cleans while other young people are out dating, and she denies herself social media, which is one of the guidelines for her recovery. Mondays, when she can return to work, are a relief. One morning, Caroline says Teddy’s been wetting the bed and that he’s self-conscious about it. She blames the stress of the move.
In the mornings, Mallory and Teddy often play “Enchanted Forest” (67), which means taking a hike and inventing stories, characters, and predicaments as they move through the woods. One afternoon, Mallory hears Teddy talking to himself during “Quiet Time.” He says, “Clouds. Lots of stars?” (69). The principal of Brook Elementary calls and leaves a welcome message for Teddy. Later, Teddy shows Mallory a drawing of a man walking backward in a forest, dragging a woman against a starry background. He says that Anya acts out a story and he draws it. This is what he calls the “whole game” (71). Teddy says Anya wants Mallory to have this drawing. She takes it but doesn’t store it with Caroline’s stash of Teddy’s other drawings.
Mallory buys an Android tablet and searches the internet for Annie Barrett, but she finds nothing useful. Something smacks the window and startles her, just as Russell calls to check on her running progress and physical state. He senses that something’s bothering her and asks if she’s having memory lapses, before promising to send her swimming exercises for the pool.
Chapter 6 Summary
Mallory swims sprints the next night. She hears a branch crack and then sees a shirtless Ted getting into the pool with her. He is a skilled swimmer, and his laps are efficient. After a while, he gives her some breathing advice. When she gets out of the pool, he sees her Philadelphia Flyers tattoo when her swimsuit rides up; it is a tattoo of Gritty, the team mascot. Mallory had been friends with a man named Isaac, whose father had played in the National Hockey League. She got the tattoo to impress him, hoping he’d let her stay with him in his drug den as they enabled each other’s habits. However, he ended up going to prison. Ted says Caroline also has a tattoo. Another branch cracks before he can say more. Ted says it’s a rabbit. They talk about Mitzi, and Mallory remembers Mrs. Gruber, a local tarot reader whom she and her friends had called the Oracle.
She remembers a recent instance of Ted’s hostility toward anything imaginary: “A few nights ago, Teddy spat up a loose molar, and Ted just reached into his billfold and pulled out a dollar—no mystery, no fanfare, no late-night tiptoeing into the bed to avoid detection” (79). Inside, Caroline asks about the phone call from the school. Mallory forgot to tell her. She tells Mallory to be more careful so that Teddy doesn’t lose his spot. For the first time, Mallory sees Caroline impatient and angry.
In the cottage, something slides against the wall behind her bed as she tries to sleep. Then, the noise moves under the floor. Mallory finds an access panel in the floor, which she opens with great effort. She sees something move below and screams, and then Caroline is there with Ted. Ted catches the animal, which turns out to be a possum. Caroline makes him nail the hole in the floor shut immediately. Caroline then makes tea, and they talk easily, as if she never scolded Mallory.
Chapter 7 Summary
During a run on July 4, Mallory passes a house she calls the Flower Castle, which is the home of Adrian’s family. Adrian steps outside in a gray suit. His father, Ignacio, is getting an award at the Golf Club that night. Adrian introduces Mallory to his parents as a Penn State runner, and she wishes she hadn’t lied to him. Sofia looks suspicious as Adrian asks what her major is. Mallory says her major is elementary education, which elates Sofia, who teaches fourth grade as well as working part-time at a library. Ignacio asks what her favorite flower is, which is a game their family plays. They think that they can learn something insightful about a person from their favorite flower. Mallory hesitantly points at an orange trumpet vine. Sofia says that trumpet vines are almost weeds and are hard to control. Back at the cottage, Mallory realizes that she has never had a real boyfriend. She looks forward to Adrian’s return to the Maxwells’ yard.
The next day, Teddy won’t play with other kids at the park. Later, he wakes Mallory from a nap and gives her a drawing of a man shoveling dirt over Anya, who is being buried in a grave in the forest. Teddy says the man stole Anya’s little girl. He says that the girl must have gotten out of the hole.
Chapter 8 Summary
Mallory visits Mitzi while the Maxwells go out to dinner. Inside Mitzi’s home, she sees an unassembled handgun that Mitzi was cleaning. Mitzi hints that Caroline doesn’t want to be a mother, so she works to avoid her child. Mallory has a theory about Teddy’s drawings and thinks Mitzi might be helpful. She thinks the names Anya and Annie are too similar to be a coincidence. Now she wonders if Anya’s spirit is using Teddy to communicate through the drawings.
Mitzi says George Barrett—an engineer for DuPont—was the house’s original owner. He had a wife and three daughters. Annie was his cousin. Men visited the cottage frequently, hoping to woo her. Instead, she stayed inside, painting and drawing, which caused rumors in town. People said she was a witch and took other women’s husbands into the woods. One day, George found blood all over the cottage and Annie was gone.
Butch and Bobbie Hercik were the next owners. They were close with Mitzi and had three girls and two boys. In the bathroom, Mallory looks in Mitzi’s medicine cabinet. She opens an Oxycontin bottle, but it’s empty. She thinks drinking Mitzi’s coffee has overstimulated her addiction. Mitzi suggests that they contact Annie with an ornate Ouija board. She says she’ll talk to the Maxwells to get their cooperation, which horrifies Mallory, who tells her about the no religion rule.
That night, Mallory sleeps badly. In the morning, Teddy’s favorite charcoals are missing. After she naps, there is a new drawing. It shows a screaming Anya with two hands squeezing her throat.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
As Mallory settles deeper into her routine at the Maxwell house, she sees new facets of Ted, Caroline, and Teddy. She also experiences her first instance of backsliding toward addiction. The first crack in Caroline’s façade is her anger over Mallory’s failure to tell her about the message from the school. This anger will make more sense later, as it foreshadows the reveal that Teddy has no vaccination records, which the school would insist on obtaining.
Ted grows more overtly flirtatious when he joins her in the swimming pool and talks casually about her tattoo. Their conversation supports Caroline’s eventual assertion that Ted is having a midlife crisis, that he feels trapped, and that he has convinced himself that he and Mallory are in love. If Ted’s later remarks—that Caroline doesn’t trust him and that they sleep in separate rooms—are true, then his behavior toward Mallory can be read as a biproduct of lust, frustration, and regret, particularly once the reader learns that Ted was complicit in Margit’s murder.
Teddy’s main development in these chapters is to provide Mallory with increasingly disturbing drawings: “I turn my attention to his latest illustration. It’s a picture of a man walking backwards through a dense and tangled forest. He’s dragging a woman by the ankles, pulling her lifeless body across the ground” (69). The drawings are morbid and unsettling, the opposite of their walks in the Enchanted Forest, which are a lovely evocation of childhood and the play of make believe. These scenes serve as a contrast to the later scene when Teddy prefers the iPad to imagination.
Mallory commits two acts in these chapters that go against the structure of her recovery. First, she begins to backslide toward her addictive tendencies when she snoops in Mitzi’s medicine cabinet. Second, she extends the lie about her past, and her enrollment at Penn State, to Adrian’s parents, potentially complicating any future relationship they might have. Mallory is still ashamed of who she has been. She prefers the fantasy in which everyone approves of her to the reality in which her past might potentially cost her friends and relationships and bring their judgment and wariness upon her: “I cringe at the lie because I’ve already forgotten about it. If Adrian and I were alone, I’d come clean and fess up—but I can’t say anything now, not with both his parents staring at me” (85). Mallory here shows The Relationship Between Forgiveness and Recovery in that to recover from her slip of lying to Adrian, she must ask for forgiveness not only of him but of his family too. She’s not ready here to make that leap yet in these chapters.
While Adrian begins to develop as a source of future support, Mallory actively enlists Mitzi’s help, showing that she is willing to break the Maxwells’ rules to solve the mystery. Mitzi’s judgment on Caroline could be read as bitter, snooty gossip, but it will prove prescient by the end of the book: “Some women don’t want to be mothers, in my opinion. They want children, they want cute pictures to put on Facebook. But do they want the actual experience of mothering?” (94). Mitzi here is accusing Caroline of wanting to be a mother because of what she anticipates the experience will be like without thinking about all the small gestures it takes every day to be a mother.
The characters have each now experienced a shift in their narrative arcs, but they are devolving toward their bad habits and secrets, rather than progressing. Given her status as an unreliable narrator, much of the current tension now arises from Mallory’s step toward addiction, her demonstrated willingness to disobey the Maxwells, and the new layer of deception she has added to her relationship with Adrian and his family.
