49 pages • 1 hour read
Freida McFaddenThe Locked Door
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A 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 28-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “26 Years Earlier”
Content Warning: This section contains graphic depictions of violence, allusions to animal cruelty, and mentions of death by suicide.
Nora explains the rules of Hunter and Prey: Marjorie will be the prey, and Nora, as the hunter, will try to catch her. Nora assures Marjorie that the game will be fun but secretly knows Marjorie won’t enjoy it. She convinces Marjorie to take off her shoes, explaining that wild animals don’t wear shoes. Marjorie resists but agrees when Nora threatens to leave. Nora tells Marjorie to start running and gives her a 60-second head start. After Marjorie runs off, Nora reaches into her backpack and pulls out the penknife her father gave her.
Chapter 29 Summary
Nora cleans the blood off of her basement floor and locks the door, terrified of the possibility of Detective Barber searching her home. The next morning, she is relieved to see that news of her true identity has not made the news.
She is called into an emergency operation for a woman with internal bleeding. Nora feels a familiar thrill before cutting into her. The patient’s abdomen is filled with blood, and Nora must find the broken artery blind to clamp it without causing more blood loss. As the nurses congratulate her, Nora wonders if they know about the murders.
Chapter 30 Summary
After surgery, Nora meets her new attorney, Patricia Holstein, in the parking lot of the police station. Holstein asks Nora if Barber has any reason to suspect her. Nora lies and says there is nothing she needs to know.
Inside, Barber questions Nora about her relationship with Shelby. Barber reveals that Nora’s fingerprints were found on a cup in Shelby’s home and that neighbors claim to have seen Nora’s car at the house the night Shelby disappeared. Holstein asks if he has other proof, and Barber admits he does not. Nora realizes that Barber believes she is guilty and will not give up until he proves it.
Chapter 31 Summary
Brady returns Nora’s car, which he took to be fixed after her tires were slashed. She invites him inside, but he declines, and Nora realizes that she is unlikely to see him again. His reaction to the truth about her father affirms her long-held belief that anyone who knows who she really is will leave her. As Brady leaves, Nora wishes desperately that things were different.
Nora places a bowl of cat food outside of her house in an attempt to coax the stray cat out. She finds another un-postmarked letter from her father asking her to visit him. Rather than destroying it, she decides to go.
Chapter 32 Summary
As a child, Nora begged her grandmother to let her visit her father. Her grandmother always denied the request, and as Nora aged, she understood why. Now, however, she feels like only her father can explain what’s happening. She flies to Oregon to visit him at a maximum-security prison.
The prison workers are visibly disgusted that anyone would visit Nierling. When they meet, Aaron tells Nora that she is beautiful and he is proud of her. She recognizes his attempts to manipulate her and demands to know who killed her patients. He replies that she did.
Chapter 33 Summary: “26 Years Earlier”
Nora begins to chase after Marjorie with her penknife. As she runs, she thinks that she’d be having more fun if it was nighttime. She hears Marjorie fall and discovers that she has twisted her ankle. Nora thinks that her plan has worked better than she expected and that hurting Marjorie will be easy. Marjorie’s look of terror when she sees Nora’s knife reminds her of the blue eye she saw in the cage in her father’s basement. She can’t bring herself to hurt Marjorie despite how much she’s been anticipating it. As she walks Marjorie home, Nora recognizes she must do something difficult, which is implied to be turning her father in.
Chapter 34 Summary
Nora denies killing her patients, insisting that she would never hurt anyone. Aaron insists that she is like him and reminds her that she killed all of her childhood pets. He jokes about his late wife’s worries about Nora, criticizing her for not seeing his crimes. When he suggests that Nora became a surgeon so she could cut into people, Nora leaves.
On arrival in San Francisco, she notices a rotting smell in her car. When she pulls over to investigate, she detects the smell of lavender mixed with the rotting odor.
Chapter 35 Summary
Nora speeds home with the windows rolled down, afraid to investigate the smell in public. The smell immediately reminds her of the rotting bodies in her father’s basement. At home, she digs through the trunk and finds a bloody severed hand. She determines that someone is trying to set her up and decides no one can know about the hand. As the daughter of a known killer and a surgeon, she is too suspicious for Barber to trust that she is innocent. She tries to dump the hand at a fast food restaurant but is intercepted.
Chapter 36 Summary
To Nora’s horror, she is confronted by a young employee. Channeling her father’s confidence and charisma, she lies that she is looking for sunglasses she lost earlier in the day. The worker accepts her explanation, and Nora leaves. At home, she tries to eat but is disturbed by the lingering smell of the severed hand. She calls a number of home security companies to try to set up an installation appointment.
Detective Barber appears suddenly and apologizes for his earlier accusations. He mentions that he tried to come by earlier, but Nora is unwilling to tell him she visited her father.
Chapter 37 Summary
Nora spends the morning in surgeries, a welcome distraction from the previous night’s discovery. She receives a call from a security company and arranges to pay extra for someone to install a full system with audio and video that evening. Philip overhears her conversation and begs her to tell him what is wrong. Since she trusts and likes Philip, she feels she cannot tell him the truth, fearing he’ll abandon her like Brady did. She promises him that she is fine.
Chapters 28-37 Analysis
Up until this point in The Locked Door, the two timelines—narrated by adult and 11-year-old Nora—have been essentially parallel, with suspense building in similar ways in both narratives. In the adult chapters, suspense is built as Nora struggles to hide the truth about her father’s crimes; in the childhood chapters, suspense is built as Nora learns about her father’s crimes. Suspense grows in the adult chapters with the growing mystery of Nora’s murdered patients, and in the childhood chapters with the growing threat of her own violence against Marjorie. These parallel timelines are intended to sow seeds of doubt in the reader about adult Nora’s reliability as a narrator, suggesting that she is capable of violence and that, now as then, she knows more than she is letting on, once more speaking to The Tensions Between Nature and Nurture.
At this point in the novel, however, the two timelines depart dramatically. In Chapter 33, 11-year-old Nora corners an injured Marjorie on an abandoned trail with a penknife gifted to her by her father. Everything to this point in the novel suggests that Nora wants to harm Marjorie. However, when the moment comes, “watching the fear in her eyes” (227), Nora recognizes that she can’t harm people the way her father does and feels “a rush of relief” at the realization (228). The encounter convinces her that “there’s something [she] need[s] to do, but [she’s] scared to do it” (228): The implication is that she is going to turn her father in. Although she is frightened, 11-year-old Nora is in charge of her emotions and capable of making decisions. The revelation that Nora may have been the one to turn her father in also makes her a more reliable narrator. At this point in the novel, child Nora’s trajectory is positive: She will soon be out of her father’s house and on her way to a successful career as a surgeon.
On the other hand, the chapters narrated by adult Nora feature the novel’s climax, as events spiral rapidly out of her control. In Chapter 30, Nora realizes that Barber believes she murdered her patients, and that “as long as he believes that, he’s going to keep digging until the real killer surfaces” (208). Nora’s sense that she is being personally persecuted adds to her loss of control and leads her to fear for her public reputation, invoking the theme of The Blurred Lines Between Professional and Personal Identities. Later, the discovery of the severed hand leads her to believe that she is being intentionally set up: “[S]omebody got into my car and left this for me, the same way they got into my house and left the blood in my basement” (236). The idea that she is being framed for murder makes Nora panic and act illogically, as when she destroys the severed hand rather than reporting it. The chapters narrated by adult Nora suggest that she is no longer in control of the events surrounding her, marking a significant departure from the childhood narrative, which is almost concluded.
The chapters in this section emphasize the distance Nora has intentionally put between herself and her father. When Nora travels to Oregon to visit her father, McFadden highlights the effort required. After flying from San Francisco to Portland, Nora will have to “rent a car and drive out to Salem, where the prison is located. The flight will be about an hour and a half, and the drive will be another hour” (217). Later, as Nora is leaving, McFadden again emphasizes the distance between Nora and her father: “[A]bout four hours later, I’m back at the San Francisco airport [and] I’ve never felt so happy to be home” (231). The emphasis on time and distance in these passages reflects Nora’s intentional desire to distance herself from her father, both geographically and morally.
Related Titles
By Freida McFadden
