The Night She Disappeared

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-10

Part 1, Chapters 11-22

Part 2, Chapters 23-36

Part 3, Chapters 37-42

Part 3, Chapters 43-51

Part 4, Chapters 52-60

Part 5, Chapter 61-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Scarlett’s Paintings

Scarlett’s paintings recur throughout the story. At times, they symbolize the inner lives of the artists who made them or their owners. Moreover, they often contain information that helps solve the mystery of Zach and Tallulah’s disappearances.

In her self-portrait, Scarlett includes many symbolic objects: a gun, a still-beating heart, a knife with blood dripping from it, and phone chargers. This painting denotes many aspects of Scarlett’s troubled character. Traumatized by her earlier rape and Liam’s murder of the rapist, she is haunted by images of life on the verge of death—the bloody knife, the heart. Executed in shades of pink, green, and gray, with “shocking splashes and spots of red” (100), the painting features chaotic dissonance that suggests the complexity of her character: She is at once sweet and childlike, but also someone who has a very dark side.

In another painting that hangs in Liam’s room, Scarlett depicts the most secret and evil part of Dark Place: the hidden tunnel that becomes the repository of the corpses of Guy Croft and Zach. For Liam, this painting represents the way he has thrown away his ambitions, desires, and potential to be at Scarlett’s beck and call. He knows about the tunnel because he is the one who murdered Guy and dumped his body there. For Sophie, this painting offers a solution to the novel’s central crime: the location of Zach’s body and a key to identifying the mysterious tool—the lever—that Zach buried for her to find.

Dark Place

Scarlett’s extravagant mansion, Dark Place, adds to the tone of mystery and suspense that provides tension in the novel. The name Dark Place is not subtle. It refers to the house’s violent history—including Scarlett’s rape and Zach’s murder—and offers a warning to stay away, which no one heeds. As befits its status as a haunted, evil place, the house is hard to get to: The mansion is on a dangerous, winding road, behind obstacles like hedges, meandering cattle, a locked gate, and a scary forest. Also in keeping with the creepy mansion trope, Dark Place is a hodgepodge of architectural styles.

Readers first get a detailed look at Dark Place through Kim’s eyes. For her, it represents the last place her daughter was seen, and approaching it, “Kim casts her eyes across the ground, across the horizon, all around her looking for signs of her daughter” (31). Because of her single-minded focus, Kim doesn’t respond to the house’s temptations: wealth, luxury, and escape from everyday life. Sophie too is wary of the house. Through the eyes of a detective, she recognizes its foreboding quality, “something from a Tim Burton movie” (39). She knows the house holds a secret to the disappearance of Tallulah and Zack.

However, for Tallulah, the house symbolizes freedom—a place where life happens. Tired of being a prematurely adult mom and a partner to the abusive Zach, Tallulah feels that the house is the answer to her unhappiness: “It’s magical, the sort of house that you have a really intense dream about” (148). Tallulah’s response to the house is similar to a child’s idea of Disneyland—but of course, fairytales are not real. Over the course of the novel, the house will become her tomb and the site of her near-death experience.

Popular Culture

Jewell uses pop culture references to define the wealthy and privileged lives of Scarlett’s circle, in contrast to Zach and Tallulah. Tallulah and Zach respond differently to the cool group—Tallulah with desire, Zach with insecure disdain—but both reactions are driven by their observations of the group’s clothing, entertainment, technology, and social media usage. They have expensive shoes and fast cars; they look like celebrities on “a billboard poster for a hip clothing brand” (61).

These accoutrements of the wealthy become symbols of division. Zach derides them as “posh kids” (304), while Tallulah envies the way they comfortably shop at the expensive natural food store, loudly talking to each other across different aisles, acting as if they own the place. Tallulah wants to be a part of their clique