53 pages • 1 hour read
Jennifer MoorheadBroken Bayou
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.
Chapters 13-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Although it is only noon, Willa pours herself a glass of wine. The VCR has arrived, and she is anxious to finally watch the security tapes she found among her mother’s things. The first tape that she pops into the VCR Is just an old soap opera. She removes it, selecting another, but her phone rings. It is Rita Meade. Combatively, Willa asks Rita how and why she obtained her number, but Rita brushes the question off and responds with one of her own: Is it true that Willa spent childhood summers in Broken Bayou, that she and Travis Arceneaux had “a thing,” and that her mother once drove a red convertible? Willa issues a curt “no comment,” hangs up, and blocks the number. After passing out and waking up again at four in the morning, Willa finally finds the right tape. It is a grainy black-and-white video. The first image is of a woman and a man in a black cowboy hat sitting in a red convertible in a parking lot. The woman, her mother, and the man, her boss, exit the vehicle and leave the frame. Moments later they return. Her mother is disheveled. Her boss hits her. An argument ensues. Willa notices Mabry in the convertible. She turns on the lights, so she is clearly in the driver’s seat. Then, the car lurches forward. The man in the cowboy hat goes down, and her mother drags his body into the trunk. Willa is astounded to learn what happened on that fateful night: Mabry accidentally killed her mother’s boss, and her mother used Willa to help cover up the crime. She stops the tape, not bothering to watch the end. Old patterns resurface, and Willa heads into the bathroom, making a small gash on her arm with a knife she carries in case she feels the desire to self-harm.
April 2018
Katherine Boudreaux has a car accident while trying to grab for her cell phone. When she regains consciousness, a man snaps a photograph of her. The next thing she is aware of is a pinprick of pain in her neck. Then she loses consciousness again.
Chapter 14 Summary
The next morning, Willa wakes to the noise of a vehicle. It sounds like Doyle’s truck. The truck is there and gone quickly, but whoever was driving it leaves a paper bag behind on the steps. In it, Willa finds a license plate, which she assumes came from her mother’s convertible. She is worried about what Doyle knows and what he might be trying to tell her, but she tries to brush those thoughts aside. In town at Nan’s café, Rita approaches her again. Willa is cautious, but Rita strikes her as an honest person, and Rita tells her that information flows “both ways” and that she can probably fill Willa in on a few details herself. Suddenly, the café empties. Something is afoot, and Willa follows everyone out to the levee. The team of divers has discovered another body. Willa gets a call from Amy, who tells her that gossip about her and Christopher has died down: His divorce records are public, and he was in fact divorced before he and Willa got together. Willa tells Amy about Rita’s questions, and Amy warns her that Rita is a national news reporter and that she should not speak with her.
Chapter 15 Summary
Rita shows up at Willa’s doorstep bright and early the next morning. Willa decides to speak with her, and the two begin their interview. Rita tells Willa that her mother’s boss was a bookie named Zeke Johnson who was believed to have taken part in a range of low-level crimes. He went missing the summer her mother worked for him, which Rita thinks has something to do with drug dealing. Rita also shares that Zeke spent many years in prison, after the summer Willa dumped the car. Willa realizes that Zeke hadn’t been in the trunk by the time she rolled the convertible into the bayou. She hastily kicks Rita out so that she can finish the video. Zeke must have gotten out of the trunk somehow. She plays the end of the tape. The video shows him scrambling away from the convertible before Willa enters the frame and drives it away. She heads to the bayou and learns that another barrel has been found and that the authorities have also arrested a suspect, Walter Delaroux. He’d lived in Broken Bayou for many years and had even reported several large barrels missing from his property. During the press conference, however, it becomes clear that there was something grisly in the trunk of her mother’s car when it was dredged up. Willa wonders if someone else had been lurking the night she’d dumped it: If the car was not fully submerged, someone else could have put a body into the trunk after she left the bayou.
Chapter 16 Summary
Willa decides to tell the police everything except that she has a security tape from the night she dumped the car and about Zeke’s involvement with her mother. She calls her aunts’ lawyer Charles and asks him to accompany her to the station. He cautions her that bringing a lawyer will make her look guilty, but she wants him there. At the station, Travis is also dismayed that she plans to talk and has a lawyer. The two speak briefly, and he tells her that the only person who could have put a body into the trunk is the suspect in the barrel murders, Walter Delaroux. It was his property they were trespassing on to dump the convertible. Willa mentions that she would like to speak with Doyle and Eddie: The license plate, which she assumed was from her mother’s car, was actually from the vehicle of one of the missing women. It too had been dredged up out of the bayou. Officially her death was ruled an accident, but there are whispers in town that she was another of the serial killer’s victims, and the police have just not been able to establish official cause of death yet. This detail turned up during the press conference and it has Willa on edge: She wonders how else Doyle would have ended up with that license plate. Travis seems hesitant to involve his brothers, and Willa realizes that he is still trying to protect them. She feels this kind of protective impulse around Mabry, so she understands it. It was, she reflects, part of what drew her to Travis in the first place: He is a kindred spirit whose family was not unlike hers.
When she is finally able to speak to the police chief, she tells him everything. He confirms that there was a body in the trunk of the convertible, and she admits to having a security tape because it exonerates her: She hasn’t brought it that day, but she will provide it to the police. She tells them that they were on Walter Delaroux’s property when they dumped the vehicle, and they seem very interested. She also tells the police about the license plate from the missing woman’s car and asserts that Doyle was the one who left it at her place. The chief seems hesitant to believe that Doyle could be involved, but he agrees to investigate. As part of the conversation, she admits that Travis helped her on the night she dumped the car. She feels terrible: She may have just cost him his job. The chief tells her not to leave town.
November 2014
Mary Duncan is having a terrible day at the Renaissance Festival. After getting separated from her husband, she encounters a man who offers to help her. The last thing she remembers is the flash of a Polaroid camera and a pinprick of pain on the side of her neck.
Chapter 17 Summary
Willa wakes at six the next morning. She records the security tape on her phone in advance of handing it over to the police. She reflects on the morning after she dumped the convertible. Her aunts had reprimanded her mother for her “wild ways,” and told her that she needed to settle down and focus more on parenting her children. They reminded her that their own mother had been just as “difficult,” and Willa remembers her mother’s face hardening. She also remembers not wanting to end up like her mother and seeing a grain of truth in her aunts’ (who are actually her mother’s aunts) statements. After all, she had to come up with a safe word so that Mabry could signal to Willa if she needed to get away from her mother and out of the house. Willa then pushes her memories aside and heads to the police station. On the way, she decides to stop at the Arceneaux place to talk to Travis’s mother, Liv, and his brother, Eddie. Liv doesn’t initially want to let her in, but she eventually does. The house is filthy and cluttered, and to Willa’s trained eye it appears that Liv has OCD and a hoarding disorder. Liv is angry and combative and bristles when Willa asks questions about her deceased daughter Emily, whose cause of death was never established. She angrily asserts that it was not her fault and tells Willa to leave when Willa offers to help her find resources to deal with her grief. On the way out, Willa runs into Eddie. He shows her Emily’s room, and Willa is chagrined to notice the lock on the outside of the door. She offers Eddie a handful of spare pieces of metal (for his figurines) in exchange for answering a few questions. She learns that Eddie does not drive, and this information makes her even surer that it was Doyle who gave her the license plate. She learns that Eddie deeply loved Emily and misses her terribly. Their conversation, however, is interrupted by Doyle returning home. He tries to prevent Willa from leaving, but she pushes her way past him. Unsettled, she proceeds to the police station.
Chapter 18 Summary
She meets with the chief and with investigator Tom Bordelon. She gives them the tape, tells them that she does not feel safe in town, and asks permission to return to Fort Worth. Nonplussed, they tell her to stay put and call them if she is in danger. When she leaves, she calls her mother. She explains that she knows about Zeke Johnson and angrily tells her how wrong it was to send her daughter to dispose of a body. Her mother seems unwilling to admit her guilt, and Willa realizes that she’s in an emotionally low state. She softens, tells her mother that she’ll call her mother’s doctor, and ends the call. Next, she heads to Nan’s for breakfast. While eating, she searches for information about Emily’s death online. She finds that Doyle was the one to find her, but she also learns that Doyle’s father died while fishing with Doyle. That death was ruled an accident, but Doyle was its sole witness. She thinks about serial killers, that there is a progression to how messy their kills are, that they learn how to be more effective by honing their technique. She finishes eating and leaves, but immediately runs into Rita. She decides to speak with her, and the two head back to the house. They exchange information. Willa learns from Rita that there were many complaints against Liv Arceneaux for child mistreatment. Emily was a happy, healthy girl, but Liv always insisted that she was gravely ill and eventually withdrew her from school. Then, she had actually become ill. Willa is sure that she has Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy, a disorder in which parents seek attention through providing (unnecessary) care to their children. Willa tells Rita about the license plate, and Rita admits that she has also considered the idea that Doyle could be the serial killer. The license plate comes from a car belonging to the missing teacher whose death is still officially an accident, but Rita is sure that she is one of the killer’s victims.
Chapters 13-18 Analysis
This set of chapters begins with Willa self-medicating with wine and engaging in self-harm. As Willa begins to experience more and more stress, her unhealthy coping mechanisms emerge. At this point, it is apparent that Willa is indeed still troubled and that she has not, despite years of therapy and her work as a psychologist, completely processed the trauma of her childhood. Because she has also explained that her mother attempted to manage her own mental health conditions with alcohol and became addicted, it is also apparent that Willa’s self-medication is learned behavior.
The passing down of unhealthy behaviors from one generation in a family to the next is a key focal point in this portion of the novel, evidence of The Generational Impact of Inadequate Mental Health Resources. Willa recalls her aunts sitting her mother down to discuss her neglectful parenting, and she shares that her mother’s mother was similarly afflicted. Both Willa’s mother and her grandmother experienced a series of mental health conditions and self-medicated to the point of developing an addiction. Willa’s own self-medication is thus further contextualized, and Willa emerges as someone caught up in generational dysfunction. Although this memory does trigger a shift in Willa’s perception of her mother, she is still somewhat mired in a cycle of anger, blame, and shame. She also recalls: “It’s triggering a skill I learned as a child, watching my mother. I could sense her mood shifting, feel the energy coming off her body like a radio frequency. I could time it almost to the second when she would snap” (172). She is describing hyper-vigilance, a form of learned behavior typical in children whose caregivers are unstable. This need to constantly monitor the parents becomes a source of tremendous stress for children, and it additionally runs the risk of permanently altering their emotional response systems and stress management capabilities: Willa struggles with heightened emotional responses to stress and her self-harm and self-medication are now revealed as complex patterns developed in order to self-soothe. And yet, as Willa reflects on her family’s generational trauma and dysfunction, she develops greater empathy for her mother. On one call, she realizes that her mother has once again become seriously depressed, and even though she is rightfully angry at her mother for involving her in a homicide, she promises to call her mother’s psychiatrist. Here, the author models an empathetic response to fraught family relationships: Willa moves past a place of judgment, recognizes that her mother was also damaged by childhood trauma, and provides help rather than anger. The shift that Willa undergoes during these chapters is a key example of her empathetic attitude.
Rita Meade is another key focal point in these chapters. Although Willa still does not trust her, Rita’s dogged tenacity, keen insight into human behavior, and ability to uncover the truth speak to an inner strength, and she emerges as a figure of Survival and Resilience. There are many parallels between Rita and Willa, and here it is evident that both women value their careers, are hard workers, and are willing to endure difficulty in pursuit of their goals. Many of the female figures in this novel embody strength and personal fortitude. This kind of representation counteracts stereotypical depictions of women in thrillers that focus on weakness and victimization.
Much of the action in this set of chapters focuses on the security tape, and The Psychological Impact of Secrets becomes particularly apparent. After viewing the tape, Willa experiences a range of emotions. She is angry at her mother for involving her in a murder, and that anger threatens to further imperil their relationship. She is also full of empathy for her sister, whom she now realizes was carrying the burden of guilt for (so she thought) having killed a man. Willa herself feels guilty for having involved Travis Arceneaux in her mother’s plot, and this web of secrecy and lies becomes another key source of psychological distress for her. Secrets are thus shown to be damaging not only to individuals, but also to relationships.
