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 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Rattled, Travis and Willa head back to his truck. Willa wants to go to the sheriff and explain everything, that she dumped the car into the bayou at her mother’s request, decades ago. But Travis tells her that because he knew what she was doing that night, he is involved. His job is on the line, and he doesn’t want to lose it. He asks her to keep quiet for now. He drops her back at her aunts’ house. She heads back up to the attic. There is a box among her mother’s things that contains security footage, tapes that she stole on the night she dumped the car that could potentially implicate her. She needs to watch them, but she does not have a VCR. She orders one from Amazon, thinking back to that night: Her mother was on a manic upswing. She took Mabry out and left Willa to go on a date with Travis. Willa had been nervous letting her mother take Mabry. Mabry was “different.” It would be years before Willa realized that her sister had fetal alcohol syndrome, but even when the two were kids Willa considered it her job to keep Mabry safe. Her mother was on and off multiple kinds of medications, and never found one that worked. Mabry is not speaking to her now. Willa tries to call her, but she doesn’t pick up. Then, she gets a call from Amy. Her ex-husband Christopher’s ex-wife is claiming publicly that Willa and Christopher got together before his divorce was final. There are also public allegations that she never actually passed her board exams. Neither claim is true, but Amy cautions Willa that they will need to do some damage control.
Chapter 8 Summary
The VCR is unfortunately delayed in transit. Willa decides to see if she can find one at Dolly’s Antiques. She wants to view the tapes as soon as possible. Dolly does not have any old VCRs, but Willa does learn that another barrel has been found and that her mother’s car is at the police impound lot. She heads over there, hoping to see if it is still identifiable. Raymond, the man working there, recognizes Willa. She realizes that he was part of the group of kids she used to run around with, that his friends had called Travis “bayou trash,” but that he himself had been quiet and relatively kind. The car is in rough shape, and Willa is relieved to see that there is no visible VIN number. She remembers her mother coming home that fateful night, years ago. She was battered and bruised, and Mabry was barefoot and covered in mud. The car was nowhere to be seen. Lost in her memories, she heads back home. Travis’s brothers Doyle and Eddie are there. Eddie, who reminds her of Mabry, seems non-threatening. He gives her a small metal figurine he made and remarks cryptically that she shouldn’t be alone. Doyle does seem threatening, but Travis drives up in his car, and Doyle leaves quickly with Eddie.
Chapter 9 Summary
Travis has brought a pizza with him and asks if Willa would like to have dinner. The two make their way inside. They talk about the night Willa dumped the car. Her mother wanted the insurance money and cryptically told her that Mabry would no longer set foot inside it. Because Mabry was in obvious distress and her mother had facial bruising, Willa remembers worrying about what might have happened to the two of them that night. She went to Travis for help, and though he didn’t actually help her dump the car, he did give her advice on where to put it. Talk turns to Travis’s family, to his troubled mother and almost non-verbal brother Eddie, but Travis does not want to go into detail. He instead talks about the case: The discovery of a third barrel means that this is almost certainly the work of a serial killer. He shares that they have a suspect but refuses to let Willa know who it is. He starts flirting, and she tries to kiss him. Flustered, he pulls away, tells her that he can’t, and leaves. Willa is left alone and confused, not sure what just happened.
February 2017
Claire Fonteneau, who is only 14, sneaks into New Orleans with the help of her brother. On the street, a man bumps into her, snaps her photograph, and then pricks her neck with something small and sharp. She loses consciousness.
Chapter 10 Summary
The doorbell rings at eight the next morning, and Willa opens it to find the aunts’ lawyer Charles and his son. Willa recognizes the boy. She saw him having a tantrum in the grocery store a few days ago. Thinking that he might be experiencing sensory overload, she’d given his mother a bottle of Italian dressing to distract him. Just as she suspected, shaking the bottle and watching its small particles swirl around like confetti had calmed him. Charles asks if she needs help getting anything down from the attic, but Willa tells him that she has it all sorted out. Willa notices that the young boy hasn’t spoken and asks Charles about him. Charles admits to being worried that at three, he still doesn’t speak, but he isn’t quite sure what to do. Willa asks if he would like her opinion, and she tells him that the boy should be tested. She adds that she can find out some information about psychologists in Baton Rouge at give it to him. Gratefully, he thanks her. Willa also feels gratitude: She is happy to be recognized for her expertise rather than gawked at, at least for a moment.
Chapter 11 Summary
Willa heads over to Taylor’s Marketplace. Its proprietor, Ermine Taylor, is behind the counter and happy to see Willa. Willa adored Ermine when she was young. Ermine might be the one person (other than Travis) whom Willa is truly glad to see here in Broken Bayou. Rita Meade, a cutthroat reporter known for the ability to dig up more information than the police, is in the shop. She asks to speak with Willa sometime and gives Willa her number. Unsure about Rita, Willa does not say anything. When Rita leaves, she asks Ermine about her mother. The summer she dumped the car, Krystal Lynne worked for a shady guy, possibly a bookie, who paid her in cash and had an office where the antique store is now. Willa is sure that he was involved in whatever happened the night the car went missing. Ermine thinks about it but tells Willa that she cannot remember who that man might have been. Willa asks about Travis next, and Ermine’s response surprises her. She learns that Travis’s father was thought to have been a decent man. The mother, on the other hand, was suspect. There were rumors she’d given Eddie rat poison to “cure” him and that it was her home “remedies” that had rendered him mostly unable to speak. Other than Eddie and Travis, the other brothers had scattered, but they all struggled with addiction, various mental health issues, and incarceration. The one daughter died under mysterious circumstances, and her autopsy was inconclusive. As Willa is taking this all in, the shop falls silent. On television, a news anchor announces that they have found a fourth barrel and a fourth body. The victim this time is the 14-year-old daughter of a Louisiana senator. Reeling from this news, Willa gets a phone call from Travis. He is angry and asks her what she got him into with the car. He alludes to something in the trunk but has to hang up. Just then, Ermine tells Willa that she does recall Krystal Lynn’s boss: He always wore a black cowboy hat and disappeared the same summer that Willa dumped the car.
Chapter 12 Summary
Willa runs home quickly. In one of the boxes where she left it is a black cowboy hat. She turns it over and over in her hands, and then calls her mother, demanding to know what happened the night that she dumped the car. Her mother angrily tells her that she had only done what she had to do, and Willa assures her that she just wants the truth and will not judge her. Krystal Lynn tells Willa that she and Mab had gone to a bar and that she’d met up with her boss. He wanted a ride back to his office. Once they were at the office, he stumbled and fell, hitting his head. Krystal Lynn admits to stealing money, which she thought she was owed, from his safe, but says nothing that could explain what is on the security tapes or explain the presence of a dead body in her car. She becomes defensive. Willa knows that she is lying, but there is little that she can do to extract the truth from her mother, and she hangs up.
Chapters 7-12 Analysis
This set of chapters begins with a further exploration of The Generational Impact of Inadequate Mental Health Resources. The author provides more information about Krystal Lynn, Willa’s mother. Willa recalls Krystal’s extreme emotional volatility, the way that their lives were governed by her mother’s alternating upswings and periods of deep depression. Her mother sought help at various points in time, but she never stuck with any of the care plans developed by or medications prescribed by her psychiatrists. After a frustrating phone call with her mother, Willa wryly observes, “Balance isn’t mama’s strong point. She’s rejected more medications than I can count” (82). While Willa will develop more empathy for her mother later on, realizing that medications often have terrible side effects and that Krystal Lynn struggled to find one she could tolerate, at this point in the narrative her focus is on the way that Krystal Lynn’s mental health conditions had impacted her childhood. Willa also provides more detail about her sister Mabry. Willa took on much of Mabry’s parenting early in their lives because of their mother’s instability. Mabry struggled because of fetal alcohol syndrome, although at the time Willa understood only that her sister was “different.” Mabry lacked emotional regulation and was developmentally disabled. Willa still struggles with guilt at not having been able to completely safeguard Mabry form harm and unhappiness. It is becoming apparent that Willa’s own troubled family helped to propel her toward the study and practice of psychology. She is driven not only by her strong work ethic but also by her desire to help people whose lives are as difficult as hers and Mabry’s.
Willa’s empathy and psychological expertise are on full display in this section, especially during her interaction with her aunts’ lawyer Charles and his young son. Charles’ son has autism, and the family has struggled to find resources and access to care in their rural community. This idea, that both medical and mental health care are less accessible in rural areas, although not a major focal point, runs through the entire novel. Krystal Lynn, Charles, and even Liv Arceneaux cannot access the care that they need, highlighting the need for healthcare resources in rural communities. Charles’s son struggles with sensory overload in public places and is partially nonverbal. Although he is stigmatized by the townspeople for “throwing tantrums,” Willa understands that he becomes easily overwhelmed and responds to him with understanding and empathy. It is apparent from Willa’s interaction with Charles and his son that, although in psychological distress herself and struggling to process her own childhood trauma, she has managed to turn her pain into an empathetic care model. Her own Survival and Resilience have equipped her to help others in need.
During these chapters, it becomes clear that Travis’s family has its own history with mental illness. The author reveals that Travis’s mother Liv was both abusive and struggling with several serious mental health conditions. Her instability harmed her relationships with her husband and her many children, and it becomes apparent that Travis comes from an even more difficult situation than Willa. Travis was stigmatized in town for having grown up in a messy trailer, and he was the target of class-based prejudice both in town and at school. Like many small towns in the South, Broken Bayou has a distinct social hierarchy in which those perceived to be at the bottom are mistreated, even though no one is wealthy. Through depictions of Travis’s family, however, the novel also hints that appearances can be deceiving. Although not overtly recognizable as such yet, this is a key strategy of foreshadowing. Willa trusts Travis and often notes how handsome and put-together he is. She mistrusts his brother Doyle, whose appearance is much messier, but thinks his developmentally disabled brother Eddie is harmless. Eddie’s personality is much more complex. Although he would never knowingly hurt anyone, he has been manipulated by Travis for years into aiding and abetting his murders. Eddie isn’t as harmless as Willa thinks. Travis is, of course, a murderer, and Doyle (despite his appearance and demeanor) is in fact trying to help by pointing Willa in the direction of the serial killer’s identity.
