57 pages • 1 hour read
Mary Downing HahnDeep and Dark and Dangerous
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2007A 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 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Dulcie makes the cousins peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with chocolate milk, but Emma refuses hers. She now hates peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because Sissy said she hates them. Emma and Ali continue to fight, and Ali explains to Dulcie that this sudden negative change in behavior is the result of Sissy’s bad influence on her cousin. Emma tells a series of lies about Ali, including that Ali pushed her off the dock and left her to drown. This comment, along with some light cursing and insults, is the final straw for Dulcie. She makes Emma sit and eat before barring Emma from playing with Sissy if she keeps behaving poorly. Emma throws a tantrum, and Dulcie sends her to bed. Afterward, Ali and Dulcie try to make sense of Emma’s behavior, speculating she is mirroring Sissy to gain her affection because she has never had any friends. Dulcie feels she does not understand children because she can hardly remember being one herself—at least nothing before becoming a teenager.
Erin’s mother, Jeanine Reynolds née Donaldson, unexpectedly arrives. She has come to visit her friend from 30 years ago, but Dulcie, not remembering her, greets her hesitantly. Jeanine is unsurprised Dulcie is an artist because as children she often drew pictures for her and Teresa, who was obsessed with mermaids. Dulcie becomes cold at the mention of Teresa, claiming not to remember her or the mermaids, and abruptly goes back to her studio, leaving Ali with Jeanine. Jeanine is surprised by Dulcie’s amnesia because she and Teresa were at the cottage so often that Ali’s grandmother called them “her borrowed daughters” (71). Ali tells Jeanine about her mother’s feelings about the cottage and the lake, as well as the name on the photo and the board game. Jeanine explains this is probably related to Teresa’s death. Jeanine tells a shocked Ali that one rainy, foggy day the last summer Dulcie and Claire spent at the lake, Teresa went out alone in Ali’s grandfather’s canoe but never returned. It was extremely painful for Jeanine, and she speculates it was for Claire and Dulcie as well. Ali asks what Teresa was like, and Jeanine says she was normal, intelligent “but….” She never finishes her thought; she remembers she had an errand to run and leaves.
Ali begins to understand her mother’s fear about water and her reluctance to let her go to the lake. She also suspects there is more to Teresa’s death than Jeanine has told her.
Chapter 11 Summary
The sound of Emma emerging from her room wakes Ali from a nap. The younger cousin is still in a stubborn, abusive mood and resumes her fierce defense of her friendship with Sissy. Ali persuades her to go down to the lake. Eventually, Emma returns to her usual warmness and asks Ali to play with her in the water. They stay in until Emma begins to shiver and turn blue, but she refuses to go back to the cottage, instead sitting and staring up the shore looking for Sissy. To Ali’s disappointment, Sissy appears. She brags about having a sister who won the Miss Webster’s Cove beauty contest at 15, then says she is “hot,” and she and Emma go into the water. After diving under the water, Sissy dunks Emma’s head several times with a sinister look on her face. Ali saves her coughing cousin from the water, chastises Sissy—who claims it was all just a game—and takes Emma home.
The following morning is beautiful and sunny. Dulcie feels it is too “pretty” to work so she spends the day exploring the area, visiting galleries and craft shops, and buying dessert with the girls. The day after is also “perfect,” so they spend it visiting a dairy farm and riding horses. That evening brings heavy rain that continues into the following morning, so Dulcie resumes working.
A loud scream jars Emma and Ali from their preparations for another board game. Dulcie runs in, exclaiming that her paintings, paints, and tools have all been ruined. The studio is a mess. Lake water and sand are on the floor, and the paints and paintings are destroyed. On one painting is the message: “I’M WATCHING YOU TELL THE TRUTH OR ELSE” (80), with a small skeleton drawn in the bottom corner. Ali and Emma are horrified. Dulcie quickly, and angrily, covers it up. She sends them back to the house so she can clean up alone and makes them swear never to speak of what happened—which she calls an act of “teenage vandalism”—again. Ali spends the afternoon consoling a crying Emma and questioning to herself whether teenagers vandalized the studio, or if somehow it was Teresa. Ali’s curiosity about what happened the day Teresa drowned grows.
Chapter 12 Summary
Sissy knocks at the door and insists to be let in, jarring Ali and Emma. Emma agrees to allow her in but only if she promises to behave. Sissy is still in the same swimsuit and, although drenched by the rain and shivering, insists she is not cold. Still, Emma brings her favorite yellow sweatshirt for Sissy to get warm. She is critical of the top and refuses it, so Emma looks for another one, tearing her room apart in the process. She finds one of her mother’s old red sweatshirts and gives it to Sissy.
When Emma tells Sissy about the damage done to her mother’s studio, Sissy suspects nearby teenagers are to blame. She adds that they will probably never find the culprits because police in the area are inept. She knows this because of the way they handled Teresa’s drowning. The police never found Teresa’s body, and she is probably still “deep down in the dark, dark water. All cold and lonely” (87). The room feels colder and darker, and Ali grows afraid but doesn’t send Sissy home because she wants to hear more about Teresa. Sissy says “everyone” thinks Claire and Dulcie were out in the canoe with Teresa because it does not make sense for Teresa to have been out there alone. Emma begs Sissy to stop talking, but she continues, grinning. She claims “some people” speculate Dulcie pushed Teresa into the lake and then she and Claire left Teresa there and lied about it, even to the police. The sisters said they were in the cottage all day and had no idea why Teresa was out with the canoe. Ali notices that Sissy is becoming louder and angrier, shaking even, as she tells her story. Sissy goes on screaming that Claire and Dulcie should be punished for “murder—that’s what they did. Murder” (88). She adds that many people have seen Teresa’s ghost and can hear her crying for help on foggy days. Teresa could be anywhere, she says—even in that very living room, or in their rooms at night. Ali yells at her to shut up and gets her to leave, but Sissy has already traumatized Emma. She tries to calm her cousin, assuring her Sissy was lying, but Emma is inconsolable. She eventually dozes, and Ali spends the time considering whether some of what Sissy said might be true. After Emma wakes, she seeks her mother’s comfort, but Ali makes her swear not to tell Dulcie what they heard.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
When Jeanine arrives to reminisce, she shares anecdotes that circumvent Claire and Dulcie’s secretiveness, supplying readers with a brief but valuable retrospective of the sisters’ childhood. Ali is not an omniscient narrator, and therefore her narration relies on information from other characters in scenes like this one to make the story a well-rounded one. For example, Jeanine adds to Dulcie’s characterization by showing that her road to a full-time career as an artist began in childhood with her drawings of mermaids. That she made artwork specifically for Teresa suggests their relationship was a close one.
The details in Jeanine’s recollections encourage more questions about the credibility of Dulcie’s amnesia. Is it believable that she has completely forgotten someone her mother considered a “borrowed daughter”? Her behavior, particularly seeking an abrupt end to the conversation, may seem like she is choosing to hide information from Ali, but it could equally be a response to avoid talking about a difficult subject. The latter theory suggests that her memory issues and reactions to the mention of Teresa may be a way of coping with traumatic memories. Her reaction to her studio being trashed in Chapter 11 is another example of this avoidance. A clear threat has been articulated, and extensive damage done to her work, but her immediate reaction is to literally cover it up with more paint and force the girls never to speak of it.
Emma’s feelings of isolation continue, and her struggles to make friends lead her to adjust aspects of her personality to be more likeable to Sissy. Sissy’s negative influence transforms Emma from a relatively even-tempered and amiable child to a rude and badly behaved echo of herself. After enduring her punishment and forced separation from Sissy, Ali notes that “Emma seemed almost herself” (75). It is like Emma recovers from Sissy’s poisonous influence the longer she spends away from her. Emma’s longing for friendship ensures that Sissy’s hold on her remains, however, and Emma’s willingness to wait for Sissy while showing signs of physical distress from the cold underscores the danger of this level of attachment.
While Jeanine and Erin have spoken about Teresa’s drowning in a respectful, somber manner, Sissy revels in turning her recounting of that day’s events into a full performance. She zooms in on the most uncomfortable details, like Teresa alone in the dark, preying again on Emma’s loneliness. The gloomy setting—the cold, heavy rain outside and the growing darkness of the room—adds to the atmosphere of her storytelling, making it feel like a campfire ghost story. After invoking those feelings of terror and empathy for Teresa, Sissy pivots to attacking the girls’ mothers, blaming them for causing that suffering. It is overwhelming, and the cousins try in vain to get her to stop. Instead of stopping, Sissy feeds off their intense discomfort, ghoulishly beaming with pleasure at the pain she is causing. Her pleasure soon folds into a seemingly irrational anger. This response, and her knowing so much about the events that day, are clues that Sissy, too, has secrets, and there is more to her than she is letting on. The number of secrets in the family keeps growing, with Emma and Ali having one of their own after agreeing to keep what Sissy said to themselves.
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By Mary Downing Hahn
