57 pages • 1 hour read
Jess LoureyThe Quarry Girls: A Thriller
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A 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 44-57 SummaryChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 44 Summary
The ambulance driver takes Heather back home. When her dad arrives a few hours later, she finds herself comforting him over Brenda’s death. He tells Heather that though they can’t find Ed, Jerome took Ant and Ricky in for questioning. When she asks him why Brenda wasn’t wearing her own clothes, Gary tells her she might not have known her friends as well as she thought. Heather gets angry, but she quells it for now. She tells her dad she’s going for a walk and goes into the tunnels to see if she can hear anything through Ant’s basement door. She doesn’t, so she returns home.
Chapter 45 Summary
When she arrives back at her house, she catches Junie in her room, pulling out the bottle of Anacin stuffed with Mrs. Hansen’s heart medication that she stole. Junie tells her she has a headache. Heather gets her some aspirin and tells her she’s going to visit their mother at the hospital. She hides the bottle of Anacin, Maureen’s journal, and the Polaroids she found at Sheriff Nillson’s under a loose floorboard.
Heather takes Junie to Claude’s, and while she’s there, he gives her a copper necklace, one he thought she was looking at when she was investigating the jewelry counter at Zayre’s. Heather tells Claude she loves him and heads to the hospital. When her mother sees the necklace Claude gave her, she asks Heather whether she remembers the copper ID bracelet she bought Gary when Heather was little.
Chapter 46 Summary
Once Heather realizes she saw her father in the basement with Maureen, she immediately returns to her house to confront him. He tells Heather he never forced Maureen to do anything she didn’t want to do, and he had nothing to do with her murder or Brenda’s, or Beth’s disappearance. He insists that he’s a good guy, even if he’s not perfect. When Heather asks why they agreed to run Ed out of town if they suspected him of murder, she realizes they never even tried; they were more concerned with covering up their own secrets. Heather understands that she is on her own in solving her friends’ murders.
Chapter 47 Summary
Heather goes to work at the deli, deciding to let Junie stay home on her own in an effort to stop treating her like a child. Though her boss tells her she should take the week off, she declines. When she returns home from her shift, she sees that Junie is on the phone. When she turns around, Heather notices she is wearing the same earrings Maureen and Brenda had on—gifts from Ed—right before they were murdered.
Chapter 48 Summary
Heather demands that Junie tell her where she got the earrings, but she doesn’t. She calls her father and tells him that Ed’s coming for Junie. Sheriff Nillson and Gary leave to find Ed, and Agent Ryan stays with Heather and Junie. Heather decides to poison Ed with the medication she stole from Mrs. Hansen.
Chapter 49 Summary
Heather treats Junie to her favorite food and a bath before bed. Then, she plots how she’ll poison Ed, deciding that she’ll look for him first at the cabin. While she’s planning to kill him, she falls asleep. When she wakes up, Junie isn’t in her bed. Without Agent Ryan knowing, Heather sneaks off into the tunnels to make sure Sheriff Nillson didn’t abduct Junie before going to find Ed.
Interlude 12 Summary: “Beth”
Beth uses the spike she found to loosen the door hinges rather than waiting for Ed to come back down into the basement of the cabin. As she reaches the last one, she hears noises above her.
Chapter 50 Summary
Heather checks Sheriff Nillson’s basement and it’s empty. She gets on her bike to ride out to Ed‘s cabin.
Interlude 13 Summary: “Beth”
Beth continues to hear voices, and though she can loosen the last hinge pin by using the others, the sound is too loud. She hears the door that precedes her cell and gets ready to spring into action before she hears the door close again—a sound she’s never heard before.
Chapter 51 Summary
When Heather arrives at the cabin, she sees Junie surrounded by Ricky and Ant. Junie tells her that she’d come out to cook for them at the cabin, and when Heather tells them that the cops are on their way, Ant tells her he had no part in Maureen’s death. Heather digs in her purse for a knife she’s packed but realizes she won’t have the courage to use it. Still, she protects Junie and holds the knife out, threatening Ricky and Ant. Ricky laughs and punches her, making her drop the knife and spill her purse.
The Anacin bottle rolls out, and Ricky opens it up to take some. Heather tells Ricky it’s poison, and he tries to force Ant to take it, telling him he’s a crybaby, just like when they killed Brenda. Heather realizes her suspicions are right. She hears a noise underground and realizes Ed is beneath them. Ricky turns on Heather, forcing her to take a pill from the Anacin bottle and grabbing Junie. Heather swallows a pill from the bottle.
Interlude 14 Summary: “Beth”
When Ed opens the door, Beth stabs him in the shoulder. He shoves her back, and when he tries to come at her again, she dodges him. She charges at him with the spike in one hand and the hinge pin in the other, thinking back to when he first told her his name.
Chapter 52 Summary
Ricky swallows a pill from the bottle after Heather, telling her that killing people makes no difference and that he’s just as tough as Ed. The door to the cellar lifts, and Ricky tells Ant to take the scarf off the lamp, thinking the room is tinted yellow.
Chapter 53 Summary
When the trapdoor opens, everyone is surprised to see Beth emerge covered in blood holding a spike covered in Ed’s hair. She darts over to Junie and Heather, grabs the handle to the front door, and tells them to run.
Chapter 54 Summary
Ricky chases the girls to the woods and up onto the rocks. Heather feels lightheaded, but she follows Beth, who knows her way around the quarry. When they reach the top of the rocks, Ricky grabs hold of Heather’s ankle, his eyes bloodshot with slobber running down his chin from the pills. When he raises his hands, holding the knife Heather brought, he slips and falls into the water below. Heather later reflects that she might have kicked him, her memory changing depending on the day.
Chapter 55 Summary
When Heather gives her report to Sheriff Nillson at the police station, she realizes her testimony makes no difference—he will tell the story he wants to tell. When Agent Ryan leans into the interview room to check on Heather, she tells him what she witnessed in the tunnels. She can feel Brenda and Maureen in the room with her, and she tells him everything—even if everyone else in Pantown doesn’t tell the truth. Agent Ryan listens and then tells her that Ant wants to speak with her. When she talks with Ant, he tells her everything and begs her forgiveness. When she asks him why he did it, he can’t say, and she feels sorry for him.
Chapter 56 Summary
Heather’s mother leaves the hospital, and Sheriff Nillson and Gary Cash are both charged. Constance files for divorce, and Gloria moves into the Cash family home. She helps take care of Constance, and Heather notices her mother does much better with Gloria around.
Beth stays in St. Cloud instead of going to Berkeley right away. She spends time with Heather and Junie and receives widespread recognition for her escape. Ed had been abducting and murdering women who looked like his first girlfriend, whom he murdered in a rage when she broke up with him.
Chapter 57 Summary
The residents of Pantown decide to shut down the tunnels. To remember Maureen and Brenda, they build shelves in Claude’s basement, on which everyone is invited to leave something that reminds them of the girls. Beth prepares to leave for Berkeley, and Claude and Heather, now together, look on at the memories of their friends. Junie, as she stands with her friends, promises Pantown will be a different place for them.
Chapters 44-57 Analysis
As Heather learns the truth, her world unravels. She realizes that if she maintains the same rules her parents followed, nothing will change, emphasizing The Impact of Violence and Misogyny on Coming-of-Age. Men try to force her to adhere to dangerous gender roles, but now she can see how following this path has harmed the women in her life. Both Constance and Gloria are dealing with mental health crises resulting from abuse and manipulation, and two of her friends are killed. When Heather realizes her father molested her friend, it is a turning point for her:
I was left to understand we were making a fresh start, though, that in his own way, he’d apologized for molesting Maureen and other girls, and now we’d pretend none of it had ever happened. Because that’s what we did in Pantown. At least, that’s what we used to do. But I wasn’t going to be a part of it, not anymore (261).
Heather might have believed her father before, but Maureen is dead, showing that there are no consequences for his behavior. She realizes that secrecy only results in violence, sickness, and harm, emphasizing The Role of Suppression in Perpetuating Violence. Because Heather resolves not to participate in this deceit, she eventually tells the truth to Agent Ryan, resulting in her father and Sheriff Nillson’s arrests.
Her father, however, tries to plead his case, as does Sheriff Nillson, comparing themselves against men like Ed. Heather recognizes the hypocrisy in this, first when her father tells her, “I’m not perfect, but I’m one of the good guys” (259). She compares this to similar comments Ant made when he forced her to take off her blouse. Heather can see the way men exploit their power to take advantage of women and convince themselves they are good men despite this. The events in The Quarry Girls highlight that sexual violence is not simply harm done by individuals but something propped up by systemic inequality and misogynistic cultural practices.
Still, the novel highlights shades of behavior and remorse among its male characters. Claude is an example of a truly good man; he does not behave misogynistically like his peers, and he helps and loves Heather. Gary tries to excuse his behavior and is at times a loving father, showing how many people who victimize others are not stereotypical monsters like Ed—all kinds of people are capable of harming others. Ricky, however, adopts Ed’s monstrosity. He tells Heather that “Ed [is] right about wasting people, how killing someone doesn’t change much at all. Your Wheaties taste the same the next morning. People smile back at you, just like always” (285). His lack of remorse is terrifying and highlights how young men can be influenced to harm others by older men and misogynistic cultural norms. Lourey writes twice in the novel that men do terrible things in packs, and Ricky demonstrates how emboldened he becomes because of Ed’s influence, even though Ant doesn’t. Ant still participates in the murder of Brenda, however, and can’t tell Heather why when she asks. Ant and Ricky are examples of the impact misogyny and violence have on their growth into men since both Ricky and Ant feel that their level of participation in violence determines their manliness.
Stylistically, the shape of the final chapters in The Quarry Girls enhances the narrative’s suspense, which has been building as Heather uncovers more clues. The chapters that contain Junie’s kidnapping, Heather’s confrontation with Ricky and Ant, and Beth’s escape are short and move quickly. The interludes featuring Beth integrate themselves more into the story as the two plotlines converge. Before, Beth has been isolated from both her community and the main narrative because of Ed. When the interludes begin working in tandem with Heather and Junie’s narrative, the girls work together to escape their attackers. Once Beth is freed, she no longer has her own chapters to recite her narrative. These narrative choices emphasize the value of female solidarity in the face of structural misogyny; in contrast to the culture of silence in Pantown, speaking out and fighting back results in real change.
Heather’s decision to tell Agent Ryan about her father and the town’s decision to board up the entrance to the tunnels symbolizes the community’s growth following the tragedies they’ve experienced. The town decides to turn away from secrets and face the truth. This ends the novel on a hopeful note. Claude says to Heather that “We’re gonna live our whole lives above ground. That’s the new Pantown” (305). This statement uses metaphor to highlight the drastic nature of this change, a literal shift from darkness to light. Because of Heather’s decision to tell the truth, other characters in the narrative are free to do the same, and her character development, in turn, influences the novel’s conclusion—a future where her sister is free to live in truth and honesty, hopefully safe enough to grow gently into womanhood.
