66 pages • 2 hours read
Mary Downing HahnA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Each day, Dave works in his pottery shed and Mom paints in her studio. They assume Michael and Molly are looking after Heather. Instead, Michael stalks insects for his collection and Molly reads and writes.
Wading in the creek one afternoon, Molly hears Heather speaking to someone in the graveyard and finds her sitting trancelike by the dead girl’s grave. Heather promises “Helen” to do whatever she wants if Helen will be her friend. Molly, concerned, interrupts Heather, who angrily tells Molly to stop spying on her. Molly briefly feels a dark presence in the graveyard, is creeped out, and leaves.
Molly tells Mom the graveyard is haunted, but Mom, exasperated, dismisses her fears. Molly attempts to talk privately to Michael about it, but he also disregards her supernatural theories, suggesting that Heather was talking to an imaginary friend. Heather interrupts, saying that Helen dislikes both Molly and Michael. Heather threatens that when Helen comes, she will make them pay for being mean to Heather. Molly is fearful, but Michael thinks she is being foolish. Hurt, Molly rejects Mom’s offer of ice cream.
Heather has a nightmare, screaming for her mother to put out a fire. She runs into the hallway, where Dave comforts her. Dave, believing Heather’s nightmares were over, asks Molly if anything upset Heather. Molly explains that Heather was talking to a girl in the graveyard. Dave insinuates that Molly and Michael were talking to Heather about the fire that took her mother’s life. Molly denies this, angry he thinks they broke their promise. Molly suggests that the graveyard is unsafe. Michael mentions that Molly believes it is haunted. The parents think this is absurd. Dave warns Molly not to scare Heather.
In the morning, Molly visits the graveyard. Heather is not there, and Molly contemplates the dead girl’s grave. Suddenly sad, Molly wants to talk to someone but rules out Mom and Dave. Searching for Michael, she discovers a new path and a fire-gutted old house. There, she sees Heather speaking to a “shimmering emptiness” in the air. Molly flees. Heather tells Molly to stay away from Helen’s house. Heather now wears a silver locket that she claims Helen gave her. Molly thinks she sees a face in one of the windows.
Molly tells Mom about the burned-out house and pond in the woods, says they are dangerous, and asks her and Dave to instruct Heather not to play there. Mom reminds Molly that she and Michael are responsible for looking after Heather while Mom and Dave work, but they do warn Heather not to play at the house. Frustrated, Molly tells Michael all the strange things she witnessed. Michael thinks Heather is just making Molly look foolish, but he wants to see the house.
Michael and Molly visit the house on a gray, ominous day. While Molly is frightened and feels like they are being watched, Michael is impressed with the age and size of the house and wants to explore. Rain drives them under a patch of surviving roof. They see Heather, soaking wet, standing at the pond’s edge. Michael, worried she will get pneumonia, marches her home with Molly’s help. Furious, Heather says that Helen will make them pay. Heather says the initials on the locket, though the same as hers, stand for “Helen Elizabeth Harper.”
Michael insists that Helen is imaginary and that Molly is an “idiot” for buying into and enabling Heather’s lies. Seeing Molly is hurt, Michael apologizes. They bike to the library to research the house and prove that Heather is lying. From old newspaper clippings, they learn that the Harper House burned down 100 years ago. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Miller, perished in the fire; their bodies were never found. Mrs. Miller was previously married to Joseph Harper and had a young daughter, Helen, from that union. Helen escaped the fire, drowned in the pond, and is buried in Saint Swithin’s cemetery—where Molly and Michael live. People believe the house is haunted and that the ghost of the little girl lures people into the pond. Molly realizes the history confirms Heather’s story.
Michael still thinks there is a rational explanation for Heather’s knowledge. They bike home down Harper House Road and encounter Mr. Simmons fishing at the pond. He denies telling Heather any history and warns them away, saying the house and pond are dangerous. Three children have drowned there, including one lonely, friendless girl three years ago. Molly worries about Heather’s connection to Helen.
Hahn builds on the theme of family in these chapters, focusing on the emotional challenges family members face when blending two households. Heather’s new fixation on Helen reveals Heather’s isolation and her unresolved issues of grief and guilt. Molly’s own reflections on death show her sensitive nature and growing sense of empathy. Finally, Hahn intensifies the story's spooky atmosphere as Helen’s presence becomes more tangible and creates a darker and more foreboding mood.
Every member of the family is struggling to adapt to their new life together. Molly especially feels the brunt of the family tension. She resents Helen for “ruining” the relationship she and Michael had with their mother and feels persecuted by both parents: blamed by Mom for not taking care of or being nice to Heather and blamed by Dave for being insensitive or even deliberately cruel. Molly therefore feels unable to communicate with her parents. She thinks that Mom will either “laugh or get cross” with her for sharing her fears and that it is “useless to turn to Dave” since Dave also dismisses Molly’s fears and clearly favors Heather (60). Molly also feels betrayed by Michael, who rejects her supernatural suspicions and, worse, shares them with Mom and Dave. Tension escalates in these chapters as characters start to take sides along bloodlines, endangering their already fragile relationships.
Heather, ironically, feels much like Molly. Heather resents Molly, Michael, and Mom for ruining her exclusive, loving relationship with Dave. As Heather rejects their overtures of friendship and love, they in turn reject her. Michael and Molly avoid Heather, and even Mom doubts whether she can reach Heather. Dave also cannot give Heather all the attention she desires. Like Molly, Heather is therefore not receiving what she needs from the family. Heather must deal with her grief and loss in her own less than healthy way, which reveals the flaws of Dave’s hands-off therapeutic approach.
Because Heather cuts herself off from everyone but Dave, Helen is a welcome companion. Heather gladly—and ominously—promises to do whatever Helen wants if she will be Heather’s friend. This desperate bargaining speaks to Heather’s feelings of isolation and unhappiness and her desire for acceptance. Notably, Heather threatens that Helen, a true friend, will help her get revenge on Michael and Molly, whom she considers enemies.
Despite Heather’s toxic attitude and her desire to cause Michael and Molly emotional harm, Molly empathizes with the sadness at Helen’s core. Molly worries about the similarities Heather shares with Helen and perhaps with the other sad girls who drowned in the pond. The nearby cemetery and the possibility of Helen’s existence prompt Molly to ponder the nature of death and the afterlife. Molly’s belief in ghosts and her suggestion to Michael that she may have a sixth sense reveal her sensitivity and her open-mindedness.
Hahn amps up the supernatural tension as readers receive more evidence that Helen may be a real ghost. Readers, however, still have only Molly’s impressions and Heather’s assurances that Helen exists. Molly, as the rest of her family suggests, has a vivid imagination. Even Molly self-reflectively wonders if she has been reading too much Edgar Allan Poe—an American author who wrote during the Romantic period and is known for his stories of the macabre—and that Heather is just manipulating her. However, Molly’s fears appear to be increasingly justified, as Molly and Michael’s research confirms not only the name of the dead child but the rest of Heather’s story. Even rational Michael cannot come up with a plausible reason that Heather would have known Helen’s background, and Mr. Simmons adds corroborative detail. The locket Heather finds provides tangible evidence of Helen and represents the dark connection between the two girls.
By Mary Downing Hahn