52 pages • 1 hour read
Pretty Girls
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Chapter 9-Letter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Claire puts the USB for Adam in her mailbox. As Lydia pores over the color-coded files of women, Claire succumbs to sleep. Lydia finds that Paul’s files correspond to the anniversaries of the women’s rapes and notes that all the women look like Claire. In the second box is the collection of papers and evidence Sam Carroll obsessively collected before his suicide. The sisters find a deed for a property in nearby Watkinsville that turns out to be Paul’s childhood home. Claire calls the phone number on the deed and reaches a voicemail message with Paul’s voice and someone named Lexie Fuller. Fred Nolan calls Claire’s burner phone to request she and her lawyer meet him for questioning.
The sisters decide to confront Lexie, if only to warn her about Paul, and start driving to the Fuller house. Claire confronts her dismissal of Lydia’s assault and apologizes for not believing her at the time. The heartfelt conversation is cut short, however, when Claire finds that Paul created a search alert for Anna Kilpatrick. She pulls up a live news report confirming that Anna’s remains were found. Eleanor Kilpatrick, Anna’s mother, interrupts Mayhew’s report with outrage about how Anna was mutilated and branded before her death. Claire and Lydia realize the woman in the snuff film was definitely Anna Kilpatrick due to the similar injuries.
Letter 4 Summary
In Sam Carroll’s next letter to Julia, he describes his relationship with Ben Carver, an incarcerated serial killer who was once a suspect in Julia’s disappearance. Ben Carver mentioned to a security guard that he may have information on Julia’s whereabouts, and so Sam visits him weekly. They talk about inane things like movies and books. Sam admits that he is desperately lonely and his life is falling apart. Eventually, he is barred from his weekly visits and is given a final gift from Ben: a book with an inscription containing a clue that ties back to Julia.
Chapter 10 Summary
The two sisters reminisce about when their parents used to love each other. Claire admits that she never felt that kind of love with Paul in their first year of marriage, but one night he caught walking pneumonia and Claire realized she was terrified of a life without him. While she nursed him back to health, she realized she needed him, concluding that need is a stronger feeling than love. Claire remembers that Paul was near Julia’s last known location on that fateful night, but he was only 15 at the time and still in boarding school.
Lydia opens up, sharing that she has a teenage daughter. Claire admits she found a file on Lydia in Paul’s box. Scared, Lydia wants to turn around, but Claire worries that Lexie might be chained up in the Fuller house waiting for help. They pull into the driveway, but the farmhouse is abandoned. Lydia tells Claire she has a gun buried in her backyard in case it’s ever needed, but Claire marches to the farmhouse and breaks in. The inside is a perfect snapshot of 1980s domesticity; strangely, the interior has also been freshly cleaned and vacuumed. Claire breaks into the garage and finds the exact setup from the snuff films drenched in blood. The room is filled with stacks of VHS tapes dating back to March 4, 1991, the exact date that Julia was taken.
Chapter 11 Summary
Claire and Lydia play the VHS dated with Julia’s disappearance. On the tape, Julia is bound and tortured in a similar way to the other girls, but the setting is in a barn, and the masked man looks older and has a tattoo that identifies him as Paul’s father. Claire can’t stomach watching, so she sits on the porch while Lydia screams as she watches. The women comfort each other in their grief, saying that they truly love each other. Claire distracts Lydia by asking about Dee’s birth story. Once calm, they decide to call every law enforcement agency they know, thinking that if everyone is alerted, then no one can cover it up. Claire wonders if Paul married her as part of a plan from the very beginning. Grabbing the tapes of Julia for evidence, she turns around to see Paul standing in the farmhouse just in time for him to punch her in the face.
Letter 5 Summary
In his next letter Sam describes meeting Paul for the first time. Even though Claire assumes Paul was well liked, Sam and Helen had strong reservations. Sam calls the match “uneven” and is immediately put off by Paul’s fawning fake persona. Sam rarely has such a visceral reaction to a person, but he admits he may be retrofitting his opinions based on bad events since. The inscription in Ben’s book jogs his memory with a single word: “images.” Sam remembers a note in Julia’s case file about a peeping tom who took pictures of women undressing, which he called his “images.” The man’s name was Gerald Scott, and Paul is his son. The coincidence is too big to be ignored, and Sam immediately suspects Paul is very dangerous.
Chapter 9-Letter 5 Analysis
The probable confirmation that Anna is the woman in the snuff tape changes several factors at play in Claire’s investigation of Paul. For one, this complicates Paul’s possession of the snuff tapes because it proves that the murders are recent and ongoing, so it is unlikely that Paul kept the files accidentally. What’s more. Mayhew’s dismissal of Claire’s concerns about the hard drive is so thoroughly suspicious that she doesn’t even question why Mayhew is quoting Paul’s words back to her.
Claire is reluctant to accept what she has already accurately theorized because that means making the final call to act, and she has always preferred to be safely in the back seat, with Paul making all the important decisions for her. Her avoidance of the truth mirrors her avoidance of past truths like Lydia’s attempted rape and Julia’s death. Even though these past events are believable, they were too difficult to be comprehended by a grieving child or by a woman desperately dependent on her husband. Claire has avoided trauma to such an extent that she never grew out of childish appeals to some authority, even when no other authority exists. This is why she still wants Paul to reach out from beyond the grave to solve the problems that he most certainly started.
Claire is so deep in denial that it takes seeing Julia in freeze-frame on one of the VHS tapes before she emphatically believes Paul is culpable in all this. Even then, she is unable to watch the film, leaving Lydia to watch it alone—another example of Claire avoiding an ugly reality while Lydia confronts it head on. This indicates that Claire still has more baggage to sift through before she can confront the fact that Paul is a violent rapist and murderer. In fact, it takes a quite literal punch to the face by a presumed dead man for Claire to reevaluate her interpretations of events.
Claire avoids her intuition the same way that she avoids watching Julia’s murder and acknowledging signs of Paul’s true character. Throughout the novel she regards her potential actions as red pill/blue pill situations where there are two clearly outlined choices. In these last chapters she is confronted with a choice as clear as day: watch the tapes to definitively know what happened to Julia, or don’t watch and assume the worst. She cannot make the same choice for Lydia and effectively shoves the responsibility of knowing onto her. Claire is still not ready to confront the truth of her total avoidance of her own agency. Because she is not comfortable with herself, her true self outside of Paul’s control, she cannot yet feel confident in her decisions.
Ben’s hint to Sam about the identity of Julia’s killer introduces the motif of images. “Images” refer to both the photographs collected by the peeping tom and the fragments of Julia’s last day, the clues that Sam collects over years of solo investigation. While Sam does eventually see the video of Julia’s death under duress, the “images” that he finds parallel the “full images” at the Fuller house, bringing up the thematic question of how much evidence is needed to fully know the truth, and how much evidence is simply too much for one person to mentally bear. Sam’s focus on Paul leaves him vulnerable to Paul’s attack instead of bring Julia’s case closer to justice.
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