51 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel CaineStillhouse Lake
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A 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 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
The children’s phones have been turned off and can’t be traced with GPS. No ransom calls have been made, and nobody knows where the children are. Gwen and Sam go to the police station to answer more questions. Other police officers are out searching for Gwen’s children, but not Javi, who is allegedly on a fishing trip and can’t be reached. Soon, the officers and detectives agree to let Gwen leave and join the others searching for her children. She doesn’t have a vehicle with her, but Officer Graham offers to take her to the search party that Sam’s part of. He claims they’re currently searching the wooded mountains near Officer Graham’s house. It’s raining and cold, but Gwen wants to go anyway. Officer Graham tells her to get his son Kyle’s coat from the back seat. She reaches for it and her hand gets covered with something she thinks is blood. Officer Graham claims he hit a deer earlier and it’s deer blood.
Gwen realizes it is probably not deer blood, and that she might have walked into a trap by getting into Officer Graham’s car with him. She gets a text from Sam Cade saying he’s at the police station and asking where Gwen is. She tries to reply that she’s with Graham, but before she can send the text, Graham takes her phone and smashes it, awkwardly pretending like it was an accident. Gwen reaches for her backpack, which the police gave back to her at the station when they released her. She tries to get a gun out without Graham noticing, but he throws the backpack in the back seat. He then pretends to use the police radio to contact the search party, and claims it’s not working. Gwen smashes the radio into Graham’s head, then gets out of the car and runs.
Chapter 13 Summary
Graham is injured but Gwen suspects he’ll still be able to come after her. She loads her gun but only has seven bullets available. She spots Graham during a flash of lightning, moving toward her. She hesitates to shoot because she wants to conserve ammunition; she also doesn’t want to accidentally kill him because she wants to know where he’s taken her children. She’s about to shoot him when she feels the barrel of another gun being pressed against her head; it’s Graham’s teenage son, Kyle. Gwen punches Kyle, who runs away.
Gwen slides down a hill and hides from Graham. She then spots him hiding, as if he’s waiting for her to come back up so he can ambush her. She pretends to be out of energy and limps back up. She shoots Graham in the shoulder so that he can’t use his arm or hurt her anymore. Gwen says she’ll allow Graham to live if he reveals the location of her children. He claims the children aren’t hers, but Mel’s. Gwen pushes Graham so that a branch impales his torso near his liver. Graham says Gwen’s children are in his grandfather’s old hunting cabin nearby, and that his sons are watching them. Gwen takes Graham’s phone and looks for Kezia’s number. Absalom’s number is in there, and Gwen realizes this is how threatening people have been finding her all along. Absalom creates fake identities for her, then presumably shares that information with others and even directs Gwen wherever he (and/or Mel) wants her to go. Gwen calls Kezia, who is with Sam, and they say they’ll drive over to where she and Graham are.
Chapter 14 Summary
Gwen has a wound on her head, which Sam dresses when he arrives. He doesn’t think she should go to the cabin because she’s hurt and it’s very cold, but she wants to go anyway. Kezia also discovered that Graham had been off duty during both of the murders at the lake. Paramedics arrive and attend to Graham while Kezia, Sam, and Gwen walk to the hunting cabin. Kezia orders Graham’s sons, Kyle and Lee, to come outside. The younger one, Lee, opens the door and asks where his dad is. He’s afraid of getting in trouble. He confirms that Gwen’s children are in the cabin. He says he didn’t want to participate in this, but his father and older brother said he had to. Lee comes out, but not Kyle. Lee tells them Kyle has a gun. The adults enter the cabin and Kyle points his rifle at Gwen, but they don’t see Gwen’s children. Lee also has a gun now. Gwen doesn’t want to shoot the children. Sam knocks Kyle down instead, and Kezia knocks Lee down, without shooting them. Kezia takes their guns away and handcuffs both boys.
Gwen finds a trapdoor underneath a rug and climbs down to discover a murder and torture “workshop” imitating Mel’s, including the same tools and even the same rug. Gwen doesn’t see her children here either, until she hears them saying “Mom.” She then notices there’s a fake wall with a door to another room, where her children are. She opens the door to free them and they hug.
Chapter 15 Summary
Lanny and Connor are okay physically. It was not even their blood that Gwen found in her house but Kyle’s; Lanny injured him in the abduction struggle. Officer Graham had his children assist him in abducting Gwen’s children, as well as holding them hostage. Back when Connor “lost” his phone, he was telling the truth that someone else took it: Kyle and Lee. Officer Graham then returned it after he was done cloning it. Kyle and Lee were also the children who beat Connor up the day he skipped school and Sam Cade brought him home.
Backup police start arriving, including Javi and Detective Prester. Gwen reflects that she shouldn’t have suspected Javi. Prester apologizes to Gwen. They look at Graham’s phone and see a text message from Absalom, saying Mel wants to be updated. Presumably, Graham didn’t get a chance to finish whatever plan they had before he was caught. However, Prester informs Gwen that there was a breakout at the prison where Mel was. Seventeen inmates escaped, including Mel. Nine of them have been caught already, but not Mel. Gwen resolves to kill Mel because the threat won’t be over until he’s gone.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
Gwen’s extreme fears throughout the novel are shown to be justified, although she misdirects her suspicion. She wasn’t suspicious when Officer Graham brought Connor’s phone back; she was relieved that a police officer was the one who found it, rather than someone dangerous. This shows that throughout much of the novel, Gwen still operates under the assumption, which the other characters hold, that someone is automatically trustworthy if they work in law enforcement. She believes this even though she knows it can’t possibly be true, since someone who works at the prison Mel is in clearly is allowing cell phones to get in and letters to get out. Even when Connor tells her he did not lose the phone and the other boys took it, Gwen doesn’t think the Graham family is suspicious at all. She’s more suspicious of Javi and Kezia than she is of Graham. This suggests that Gwen has internalized some racist and sexist attitudes and is more comfortable trusting a white man—society’s image of a police officer—despite her real experiences. This is an example of how post-truth thinking is utilized in the novel: Even Gwen is sometimes driven by her emotions and prejudices rather than the evidence before her. It is implied that she is slowly losing some of these attitudes and might continue to do so in future novels. After Gwen realizes Graham is a villain, she views him as part of the “virus” that Mel infects people with. Her language dehumanizes him, as if in retribution for the way that misogyny dehumanizes women.
As the inaugural novel in a series, Stillhouse Lake wraps up the main plot and themes of this novel while still leaving “seeds” for subsequent novels in the series to pick up on. For example, Gwen does find out that Graham committed the two Stillhouse Lake murders and kidnapped her children, and she gets her children back. However, Mel is still at large, and actually more dangerous than at the beginning of the novel because now he has escaped from prison, along with 16 other incarcerated people. This ends the novel on a cliffhanger in order to build intrigue and encourage readers to read the remaining books in the series, while also giving the reader satisfaction by rounding out the main plot points that were introduced in this given novel. Although Mel has broken out of prison and this is not exactly a “happy ending,” the novel also ends on a hopeful and uplifting note because Gwen’s children are safe for now, and she feels a deep sense of resolve to end this battle once and for all, not by continuing to run but by killing the monster. This is a satisfying final show of strength and confidence from her character. Gwen is also in a better position to kill Mel now than she was before because she has some allies, has exposed several threats that were hiding in plain sight, and has learned skills along the way.
