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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
When Ali wakes the next day, Emma is still asleep, having spent the night awake with nightmares. Ali spends time alone in the kitchen while Dulcie works in the studio, having salvaged most of the damaged paintings. Sissy opens the back door, telling Ali she came to see her. She asks about the studio and says she wishes she could have seen Dulcie’s reaction. This remark confirms Ali’s suspicion that Sissy was responsible for the destruction. She confronts her, but Sissy denies it, calling Ali “crazy.” Sissy then invites Ali to join her on a walk, saying maybe she will answer some of Ali’s questions. Ali estimates Emma will be asleep for at least another hour, so she follows Sissy. She walks for a while through the woods, arriving at a cliff on a hill above the lake. Pointing at the water, Sissy says that is what she came to show Ali and she is the only one who knows what lies beneath. Fed up and disappointed, Ali sets off for home but, changing her mind, decides to follow Sissy to find out where she lives. The rain starts falling heavily, and she loses track of Sissy.
She arrives at a road opposite a colorful house and approaches it thinking it must be Sissy’s. Instead, she finds a woman named Kathie Trent who welcomes her in from the rain. While Ms. Trent dries Ali’s clothes, they talk about Dulcie, Claire, and Teresa. She shares that Teresa was not well liked—especially by her older sister Linda—because she was “too difficult [and] always mad about something” (99). Ali notices a hanging quilt made of blues and grays that reminds her of Dulcie’s art. Ms. Trent describes it as her “interpretation” of the lake’s movement, colors, and depth. Realizing two hours have passed since leaving home, Ali calls Dulcie for a ride to avoid walking through the rain. An angry Dulcie arrives with Emma in tow and, after speaking briefly but genially with Ms. Trent, takes Ali home. She chastises Ali on the drive, warning her she must do better to care for Emma.
Chapter 14 Summary
Over the course of a week and some, Dulcie’s anger towards Ali slowly eases. Ali believes this improvement is helped by Sissy’s absence during this period. Emma and Ali spend that time painting and sculpting with clay. On one afternoon, Emma tells Ali Sissy promised to visit her later that day. This confuses Ali because they haven’t been seeing Sissy. Emma does not tell Ali whether Sissy has visited the cottage in secret, but Emma’s rude behavior is so like Sissy’s that Ali suspects Sissy has been slipping into Emma’s room. The cousins fight, and Ali stomps off to the kitchen, leaving Emma alone in the living room.
When Dulcie comes in, she quarrels with Ali because she and Emma still aren’t getting along. She adds that Ali blames others rather than accepting responsibility herself. Ali cries, and Dulcie apologizes. Dulcie admits she has not been sleeping, her work is “hideous,” and she is beginning to agree with Claire that going to the cottage was a mistake. She considers leaving, but Emma, wanting to stay with Sissy, resists. Angry, Dulcie again tells Emma she is not to see Sissy ever again, particularly because of the trouble Sissy is causing with her and Ali. Emma yells at her mother, who springs from her seat and raises a hand to strike her daughter. Emma cowers, and Ali is surprised to see her aunt behaving like her mother would.
After things calm down and the family has dinner, Ali settles into bed during another very stormy night. She is awoken from a nightmare about Teresa by Emma, who also had bad dreams. She has come to Ali because Dulcie is missing. The girls walk through heavy rain and find her in her studio painting more gray and blue streaked paintings with a “pale blob at the bottom of each painting” (110). The blob looks to Ali like a “stone, a shell, a skull” and alarms her (110). Trembling, they all return to the house.
Chapter 15 Summary
The weather improves the following day, but Dulcie’s mood doesn’t, so she spends the day alone walking in the area. Emma uses her mother’s absence to plot a visit from Sissy. She and Ali fight again, and Emma locks herself in her room. The fighting with her cousin and her aunt’s prickliness begin to wear on Ali. She, too, questions the choice to spend the summer at Sycamore Lake. In the process of dialing her mother to talk about leaving the cottage, she sees Emma bolting through the rain and into the trees. Assuming Emma is going to meet Sissy, Ali hangs up, grabs a jacket, and follows her.
Ali finds Emma and Sissy squabbling over an old, stained, and muddy doll which she identifies as from The Lonely Doll. Ali tells her to give it back, but Sissy coaxes Emma into disobedience. Dulcie arrives to hear Ali’s raised voice and furiously demands to know what is going on. Emma says Ali’s jealousy of Sissy is behind it all. Dulcie stares at the doll “as if it had come from some dark, secret place” (115). She then snatches it, ripping an arm off in the process, and launches it off the cliff and into the lake. On the way home, Ali wonders why Dulcie reacted so strongly to the doll, behaving as if she was terrified of it and found it dangerous.
Later Ali tries to read in her room, but the cold and earlier conflict are too distracting. She goes downstairs and talks with Dulcie. She interrogates Ali about why she let Emma out into the rain, refusing to accept that her daughter snuck out deliberately. Dulcie calms and apologizes for her harshness, saying she hasn’t been herself. She also acknowledges that her response to the doll was overblown. It confuses her because she has previously used similarly old and dirty salvaged dolls in her art. Many were headless and even more hideous—made more so by green paint that made them look like they were “exhumed from graves or the depths of the sea” (118). Shortly after, as Dulcie goes to check on Emma, Ali notes that her aunt now looks as haggard as her mother Claire. She also begins to suspect a connection between her dream, Sissy, “[…] the cottage, the lake, the canoe, Teresa, [and] the doll” (119).
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In the same way Sissy identified Emma’s loneliness as a vulnerability to exploit, she also homed in on Ali’s curiosity as a way to influence her. Her pointing off the cliff into the water feels like a clue relating to Teresa, but because Sissy has been toying with her, she dismisses it as another game. For once Ali’s intuition fails her because Sissy does, in a roundabout way, answer the question “what is your name?” by pointing to the lake. Still, it is understandable that Ali would not conclude that Sissy is saying she is Teresa because of the supernatural implications of that admission. The trip through the woods initially seems like a wasted journey, but Ali’s accidental encounter with Kathie Trent proves fruitful. There is an element of fate about their meeting because Ms. Trent arrives just as Ali most needs a warm and comforting counterbalance to her increasingly difficult interactions with Dulcie. Additionally, meeting Ms. Trent is useful to filling out details about Teresa. Like Jeanine Donaldson, she is a repository of knowledge about life in Gull Cottage all those years ago, and she provides information about the kind of person Teresa was.
Dulcie’s emotional stability teeters more substantially in Chapter 14. Most of her anger was previously expressed in small outbursts at Ali, but it mushrooms into an explosive, almost abusive moment with Emma. Dulcie’s reflex to slap her daughter is surprising, but not to Ali, who is “[…] used to [her] mother behaving like this” (76)—a comment that suggests her mother has a history of abusive behavior and further explains the complicated nature of their relationship. Dulcie’s aggression ironically comes after Ali concludes that the anger about her wandering off with Sissy had dissipated. Rather, it seems to be constantly simmering under the surface. Following another jab at Ali, Dulcie is quick to apologize, showing recognition that this behavior is uncharacteristic. Her “hideous” work, which is just “the same thing over and over again—the lake, the fog…” (107), is a key factor in this frustration. Even though she hates it, she is unable to paint anything else—as if she is compelled somehow. Although her memories of the incident involving Teresa have been repressed, subconsciously she still relives the trauma of them repeatedly through her art and perhaps in dreams that keep her from sleeping at night.
The near constant conflict in the cottage wears Ali down to the point of calling—or starting to call—her mother. In the preceding chapters, there is no mention of her being in contact with Claire or her father while summering at Gull Cottage, but it is a fair assumption that she would be in regular contact with them. This attempted call, however, is a crucial sign Ali has reached her breaking point and is ready to abandon the idyllic summer she was so excited to spend with her cousin and aunt and any curiosity she has about Teresa. Before Ali can complete the call, she must chase an escaping Emma. Making Dulcie upset to the brink of violence has not deterred her cousin; it has only made Emma more secretive about meeting with Sissy. Her desperation for companionship is pushing her to increasing lengths of deviousness and has grown to a level of compulsive obsession comparable to Dulcie’s fixation on the lake.
When Ali finds Emma, she and Sissy are fighting over a tattered replica doll from The Lonely Doll—a book that has repeatedly featured as Emma’s favorite. This becomes another hook for Sissy to manipulate Emma. Dulcie arrives before the situation gets out of hand but only escalates tensions further. She has an exaggerated, even cruel, reaction to seeing the doll that feels less about ending the dispute than about getting the doll as far away as possible. It parallels her earlier reactions to hearing about Teresa’s drowning and signals that the doll holds some deeper, secret meaning. She later confirms this when she and Ali talk about her previously using similarly bedraggled-looking dolls in her art pieces. Despite Dulcie’s confusion, the connection between the doll and the other events at the lake is becoming obvious to Ali.
Related Titles
By Mary Downing Hahn
