CHARACTER
A Flicker in the Darkby Stacy Willingham

Lena Rhodes

Lena Rhodes

Quick Facts

Who They Are

Bold, flinty, and irresistible to watch, Lena Rhodes is the kind of fifteen-year-old who seems to manufacture her own spotlight. Even though she dies before the present timeline, she dominates the novel through Chloe’s memories—part idol, part warning, part unsolved riddle. Lena’s life and murder become the hinge on which the town’s innocence swings to suspicion, and on which Chloe’s childhood snaps into permanent anxiety. Lena embodies the friction between the person a community thinks a girl is and the person she actually is: a tension that fuels both the town’s panic and Chloe’s misread clues.

Lena’s signature firefly belly-button ring—a tiny light that glows in the dark—captures her essence: bright, enticing, and tragically easy to track. It becomes evidence, symbol, and red herring all at once, guiding Chloe toward the wrong monster and revealing how a single flicker can mislead in a landscape of shadows.

Personality & Traits

Lena’s presence is a collision of bravado and vulnerability. She knows how to hold a gaze and how to weaponize it, riveting adults and kids alike. Yet the same fearlessness that makes her magnetic also makes her reckless—especially when she believes she can control the danger she stirs up.

  • Provocative and worldly: She swears loudly, drinks vodka from a Sprite bottle, and flaunts a sunflower-yellow charisma that reads older than her years, mesmerizing Chloe.
  • Confidence as performance: People watch her and she knows it; attention makes her “glow even brighter, walk even taller,” a feedback loop that emboldens risk.
  • Rule-breaking savvy: She picks locks and pushes boundaries, seeking the thrill of discomfort in others as proof of her own power.
  • Kindness to Chloe: Beneath the bravado, she plays the generous “cool older kid,” sharing makeup tips and hand-me-downs—a softness that makes her loss personal for Chloe.
  • Fatal miscalculation: Her knowledge of Cooper’s first murder (Tara King) turns her confidence into a liability; she taunts rather than tells, underestimating the danger.

Character Journey

Because Lena exists in flashback, the arc belongs to Chloe’s evolving perception of her. At first, Lena is pure aspiration—beauty, nerve, and the promise of adult freedom. After the murder spree, she becomes a totem of lost innocence, the ghost that haunts every choice Chloe makes. The late revelation that Cooper killed her reframes Lena yet again: no longer a random victim of a town’s supposed boogeyman, but a targeted silencing because she knew the truth. That shift exposes the rot of loyalty within the Davis family—Richard’s lie and arrest, Cooper’s predation—and shows how a community can be led by a glow-in-the-dark clue into the darkest kind of mistake.

Key Relationships

  • Chloe Davis: Lena is Chloe’s dangerous muse—fascinating, a bit terrifying, and impossibly self-possessed. Her death ends Chloe’s childhood and seeds the obsessive vigilance that defines Chloe’s adult life, from her career to her trust issues.

  • Cooper Davis: Lena crushes on Cooper and uses Chloe to orbit closer, teasing and taunting him at the festival. The final truth—that Cooper murders her because she witnessed his first killing—reveals their dynamic as a trap Lena didn’t recognize until it was too late.

  • Richard Davis: Chloe’s memory of Richard staring at Lena at the Crawfish Festival becomes a cornerstone of her theory of his guilt. The belly-button ring later found among his things cements a narrative that seems airtight but is built on misinterpretation and a father’s catastrophic lie.

  • Bert Rhodes: Lena’s father is shattered by her death, his grief hardening into rage aimed at the Davises. Hints of a troubled home life—Lena saying her parents locked her in her room—complicate the portrait of the “bad girl,” suggesting chaos she couldn’t control followed her home.

Defining Moments

Lena’s story unfolds through vivid set pieces that double as misdirections and revelations.

  • The Crawfish Festival

    • What happens: Lena flaunts her firefly ring, gives Chloe vodka, and needles Cooper in public.
    • Why it matters: This scene crystallizes Lena’s power and risk-taking while planting the gaze (Richard’s), the glow (the ring), and the tease (Cooper)—clues that will later be read all wrong.

  • The Belly-Button Ring in the Jewelry Box

    • What happens: Chloe discovers Lena’s distinctive ring hidden among Richard’s belongings.
    • Why it matters: The ring becomes the linchpin of Richard’s arrest and conviction, proof that seems incontrovertible—until it’s revealed as evidence misattributed because of a father’s lie to protect his son.

  • The Final Confession

    • What happens: Cooper admits he killed Lena because she knew about his first victim, Tara King, and used that knowledge to taunt him.
    • Why it matters: Lena’s murder shifts from random to calculated, exposing the mechanism of silencing at the heart of the case and recasting the entire mystery through the lens of family loyalty gone rancid.

Essential Quotes

She was loud, vulgar, cussed in a way I had only ever witnessed when my father accidentally hacked the tip of his thumb off with a hatchet in his workshop. The filth that spewed out of her mouth was at odds with her appearance, which made her all the more mesmerizing.

This juxtaposition—refined looks against raw language—captures Lena’s paradox and the theme of performance. Chloe’s fascination isn’t just with rebellion; it’s with the way Lena bends expectations, making contradiction itself part of her allure.

“It’s a firefly,” she said, reading my mind. “They’re my favorite. It glows in the dark.”

The ring is both charm and omen. Its glow promises guidance but delivers misdirection, leading Chloe—and the town—toward a false certainty that seems bright enough to trust.

Cooper shook his head. “Don’t listen to her. You don’t want to be like Lena.”

This warning reads as moralizing in the moment, but in hindsight it doubles as threat and self-preservation. Cooper frames Lena as “bad influence” to mask his own danger, shifting suspicion onto the girl who already sees too much.

“Except Lena,” he says finally. “Lena knew.” “Lena was a liability,” I say, trying hard to swallow the tears crawling up the back of my throat. “You had to get rid of her.”

The language of liability exposes the cold calculus behind the murder. What looked like a sensational serial crime becomes a targeted elimination, illuminating how knowledge—not innocence or guilt—determines who lives and who dies in this story.