Opening
Across these four climactic chapters, Frank Drum tests the limits of certainty and the cost of mercy. Guided—and challenged—by his father Nathan Drum, he wrestles with The Nature of Grace and Forgiveness as suspicion swings toward Emil Brandt before the truth inside the Brandt household forces the brothers into adulthood.
What Happens
Chapter 36: The Path to the River
The Sunday after the funeral, New Bremen tries to settle. Gus is cleared, and Nathan Drum preaches with new steadiness. Frank Drum feels his anger over Ariel Drum’s death ebb into a heavier sadness. He stares down the possibility of forgiving Warren Redstone, whom he still believes guilty, and finds that grace is no longer a sermon but a demand.
The Drums visit the Brandts to mend a broken bond. Only Emil attended Ariel’s funeral, and Ruth Drum carries a private guilt toward him. At the farmhouse, Emil says he cannot continue his memoir without Ariel. Lise Brandt meets them hostilely, then brightens when Jake Drum appears, disappearing with him to the garden.
As the adults talk, Frank’s mind catches on a terrifying “what if.” He steps off the porch to the back gate and closes his eyes. Feeling the ground with his feet, he follows the rutted path down the slope, across the tracks, and along the worn trail to the river. When he opens his eyes, he stands only a few hundred yards from where Ariel was last seen. Icy clarity hits: a blind man could navigate this path—and Emil could have put Ariel in the water.
Chapter 37: An Awful Accusation
Jake finds Frank at the river and hears the theory: Emil killed Ariel because she was pregnant with his child. Jake resists—Emil is old, blind—but Frank lays out the chain: Ariel abandoned Juilliard, spent her days at the Brandts, and Karl Brandt confirmed he wasn’t the lover. The pieces of Truth, Lies, and Mystery reassemble into a darker picture.
They decide to tell Gus. On the way, Jake confesses his “miracle”—the end of his stutter—wasn’t a vision; it was the moment he wasn’t afraid anymore. He wants to leave things in God’s hands. Frank can’t. Gus hears them out and agrees the theory is plausible enough to bring to Nathan.
In the sanctuary, stained glass blazing with sunset, Frank tells his father everything. Nathan listens without heat. He promises to speak to Emil but refuses to “convict someone in advance of knowing all the facts.” He lets Frank come on one condition: silence. The accusation will be handled with care, not fury.
Chapter 38: The Awful Grace of God
Father and son drive to the Brandt farm in silence. Emil is at the piano, playing a piece Ariel composed. Nathan asks directly if he fathered Ariel’s child. Emil admits to a single encounter; Ariel loved him, he says, but he tried to push her away from a broken man. His recent suicide attempt, he explains, was meant to free her from him. He swears he didn’t know about the pregnancy and did not kill her.
Nathan prays and then says he believes Emil. He ends their friendship anyway and tells him he must be the one to tell Ruth the truth. “God be with you, Emil,” he says, and leaves. In the car, Nathan quotes Aeschylus: even in sleep, pain drips into the heart until wisdom comes “through the awful grace of God.” The words name the way this summer teaches.
Nathan then tells Frank he has accepted a call to a church in St. Paul; they will move. The mixture of relief and loss opens Frank up: he confesses that he let Warren Redstone escape. Nathan doesn’t rage. He forgives his son and says he is done with anger. That absolution lifts the weight Frank has carried all summer.
Chapter 39: Seventy Times Seven
The final weeks blur as the Drums pack. The town already feels like memory. Loose ends draw tight: Morris Engdahl dies drunk at the cannery, and Nathan conducts a sparse funeral. Jake keeps visiting Lise, aching for her isolation. He tells Frank the Brandts have “no center” and will break apart, while his own family is slowly knitting together—a hard-won shift in Family Secrets and Bonds.
The day before they leave, the boys help Lise build a rock wall. Fetching a crowbar from the shed, Frank cuts his finger and opens a small cabinet for a bandage. Inside: Ariel’s gold watch and mother-of-pearl barrette. He confronts Jake, who admits he suspected Lise but stayed quiet—her life already a prison—and pleads for the lesson to forgive “seventy times seven.”
Frank chooses the truth—for Ariel, and to clear Warren Redstone. He tells Lise he knows and is going to tell Emil. Her banshee cry splits the air. She charges, swinging the crowbar. Jake blocks her; she nearly brings it down on him—then stops. She lets the bar fall, collapses, and apologizes. Jake stays with her, steady and kind. Frank limps toward the porch to deliver the truth to Emil.
Character Development
The summer’s crucible strips away certainty and leaves conviction. Each character steps toward or away from grace.
- Frank Drum: Trades vengeance for responsibility. He tests his theory, confesses his own failure, insists on the truth, and accepts its cost.
- Jake Drum: Finds courage in the end of fear. He extends radical compassion to Lise and becomes a quiet moral anchor.
- Nathan Drum: Models measured justice and unearned mercy. He confronts Emil, believes him, ends the friendship, forgives his son, and chooses healing over wrath.
- Lise Brandt: Revealed as Ariel’s killer, she acts from possessive fear and isolation. Her final surrender exposes a soul caved in by jealousy and loneliness.
- Emil Brandt: Not a murderer, but a ruinous man whose selfishness and secrecy help create the tragedy. He is left to live with the consequences.
- Ruth Drum: Caught between grief and duty, she becomes the necessary witness to the truth Emil must tell.
Themes & Symbols
Truth, Lies, and Mystery The mystery resolves not through police work but through a boy’s intuition and a chance discovery. The truth refuses neat binaries; it emerges from jealousy, fear, and misguided love, showing how assumptions—like blindness as harmlessness—can hide what is right underfoot.
The Nature of Grace and Forgiveness Grace here is not thunderbolt intervention but stubborn human choice: Nathan’s restraint, his forgiveness of Frank, and Jake’s invocation of “seventy times seven.” The story argues that wisdom can come only through suffering—awful, unwanted, and transformative.
Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence Frank’s limp toward the porch and Jake’s stillness beside Lise mark a crossing. Both boys see the worst and choose who they will be in response: one bearing truth despite pain, the other offering mercy despite fear.
Symbols
- The Crowbar: Lise’s held-back violence, finally raised and finally dropped—an edge between harm and restraint.
- Ariel’s Watch and Barrette: Small, intimate objects that become irrefutable proof; memory turned evidence.
- The Path to the River: A map of hidden possibility, reminding that what looks impossible is simply unexamined.
Key Quotes
“It never pays to convict someone in advance of knowing all the facts.” Nathan’s ethic of restraint directs the investigation and checks Frank’s fury. The line argues for humility in the face of grief and steers the novel away from vigilantism toward moral patience.
“God be with you, Emil.” Nathan’s farewell both blesses and banishes. It signals belief in Emil’s confession while drawing a boundary against his moral failure, embodying grace without absolution.
“Even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” The Aeschylus line names the novel’s method: suffering as teacher. Wisdom arrives not because we want it but because pain remakes us, one unchosen drop at a time.
“Seventy times seven.” Jake’s biblical measure recasts justice as endurance in forgiveness. His mercy toward Lise does not erase her guilt; it insists that compassion can coexist with truth.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters deliver the narrative climax and the book’s moral center. The killer is not a faceless monster but a neighbor whose fear and jealousy curdle into violence, reframing the summer’s Death and Grief as the crucible that produces hard wisdom. Nathan’s decision to move, his forgiveness of Frank, and the brothers’ opposing yet complementary responses to Lise fuse justice with mercy.
The section closes one family’s story so another can begin. The final image—Frank carrying the truth to Emil—bridges the solved mystery to the story’s reflective close, setting up the reckonings and reconciliations in the Epilogue.