Opening
A fever grips the Sawtelle farm as skill, secrecy, and the supernatural converge. Across five chapters, a ghost steps out of the rain, a syringe surfaces from the barn’s shadows, and a family’s fragile order breaks—pushing Edgar from stunned grief toward deliberate resistance.
What Happens
Chapter 16: Epi’s Stand
Trudy Sawtelle staggers through the kitchen, burning with fever, while Edgar Sawtelle heads back to the barn to help Epi after a brutal dogfight. Disoriented, Trudy feels untethered from her body, her thoughts drifting to Almondine and the first signs of age in the dog she once knew as a pup. Overwhelmed, she retreats to bed.
Claude Sawtelle arrives from town, reeking of beer and cigarettes, and at once displays unnerving competence. He coaxes the terrified Epi from behind the barn, pulls Prestone starter fluid from the garage, and explains that the ether inside will sedate her. A flashback traces how he learned these skills: as a young assistant to Doctor Papineau, he practiced sedating difficult animals—and then, in secret, practiced more, killing two dogs. Another memory shows Gar Sawtelle catching Claude at a dogfight, patching bloody animals as a back-alley vet.
Back in the present, Claude murmurs nonsense to calm Epi, slickly applies the ether rag, and carries the limp dog to the medicine room. Edgar fetches Claude’s old medical bag from his car—the one still marked with Papineau’s initials. Claude shaves, cleans, and sutures Epi’s wound, then doses Finch with Valium and treats him too. His touch is precise, his effect chilling: healer and harm-doer embodied in one man.
Chapter 17: Courtship
Claude steps into the house and finds Trudy delirious. When she mistakes him for Gar, the moment crackles with the burden of Family and Legacy. He drives her to town. Left behind, Edgar buckles under Grief and Loss; asleep, his hands slam against his chest in a sign he can’t form awake.
Weeks pass. Claude becomes indispensable—first with chores, then dinners, then evenings beside Trudy. When Trudy confronts Edgar about his withdrawal and the bruise on his chest, she argues for “fresh starts” and insists he cannot stop life from shifting. Edgar feels the first hard bite of Betrayal and Revenge, while mother and son fail to bridge their divide—another rupture of Language, Communication, and Silence. To keep from battering himself in sleep, Edgar ties his hands to the bedframe with binder twine each night.
Chapter 18: In the Rain
A sodden spring settles in. Two nights in a row, the kennel explodes with barking. On the second, Edgar glimpses Claude’s Impala in the drive—Claude has stayed over. He steps into the storm. Raindrops still, gather, and shape themselves into a man: Gar’s ghost.
The ghost signs, using the language only he and Edgar share. To prove he’s real, he signals the kennel; the dogs obey. He tells Edgar to “search” for “what he lost.” In the barn workshop, beneath the mow stairs, Edgar finds a plastic syringe with two crystalline grains inside. The ghost implies Claude used it on him—and warns that Claude has already proposed to Trudy and that she will accept.
Then the ghost lays a hand on Edgar’s chest. Memories flood into Edgar—Gar’s life, the barn, Claude backing away on the day of the death. Edgar doubles over and vomits. As the rain thins, the ghost, fading, tries to spell a final clue—“Find H-A-A…I”—but disappears before finishing. One last sign remains: Remember me.
Chapter 19: Awakening
At dawn, Edgar wakes in a kennel run with Essay and Tinder, rattled and blank about how he got there. The syringe lies crushed in a puddle; panicking, he tosses the shards into the old silo’s foundation. He circles the house and climbs into the apple tree overlooking the kitchen window.
From the branches, he watches Trudy and Claude moving easily as a couple, sharing coffee. Claude spots him. Fear flickers across his face, then hardens. He kisses Trudy deliberately, a provocation. Edgar holds his gaze and smiles—cold and steady. The balance shifts: uncle and nephew move into open conflict, and Truth and Deception becomes the ground beneath their feet.
Chapter 20: Smoke
Shaking with rage, Edgar takes a framing hammer from the workshop, ready to confront Claude. Almondine appears in the doorway, and her calm presence drains the violence from him. He sets the hammer down as Claude’s car starts and pulls away. When Trudy asks what’s wrong, he cannot tell her. The day proceeds oddly normal as the ghost’s memories already begin to blur.
That night at dinner, Edgar asks about the afterlife; Trudy offers only pragmatic answers. She confirms Claude is moving in and insists grief has no rules—that one must pay attention to “what’s real, what’s in the world.” Edgar realizes he has no say. Later, alone with the dogs, he assembles the pieces: Claude murdered Gar; the evidence is gone beneath winter snow; no one will believe a story anchored in a ghost. He resolves to wait, watch, and find the opening he needs. As he returns to the house, the grass where the syringe shattered stands bone-white, a scar on the lawn.
Character Development
The family’s balance collapses as private grief turns into public positioning, and the novel’s moral lines sharpen.
- Edgar Sawtelle: He moves from inward collapse to outward resolve. The ghost’s visitation crystallizes his suspicions and retools his pain into purpose. The apple-tree stare-down marks his Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence: he accepts a role as Claude’s silent adversary and learns to weaponize patience.
- Trudy Sawtelle: She chooses momentum over mourning, framing love and companionship as survival. Her arguments for “fresh starts” and the insistence on what’s “real” reveal both pragmatism and a willful narrowing of what she’ll see—especially when it comes to Edgar’s pain.
- Claude Sawtelle: His capability with animals and his dark apprenticeship expose a long pattern of control, risk, and cruelty. In the kitchen-window moment, fear flashes into calculation; he recognizes Edgar as a threat and immediately answers with dominance.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters fuse domestic realism with the supernatural to reframe the book as a revenge tragedy. Betrayal begins at home, as Trudy’s new intimacy with Claude rubs raw against Edgar’s loyalty to Gar. Deception spreads in the spaces where language fails—Edgar’s muteness, Trudy’s rationalizations, Claude’s silence—while grief fractures into incompatible styles: one inward and isolating, one restless and forward-leaning. The ghost’s fluent signing asserts that truth can still find a medium, even when speech cannot.
Symbols lock the moral stakes into place:
- The syringe: A sliver of proof and a token of clinical evil, it turns suspicion into near-certainty, then vanishes—like justice just out of reach.
- The rain: A threshold between worlds, it obscures and reveals at once, giving Gar’s ghost a body and Edgar a command.
- The ghost: Memory made visible; a charge to remember and act that binds son to father and drags the past into the present.
- The white grass: A visible stain on the land, marking where corruption touched the farm and confirming that the night in the rain was real.
Key Quotes
“Remember me.”
- The ghost’s final sign mirrors Hamlet’s imperative and becomes Edgar’s mandate. Memory here isn’t passive; it is an order to seek justice and reorder the world.
“Fresh starts.”
- Trudy’s phrase attempts to sanctify rapid change as necessity. It reveals a coping strategy that prioritizes survival over reflection and sets her at odds with Edgar’s loyalty to Gar.
“What’s real, what’s in the world.”
- Trudy grounds herself in the tangible, refusing the metaphysical. Her stance clashes with Edgar’s experience of the ghost and signals the widening gap between their realities.
“Search” for “what he lost.”
- The ghost turns grief into action. The command reframes mourning as investigation and leads Edgar to the syringe—evidence that the past has left fingerprints.
“Find H-A-A…I”
- The unfinished clue captures the tragedy of partial knowledge. It haunts Edgar with the sense that the key exists but remains just beyond articulation.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This sequence is the novel’s hinge. Domestic sorrow becomes a haunted quest, binding Edgar to a moral charge and fixing Claude as his adversary. The parallels to Hamlet lock into place—father’s ghost, guilty uncle, divided mother—while the farm’s ordinary rhythms now pulse with threat. Edgar’s innocence ends in the apple tree; from here on, every gesture is part of a careful war over truth, fought in silence, patience, and the stubborn act of remembering.