59 pages • 1-hour read
Murder Takes a Vacation
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Part 1, Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating, emotional abuse, physical abuse, ableism, and death.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “April 3”
Having agreed to let Danny give her some fashion tips, Mrs. Blossom accompanies him to the atelier of his friend, Cece. Cece immediately advises Mrs. Blossom to change her hairstyle, which she says makes no statement other than, “I’m old, don’t look at me” (52). Cece fits Mrs. Blossom with a flamboyant caftan with vertical stripes, plum-colored sleeves, and a plunging V-neckline to emphasize her cleavage. Ordering Mrs. Blossom to “respect” her creation by not “mousing” it up, Cece gives her tips on accessories before Danny takes her shopping for shoes, scarves, bangles, and sunglasses.
Curious about his sexual orientation, Mrs. Blossom asks Danny haltingly about when he first knew he liked “fashion.” He answers that his love for clothes began at age five, when he saw his Pakistani father wearing a sherwani at a wedding. His parents broke up when he was six, and he never saw his father again. Most people, Danny says, don’t realize that clothes “tell stories” about who they are or who they want to be. He tells Mrs. Blossom that her fondness for bright, flowery prints may be an unconscious way of distracting others from really looking at her—that her “invisibility” may be a choice that she makes. He goes on to say that she reminds him of her mother, who died three years ago, probably as a result of her anorexia.
Apologizing for the “dark turn” their conversation took, Danny walks her back to her hotel and leaves. Mrs. Blossom discovers that her room and possessions have been thoroughly searched. Even her pillbox has been searched, its seven slots left open, though the secret compartment (with her diamond earrings and gummies) seems to be untouched.
Not wanting to derail her vacation plans, Mrs. Blossom decides not to report the break-in, since nothing seems to be missing. She decides she can’t trust Danny, who she realizes kept her far away from the hotel that day, while periodically checking his phone. She wonders if the search has to do with Allan and his text, which gave the address of her hotel. If so, she thinks, that person’s curiosity must be “sated” after such a thorough search. She decides not to let her first-ever European vacation be spoiled by these strange events. Besides, she reasons, once she’s on the Seine cruise with Elinor, surrounded by other tourists, she’ll surely be safe.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “April 5”
On the top level of the Eiffel Tower on her last day in Paris, an old New Wave song about Paris buzzing in her head, Mrs. Blossom looks back on her teenage years, when her social life centered around punk, New Wave, and other eclectic music. Then, at age 20, she married Harold, who was three years older and didn’t care for music, particularly not punk concerts. Mrs. Blossom dutifully “put away childish things” and began to frequent museums, leading to a lifelong interest in art (67). This led, in turn, to this Paris vacation: Having recently become a fan of Joan Mitchell, she decided on Paris after hearing about a special exhibition displaying Mitchell’s work side-by-side with Claude Monet’s. Her budding interest in Joan Mitchell also coincided with her daughter’s family announcement of their plans to move to Japan without her, saying that she was “entitled to a life of [her] own” (70). Somehow, the emotionality of Mitchell’s abstract works resonates with some of her own lonely turbulence.
Shopping for new shoes after the Monet-Michell exhibition, Mrs. Blossom admires her “new look” reflected in a store window; at the same time, she notices a trench-coated man staring at her with “fierce concentration.” Recognizing him from the art exhibition, she suspects she’s being followed and tries to slip away. The man trails her doggedly, and finally, she braves her claustrophobia and pushes her way through a dense crowd to lose him.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “April 6”
Meeting up with her old friend Elinor, whom she has known since first grade, Mrs. Blossom intrigues her with her story about the man she met in Paris who helped her pick out her new stylish clothes. Unlike Mrs. Blossom, Elinor was “boy crazy” in her youth and had two failed marriages before finally settling into a happy one, which unfortunately ended a few years ago with her husband’s death. Also unlike Mrs. Blossom, Elinor shuns museums, which she thinks are “terrible places to meet eligible men” (77). She prefers campy TV shows like Real Housewives to fine art.
Always petite and thin, Elinor used to draw amused looks when she strolled with her friend; people used to say they looked like the “numeral 10.” Ignoring Mrs. Blossom’s suspicions about Danny’s sexuality, Elinor teases her about her new “relationship,” and Mrs. Blossom decides not to tell her about her brief fling with the mysterious Allan Turner—especially since he turned up dead soon afterward.
Around 11 o’clock that night, Mrs. Blossom wakes to a knock on her hotel door. Peering through the peephole, she sees a bellman, who urges her to leave her luggage outside the door to make checkout easier the next day. Suspicious, she tells him not to worry about her luggage, of which she has only one piece. As he walks away, she notices that his uniform doesn’t seem “quite right”; stealthily, she follows him and sees him leave the hotel.
At a nearby café, he meets up with two men: Danny and the trenchcoated man who followed her out of the art museum the other day. Their conversation, which looks like it might be in French, seems animated, but she can make out only one word: valise. Returning to the hotel, she asks a real bellman if guests ever leave their luggage outside their rooms the night before checkout, and he scoffs at the idea.
Sleepless that night, Mrs. Blossom wonders if Allan concealed something in her luggage that night he was in her room—something small and light, like drugs. Equally, she realizes, Danny and Cece might have sewn something into the hems of her caftan. Danny, she realizes, always pops up whenever something strange happens, and now, it seems that he has sent men to follow her and try to get access to her luggage.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “April 7”
Having arranged to meet Elinor at noon in the hotel lobby, Mrs. Blossom calls the front desk to ask them to ring her. When they tell her that her friend checked out hours ago, around nine o’clock in the morning, she feels a surge of panic. Her attempts to phone Elinor go straight to voicemail. Their plan had been to check out together, pay a visit to Notre Dame, then board the Seine cruise; Elinor does not have the contact number to find the ship on her own.
After wandering the streets, looking about desperately, Mrs. Blossom returns to the hotel to find Danny waiting for her. He tells her that Elinor is having a “spa day” at his expense. Exasperated, Mrs. Blossom demands to see his identification, and he shows her a Georgia driver’s license bearing his photo and name: Danny Johnson, 42 years old. He wants to go somewhere to talk, but Mrs. Blossom, who doesn’t trust him, demands it be a public place, like a park. Mysteriously, Danny says, “I’ve only spent every day since I met you trying to keep you safe” (91).
At the park, Danny tells her that she was naïve to trust Allan Turner, who has entangled her in his illicit schemes. Allan, he says, was supposed to meet with a Pakistani billionaire in London and hand over a “missing antiquity.” For this, he expected to be paid $5 million, but in reality, he was going to be detained and perhaps arrested for stealing the object. The antiquity is a statue that was removed from Chitrali, a region of northern Pakistan, in the mid-20th century. He claims to have set up this sting operation for the FBI’s stolen art division, of which he is an international agent.
When Allan first entered England, Danny says, his bags were searched as part of the FBI operation, but no statue was found. Then, for reasons unknown, Allan canceled his appointment with the billionaire and went on to Paris, where he died falling from a balcony. The FBI suspects that he may have planted the statue on Mrs. Blossom to smuggle it out of the US and then followed her to Paris to get it back.
Mrs. Blossom scoffs at this, saying she would have noticed the extra weight of a statue in her bag, and she didn’t find it when she unpacked. Danny counters that it’s a small statue, and someone might have removed it from her luggage before she noticed it. Mrs. Blossom argues that even if this did happen, it no longer has anything to do with her, since the statue is clearly no longer in her possession.
Danny tells her that the statue is a “Quqnoz—very like a phoenix, a mythical bird that rises from the ashes” (96). It is marble with sapphire details in the head and tail. To the Pakistani government, he says, it is priceless. Allan, a lawyer, was not a professional thief and had few options for disposing of the bird, which makes his change of mind in London all the more mysterious.
Mrs. Blossom, however, still clings to her belief that Allan is mostly innocent. Few men have ever shown a romantic interest in her, and she ruefully remembers how her “aggressively thin” mother warned her that any man who praised her looks was just trying to “butter” her up. Her mother, who was always trying to force her to lose weight, never truly accepted her for who she was. Then she met Harold, who adored her just the way she was, and for almost 40 years, they were inseparable.
Danny asks to search Mrs. Blossom’s bag for the Quqnoz, since his friend, the fake bellman, failed, and his other friends didn’t find it in Elinor’s luggage at the spa. She points out that Danny already searched her hotel room and found nothing, but Danny, looking panicked, denies having anything to do with that search. They realize that someone else has been tracking her movements, maybe the person to whom Allan texted her name and photo. However, Mrs. Blossom refuses to change her plans, saying she’ll be quite safe on the cruise ship, which sets sail very soon. Danny, still fearing for her, promises to “keep tabs” on her to make sure that she’s safe, but Mrs. Blossom says she’ll feel safer when he’s not around.
Part 1, Chapters 4-7 Analysis
The novel’s gathering intrigue enters a lull as Danny takes Mrs. Blossom clothes shopping, and the narrative turns its attention to Mrs. Blossom’s personal journey. Danny’s designer friend Cece, a fashionista even more brutally frank than himself, suggests that Mrs. Blossom’s “invisibility” may be an unconscious choice she makes through her appearance, a way of avoiding attention and attraction. She wears her hair in a dowdy cut that (in Cece’s words) screams, “Don’t look at me!” (52). Mrs. Blossom’s memory reveals that her body image issues are rooted in her mother’s abuse; she is depicted as an “aggressively thin” woman who damaged her daughter’s self-esteem by continually badgering her about her weight, developing the theme of The Personal Impact of Societal Prejudices About Weight. She also told Mrs. Blossom not to trust any man who tells her she’s “pretty,” as he just wants something from her, a comment that, in Mrs. Blossom’s mind, will come to be linked with her experience with Allan. She is also revealed to hold unresolved guilt with regard to her marriage, as yet unexplained, which, most recently, has made her “relatively chaste” evening with Allan feel “almost like a betrayal” (28). Her self-consciousness about her age, figure, and marital history has negatively affected her self-image, but in these chapters, she begins making progress on her character arc to self-acceptance and confidence.
Cece and Danny are closely tied to her progress in Part 1 as they begin the process of restoring Mrs. Blossom’s self-confidence, upgrading her “mousey” attire with a stylish new caftan, scarves, bangles, and sunglasses. Their fashion sense helps plant the seeds for her “blossoming” later in the book, setting her up for Reclaiming Identity and Agency in Later Life. Ironically, Mrs. Blossom, who has long been on the receiving end of slights about her weight, succumbs to stereotypes herself, almost asking Danny about his sexual orientation because of his interest in fashion. Smoothly, he fends off her implication, then touches Mrs. Blossom’s heart with a reminiscence about his parents, a father who left when he was eight, and a mother who died due to disordered eating. Danny’s mention of his unreliable father foreshadows later developments that involve him, such as his theft of the Quqnoz.
These moments of connection are interspersed with the return of Mrs. Blossom’s suspicion, a pattern that recurs throughout the book, keeping Danny an ever-ambiguous character until almost the end. After clothes-shopping with Danny, she finds that her hotel room has been turned upside-down in a methodical search. Whether or not Danny orchestrated it, it now seems undeniable that Allan has involved her in some kind of smuggling plot. Lippman seeds the mystery elements throughout these chapters, but Mrs. Blossom, who is now suspicious of Allan, Danny, and her circumstances, still hasn’t accepted her role as an amateur detective. For example, although she notes that the tiny slots of her pillbox have been searched, she is too rattled to pay it much notice and misses an important clue.
In these chapters, Lippman also further develops Mrs. Blossom’s character by delving into her youth. On her last day in Paris, a snatch of a song in her head reminds her of a vibrant part of herself that she gave up when she married Harold. She reflects that all close relationships, idyllic or not, involve sacrifice, and one of the “childish things” she put away was her love of eclectic music. When she became “Mrs. Blossom,” which she does not regret, her personality lost some of its color. Lippman also introduces a foil for Mrs. Blossom in her best friend Elinor, a fellow widow who is, in many ways, her reverse image: slim, striking-looking, sexually adventurous, and a fan of campy TV shows rather than museums. However, the narrative also highlights how, underneath, they have similar insecurities: Though Mrs. Blossom envies Elinor’s looks and flamboyance, her friend, in turn, covets her long, stable marriage. Elinor even confides that, growing up, her only “accomplishment” was being thin, and that Mrs. Blossom was the one the boys were interested in, a memory that her friend does not share. Both girls had insecurities and envied the other, thinking herself the misfit. Another source of friction between the two friends is that the shy Mrs. Blossom has invited Elinor on the cruise for her companionship, forgetting that her “boy-crazy” friend may “third-wheel” her once she spots an eligible bachelor. With Elinor’s introduction, the novel gains a fresh perspective on Mrs. Blossom, whom Elinor has known since childhood. Elinor’s point of view both supports the contentions of Danny and Cece and highlights the unreliability of Mrs. Blossom’s perspective when it comes to self-assessment.
After Mrs. Blossom confronts Danny over his latest series of betrayals (the spies he has hired, his semi-abduction of Elinor), he seems to come clean with her, telling her about the story’s “McGuffin”—a Hitchcockian term for a singular object or device that drives the plot but is ultimately revealed to be a red herring. In this case, it is an antique statue of a Quqnoz, a phoenix-like bird from mythology, which alludes both to the noir mystery The Maltese Falcon and to Mrs. Blossom’s own phoenix-like rebirth by the end of the novel. Danny, who now claims to be an FBI agent, denies searching her hotel room, raising the sinister possibility that a third party may be on her trail. Danny suggests to her that the Quqnoz statue was (perhaps) small enough for Allan to plant in her luggage without her feeling its weight. Scoffing at this, Mrs. Blossom doesn’t think to mention that her pillbox was searched too, signifying that whoever ransacked her room was clearly looking for something much smaller than a statue. With the introduction of the statue, Lippman offers a concrete object to center the mystery around, following mystery genre conventions while nodding to detective noir.
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