53 pages • 1-hour read
The Inmate
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Chapter 47-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 47 Summary
Brooke orders pizza, and they eat as a family. Afterward, Shane tells Brooke that his mother left the farmhouse to him; he wants to check it out the next day to see how much work it will require to make it livable. Brooke is shocked that Shane would want to live in the house where three murders took place, but he insists it was his home before it was a murder scene. Shane doesn’t want to impose on Brooke, but she reluctantly agrees to take Shane to the farmhouse.
Upstairs, Josh asks Brooke why Shane is staying with them, and Brooke explains that he is an old friend. Brooke asks if Josh likes Shane, but he seems only lukewarm. Brooke assures Josh that Shane will only be staying a few days, and he seems relieved.
Later that night, Shane suggests that he stay with Josh after school while Brooke works. Brooke hesitates but promises to think about it. Brooke has clothes for Shane in the dresser, and Shane is annoyed to realize they are Tim’s things. Shane expresses frustration that Tim took advantage of Brooke and kisses Brooke, but she pulls back. Shane apologizes, but she is the mother of his child. Brooke relents, and they have sex.
Chapter 48 Summary
Brooke wakes in the middle of the night, convinced she heard a car entering the garage. She looks out the window, but the garage is closed. She thinks there are tire tracks in the snow, but she can’t be sure. She considers going down to check on her car, but she can hear Shane breathing in the guest bedroom, so she decides she’s imagining things and goes back to bed. In the morning, she wakes to Shane making pancakes. Shane asks again to go to the farmhouse. He doesn’t have a driver’s license or any other way of getting out there. Brooke reluctantly agrees to drop him off.
Chapter 49 Summary
After breakfast, Shane brings up the trip to the farmhouse in front of Josh and invites him to go along. Josh is excited. Brooke gathers cleaning supplies while Shane shovels the snow from the driveway. When Brooke goes to get her car keys, she finds them in the wrong place but assumes she put them there in the excitement of Shane’s homecoming.
Brooke, Shane, and Josh load the car and drive to the farmhouse. When they pull up, Brooke is mildly surprised by how rundown the house has become in the past 10 years. Josh is excited when Shane offers to show him inside, taking away Brooke’s chance to leave.
Chapter 50 Summary
Brooke, Shane, and Josh clean the lower floor of the house. After two hours of kicking up dust, Josh begins to sneeze. Brooke suggests he goes outside for some fresh air. Shane offers to build a snowman with Josh. When Brooke hesitates to allow him to take Josh out alone, Shane accuses Brooke of not trusting him. Brooke guiltily relents. She settles into a chair and looks up local news on her phone. The cell service isn’t good, but she sees the headline “Local Prison Guard Found Murdered” and the top of a photo (343). Brooke recognizes Marcus Hunt’s eyes. Brooke thinks back to the sound of her car pulling into the garage and her car keys in the wrong place. She wonders if Shane snuck out during the night.
Brooke moves to the spot at the bottom of the stairs where she was attacked 11 years ago. As she replays the night in her mind, Brooke realizes her attacker was actually Shane: She recognized the familiar feel of his body against hers. Brooke also thinks about the extra scream she heard that night and realizes for the first time that it was Chelsea screaming upstairs. If Chelsea was screaming because someone was approaching her with a knife, it couldn’t have been Shane—he was already attacking Brooke at that moment. Tim was the only other person in the house. Brooke realizes Shane and Tim must have been working together.
Chapter 51 Summary
Brooke recalls Tim and Shane exchanging hushed words that night shortly after Brooke, Tim, Chelsea, and Kayla arrived. What if they were talking about their plan to murder everyone? The timeline seems to work out: After they found Brandon, Shane left Tim alone to kill Kayla. Then, Brooke left Chelsea alone in Shane’s room, giving Tim the chance to kill Chelsea while Shane dealt with Brooke. When Brooke escaped, Shane stabbed Tim and Tim hit Shane so they could blame all the attacks on a drifter. But when Brooke pointed the finger at Shane, Tim did too.
Brooke calls Shane to bring Josh back. Shane is offended at Brooke’s attempt to limit his time with Josh and threatens to take Josh away from Brooke. Brooke searches for the keys to her car, but Shane already took them. Shane then makes a veiled threat on Brooke’s life by comparing her last moments to Tracy Gifford’s. Brooke rushes out of the house and slips on the front steps, injuring her ankle. She limps out onto the road and tries to call 911, but she has no service. An SUV comes up the road. Brooke is momentarily relieved to see Margie. But then the elderly woman pulls a gun on Brooke and confesses that her name isn’t really Margie.
Chapter 52 Summary
Margie is actually Pamela Nelson, Shane’s mother. Pamela tells Brooke everything. After Shane killed Tracy Gifford and came to Pamela for help, Pamela convinced Shane to help her get revenge on Brooke’s parents. Pamela had an affair with Brooke’s father when Brooke and Shane were about five. Brooke’s father promised to leave his family for Pamela but changed his mind. Pamela decided to kill Brooke for revenge.
That night, Pamela hid in the farmhouse and helped Shane kill Brandon, Kayla, and Chelsea. They decided to keep Tim alive to take the fall, but then Brooke escaped. A year ago, Pamela saw Brooke on the social media account of Brooke’s old workplace; from that post, Pamela learned about Josh. Pamela staged the car accident that killed Brooke’s parents to lure Brooke back to Raker so Pamela could be close to her grandson.
When Brooke began seeing Tim, Pamela saw an opportunity to get Shane out of prison. Pamela used the key Tim gave Brooke to lure Kelli to his house and left her in the basement. Pamela was also the source of the anonymous call to the police that led to Tim’s arrest. Now, Pamela plans to kill Brooke so Shane will get custody of Josh.
A sound in the woods distracts Pamela, allowing Brooke to grab the gun.
Chapter 53 Summary
Brooke and Pamela struggle over the gun. It fires twice. The first time, the shot goes wild, but the second time, Pamela is hit in the chest. Brooke takes the gun and rushes to the woods to find Josh. Before she gets far, Josh emerges, crying because Shane has been injured. Icicles fell from a tree and hit Shane. By the time Brooke gets there, Shane is dead.
Chapter 54 Summary
A month has passed since the encounter at the farmhouse. Pamela Nelson survived her gunshot wound and has confessed to everything, including Kelli’s murder. The prosecutor has dropped the charges against Tim.
After Josh sees Tim on the corner, he suggests that Brooke go talk to Tim. After dinner, Brooke walks to Tim’s house. Tim’s mother opens the door. She is reluctant to allow Brooke to see Tim, but then Tim steps out on the porch. Brooke understands why he might hate her but asks that Tim not take it out on Josh. Tim doesn’t hate her. Brooke tells him about a lightbulb that needs to be fixed, and he promises to look at it that weekend.
Epilogue Summary
The Epilogue, which takes place three months later, is written from Josh’s point of view.
Tim has started visiting Brooke’s house regularly. Josh even saw him leave his mom’s room in the middle of the night. Josh is happy to have Tim around, even though Tim is not his dad. When Tim and Brooke first started dating, Tim warned Josh that Shane is a bad man. That’s why Josh wasn’t happy when Shane came to stay with Josh and his mom. When Shane took Josh into the woods and was mean to Brooke on the phone, Josh decided he had to do something to protect his mom. Josh saw the icicles in the tree, so he shook the tree limb to make them fall on Shane. They struck Shane, but he was still okay, so Josh picked up a heavy icicle and hit Shane on the head over and over until Shane stopped moving. Brooke says Josh should be sorry when he does something bad, but Josh isn’t sorry he hurt Shane. Josh will do anything to protect his mom.
Chapter 47-Epilogue Analysis
The novel’s two time frames come together when Shane takes Brooke back to the farmhouse. Readers have watched the events of the murder play out in the flashback chapters, and now Brooke relives her memories of that night, putting together clues she has never before considered. Being on the scene of the crime forces Brooke to confront the horrible trauma she has mostly wanted to repress.
Brooke’s loyalty oscillates throughout the novel, a tendency that plays into the theme of Distrusting Others and Oneself. At first, she trusts Tim as her oldest friend, but soon she believes that he is capable of murder. Despite the fact that someone with a body in his basement would not invite witnesses to find it, Brooke never doubts Tim’s guilt. The opposite is true about Shane. Her conviction about who tried to choke her to death wavers because of her attraction; as soon as she imagines kissing Shane in the infirmary, she gives in to her self-doubt. In fact, despite being so firmly in Tim’s court in the past, she becomes so desperate to believe Tim guilty in the present that when she realizes Shane strangled her, she assumes that Tim must have been part of the murder plot. Brooke’s many excuses for the red flags around Shane are often implausible. When she hears her car coming back into her garage and sees that her keys are in a different place, she dismisses all of her concerns out of a romantic delusion that she, Shane, and Josh could be a family.
The novel’s resolution is typical of thrillers: Margie/Pamela’s confession accounts for every single event that has taken place in the novel so far. However, there are still plot holes and loose ends after the novel’s mysteries are solved, revealing somewhat careless plotting and the novel’s prioritizing of suspense and surprise over authenticity. The revelation that Margie is Pamela Nelson and that Pamela had an affair with Brooke’s father has never been hinted at—although this is probably what Brooke’s father was referring to when he implied that something else was behind the insistence that Brooke and Josh stay off social media. Possible seeds for the affair might have come from Brooke’s parents being unhappily married or even separated or from writing Brooke’s father more prominently as a womanizer—details that the novel does not include. The affair might explain why the unhinged Pamela wanted to kill Brooke—misguided revenge for Brooke’s father’s decision to stay with his wife for the sake of their child. However, nothing explains why Pamela would want to murder Brandon, Chelsea, and Kayla—teenagers with no connection to her affair. It is also unclear why Shane murdered Tracy; the novel is possibly suggesting that Shane is a psychopath—a condition that has possibly been genetically passed down to Josh.
Tim’s acceptance of Brooke even after she aided in his arrest and near conviction of murder is not surprising based on the depth of his feelings for her. However, the fact that Brooke would want him back in her life after questioning his motives and actions is questionable. It seems that with that level of distrust, it might be difficult to support a relationship.
Josh’s revelations in the Epilogue offer one last final plot twist, a common trope of the psychological thriller genre. McFadden hinted several times at the possibility that Josh might end up just like his father; however, the novel’s preoccupation with the relationships between sons and mothers makes this swerve into father-son connections feel possibly unearned. However, Josh’s intentional murder of Shane does play into the theme of Justice. In the end, Shane gets the comeuppance he deserves—a vicious killing at the hands of a boy he used as a pawn in his mind games with Brooke.
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