The Women in White

Riley Bell, a thirty-two-year-old nurse's aide, arrives at a small brick house in Virginia to interview for a live-in caretaker position. Riley is desperate: Her ex-husband Danny's gambling addiction led to their bankruptcy, divorce, and the loss of their home, and she has been sleeping in her car. Betty Sadler, an eighty-one-year-old wheelchair user whose husband Douglas recently died, is elegant and sharp. She serves Riley tea while drinking coffee herself, seemingly knowing Riley's preference without being told, and hires her on the spot.

As Riley settles in, she discovers Betty's home is frozen in the 1960s: a rotary phone, vinyl records, vintage kitchen appliances, and no television, internet, or modern technology. A neighbor reveals that no one has ever been inside the Sadlers' house. Riley notices a locked interior door that gives off a strange electric current but dismisses her unease. Betty opens up about three college friends, Kathleen, Ivy, and Helen, whom she has not seen in sixty-one years, and asks Riley to find them.

The narrative alternates with flashbacks to 1964 at Marquis University, where Betty, then nineteen and newly married, is tested by her husband Douglas with Zener cards, a tool used to measure extrasensory perception. Her results are extraordinary. Douglas works at the Trimble Institute, a parapsychology research lab run by Dr. Silas Trimble, who designates Betty "Girl Four," the last of four exceptional subjects he has been seeking.

Backstory chapters reveal how Dr. Trimble recruited each woman by exploiting her vulnerabilities. Kathleen, married to law student Ronald Moore, carries deep trauma from childhood sexual abuse by her mother's boyfriend, Mac. Ivy Lennox has precognitive abilities she has hidden since childhood; Douglas impersonated a faculty member to lure her to a covert test, and Dr. Trimble engineered a job for Ivy's husband at Marquis. Douglas's complicity helps explain his later protectiveness of Betty. Helen Hopkins, a shy factory worker in Boston, experienced a clairvoyant vision of a deadly disaster at the moment it occurred.

At Marquis, Dr. Trimble makes the women sign confidentiality agreements, wear identical white dresses, and spend increasing time in the lab. He subjects them to the Ganzfeld experiment, in which blindfolds made of halved Ping-Pong balls and earplugs create a uniform sensory field that causes the brain to generate hallucinations. The procedure is especially traumatic for Kathleen, whose fear of darkness stems from Mac's nighttime abuse. When the pregnant Ivy goes into premature labor during a field test, the other three feel a telepathic summons to find her, but Dr. Trimble cares more about documenting their bond than about getting Ivy help. Betty has a disturbing dream about a vehicle destroying a yellow baby blanket and lies about it to Dr. Trimble. Ivy delivers a healthy daughter, Sandra.

In the present, Riley travels to Marquis. None of the four women appear in the 1964 yearbook, but through an obituary she finds Ivy's daughter, Sandra Lennox, now a therapist. Sandra tells Riley that Ivy was committed to a psychiatric institution shortly after Sandra's birth and died when Sandra was four. Sandra has inherited and memorized Ivy's diaries. At the library, the Trimble Institute's 1964 archive files are all missing, and a visitor log shows that a Marquis student named Alex Finch accessed them four times recently.

Riley tracks down Alex, who suspects her psychology professor stole her student ID. Riley then meets Dr. Trimble's grandson, Samuel Trimble, who reveals that all four women were destroyed on the same day in 1964: Kathleen killed her husband with a baseball bat, mistaking him for an intruder, then killed herself; Helen jumped off a bridge; Ivy was committed; and Betty and Douglas vanished.

Betty is devastated but resolute, declaring that Dr. Trimble killed her friends by destroying their bonds and sanity. She shows Riley a suspicious letter requesting Douglas's papers. Betty has already hidden the papers, but Riley reads them and discovers that a new volunteer was designated "Girl 1 for Phase Two," revealing Dr. Trimble was planning to replace the original women. An anonymous text lures Riley and Betty to a coffee shop; when they return, the locked interior door has been forced open and the papers' original container is empty.

The 1964 flashbacks reveal Dr. Trimble's most destructive tactics. He confines the women in a basement, deprives them of sleep, separates Ivy from her newborn, and fractures their trust by telling each woman her friends voted for her to endure the worst assignments. When Betty discovers a note revealing Helen's secret crush on Douglas, genuine betrayal fractures the group further. Their psychic abilities diminish as their bonds break.

The consequences unfold on a single terrible day. Kathleen, asleep on her couch, mistakes Ronald for Mac when he wakes her in the dark and kills him with his baseball bat, then takes her own life. Helen walks to a bridge and jumps. Ivy, likely experiencing severe postpartum depression worsened by the experiments, becomes disoriented and is committed. Douglas flees with Betty by car. On the highway, he runs a yellow light, a detail Betty recognizes from her earlier dream, and a truck strikes her side, resulting in her paralysis from the waist down and the loss of her unborn baby, a pregnancy she had kept secret. Douglas becomes obsessively protective, confining Betty to a house with no television and forbidding all outside contact. Betty never stops loving him. Decades later, she wakes to find he has died beside her of a heart attack.

In the present, clues accumulate that someone is reviving the experiments: A young woman at a hospital screams about "Ganzfeld," and the stolen files and break-in form a pattern. Riley and Betty investigate Samuel Trimble and find a basement shrine to his grandfather's work. Then Alex Finch goes missing.

Betty insists they visit Sandra at her isolated country home. After Riley notices troubling details, Sandra reveals herself as the true threat. She drugs Riley's lemonade, pulls a gun, and confesses that after reading Ivy's diaries, she recognized the experiments as scientifically revolutionary and plans to replicate them for sale to governments. She has already tested the Ganzfeld technique on homeless and runaway individuals. Alex is her therapy patient, kidnapped after potentially witnessing Sandra plant stolen evidence.

Sandra handcuffs Riley and begins a telepathy test, planning to kill her afterward. Betty stalls, secretly inching her wheelchair closer while signaling Riley through coded instructions. Betty strikes Sandra with a chair; Riley hits her with a coffee mug. They seize the gun and restrain Sandra. Riley searches the property and locates Alex in a shed, blindfolded and drugged but alive. Police arrest Sandra.

After Sandra's sentencing, Riley takes Betty on a cross-country road trip to see the ocean, Elvis Presley's birthplace, and the Grand Canyon, the destination Betty and Douglas always dreamed of visiting. Betty watches a meteor shower, dreams of being reunited with her young friends, and dies peacefully in her sleep.

Betty's will leaves Riley her house and money. Riley pays off Danny's casino debts, funds Alex's college expenses, and finally tells Danny goodbye, blocking his number and honoring her instincts that she cannot save him at the cost of herself. She adopts Sandra's old dog Hank, begins exploring EMT training, and invites a journalist from The Atlantic to Betty's house to tell the story of the four women in white: "She was called Girl Four. But she wasn't a number. Betty Sadler was the most extraordinary woman I've ever met" (280).