We Are All the Same in the Dark

Angel opens the cookbook and sees all of Odette’s notes and photographs of the crime scene at the Branson house, and she vomits. She suddenly realizes that moving into the Blue House could draw attention to her, and she fears her father finding her. After dark, she leaves the Blue House, making noise so people know she is leaving. She hides her car a mile away and runs back to the house. She calls Finn to update him on her progress in cleaning and asks if she can keep the cookbook; Finn says yes (the implication being that he does not know what is in it).

Angel goes to the police department and asks for Rusty. The officer at the front desk says he is out on patrol, but Rusty’s partner, Gabriel, offers to help. Angel asks him to relay a message to Rusty: She references a nightmare Rusty once told Odette about and mentions a song he likes as she invites him to meet her at a nearby diner, saying she knows something about Odette and Trumanell. Gabriel calls Rusty and relays the message.

Rusty meets her in the diner. Posing as a “clairvoyant intuitive,” Angel questions Rusty by using the information about him and the case that Odette compiled in the cookbook to pretend that Odette is speaking to her from the grave.

Rusty asks to talk to Angel later at the lake. Before their meeting, Angel goes to the GPS coordinates marking the spot where she was dumped on the side of the road. She finds a patch of dandelions and blows in one of the stems like Wyatt mentioned.

Later, she meets Rusty at the park to talk about Odette; he mentions that she worked with a forensic scientist just before she disappeared. The scientist believed the boots Odette brought her had something to do with Trumanell’s disappearance because Trumanell’s blood was on the boots, along with toxic elements found in coffins, suggesting she was buried in a cemetery. Angel mentions that the boots were Odette’s father’s. Rusty gets frustrated that she is not telling him everything and threatens to find out more about her. When Angel mentions something else he only told Odette, Rusty “half-believes” Angel is communicating with Odette and gets even more upset; Angel realizes Rusty was in love with his partner.

Fleeing Rusty, Angel hurries back to her car, but it will not start. She panics, but Rusty assures her he will not hurt her. He tries starting her car, but the battery has died. While trying to jump-start her car, Rusty admits he does not care who she is and only wants information that will lead to Odette’s killer. He offers to help replace Angel’s battery.

Angel goes to the cemetery and looks for the statue dedicated to Odette and Trumanell. She goes to sleep there but abruptly wakes up sometime later. She hides as a car pulls up. A person gets out of the car and approaches the memorial statue. Angel cannot make out who the person is, but they walk with a limp.

Angel returns to the Blue House; Finn is there with the cookbook. Finn asks Angel if she wanted him to find it, which she denies. He wonders why Odette never told him about it. For a moment, Angel feels that she “becomes” Odette, and she and Finn kiss. Finn mentions that Odette had sex with Wyatt a month before her disappearance, which Angel had no idea about. Angel gets the marijuana from the bag in the cookbook and suggests they smoke it, using a page from a Bible as rolling paper. As she smokes, she remembers what 70x7 means. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up, both Finn and the cookbook are gone.

Angel wakes to a phone call from Rusty telling her that her car is fixed, and Angel asks to meet again at the park. When they meet, she mentions the Bible verse and Frank Branson’s other children. She asks if Rusty found out who left the shovel or called Odette crying. Rusty demands to know where Angel is getting her information, but Angel continues to pretend she is communicating with Odette. Angel mentions the therapist whom Odette visited before disappearing and mentions the possibility that she was being recorded. They set off to visit Dr. Andrea Greco.

Rusty and Angel arrive at Dr. Greco’s house. Rusty asks about Odette’s visit, and Dr. Greco insists she does not record anyone without their permission. Rusty asks if Odette thought her father or Wyatt had any role in killing Trumanell or Frank Branson. Greco once visited Wyatt while he was in a psychiatric hospital and believed he was “fully capable of murder” (287). She asks Angel and Rusty to leave, giving Angel a copy of her book. When Rusty goes to his car, Dr. Greco briefly talks to Angel alone. She says Odette mentioned a girl who would not speak; Dr. Greco is certain that girl is Angel. She says that Odette would not have wanted Angel to die for her.

Angel recalls how her father killed her mother. When he shot her, the shotgun pellets punctured Angel’s eye. She crawled under their trailer and hid as he left; she was still watching as the police came.

Rusty and Angel drive back from Dr. Greco’s house. Rusty asks about Angel’s real name and if she is worried about her father finding her. Angel tells him she is on the run from him. Rusty says he and his partner have tracked her father down and assures her that they will deal with him if she agrees to go back home to Bunny. She still refuses to tell him the real source of her information about Odette, and Rusty tells her to get out of town if she refuses to cooperate.

Rusty drops Angel back off at her car. She thinks Rusty will go after Wyatt next, so she calls Wyatt urgently and tells him what the therapist said. She asks if he killed Trumanell; he says he did not but that he knows who did. Angel begs him to tell her and warns him that Rusty and his partner will come for him, but Wyatt hangs up. Angel goes back to the park to abandon her car, knowing it likely has a tracker on it.

Angel recalls her father sending a hitman—one of his old friends—after her. A woman interrupted when he approached Angel and threatened to call 911; he left. The woman introduced herself as Bunny.

Angel goes to Maggie’s house and tells her everything. Maggie insists she spend the night there and tells her not to go back to the Blue House. In the evening, Maggie calls her mother, who had a stroke several years earlier. That night, Angel tries to sleep but then returns to the Blue House against Maggie’s advice.

Angel runs to the Blue House and finds that Finn returned the cookbook; it looks intact. She takes the cookbook to the closet to read it fully and finds the last words Odette wrote: “Don’t give up” (312).

Angel wakes up, thinking she heard a noise on the front porch. Angel starts to panic; she looks outside and sees no one there. She goes back into the house to get her backpack, and on Odette’s bed, she finds a prosthetic eye—one she does not recognize. When she turns on her phone to call someone, she is suddenly shot in the shoulder. She hides under the bedframe and hears the shooter go out into the hallway. Sneaking up on him, she hits him with Odette’s titanium leg; he hits his head hard on the bathroom tile. She does not recognize the man but hopes he is not dead, as she “[does not] want to tell Bunny [she] killed a man wearing a cross” (318).

This chapter recounts the events of June 5, 2005, the day of Trumanell’s disappearance. On that day, Maggie’s mother, the wife of Reverend Rodney Tucker, confessed that Maggie was not Rodney’s daughter but Frank Branson’s. Tucker went to the Bransons’ home, threatening Frank, Wyatt, and Trumanell with a gun. Wyatt tried to wrestle the gun from him, and in the scuffle, the gun went off and a shot hit Trumanell, killing her. The pastor called his brother, Odette’s father, to help clean up. The two of them convinced Wyatt that his sister’s death was his fault and that no one would believe him if he said what actually happened. Odette’s father then took Frank Branson into the field and shot him.

Back in the present, Angel is recounting this story to a reporter. She mentions that Maggie’s call to her mother almost got Angel killed; Maggie told her mother about Angel and Odette’s diary, and Reverend Tucker overheard and went to the Blue House.

Angel returns to the Blue House to finish cleaning it out. The Betty Crocker cookbook has been taken as evidence. She takes down the old picture of the town’s first sheriff and realizes there is a diagram sketched on the back of the frame—a map of graves. The bodies of both Trumanell and Odette are found on top of the first sheriff’s grave. The figure with the limp Angel saw in the cemetery turns out to be the cemetery’s caretaker.

Two years later, Angel is in college, in bed with her friend and roommate. The two have grown close over the course of four semesters, but Angel has still not told her about her eye. The novel concludes with a quote from Dr. Andrea Greco’s best-selling true crime book that comes out after the events narrated in the novel about Trumanell and Odette’s disappearances.