62 pages • 2 hours read
Jason RekulakHidden Pictures
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Mallory finds a baby monitor in the Maxwells’ basement. She hides the camera in the pile of stuffed animals in Teddy’s room. During Quiet Time when he is in his room alone, she watches the footage. The frame freezes just as he begins drawing, and the screen glitches. Mallory hears someone say hello. Suddenly, the screen clears, and she sees that Teddy is lying on his mattress, convulsing. Mallory runs upstairs but can’t open the door. She looks beneath it, and the strong smell of urine hurts her eyes and throat. The doorknob clicks open and lets her in. Teddy is now sitting on his bed, drawing, filling the paper with black smudges. When he looks at Mallory his eyes are completely white.
Teddy feels strong when she touches him. His eyes return to normal, and he apologizes. He says he doesn’t know what was happening. There are two new pictures, featuring a young girl and a rabbit. He says the pictures are not supposed to be there. Mallory thinks Anya takes the pictures away before Teddy wakes, which is why he is now confused by them. As he cries, Mallory sees that his right hand has pencil smudges, as if it is the hand he was drawing with. However, Teddy is left-handed. He would never have chosen to draw with his right hand.
Chapter 14 Summary
Adrian comes over to look at the drawings, and she tells him about the baby monitor. He says his mother hasn’t found anything yet but should have results within a week. Mallory is worried that a week will be too long. She thinks the spirit is trying to get her. She feels watched—a feeling like what she remembers feeling during the (possibly fictitious) male gaze research study.
Adrian asks to sleep on her floor, but Mallory reminds him that the Maxwells don’t permit overnight guests. She wants to tell him the truth about herself but resists. Adrian doesn’t know about her dead sister and estranged mother, and she doesn’t want to complicate things further. Adrian believes the ghost is communicating with Mallory, not endangering her.
Caroline comes outside after Adrian leaves. She asks Mallory about Adrian, and Mallory tells her that the Star Wars novels are the only warning sign so far. Caroline is happy for her. She says to invite Adrian to the house and to use the pool. Mallory notices that Caroline is trying—and failing—to focus on John Milton’s book Paradise Lost. Later, Mallory decides she agrees with Adrian: Anya wants to make contact, and she wants to do it as well.
Chapter 15 Summary
Adrian is going to come for a pool party and watch Teddy while Mallory and Mitzi use the spirit board in the cottage. Mitzi tells Adrian not to interrupt, no matter what he hears from the cottage. Inside, Mitzi burns sage and lights candles. She scans the drawings, including the three new ones. Mitzi invokes the spirits and asks to talk to Annie Barrett or Anya. Mallory feels hair brushing the back of her neck. Then, she feels breath. The planchette moves aggressively to random letters. Teddy opens the door to shush them as Mitzi blames Mallory for moving the planchette. Mitzi tells Teddy they are using a spirit board to contact the dead. After he leaves, Mitzi is angry. She says Mallory made up the whole story about Anya and the drawings for attention: There are no spirits there. Mitzi wobbles as she crosses the lawn. Mallory worries that Teddy will tell his parents.
Chapter 16 Summary
Mallory wonders if things will improve if she stops wondering about the mystery. Perhaps it is all in her head. However, Teddy keeps asking about spirit boards as they play. After Mallory’s run that night, Caroline and Ted are waiting for her. Caroline shows her a drawing and tells Mallory they know about Mitzi and the board. The drawing shows stick figures around the spirit board. Anya is at the center. Mallory takes it as proof and says she knew a spirit had been there. She shows them the other drawings and tells them about her experiment with the baby monitor. Ted scoffs and says ghosts don’t exist. Caroline is obviously wondering if Mallory does the drawings, and Mallory, although she feels defensive, remembers that she has occasional memory lapses. Mallory asks if they can ask Teddy for the truth. When they confront him with the drawings, he says that because Anya isn’t real, she obviously can’t draw.
Mallory tells them that the smell on the pages is Anya’s rot. However, they don’t smell anything unusual. Caroline and Ted send her back to the cottage. Ted follows and says they won’t fire her. He hugs Mallory and says she’s safe and that he won’t let anything happen to her. Then, he touches her hair, which makes her uncomfortable. Caroline enters, and he lets her go. Mallory thinks Ted needs a night to cool off.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
The séance with Mitzi is the set piece of these four chapters. It serves at least two functions: It convinces Mallory that she is right, and it convinces the Maxwells—or so it seems—that she is wrong. This conflict advances the themes of the burden of proof and the standards of acceptable evidence.
Mallory knows that she is correct, but she does not have a way to prove it unless other people share her standards of proof. She feels like Teddy when he sobs after she pulls him from the trance: “It’s all too much for Teddy because he explodes into tears, and I pull him into my arms and his body is soft and loose again; he feels like a regular boy again. I realize I’m asking him to explain something he doesn’t understand. I’m asking him to explain the impossible” (166). She is also making her best effort to explain the impossible, and no one owes her any credibility at this point.
However, the confrontation with the Maxwells, after the discussion about the spirit board, shows a rift between their words and their actions. Given their strict rule about no spiritualism, it seems odd that they give Mallory another chance, particularly when Mallory begins talking about ghosts, as well as bringing Mitzi into their private business. However, their apparent nonchalance foreshadows the fact that they already know—and believe—that they are being haunted because Caroline took Teddy away from his mother.
Nevertheless, their skepticism is strong enough to rattle Mallory, who again acknowledges that she can be prone to memory lapses. Despite her growing conviction about Teddy’s situation, she is less sure about herself and her identity. When she wrestles with the urge to tell Adrian the truth, she thinks:
He doesn’t realize I’m Mallory Quinn, ex-junkie and total screwup. He doesn’t know that my sister is dead and my mother won’t speak to me, that I’ve lost the two people in the world who meant the most to me. And there’s no way I can tell him. I can barely admit these things to myself (170).
Despite her efforts to recover, she is still too ashamed of her past to risk losing Adrian over the truth, even though she is willing to bring him into a situation involving ghosts and murder.
Mallory’s belief that Anya wants to communicate, rather than threaten, is enough to make her proceed. However, in an interesting counterpoint, just as she stops viewing Anya as a predatory force, Ted begins to grow more overt in his advances. He touches her and says, “Listen Mallory: You’re safe here. You’re not in any danger. I will never let anything bad happen to you” (193). She does not yet know the level of Ted’s involvement in the situation, but she knows that he is as much of a danger to her as anyone else in the novel.
