53 pages • 1 hour read
April HenryThe Night She Disappeared
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A 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 41-45Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 41 Summary: “The Fourteenth Day: Gabie”
Gabie gets a call from Drew, who relates the incident with Robertson. He is now secretly trailing Robertson’s car. Gabie commandeers Miguel’s car and follows Drew’s lead until they both arrive at a remote farmhouse. Drew arms himself with a tire iron, and Gabie takes a gun from Miguel’s glove compartment. The two crouch at the edge of Robertson’s lawn and peer through his window. Gabie recognizes Robertson as a regular customer with whom she regularly exchanges playful, silly banter. She has always thought of him as harmless, but as she watches he takes a gun out a desk drawer and walks down a set of stairs to his basement. As Gabie dials 911, a woman starts screaming from the basement.
Chapter 42 Summary: “The Fourteenth Day: Drew”
As Gabie speaks with the police, Drew smashes one of Robertson’s windows with the tire iron and unlocks his front door from the inside. Gabie reports that the police are on their way, but they both know that the screaming woman doesn’t have time to wait. They enter the house and identify themselves as the police, then run to the basement. There, they find Kayla standing in the doorway, wielding the bed slat, which she has just used to hit Robertson in the head. As Robertson prepares to shoot Kayla, Gabie fires Miguel’s gun at his head, only to realize that it is a BB gun. Drew throws the tire iron at Robertson and misses, but Kayla seizes the moment of distraction to knock the gun out of his hand. Suddenly the lights turn off, and a struggle ensues in the dark. Robertson pins Gabie to the ground and holds a screwdriver up to her throat. He threatens to stab her if Drew doesn’t locate and return the gun. Using a flashlight from Robertson’s workbench, Drew finds the gun. As he frantically calculates whether he can risk shooting Robertson so close to Gabie, Kayla runs at Robertson with one of the plate shards. As they struggle in the darkness, sirens start to wail up the driveway. The flashlight beam reveals Gabie and Kayla now motionless on the floor. Robertson kicks them both, then takes a monkey wrench from his workbench. As he prepares to bring it down on them, Drew shoots him with his own gun.
Chapter 43 Summary: “The Fourteenth Day: Kayla”
Right after Drew fires the gun, the police burst into Robertson’s basement. By the light of their flashlights, Kayla sees that Gabie has a deep wound in her neck. An officer confirms that Robertson is dead, and Kayla collapses. Drew tells Kayla that Gabie always knew she was still alive.
Outside of Robertson’s house, Kayla inhales the smell of fresh air and watches the stars sparkle in the sky. She feels immense relief at the knowledge that Gabie is still alive. All three high schoolers are taken to the hospital. Sergeant Thayer enters Kayla’s room but says he will delay her questioning until the following day because there are people who need to see her first. Kayla’s family enters the room, and they all embrace. She knows that her time in captivity was like prison for them, too, but now all of them are free.
Chapter 44 Summary: “The Sixteenth Day: Gabie”
Gabie, Drew, and Kayla spend a day and a half in the hospital while their wounds are stitched and treated. They learn that Kayla’s abductor’s real name was Ronald Hewett. Hewett was a regular customer at Pete’s Pizza. He had been taking notes on the Pete’s girls for months and had picked Gabie as his ideal target. A cadaver dog found the body of a not-yet-identified girl buried in Hewett’s front yard. The girl had been missing for six months and was presumed to be a runaway. Cody’s innocence has been confirmed posthumously.
On their discharge day, the three are taken home by Gabie’s and Kayla’s parents. They make a pact not to speak to the media about their experiences.
Chapter 45 Summary: “The Eighty-Eighth Day: Drew”
Eighty-eight days after Kayla’s rescue, Drew and Gabie step onstage to accept a medal of heroism from the Portland police department. Kayla watches from the audience, beaming. Sergeant Thayer is also in the crowd, looking disgruntled.
In the intervening days since their confrontation with Hewett, Gabie has decided to go to Stanford but not to do premed. Drew and Gabie continue to spend time together, and her parents have fully accepted Drew. Occasionally he has nightmares about killing Hewett but knows that he did the only thing he could to save Gabie.
On stage, the chief of police credits Drew and Gabie for potentially saving other girls from Hewett. He hands them their medals, and they smile as the crowd applauds.
Chapters 41-45 Analysis
The narrative reaches its climax in this section when Drew and Gabie confront Robertson, whose real identity is revealed as Ronald Hewett. The discovery of Kayla in his basement resolves the mystery and validates the intensity with which Gabie and Drew have pursued the truth. Their intervention directly saves Kayla’s life, confirmed by the fact that the police don’t arrive until after Drew kills Ronald Hewett. If they remained complacent and relied on law enforcement, Kayla would have died. The successful rescue illustrates that authority figures can’t always be relied on to do the right thing. Drew, Gabie, and Kayla all had to advocate for Kayla’s survival and take on responsibility beyond their years.
By surviving her ordeal in the basement, Kayla defies the odds and breaks with the narrative of victimization that has been pushed onto her. Henry could have ended the novel with Kayla’s murder, the statistically likely outcome of an abduction when the victim has not been found for over a week. Instead, Kayla maintains her identity and agency throughout her captivity and takes an active role in her own salvation. She regains control over her own life and walks away from an encounter that leaves her captor dead, subverting the trope of the tragic victim.
The final section of the novel also concludes Drew’s and Gabie’s coming-of-age arcs. Gabie has emerged from her cocoon of shyness and is no longer invisible to her peers. Her relationship with Drew continues to flourish, and she even tells her parents that she won’t study premed at Stanford. Drew is no longer a “straight-C slacker” (231). He has emancipated himself from his mother and has plans to attend college and become a paramedic. Each of them has grown past their earlier limitations and become truer versions of themselves.
While all three teenagers display remarkable resilience, Drew’s reaction onstage at the award ceremony shows that the trauma of their experience will linger. Despite knowing he did the right thing, Drew has nightmares and sometimes feels “like there’s a criminal in [his] head” (232). He has also made the hard choice to emancipate himself from his mother and now has no contact with a parental figure. Drew and Gabie’s heroism saved Kayla along with her own resilience, but her survival should never have rested on the shoulders of three high schoolers. Under the relief of their survival lurks the knowledge that many adults in their lives failed them, and all three of them will face lingering consequences. By allowing her protagonists to triumph while acknowledging the ramifications of everything they’ve been through, Henry delivers a realistic version of a happy ending.
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By April Henry
