Deep and Dark and Dangerous

“In faded shades of yellow and green, Mom’s older sister, Dulcie, grinned into the camera, her teeth big in her narrow face, her hair a tangled mop of tawny curls. Next to her, Mom looked off to the side, her long straight hair drawn back in a ponytail, eyes downcast, unsmiling, clearly unhappy.”

This photograph provides a perfect portrait of Dulcie and Claire’s contrasting personalities. The beaming smile on Dulcie’s face has largely stayed with her in the decades that have followed—even if it is a façade—while Claire’s moodiness also endures. It is a literal snapshot of life at the cottage before Teresa’s death and provides a glimpse of who the girls were in their youth, and more importantly, who they were before the drowning. It also provides some context for the tense interactions Claire and Dulcie have in the pages that follow.

“Mom snatched the photograph, her face suddenly flushed. ‘Where did you get this?’ She acted as if I’d been rummaging through her purse, her bureau drawers, the medicine cabinet, looking for secrets.”

This moment of shock, even outrage, captures Claire’s sense of violation at Ali discovering a crack in her veneer of secrecy. Her overreaction is a key flag to Ali, and to readers, that this is not an ordinary photograph. If anything, it only encourages Ali’s curiosity and leads her to conclude that the photo is a mystery like the kind she reads about in books.

“I’m walking along the shore of Sycamore Lake in a thick fog. I see a girl coming toward me. I can’t make out her face, but somehow I know it’s ‘T.’ She seems to know me, too. She says, ‘You’d better do something about this.’ She points at three girls in a canoe, paddling out onto the lake. One is my mother, one is Dulcie, and I think the third girl is ‘T.’ But how can that be? Isn’t she standing a few feet away? No, she’s gone. The canoe vanishes into the fog.”

The details of Ali’s dream here can almost be substituted for the description of her, Sissy, and Emma’s trip in the canoe in Chapter 17. The supernatural elements of the story allow Hahn to use this moment of clairvoyance to foreshadow a key scene to come.