Murder Road

“My childhood was a 1970s nightmare, filled with dark, garish colors and deep shadows, like Rosemary’s Baby. Once I got out of that childhood, I never looked back.”

Throughout the novel, St. James uses pop culture references to illustrate and emphasize her points. Rosemary’s Baby was a novel by Ira Levin, but much more famous is the Roman Polanski film based on the book, released in 1968. In it, Polanski builds a tense and claustrophobic home environment, complete with Satanic cult neighbors, that builds to a horrific birth scene. By connecting her childhood to this film, April attempts to convey the horror of her childhood in just a few words, without detail.

“Assert your authority, I wanted to tell him. Act like you are already in control that’s how you dominate someone bigger than you.”

April is watching Eddie interact with police officer Kal Syed in the wake of Rhonda Jean’s death. At this point in the novel, April believes that she is tougher and more experienced in difficult situations than Eddie is. This belief is based on her own history, however, and doesn’t take into account The Difference Between Appearance and Reality. Over the course of the novel, she will discover that Eddie is stronger and tougher than she thought, and in the end, they will end up being a team.

“Everyone always underestimated my husband. Everyone but me.”

April thinks this after Eddie leaves Rose money to pay for their room, despite how Rose has treated them thus far. She is correct that people tend to underestimate Eddie, highlighting the theme of The Difference Between Appearance and Reality. However, she fails to recognize that she, too, underestimates her husband, a fact she will come to understand throughout the novel as she discovers that he is keeping secrets from her, too.

“A woman who would stab a hitchhiker—or watch her husband stab her—and then take her to the hospital would have to be what my mother used to call a Prime Bitch. Detective Quentin wanted to know if I was a Prime Bitch or not.”

April sees that Quentin, like her, can size people up in the first moments of meeting. Her reference to her mother shows that, even though her mother left when April was 18, she influenced April deeply. This quote shows how easily April falls back into the patterns of thought that her mother taught her when she is under pressure. One part of April’s character arc, and a challenge that she faces in the novel, is Overcoming Past Trauma and leaving her mother’s training behind.

“I found a paperback novel and picked it up. It was Flowers in the Attic. ‘There is something very wrong with that woman,’ I said.”

By referencing Flowers in the Attic, St. James connects Murder Road to a modern pulp horror classic. She also more firmly establishes the novel’s setting, as the VC Andrews novel was published in 1979 but made popular by a 1987 film adaptation. Further, Rose’s taste in reading material creates an ambiguous first impression of this character—it implies that Rose, who turns out to be one of April and Eddie’s strongest allies, might be a threat.

“I’d never been to this place, but I still knew it. The hostel in Phoenix. The apartment I’d shared for two months in South Carolina. I’d sat on those sofas and listened to whatever guys were hanging around talk about whether Soundgarden was better than Nirvana, pretending to care. Pretending I was just like the rest of them, while feeling like I was no one at all.”

April feels a kinship with the kids at Hunter Beach, many of whom have run away from home, because her own youth was like theirs, but her confession that she was “pretending” illustrates the difference between them. Unlike most of the kids she lived with, and the kids at Hunter Beach, she was surviving, not exploring. Later she will discover that many of these kids, notably Rhonda Jean, are more like her than she knew, running from abusive situations, illustrating the theme of Finding Connection in Common Experience.

“Was this what marriage was going to be like? The two of us in a standoff when we didn’t agree? When I’d dated before, I’d never let a man get this deep. When a man pushed me somewhere I didn’t want to go, I had simply walked away. The urge to do that now was strong. I could get out of the car and get away from this, from him, from how I was feeling. I could just start walking, like Rhonda Jean had. But suddenly, that didn’t feel like I would be walking away—it felt like I would be running. This was my life now, this car, this man, this Waylon Jennings music. I’d run for survival before, but this wasn’t survival, and I wasn’t a coward.”

The situation they’ve found themselves in has put April and Eddie’s new marriage under stress, and they are in the midst of their first “standoff.” Eddie wants her to communicate, but she doesn’t want to share her reaction to Hunter Beach with him. This is another moment in April’s character arc where she confronts the urge to run and recommits to staying, working toward Overcoming Past Trauma.

“He could have been a cop, I thought. I watched the calm expression on his face, the way his gaze held hers, firm but not intimidating. The girl was staring at the photo, biting her lip. Unaware that she was instantly doing as he asked. I knew I was good, but I also knew that my husband of two days just might be smarter than me.”

Watching Eddie question the checker at Dollar Mart, April again considers The Difference Between Appearance and Reality. Eddie’s appearance has shifted again, this time to resemble a cop, reflecting their current experience with the police department. April is beginning to realize that, just as she accused everyone else, she too is guilty of underestimating Eddie.

“I’d seen a lot of bad things in my life—maybe more than my share. But I had never seen anything as terrible as that girl, as her face, as her undead hands. She was a dark, cold hole in the fabric of reality, punched through with a naked fist. The word that came to mind was unholy, though I had never been religious a day in my life. I had never imagined that something could be as vibrantly, furiously dead as she was, and I never wanted to see her again.”

In the parking lot of Dollar Mart, April sees the Lost Girl for the first time. Although this moment is a relief, in that it confirms that Eddie wasn’t hallucinating the night of Rhonda Jean’s death, it also represents a terrifying shift. April realizes, upon seeing the girl, that she is not just the victim, but something darker—her presence is malevolent, implying a different motive behind her appearances.

“The story hadn’t ended. But it didn’t matter—Eddie and I weren’t going to be here for the last chapters. We wouldn’t get to read it. And on that long-ago summer night, my mother had taught me that in order to survive, you sometimes have to cut and run. Leave people behind. Just go.”

When the police allow April and Eddie to leave Coldlake Falls, she is surprised by the fact that she wants to know how the story ends. This feeling shows how April is changing, though at this point her mother’s training is stronger than her need for resolution. As much as she wants to bring the story of the murders to a satisfactory conclusion, she believes she must “cut and run” just as she has done many times before.

“I didn’t believe in happy endings—far from it. I didn’t believe that Eddie and I would drive off into the stormy sunset in our bloody car and never have a problem again. My guard was incapable of truly going down. I had wanted so badly to get out of Coldlake Falls, as if that meant that Eddie and I could go back to normal, whatever that was. But something wasn’t right. I had the familiar feeling that whatever we were driving into, it was going to be bad.”

With the notion of “happy endings,” April once again places their experience in the context of a story. However, in this case, she shows her pessimism, or perhaps her deeper understanding that their part in the story isn’t finished. Although they are about the drive out of Coldlake Falls, she doesn’t truly believe they will make it—her life experience has taught her not to believe that it would be so easy.

“If we do this, I thought into the darkness, we do it on my terms. And if we do it, you owe me. Do you hear me? I don’t care if you’re dead. This was supposed to be my honeymoon. You owe me.”

After Eddie and April return to Coldlake Falls and Rose’s house, April watches Eddie sleep and considers what to do. In this passage, she speaks directly to the Lost Girl, knowing that the girl isn’t going to let them leave until the mystery is solved. This moment is a shift for April, who is used to abandoning her communities and starting fresh whenever trouble threatens her. Now, she accepts the Lost Girl’s challenge, promising to finish what she’s started. She also asserts herself by offering some terms of her own, making a deal that is just between herself and the Lost Girl.

“‘I know everything.’ Beatrice pulled the newspaper toward her. ‘I collect all the information I can find. My sister does, too. You could say it’s a hobby, except it’s about dead people so we’re not allowed to talk about it. I know it’s weird, but I don’t care.”

Beatrice Snell enters the novel just as April and Eddie are wondering how to begin investigating the Atticus Line murders. She and her sister function as amateur detectives and local insiders, offering information in the form of police reports and local knowledge. As Beatrice points out a moment later, as a teenage girl, she is invested in solving the murders, feeling her vulnerability in the community, and her interest in the Lost Girl is personal.

“When I met Eddie Carter, I saw someone who was so different from me, yet whose darkness mirrored my own. Reader, I married him. Because it should be me or no one.”

April and Eddie are drawn together because they have both faced difficulty and trauma—hers through her father’s abuse and her mother’s manipulations, his through the war in Iraq. Even so, April struggles to be honest with Eddie, only revealing her truth in layers, even though she immediately senses that he is someone who can truly connect with her. With the comment, “Reader, I married him,” April quotes Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, in which the protagonist, Jane, directly addresses the reader to explain why she marries Edward Rochester, a difficult man but one who is perfect for her.

“I was disposable, and yet I was treated like a disappointment for acting that way. Just like every other job I’d ever worked. The thought bubbled through my mind, unbidden: I don’t want to do this anymore. I want more. Surviving to tomorrow wasn’t good enough. Not anymore.”

This reflection illustrates another shift for April—she has always been content to accept this treatment of her as “disposable,” as it allowed her the freedom to leave. Here she shows another way her character is changing over the course of the novel—whereas earlier she might have accepted her boss’s terms and fought for her job, April’s attitude has changed. Along with her sense of fully becoming April Delray and fully committing to her marriage, her sense of self-worth has increased as well.

“The way she taught me the lesson of her life—never let anyone in—was very, very hard. She had been beaten bloody for that lesson. She had killed for it. She had fled her life, changed her name. She had left her old self dead by the side of the road, along with the husk of the little girl I had been. She was sitting in prison now for that lesson. She had sacrificed everything for it. She had taken all of our money in her final lesson to me. I should never let anyone in—even her.”

Although April’s mother only makes one appearance in the novel, her presence is felt with every decision April makes, and every time she doubts herself. Here, April shows that her mother’s lessons are harsh and unapologetic. However, she also considers the way her mother has come to believe what she teaches April, as she lost just as much, and perhaps more, than April.

“I had to make it right with Eddie, and I would. I would make all of it right. I wouldn’t run or hide. If I wanted this life, life as April Carter, no one was going to give it to me. I had to make it myself, and I had to hold on to it so it couldn’t be taken away. I looked at the closed bedroom door, my mind spinning. Back, back to that first night, when we’d taken a wrong turn off the interstate. Back through everything that had happened since.”

With this final shift to her married name, April shows her growth and commitment to Eddie and her new life. However, her comment about it being “taken away” shows that April is still not completely confident and secure in the relationship or her new life, although she is willing to fight for it.

“Then the Lost Girl smiled. A sound left my throat that was part gasp, part helpless moan. I knew that smile. It wasn’t the amused kind, or the friendly kind. The Lost Girl’s lips formed a pressed line, a smile that said, You’re going to suffer, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

April has gone to meet the Lost Girl alone, on Atticus Line. Too late, she realizes that she has made a mistake going out to Atticus Line alone. With this shift, Murder Road subverts genre conventions that would cast the Lost Girl as a victim looking for help.

“The car slowed more, pulling up beside me. ‘Come and get me,’ I whispered into the darkness. Crystal Cross. April Delray. April Carter. She could come and get all of us.”

Throughout the novel, April grapples with all her past selves in an attempt to claim her life as April Carter and make it last. She decides to confront the Lost Girl and walks down Atticus Line alone. Rather than use one or another of her identities to help her get through the situation, April calls on the knowledge and experience of all her identities, which have kept her alive in the past and gotten her to where she is today.

“‘Well, we won’t know until we develop it,’ Gracie said. ‘Maybe it’s like the Zapruder film.’”

Gracie and Beatrice have proven to be skilled investigators and daring accomplices. Their latest escapade has them breaking into the high school darkroom to develop Shannon’s film, illustrating that they are truly crucial to April and Eddie’s investigation. Gracie’s reference to the Zapruder film brings her investigative knowledge and her interest in conspiracy theories to the fore—the Zapruder film is the clearest and most direct footage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, an event that has been surrounded, over the years, by numerous conspiracy theories.

“Stories don’t always end the way they’re supposed to. They don’t always end at all.”

Once again, April finds herself packing to leave Coldlake Falls before the story has ended. While St. James seems to foreshadow an ending with no closure here, soon John Haller will make an appearance that will finally lead to the end of the story. Because he dies, they won’t get answers to all their questions, but the story will be finished—and in this case, the story’s closure is also important to lay Shannon to rest and stop the Atticus Line killings.

“My voice was weirdly normal, like it had been that first night, when I realized that Rhonda Jean was bleeding to death. I was still shaking, but it didn’t matter. My thoughts had stopped scattering like a flock of startled birds. Twelve-year-old April—born as Crystal Cross in Los Angeles, California—had taken over.”

Throughout the novel, April finds the different identities that she has taken on over the years playing a part in her actions and decision-making. Here she displays the same calm that Eddie commented on when she was faced with a bleeding Rhonda Jean. While Crystal Cross is the identity that April most wants to leave behind, refusing to even say her name earlier in the novel, now she sees what that early, fundamental identity has to offer—Crystal is calm, unshaken by trauma as her father’s abuse taught her early on, and right now, she is just what April needs.

“What I knew, Mrs. Carter, was that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my philosophy. When a single killer is ruled out in a series of murders, the only answer is that there are multiple killers. What would make multiple people in a small town commit murder and never get caught?”

In this final chapter, April and Eddie finally meet Quentin at his home, outside of his professional auspices. He reveals to them that he has been aware of the paranormal aspect of the murders since the beginning, when he was first called into Coldlake Falls. In this final conversation, Quentin shows himself to be more open-minded than he appeared earlier. In the first sentence here, he paraphrases Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Act I, Scene V). The quote implies a willingness to suspend rational skepticism and follow the evidence where it leads.